Listen now (64 min) | John McWhorter is back for our first conversation of 2022. Let’s get into it! We begin by discussing the death of the groundbreaking black actor Sidney Poitier. Portier was best known for his roles in films like The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, In the Heat of the Night
Thank you so much for this episode. Glenn and John, I was mildly surprised by your intuition of it somehow being "not right" that the presence of well-known women is lacking in your arena of discourse on culture and politics. It's certainly fair to ask why but I thought your sentiment implied concern for injustice. I reflected that, as a woman (sorry for the identity disclaimer), I hadn't noticed the disparity and I hesitate to make an assumption about the reason. But I am also not one who needs or seeks to "see myself" in those that give me inspiration. Your bimonthly conversations with John in which you both display humility, vulnerability, and courage have influenced my own thinking and given me strength to fight my own battles despite our utter lack of intersecting identities.
That being said, I remember one Ayishat Akanbi, featured on Coleman Hughes's podcast some time ago, whom I found to be a very dynamic thinker and was at least at the time pushing back on some very regressive ideas coming on the left from her position as an artist and fashion designer.
Heterodox black women: Off the top of my head, here are 11 *brilliant*, politically unclassifiable black women putting out scintillating, provocative content.
These and other women are out there, many are wildly popular, and if you boosted them from your big platforms, they would conquer the world and we could be done with wokeness within a year!
1.
Brittany Talissa King. A former BLM organizer who had a come-to-Jesus moment and embraced heterodoxy. If you read nothing else by her, read her essay "Free Black Thought":
Kimi Katiti, Boston-born, raised in Uganda and South Africa, seduced by CRT in college in America, fought her way through it, and lived to tell the tale. Amazing graphic artist. Read her healing story at the Journal of Free Black Thought:
Maye Muses. YouTubing out of LA: Nimble-minded, sarcasm-drenched commentary on the issues of the day from a deeply heterodox, ideologically unclassifiable position.
Josephine Mathias. Canadian. Started out as a college student who saw right through the bullsh*t she was being taught and decided to tell the world about it. On a bit of a hiatus, but watch these spaces:
Sorry to here Lani passed away. She was good friends of my best friend's sister. I once took her out on a date taking a bus and a train all the way from Hollis, Queens, to Slugs in the East Village (Alphabet City) to hear Pharaoh Saunders.
Anyone looking to fill 40 minutes could do worse than Kara Swisher's new "Sway" interview of SF Mayor London Breed. Breed says she knows how she's going to vote in the Boudin recall vote, but she's not ready to announce it. Interesting. Breed sounded like a right wing type when she bemoaned all the money spent on social programs that failed their promise to decrease crime. Swisher asked what role the loss of Silicon Valley companies to Austin and Miami have had on Breed's recent change of heart.
Regarding why there are so many more heterodox men than women, not just among Blacks, is part of a broader sex divide that's been growing. I suspect it's a mix between delayed/absent marriage, as marriage tends to make women more conservative, more education achievement among women, and some downstream effects of birth control which has been mainstream for four generations now. We're moving away from the bourgeois family structure, seen both in the broken homes and dysfunctions of the American poor first seen among Blacks but increasingly seen among Whites and Latinos, and the childless homes of the middle and upper classes. Even when middle and up have kids it's later in life, maybe to a 50 year old dad and a 40 year old mom, and while I don't have a clear argument for why this would contribute to greater sex political polarization I feel like it does.
The end of this conversation has been something I've talked about since a few years after 9/11 - unless the DHS, FBI, and CIA are actually super secretly stopping plots all the times (and for some reason only doing press conferences about mentally ill/developmentally disabled people that they paid and equipped to "plan" an attack). There are millions of guns and vehicles in the united states, and it's trivially difficult for people to acquire one or both. If there were really terrorists of various stripes hiding around every corner, I can't help but think there would be WAY more small-scale terrorist attacks. The total lack of their existence seems like decent evidence that the threats we're supposed to worry about aren't really all that threatening.
For anyone interested in more information further to the discussion about the revolutionary left in the 1960s and 1970s, I highly recommend DAYS OF INFAMY, by Bryan Burrough. It catalogues in some detail the extent to which they tried to live up to their rhetoric.
