My 22 year old, college from his bedroom son, informed me that anyone against woke/cancel/antifa culture is a Nazi. When I asked him if he thought I was a Nazi, he smirked & shrugged, which was an obvious passive aggressive affirmation of my Nazi-ness. While I don't feel like a Nazi, it took most of will power to not go all SS on his punk ass. So much so that it's pushed my heart into a crazy 2 day arrhythmia.
It's been a tense 2 days here. I wouldn't be surprised if this ends my 30 year marriage.
The irony I suppose is that I didn't even vote for Trump, just pointed out the bullshit around Trump.
I used this McCluhan quote before. Didn't think I'd be the idiot.
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”
I appreciate all of your takes. I tried discussion but the smirk and the fact that my social justice offspring, who has never actually helped another human in his life, started condescending to me like I was a feeble minded 4 year old.
I know that my son's political ideology is puddle deep. He used to get every bit of political "incite" from John Oliver & Trevor Noah. I suspect it hasn't changed.
What has changed has been his choice of friends once he hit high school. He qualified for gifted classes & literally every one of his new friends were young lefties with daddy issues who hated their upscale Republican fathers.
He then followed them to the same college where woke mania circulated like syphilis
at a low rent brothel.
Again, I don't know where this is heading but I suspect it won't be good.
I want to offer you some words of encouragement. Your son may not always act like the know-it-all that he is right now. I was a high school teacher for many years and many a parent expressed concern over their adolescent's attitudes and behaviors, the worst of which was most often directed toward the parents themselves. Often, the teens were much better behaved at school. Why? Because they know home is the safe place to rebel or be a sh*t. Their parents love them, and they know it.
I also mentored many new, young teachers. Like the high schoolers, the 20-somethings think they know much more than they do. Still, in both cases, what I often saw over the course of time was a softening of their insistence that they were always right. There is way too much hyper "wokeness" at many colleges today. Good thing is, after college, life eventually has to be faced, and that's often a much need cold slap of reality. Hang in there.
Thanks for your time. I suppose that what bugs me is that up until college we used to talk things through. For example, before he left for college I wanted to know his drug usage. But I knew he'd lie because he knew it would freak out his mother. So I offered a confidential full disclosure drug quid pro quo. I'd reveal my drug usage if he'd tell me his drug usage. By his age I had done considerably more drugs than he did. I told him to talk to me before he did anything stupid. Consequently, after that discussion, he pretty much stopped doing anything.
I also have a 17 year old son. I treat him like an adult. I've never been good at condescending crapola with my children. Life isn't a party. At times it's harsh and psychologically crippling. Putting happy wappy blinders on your kid usually just means that they won't see the punch coming. At least if you can see the punch coming you can duck if you're lucky. If not, you can at least brace yourself.
Americans seem to be under some mistaken delusion that this comfy capitalist shopping mall will just go on forever & ever amen. That, to me, is a very dangerous thought that history doesn't support in the least.
A plug for Trevor Noah...his book, Born A Crime, I think is terrific...a first person account of growing up during apartheid using the wit and wisdom he is so gifted with.
You should sit down and ask you 22 year old son what Nazism is. Have him explain the qualities and ideology of National Socialism.
I suspect he doesn't know. In much the same way people argue that you are wrong because "science has proven it so", not understanding that science does not deal in absolutes. That is, science can't prove anything. Absolutes are the realm of religion.
National Socialism is based, philosophically on intolerance of other people's views, bigotry, as well as the demonization of the other, those who are not part of your tribe, and militarization against, which is the hallmark of an authoritarian ideology. Combine this with the militarization of society, even the government and youth corps had military rank, and you end up with fascism.
Of course, to get National Socialism, you also need to have a strong system of racial purity and a belief that all people should have their hand held by and cared for by the government. In truth, I have found that woke/cancel/antifa is closer to Nazism than most other ideologies in the US today.
Antifa specifically espouses violence to silence those who disagree with their views, much like Hitler's Brown shirts which predated his rise to the Chancellorship.
