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Character is destiny in so many ways. I did not vote for Trump. I don't think he held up any values apart from his love of himself and of power. He worked very, very hard but that in itself is nothing to admire if the ultimate goal is to have a gangster's grip on America. He's been called great many things but to me both those praising him and those calling him names missed the only relevant reality: that he never cared about anything or anyone except for himself. That was obvious to me. Fran Liebowitz, one of my heroines, isolated the basics: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fran+liebowitz+on+donald+trump+&t=newext&atb=v225-1&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DYMqeQiXtK8U

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You say:

"It's not seditious to wonder whether or not irregularities ought to be investigated in an electoral process. There are irregularities all the time in elections."

I agree but it might be if investigations by honest people had been conducted and everyone and their dog agrees there were no substantial irregularities and YOU KNOW IT but you sow doubt in the electoral process in bad faith, not even believing what you are saying.

Trump should have been impeached and removed from office when he said there were millions of illegal votes cast in the 2016 election without any evidence. It was investigated and found to be false. A President who lies about matters so fundamental to democracy should not hold office. The truth should matter. If there were any real facts supporting the idea that there was widespread corruption in the way the vote was conducted then all these extremely talented people on the case would have had some success with the courts over the last two months.

As for deplatforming. Do private companies not have the right to establish rules for their platform? It is hilarious to watch people like Devin Nunes complaining on the most successful and popular cable news outlet that he is being silenced. If only that were possible.

If we want character to matter then we need to impeach and remove from office all those who lie in bad faith.

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You can be ideologically pure or effective, you can’t be both. Unfortunately, most are choosing the former.

Trump’s intelligence – To call a person who, by all accounts is a political outsider, capable of manipulating the system to rise to what many consider the most powerful political position in the world stupid was the democrats first mistake. Trump is smart. Maybe not in the traditional academic sense, but smart as a fox.

Trump’s danger - If you believe that the rise of Trump to power was a symptom of underlying political unrest and not the cause, than the extent of Trump’s danger to democracy is currently unknown. A more violent, extremest leader could rise through the ranks, making Trump look civil in comparison.

Election Integrity - The vast majority of experts rate our election system as dysfunctional compared to many European systems.

A 2019 report by Harvard University's Electoral Integrity Project found that the United States had the second-lowest integrity score among liberal democracies for elections between 2012 and 2018. The country was ranked at No. 57 overall. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-10-07/us-elections-compare-poorly-to-other-democracies-research-shows

Even John's progressive New York remains in the bottom quarter compared to other US states. https://elections.mit.edu/#/data/map

Danger – We are reproducing similar conditions for white males that existed prior to WWII. Our political figures, our elite, our intelligentsia are unable to see the damage being caused to the social experiment that is America by the prevalent theories of social discourse, interactions and narrative.

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I have read the extract several times and it becomes more difficult at each reading (which probably says something about me rather than the Professors – my excuses – I’m in the U.K. so it’s not my business, and I don’t have a political ‘home’ in the U.K. and I doubt I would have one in the U.S.A.). For what it is worth, from my uninformed perspective across the pond, the two arguments I cannot understand from Professor Loury are:

(1) The argument to take away the right to contract, and get people to agree with you.

In disavowing President Trump at this moment, Professor Loury, even though he recognises the situation, appears to support one set of people casually removing the right to contract from another group who hold different beliefs. Taking a position that in anyway associates with the removal of the right to contract (no employment, no banking, no communication platforms, no professional body membership etc. ) from roughly half a country appears extremely dangerous. The list of witches will be as long as one group can get away with, or as long as needed to suppress a belief/group. The position is made worse, rather than better, by the statement,

“You don't kill Trumpism until you talk to the 70 million people who voted for him and get at least 15 or 20 million of them to agree with you. That's the task at hand.”

I’ll repeat, “get them to agree with you”, what does that mean? Surely the aim would be to hear and understand these people’s concerns, so that they are acknowledged effectively in policy?

(2) Applying the ‘character argument’ to President Trump alone.

If a character argument can be made then it should be applied to all Members of Congress of both parties, and presumably also to State Legislatures. It seems peculiar to focus only on President Trump. Professor Loury seems to recognise the ‘fine people hoax’ constructed after Charlottesville, is a hoax, nonetheless, the President Elect has used the hoax, both before the election and afterwards. What kind of character is the President Elect to use a hoax about one of the most sensitive and divisive issues in the U.S.A?