Fast forward to today — I’d say the people on the far right whom Glenn was discussing are much better armed than the revolutionary left way back when and probably today. I agree with John they are unlikely to succeed in staging a coup or starting a civil war. However, if they were ever to try, they would be able to cause a great deal of death, injury and civil strife before they would be suppressed. This is not to minimize what the revolutionary left has done or could do. It’s just to say that things could get really bad, in ways we’d like to avoid and would regret, and still be short of a successful coup or starting a civil war.
In that regard, I share Glenn’s fears, particularly when he talks about a white nationalist reaction to the racialization of everything and the demonization of whites.
Re: Voting Ability time frame, it is really very simple. “Center” the rules and ability to vote around a parent/guardian who has a 4 month old baby and a 2 year old.
Also.. it’s not “right wingers” who are fed up and saying they better not come in my neighborhood or town.. highly educated center ppl are becoming “right wingers” by this definition. Along with the border crisis .. People have had it.
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?
Frankly I’m amazed people do not believe the election was a scandal Why did vote counting stop in all swing states at the same time. Starting there but lots of evidence of illegal voting throughout those states. Georgia destroyed voting ballots .. against federal law. The Georgia AG lying about his conversation with Trump. Unfortunately main stream media doesn’t report these examples but it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Further, 2016 several Dems had the same complaints which Republicans and Trump had regarding the machines. So please do more in research. Candace Owens is a black women who is very intelligent. Also please research what is going on with the Michigan Capitol “insurrection” the “dress rehearsal” for the US Capitol “Insurrection” and those who were arrested. Nothing like 12 of the 16 of those involved in Michigan plot being FBI agents.
Re: Prof. McWhorter's comments at ~57:30 -The Panthers and Panther-adjacent groups in the 60's were met with (1) hard-edged police repression (yes, including the helicopter bombing in Philly and other methods that today look barbaric and totalitarian), and (2) cooptation by the elites into academia, etc. And even with both repressive and converting forces operating on them they still managed to do a LOT of damage. John's insistence that shrapnel bombs "don't happen here" is belied by the "Days of Rage" count of literally thousands of bombings and bomb threats during the 70's. And in the end a lot of what those radicals wanted wound up being the official curricula of education schools, history and -studies programs, and sociology programs.
Thanks to Glenn and John for recognizing that the real danger of violence and instability in future elections is due to problems in the integrity of how votes get counted, not in how votes are cast. I am a volunteer election official in my county. I know how tight the process is and how next to impossible it would be to import fake ballots, miscount ballots either deliberately or accidentally either by machine or by hand, destroy ballots (without getting caught), and all the other things that the Trump supporters claimed to have observed in 2020. But Republican legislatures in multiple states, including some important swing states, are changing their procedures to allow election administration to be done by partisan boards and giving the legislature more power to override the actual voting results. In 2020, 147 Republican Representatives refused to certify the Electoral College vote, based on no evidence whatsoever. The Democrats should focus on passing legislation that (1) mandates paper ballots everywhere. Amazingly, eight states still use voting machines that produce no permanent record, making recounts impossible. (2) mandates risk-limiting audits and standards for ballot counting reproducibility and recounts, (3) eliminates the power of state legislatures to override voting results and send their own slate of electors, (4) eliminates the ability of US legislators to prevent the certification of state election results without some kind of court-ordered investigation into possible corruption of the vote counting process in the state. A voting integrity act limited to measures like that would probably get a significant amount of Republican buy-in.
Great episode this week! I felt that John was a bit pedantic when reflecting on the effects of the events on January 6th. I think Glenn summed it up pretty well. However, I do not think the criticism of Trump and his active role in normalizing illiberal activities amongst republican lawmakers went far enough. Equating Trump to Stacy Abram is a bit much seeing as one actively tried to and still attempts to undermine the foundations of democratic processes while the other was just a sore loser at the time. I agree that how the media on the left depicts Jan 6th is overdramatic. It wasn't a coup attempt by any means ( at least not a competently orchestrated one). It was, however, an international embarrassment and a civilization-defining moment. America is the model for modern democracy and displays of Jan 6th hurt our moral authority on the matters of democracy. Events like that day only serve to strengthen the hand of Russia and China, who are staging their own illiberal activities in Ukraine and Taiwan/Hong Kong.
