The Frankfurtists were wrong about everything except this: there was never a socialist revolution in America because, since 1600, our quality of life has simply been too high. Even the poorest of the poor in the US have it 'good' relatively. You'd have to be insane to give up a good job and a good family to go fight in an insurrection when you are as spectacularly rich as people like John and Glenn are, along with, I would guess, every last one of us reading this Substack.
Now I want anyone reading what I'm about to write to completely forget about Charlottesville and 'white nationalists.' To whatever extent those people actually exist on the Right in America, it is extremely limited. Instead, envision yourself as one of the tens of millions of normal, not racist, working class Republicans who voted for Trump last year. These are the things you are thinking moving into 2022:
The government puts a gun to your head and forces you and your kids to stay home from work and school because of a virus that poses no significant danger to you. Inflation wipes out your life savings. Murder and property crime skyrocket to unbelievable levels, with the government in many places seemingly complicit. You have to get forcibly injected with medicine you don't need, for a virus you've already had, in order to get paperwork just to go comply with insane mandates that you--and everyone around you--knows aren't working. You can't leave your house without a mask on, despite the fact that even CNN now admits that it's just safety theater. You constantly see media and political elites flaunt these rules, but you're a serf; if you try to go into a McDonald's in New York without your passport, the NYPD peppersprays you. By the way, you've been banned from all social media this week because you retweeted a TERF who had the audacity to say "women are people with Y chromosomes." You also were attacked in the streets by an Antifa mob because you had a "#bluelivesmatter" pin on your wallet: apparently, they inform you, that you are the fash that they intend to bash.
You endured four years of absolutely and utterly deranged Russiagate conspiracy theories following the 2016 election. You watched as every media and political institution, including the CIA and FBI, debased itself and destroyed its credibility in attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the candidate YOU voted for. You knew it was all nonsense even as every "smart" person told you how PUTIN HAS SEXUAL BLACKMAIL ON TRUMP over and over and over again, and yet once it was all definitively resolved and demonstrated to be false and sourced directly from Hillary and the Democrats, even after a completely phony impeachment attempt, not a single person was brought to justice. You will never be able to trust institutional authority ever again in your life--and quite frankly, for good reason.
Now comes 2020. LEGITIMATE news stories break about Joe Biden's corruption, and you watch as before your very eyes Big Tech bands together to censor this LEGITIMATE reporting, including state-funded firms like NPR. You watch as conservative politicians are deplatformed. You see videos from sitting Senators like Rand Paul taken down by YouTube for spreading "misinformation" on COVID. You hear about how in places like Kentucky the Election Commissioner unilaterally changed acceptance guidelines on mail-in ballots due to COVID, even though this is explicitly against state law and, quite possibly, could have led to election fraud. So you dare to suggest such a thing may have taken place. You mention it. You make a video exploring potential election fraud. You talk about it. You take a REASONABLE approach to questioning the outcome of the election. Even if you aren't alleging that the outcome of the votes themselves are illegitimate, when tech monopolies utilize their power to unilaterally censor one side and prop up the other--is that really a fair election? I mean really? Is it?
Google puts up banners saying ELECTIONS ARE VERY SECURE. THERE IS NO ELECTION FRAUD. Twitter bans you for suggesting there's ever any election fraud. Uttering the word 'fraud' is participating in the BIG LIE. Democrats shout, "THERE IS NO ELECTION FRAUD!" Biden is THE MOST LEGITIMATE PRESIDENT EVER. All this, after spending FOUR YEARS ranting and raving uncontrollably about how Russia STOLE THE ELECTION. #RESIST. #NOTMYPRESIDENT. Now, if you even suggest there may have been issues--which there were, I guarantee you, if for no other reason than censorship--you're a deluded conspiracy theorist.
It is now an okay opinion in polite society--acceptable, appropriate, even necessary--to believe that the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections were stolen by the dirty Republicans, but if you suggest that any malfeasance was involved in 2020, you will be kicked off the internet.
This is to say nothing about the insane excesses of the Biden administration, his horrendous rhetoric, and the hyper-McCarthyism of Pelosi and the Jan 6 Commission.
I happen to agree with most of the things I've written here, but whether or not they're true doesn't actually matter. Significant numbers of people believe them, even if you yourself are convinced they're all false--even if you still think Trump is a Russian asset. Not rednecks, not white nationalists, but normal conservative Americans all throughout the country. They believe that things are getting worse. They feel as if they're being lied to. They feel like a great deal is at stake and that they are losing their place in their own country. If you are the person I'm describing, and there are millions of them, you have fallen on very hard times over the last two years. They may get significantly worse as inflation continues to climb. And as things get worse, people have less to lose; and the less people have to lose, the more willing they are to use violence as a means to enact political change.
There are years where nothing happens and days where years happen. If it's going to come, it'll be in the blink of an eye. Just remember, John: America waged its Revolution over a 3% tax on tea. That sure seems insignificant next to vaccine mandates, doesn't it?
As a sidenote about voting, John is a brilliant man but what I find so frustrating about him in these conversations is that his views on election integrity can only be described as "100% Unconstrained," to borrow Sowell's vocabulary.