Professor Loury wonders, “Perhaps there should have been a commission to investigate”, specifically within the context of mail-in ballots, but does not use this to question the character of all Members of Congress, and the President Elect. What character must these people have if they did not immediately agree to both a forensic audit and a wide ranging commission on democratic transparency? Without this surely they are all responsible for inciting what happened, surely they are all responsible for not delivering confidence in a fair and transparent election, surely they are all of the wrong character to be in elected office?

Before I use a short list, I should state that there have been caes of problems in U.K. elections, there are also ongoing arguments about I.D. and mail in ballots, local and Mayoral elections were even delayed from last year to this year (due to Covid), so when I imagine the following list, it is definitely not from a position of presumed superiority.

An imagined list of potential concerns might be:

(i) free and fair election (e.g. media and the hoaxes, a politically motivated first impeachment, the taking down of funding sites, freezing the NYP on Twitter, billionaire funding of the electoral system, threat of violence/cancelling/doxing …),

(ii) unconstitutionally made changes to the electoral process in some states (so signalling against the Constitution, so accepting otherwise illegal ballots, so increasing the opportunity for fraud …),

(iii) the lists of alleged fraudulent registration provided by the, so called, Voter Integrity Project,

(iv) the apparently low signature rejection rates,

(v) the lack of meaningful observation,

(vi) technology concerns (non-open source software, non-separation of responsibilities, other connected and storage devices in counting rooms, custody chains, adjudication, young privilege due to voting machine complexity …),

(vii) delay of DNI report to Congress on potential foreign interference

etc …

I do not know what the actual list of concerns is, but if there were concerns shared by millions then politicians of good character would have sought to address these concerns, if they have not then they are all not of good character and not fit for office.

Well that was quite a bit of typing given that I am not American and it is not my business, probably a side-effect of lockdown, but I’ll call it an outside perspective. As an aside, I will say that Professor McWhorter’s comment, “ we're talking about the idea that an actual functioning human being can walk around believing in Q”, made me chuckle. I wonder whether professors can walk around believing that elections are free, fair and transparent. I recall a slightly related comment from Professor Heather McDonald to Professor Loury (Manhattan Institute October 2020), “I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but I'm moving to the point now where I do think it is conceivable that China is the funder of our diversity ideology”, so perhaps some professors do worry.

P.S. great discussion!

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You assumed good faith, if not exactly in Trump, in the voters. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think it’s right to demand robust evidence of malfeasance, and not to be cynical. The problem we have we have is not just a rise in bad faith but a really unhinged sense among major sections of society that they *just know* the truth. It’s a strange subjectivism where people think they have a special insight into reality that means they see things that the rest of us poor schmucks don’t. This moral certitude is dangerous whether it’s from die-hard Trump people or the woke left and their enablers.

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Character: compared to what? Shallow bullshit. I love you but you're wrong.

I'm a lifelong Democrat, but what choice did I have but to vote for Trump? He comes closest to the values I've held all my life. Speech, due process, rule of law, equal opportunity.

Is Biden an example of character or superior character? Really? What about Obama, Bush, Bill Clinton? Who is the example? How does one judge? Is it a matter of education, breeding, class? Is character more important than policy?

Is character in telling the truth, fulfilling commitments, personal dignity? If so, where is the example? Did FDR have character?

Or is character in conceiving of one’s duty as serving the people who elected you, serving the country and the constitution?

Trump served a part of the electorate that was criminally lied to and neglected for thirty years, but the benefits instead spread across all kinds of people. Trump was under vicious attack from the beginning to the end of his presidency, not for blunders of etiquette, but for his opposition to progressivism.

Maybe Trump lost the election, but still, a lot of people think he didn't—because there was a mountain of evidence that no one in the establishment wanted to look at. I recall no comprehensive negation by any party. I recall dismissal. Certainly, it can be said that the Democrats took no trouble to hide that they wanted to steal the election. Certainly it can be said positively that the Democrat solution to the mountain of true or false evidence was to suppress the discussion. Tell me, how does suppression of speech speak to character?

What is the appropriate redress for a stolen election? In a world of grievances, is it greater or smaller that the historical grievances our founders had? I'd like to hear the argument.

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