As for black heterodox women, I would not consider Carol Swain among them. Her insistence on staying a strong uncritical supporter of Trump is disqualifying. Perhaps a concrete definition of the term "heterodox black voice" is in order. Kimi Katiti is a great black woman, who, much like Carol Swain is rooted in a Christian foundation. She is from Zimbabwe and lives in LA, but has lived all over the world, giving her a global context that is important for Black America. Brittany Talissa King is another heterodox voice who is especially interesting, given her early involvement in the BLM movement post-Michael Brown. Both have sizable Youtube followings.
Thank you so much for this episode. Glenn and John, I was mildly surprised by your intuition of it somehow being "not right" that the presence of well-known women is lacking in your arena of discourse on culture and politics. It's certainly fair to ask why but I thought your sentiment implied concern for injustice. I reflected that, as a woman (sorry for the identity disclaimer), I hadn't noticed the disparity and I hesitate to make an assumption about the reason. But I am also not one who needs or seeks to "see myself" in those that give me inspiration. Your bimonthly conversations with John in which you both display humility, vulnerability, and courage have influenced my own thinking and given me strength to fight my own battles despite our utter lack of intersecting identities.
That being said, I remember one Ayishat Akanbi, featured on Coleman Hughes's podcast some time ago, whom I found to be a very dynamic thinker and was at least at the time pushing back on some very regressive ideas coming on the left from her position as an artist and fashion designer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEC1g4NRha0&t=4s
Heterodox black women: Off the top of my head, here are 11 *brilliant*, politically unclassifiable black women putting out scintillating, provocative content.
These and other women are out there, many are wildly popular, and if you boosted them from your big platforms, they would conquer the world and we could be done with wokeness within a year!
1.
Brittany Talissa King. A former BLM organizer who had a come-to-Jesus moment and embraced heterodoxy. If you read nothing else by her, read her essay "Free Black Thought":
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/dubois-washington-black-lives-matter
Her vital podcast, American Shade, which has featured Coleman Hughes and numerous other heavy hitters (24K subscribers): https://www.youtube.com/c/AmericanShadewithBrittanyKing/
Her website: https://www.brittanyking.com/
Her Twitter: https://twitter.com/KingTalissa
2.
Kimi Katiti, Boston-born, raised in Uganda and South Africa, seduced by CRT in college in America, fought her way through it, and lived to tell the tale. Amazing graphic artist. Read her healing story at the Journal of Free Black Thought:
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/we-love-lived-experienceuntil-it
YouTube channel (42K subscribers): https://www.youtube.com/user/Nyonyozimusic
Website: https://www.kimikatiti.com/
3.
Sheena Mason. Asst. Prof. of English in the CUNY system and founder of uncompromisingly heterodox "Theory of Racelessness."
YouTube (10K subscribers): https://www.youtube.com/c/QueenShe
Website: https://www.theoryofracelessness.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SheenaMasonPhD
Article: https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/theory-of-racelessness-a-case-for
4.
Gothix (aka Vanessa). A "problematic" free thinker from Rhode Island who takes no prisoners and spares no holy cows.
YouTube (235K subscribers): https://www.youtube.com/c/GothixTV/featured
Website: https://gothix.tv/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gothixtv
5.
Savvy (Savannah Edwards). Out of NOLA: Not only heterodox but FEROCIOUSLY funny producer of unflinchingly heterodox videos and podcasts.
TikTok (837K followers): https://www.tiktok.com/@thisissavvy
All her links: https://linktr.ee/thisissavvy
6.
Maye Muses. YouTubing out of LA: Nimble-minded, sarcasm-drenched commentary on the issues of the day from a deeply heterodox, ideologically unclassifiable position.
YouTube (9K): https://www.youtube.com/c/MayeMuses/videos
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Maye_Muses
7.
Josephine Mathias. Canadian. Started out as a college student who saw right through the bullsh*t she was being taught and decided to tell the world about it. On a bit of a hiatus, but watch these spaces:
YouTube (95K subscribers): https://www.youtube.com/c/MyNameIsJosephine
Twitter (17K followers): https://twitter.com/nameisjosephine
8.
Africa Brooke. UK by way of Tanzania, she wrote a SEARING open letter about leaving the cult of wokeness: https://ckarchive.com/b/d0ueh0h67mpd
Instagram (183K followers): https://www.instagram.com/africabrooke/
Website: https://africabrooke.com/
Two podcasts:
Unfiltered: https://unfilteredwithafrica.buzzsprout.com/
Beyond the Self: https://www.stitcher.com/show/beyond-the-self-with-africa-brooke
9.