I don't know whether or not election fraud is a serious issue in the US. I don't know in part because you can't know unless there are restrictions in place. I also don't know what the correct restrictions are. But the idea that anyone, after the saga of the Trump and post-Trump years, who has concerns over the truthfulness and validity of our elections, is just trying to 'suppress voters'--well, I'm sorry John, but it's outrageous. It's slanderous. It's pie-in-the-sky liberal utopian thinking. Conservative Republicans who want more restrictive voting laws might be wrong, but they're not crazy, and they're not racist.
Any argument that we don't need any restrictions on voting, which is effectively what John has argued in the past, boils down to the premise that no one would want to commit election fraud. This is insane. I know people who were so hysterical over Trump that they would have gone out to vote against him twenty times if they could've gotten away with it--and in places like CA, they could have. It seems like a truism to me. If the Democrats could cheat, they would. So would Republicans. Lax voting laws make it easier to cheat. Cheating is bad. Therefore, a certain amount of restrictions are good and necessary.
Again, that's a debate to be had. I personally think that the fact that Democrats go BERSERK at the mere suggestion of simple and completely reasonable limitations like voter ID--when they want to literally turn our country into a papers, please society--or flip their shit because AZ and WI want to audit their votes....well, I gotta be honest, that make me very, very suspicious. If having to show our IDs to get vaccinated to show our vaccine cards to go to the movie theater isn't racist, I'm struggling to see why Dems think that voter ID laws are racist--except because they know that voter ID reduces election fraud, and they think election fraud benefits them more than Republicans. The principle does not seem to be rigorously observed internally.
And can someone express to me why it's an outrage to audit an election? Why wouldn't we audit every election? Let's do it right now! Let's go back and make sure every single election ever held was legitimate and fair! I don't think they weren't, but I'll tell you what: the conservative Republican I'm envisioning right now? Shrieking and name-calling when he suggests doing a recount, and refusing access to the ballot box, is doing nothing but continuing to undermine his confidence in elections. And that is a serious issue.
Glenn is right. Politicized elections are bad. In democracies, we've agreed to settle conflicts with ballot boxes instead of firearms, and we're better off for it. But if people don't have faith in elections, it no longer will suffice. And if you're a lawless president, who regularly and openly disregards the Constitution and the rulings of courts, doing something I'm disinclined to comply with anyway--like vaccine passports--then that blow to the legitimacy of the sitting government is going to prove fatal. War, or secession, is inevitable. It won't look like the North vs. the South, but it will be bad. I hope we never find out.
The Frankfurtists were wrong about everything except this: there was never a socialist revolution in America because, since 1600, our quality of life has simply been too high. Even the poorest of the poor in the US have it 'good' relatively. You'd have to be insane to give up a good job and a good family to go fight in an insurrection when you are as spectacularly rich as people like John and Glenn are, along with, I would guess, every last one of us reading this Substack.
Now I want anyone reading what I'm about to write to completely forget about Charlottesville and 'white nationalists.' To whatever extent those people actually exist on the Right in America, it is extremely limited. Instead, envision yourself as one of the tens of millions of normal, not racist, working class Republicans who voted for Trump last year. These are the things you are thinking moving into 2022:
The government puts a gun to your head and forces you and your kids to stay home from work and school because of a virus that poses no significant danger to you. Inflation wipes out your life savings. Murder and property crime skyrocket to unbelievable levels, with the government in many places seemingly complicit. You have to get forcibly injected with medicine you don't need, for a virus you've already had, in order to get paperwork just to go comply with insane mandates that you--and everyone around you--knows aren't working. You can't leave your house without a mask on, despite the fact that even CNN now admits that it's just safety theater. You constantly see media and political elites flaunt these rules, but you're a serf; if you try to go into a McDonald's in New York without your passport, the NYPD peppersprays you. By the way, you've been banned from all social media this week because you retweeted a TERF who had the audacity to say "women are people with Y chromosomes." You also were attacked in the streets by an Antifa mob because you had a "#bluelivesmatter" pin on your wallet: apparently, they inform you, that you are the fash that they intend to bash.
You endured four years of absolutely and utterly deranged Russiagate conspiracy theories following the 2016 election. You watched as every media and political institution, including the CIA and FBI, debased itself and destroyed its credibility in attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the candidate YOU voted for. You knew it was all nonsense even as every "smart" person told you how PUTIN HAS SEXUAL BLACKMAIL ON TRUMP over and over and over again, and yet once it was all definitively resolved and demonstrated to be false and sourced directly from Hillary and the Democrats, even after a completely phony impeachment attempt, not a single person was brought to justice. You will never be able to trust institutional authority ever again in your life--and quite frankly, for good reason.
Now comes 2020. LEGITIMATE news stories break about Joe Biden's corruption, and you watch as before your very eyes Big Tech bands together to censor this LEGITIMATE reporting, including state-funded firms like NPR. You watch as conservative politicians are deplatformed. You see videos from sitting Senators like Rand Paul taken down by YouTube for spreading "misinformation" on COVID. You hear about how in places like Kentucky the Election Commissioner unilaterally changed acceptance guidelines on mail-in ballots due to COVID, even though this is explicitly against state law and, quite possibly, could have led to election fraud. So you dare to suggest such a thing may have taken place. You mention it. You make a video exploring potential election fraud. You talk about it. You take a REASONABLE approach to questioning the outcome of the election. Even if you aren't alleging that the outcome of the votes themselves are illegitimate, when tech monopolies utilize their power to unilaterally censor one side and prop up the other--is that really a fair election? I mean really? Is it?