Ayishat Akanbe. UK by way of Nigeria. Queen of the devastating one-liner.
Twitter (90K followers): https://twitter.com/ayishat_akanbi/
Forthcoming book: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘸𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨: 𝘊𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺, 𝘊𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘣 𝘰𝘧 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘰𝘴:
https://twitter.com/FreeBlckThought/status/1483864331859070976
10.
Ada Akpala. UK by way of Nigeria. One of the most independent thinkers on the scene.
YouTube channel, "A Different Voice Initiative": https://www.youtube.com/c/DifferentVoiceInitiative/
Read her story: https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-black-girl
All her links: https://linktr.ee/differentvoice
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ada_akpala
11.
Inaya Folarin Iman. UK by way of Nigeria. Founder of the important Equiano Project, which produces writing, events, videos, interviews, etc.
Website: https://www.theequianoproject.com/
Twitter (50K followers): https://twitter.com/InayaFolarin
Give these ladies a listen and keep up the phenomenal work!
Sorry to here Lani passed away. She was good friends of my best friend's sister. I once took her out on a date taking a bus and a train all the way from Hollis, Queens, to Slugs in the East Village (Alphabet City) to hear Pharaoh Saunders.
Anyone looking to fill 40 minutes could do worse than Kara Swisher's new "Sway" interview of SF Mayor London Breed. Breed says she knows how she's going to vote in the Boudin recall vote, but she's not ready to announce it. Interesting. Breed sounded like a right wing type when she bemoaned all the money spent on social programs that failed their promise to decrease crime. Swisher asked what role the loss of Silicon Valley companies to Austin and Miami have had on Breed's recent change of heart.
Regarding why there are so many more heterodox men than women, not just among Blacks, is part of a broader sex divide that's been growing. I suspect it's a mix between delayed/absent marriage, as marriage tends to make women more conservative, more education achievement among women, and some downstream effects of birth control which has been mainstream for four generations now. We're moving away from the bourgeois family structure, seen both in the broken homes and dysfunctions of the American poor first seen among Blacks but increasingly seen among Whites and Latinos, and the childless homes of the middle and upper classes. Even when middle and up have kids it's later in life, maybe to a 50 year old dad and a 40 year old mom, and while I don't have a clear argument for why this would contribute to greater sex political polarization I feel like it does.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/opinion/gender-gap-politics.html
https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2018/05/20/all-the-lonely-people-where-do-they-all-come-from/
The end of this conversation has been something I've talked about since a few years after 9/11 - unless the DHS, FBI, and CIA are actually super secretly stopping plots all the times (and for some reason only doing press conferences about mentally ill/developmentally disabled people that they paid and equipped to "plan" an attack). There are millions of guns and vehicles in the united states, and it's trivially difficult for people to acquire one or both. If there were really terrorists of various stripes hiding around every corner, I can't help but think there would be WAY more small-scale terrorist attacks. The total lack of their existence seems like decent evidence that the threats we're supposed to worry about aren't really all that threatening.
PS, if you don't know what I mean in the parenthetical above: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/magazine/fbi-international-terrorism-informants.html
For anyone interested in more information further to the discussion about the revolutionary left in the 1960s and 1970s, I highly recommend DAYS OF INFAMY, by Bryan Burrough. It catalogues in some detail the extent to which they tried to live up to their rhetoric.
Fast forward to today — I’d say the people on the far right whom Glenn was discussing are much better armed than the revolutionary left way back when and probably today. I agree with John they are unlikely to succeed in staging a coup or starting a civil war. However, if they were ever to try, they would be able to cause a great deal of death, injury and civil strife before they would be suppressed. This is not to minimize what the revolutionary left has done or could do. It’s just to say that things could get really bad, in ways we’d like to avoid and would regret, and still be short of a successful coup or starting a civil war.
In that regard, I share Glenn’s fears, particularly when he talks about a white nationalist reaction to the racialization of everything and the demonization of whites.
Re: Voting Ability time frame, it is really very simple. “Center” the rules and ability to vote around a parent/guardian who has a 4 month old baby and a 2 year old.
For black women who are heterodox, how about Condoleeza Rice and Janice Rogers Brown?
Also.. it’s not “right wingers” who are fed up and saying they better not come in my neighborhood or town.. highly educated center ppl are becoming “right wingers” by this definition. Along with the border crisis .. People have had it.
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?
Frankly I’m amazed people do not believe the election was a scandal Why did vote counting stop in all swing states at the same time. Starting there but lots of evidence of illegal voting throughout those states. Georgia destroyed voting ballots .. against federal law. The Georgia AG lying about his conversation with Trump. Unfortunately main stream media doesn’t report these examples but it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Further, 2016 several Dems had the same complaints which Republicans and Trump had regarding the machines. So please do more in research. Candace Owens is a black women who is very intelligent. Also please research what is going on with the Michigan Capitol “insurrection” the “dress rehearsal” for the US Capitol “Insurrection” and those who were arrested. Nothing like 12 of the 16 of those involved in Michigan plot being FBI agents.
Re: Prof. McWhorter's comments at ~57:30 -The Panthers and Panther-adjacent groups in the 60's were met with (1) hard-edged police repression (yes, including the helicopter bombing in Philly and other methods that today look barbaric and totalitarian), and (2) cooptation by the elites into academia, etc. And even with both repressive and converting forces operating on them they still managed to do a LOT of damage. John's insistence that shrapnel bombs "don't happen here" is belied by the "Days of Rage" count of literally thousands of bombings and bomb threats during the 70's. And in the end a lot of what those radicals wanted wound up being the official curricula of education schools, history and -studies programs, and sociology programs.
A classic Glenn Loury rant starting around 40:50 seems to somehow stun John.
A couple of clips from In the Heat of the Night:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnvmOY1NUGo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP3arfW6uvw
Thanks to Glenn and John for recognizing that the real danger of violence and instability in future elections is due to problems in the integrity of how votes get counted, not in how votes are cast. I am a volunteer election official in my county. I know how tight the process is and how next to impossible it would be to import fake ballots, miscount ballots either deliberately or accidentally either by machine or by hand, destroy ballots (without getting caught), and all the other things that the Trump supporters claimed to have observed in 2020. But Republican legislatures in multiple states, including some important swing states, are changing their procedures to allow election administration to be done by partisan boards and giving the legislature more power to override the actual voting results. In 2020, 147 Republican Representatives refused to certify the Electoral College vote, based on no evidence whatsoever. The Democrats should focus on passing legislation that (1) mandates paper ballots everywhere. Amazingly, eight states still use voting machines that produce no permanent record, making recounts impossible. (2) mandates risk-limiting audits and standards for ballot counting reproducibility and recounts, (3) eliminates the power of state legislatures to override voting results and send their own slate of electors, (4) eliminates the ability of US legislators to prevent the certification of state election results without some kind of court-ordered investigation into possible corruption of the vote counting process in the state. A voting integrity act limited to measures like that would probably get a significant amount of Republican buy-in.
Great episode this week! I felt that John was a bit pedantic when reflecting on the effects of the events on January 6th. I think Glenn summed it up pretty well. However, I do not think the criticism of Trump and his active role in normalizing illiberal activities amongst republican lawmakers went far enough. Equating Trump to Stacy Abram is a bit much seeing as one actively tried to and still attempts to undermine the foundations of democratic processes while the other was just a sore loser at the time. I agree that how the media on the left depicts Jan 6th is overdramatic. It wasn't a coup attempt by any means ( at least not a competently orchestrated one). It was, however, an international embarrassment and a civilization-defining moment. America is the model for modern democracy and displays of Jan 6th hurt our moral authority on the matters of democracy. Events like that day only serve to strengthen the hand of Russia and China, who are staging their own illiberal activities in Ukraine and Taiwan/Hong Kong.
As for black heterodox women, I would not consider Carol Swain among them. Her insistence on staying a strong uncritical supporter of Trump is disqualifying. Perhaps a concrete definition of the term "heterodox black voice" is in order. Kimi Katiti is a great black woman, who, much like Carol Swain is rooted in a Christian foundation. She is from Zimbabwe and lives in LA, but has lived all over the world, giving her a global context that is important for Black America. Brittany Talissa King is another heterodox voice who is especially interesting, given her early involvement in the BLM movement post-Michael Brown. Both have sizable Youtube followings.