Google puts up banners saying ELECTIONS ARE VERY SECURE. THERE IS NO ELECTION FRAUD. Twitter bans you for suggesting there's ever any election fraud. Uttering the word 'fraud' is participating in the BIG LIE. Democrats shout, "THERE IS NO ELECTION FRAUD!" Biden is THE MOST LEGITIMATE PRESIDENT EVER. All this, after spending FOUR YEARS ranting and raving uncontrollably about how Russia STOLE THE ELECTION. #RESIST. #NOTMYPRESIDENT. Now, if you even suggest there may have been issues--which there were, I guarantee you, if for no other reason than censorship--you're a deluded conspiracy theorist.
It is now an okay opinion in polite society--acceptable, appropriate, even necessary--to believe that the 2000, 2004, and 2016 elections were stolen by the dirty Republicans, but if you suggest that any malfeasance was involved in 2020, you will be kicked off the internet.
This is to say nothing about the insane excesses of the Biden administration, his horrendous rhetoric, and the hyper-McCarthyism of Pelosi and the Jan 6 Commission.
I happen to agree with most of the things I've written here, but whether or not they're true doesn't actually matter. Significant numbers of people believe them, even if you yourself are convinced they're all false--even if you still think Trump is a Russian asset. Not rednecks, not white nationalists, but normal conservative Americans all throughout the country. They believe that things are getting worse. They feel as if they're being lied to. They feel like a great deal is at stake and that they are losing their place in their own country. If you are the person I'm describing, and there are millions of them, you have fallen on very hard times over the last two years. They may get significantly worse as inflation continues to climb. And as things get worse, people have less to lose; and the less people have to lose, the more willing they are to use violence as a means to enact political change.
There are years where nothing happens and days where years happen. If it's going to come, it'll be in the blink of an eye. Just remember, John: America waged its Revolution over a 3% tax on tea. That sure seems insignificant next to vaccine mandates, doesn't it?
What gives you the idea that John & Glenn and all of us who are reading this are “spectacularly rich”?
As a sidenote about voting, John is a brilliant man but what I find so frustrating about him in these conversations is that his views on election integrity can only be described as "100% Unconstrained," to borrow Sowell's vocabulary.
I don't know whether or not election fraud is a serious issue in the US. I don't know in part because you can't know unless there are restrictions in place. I also don't know what the correct restrictions are. But the idea that anyone, after the saga of the Trump and post-Trump years, who has concerns over the truthfulness and validity of our elections, is just trying to 'suppress voters'--well, I'm sorry John, but it's outrageous. It's slanderous. It's pie-in-the-sky liberal utopian thinking. Conservative Republicans who want more restrictive voting laws might be wrong, but they're not crazy, and they're not racist.
Any argument that we don't need any restrictions on voting, which is effectively what John has argued in the past, boils down to the premise that no one would want to commit election fraud. This is insane. I know people who were so hysterical over Trump that they would have gone out to vote against him twenty times if they could've gotten away with it--and in places like CA, they could have. It seems like a truism to me. If the Democrats could cheat, they would. So would Republicans. Lax voting laws make it easier to cheat. Cheating is bad. Therefore, a certain amount of restrictions are good and necessary.
Again, that's a debate to be had. I personally think that the fact that Democrats go BERSERK at the mere suggestion of simple and completely reasonable limitations like voter ID--when they want to literally turn our country into a papers, please society--or flip their shit because AZ and WI want to audit their votes....well, I gotta be honest, that make me very, very suspicious. If having to show our IDs to get vaccinated to show our vaccine cards to go to the movie theater isn't racist, I'm struggling to see why Dems think that voter ID laws are racist--except because they know that voter ID reduces election fraud, and they think election fraud benefits them more than Republicans. The principle does not seem to be rigorously observed internally.
And can someone express to me why it's an outrage to audit an election? Why wouldn't we audit every election? Let's do it right now! Let's go back and make sure every single election ever held was legitimate and fair! I don't think they weren't, but I'll tell you what: the conservative Republican I'm envisioning right now? Shrieking and name-calling when he suggests doing a recount, and refusing access to the ballot box, is doing nothing but continuing to undermine his confidence in elections. And that is a serious issue.
Glenn is right. Politicized elections are bad. In democracies, we've agreed to settle conflicts with ballot boxes instead of firearms, and we're better off for it. But if people don't have faith in elections, it no longer will suffice. And if you're a lawless president, who regularly and openly disregards the Constitution and the rulings of courts, doing something I'm disinclined to comply with anyway--like vaccine passports--then that blow to the legitimacy of the sitting government is going to prove fatal. War, or secession, is inevitable. It won't look like the North vs. the South, but it will be bad. I hope we never find out.