I realize that this is a very superficial overview. I am not a historian, I am a philosopher, but your son is being indoctrinated, and it is up to you, as his parent, to teach him how to think, and how to test what people are telling him.
Liberal arts is considered a useless field of study, which is why all of the rich and powerful make sure that their children are educated in it, because it teaches you how to think and be your own person.
And it only becomes marketable if you want to be run a company, or be your own boss, rather than following someone else's orders.
Teach your son how to think, he will appreciate you for it later.
The only thing you can do is let him go off into his life the way he wants to.
Raising kids is hard, but it's far more painful and terrifying to see them go out on their own than to see them stumble as they learn to walk as babies.
"Choose your battles". If your kid is just being an idealistic kid, fine. It shows he has a heart.
He'll learn to temper that like we all did, but if you choose to battle over it, it may drive a wedge between you forever.
So... when he acts like a cunt, just accept that this is where he is right now -caught up in his generations rise to actual fascism. One day he and his cohorts will understand.
We're going to be visiting some bad places as a country in the next ten years. Tell him no matter what that you love him and always have. That'll never change.
Let him be.
He'll become rightfully disillusioned with his little woke revolution when he sees first hand how it's subjective... and one day he and his buddies will be on the receiving end of it -when the Stats no longer needs them to round up "the landlords".
My 16 year old is a huge trump supporter and it’s been a tough 4 years as I am not. I know my case is extremely unique since we live in a very liberal area and he is so young but my son met trump in 2016 when trump visited my fathers former fire house in nyc on 9/11 and with the influence of my parents he became a huge supporter at the age of 12!! This terrified me.
I never get called a nazi but I do get called a liberal like it’s a curse word on a daily basis. Not as hurtful but it still doesn’t feel good to have your kid talk down to you like you’re an idiot.
My parents were super conservative and I rejected that which they never respected so I wanted to try something different.
My approach was to tell him that he is his own individual and that if he wants to support trump, or any other politician, all that I ask is he knows the issues and understands them well enough that he can defend his support. I will say that even my most liberal, trump hating friends have made a point to tell me that he at least knows his stuff and debates them with respect and knowledge even if they don’t agree. So I didn’t fail as a parent completely, I guess.
Here’s the good news, by not pushing my own beliefs on him I do believe that he was able to see things more clearly than most of his peers do because he had his own convictions. As of this past month he’s even started to move more to the center and is willing to acknowledge some of Trump’s wrong doings and we have been able to have some civil political conversations.
The biggest highlight was watching him argue with my mother on Xmas that Trump needs to concede and move on for the good of the country. He even criticized Bush, Romney, turtle man McConell and the republican establishment that she loves. I must say it was a proud mama moment.
My advice is to let your son have his beliefs and respect them but insist that your son respects his own beliefs enough to understand them himself.
If that fails you could tell him that to prove you aren’t a nazi you are donating his inheritance to the holocaust museum in his name😂
Yes, we have been finding common ground on politicians we don’t like as well as pointing out all the hypocrisies on both sides. So much to agree on sadly.
Your situation is slightly different in that your kid is still young enough to be at home all of the time. Mine is only here because it's winter & Covid. If he were at school it would be a lot easier to out wait him. I never pushed my beliefs on him.
I remember 2 left wing co-workers discussing "how to raise a child to turn out liberal." Thought the idea was absurd. Forcing teenagers to think the way you want them to think is one idea doomed to nothing but failure.
What they'd end up with is Republican or apolitical kids who wouldn't give a shit about their parent's lectures on politics.
I know someone who said her child in 2nd grade made an advent calendar to count down the days until Trump is out of office. So many people appeared to believe her child came up with it on her own. Ha!
Yes, very different since mine was so young but he was staying with my mom a lot since she lives next to us and the 24/7 Fox News that he was watching and her rhetoric was challenging to counter. Mine was def not the normal situation but I feel for you.
It’s good you don’t push your beliefs on him and maybe remind him of that and ask for the same respect.
As far as your friends trying to raise their kids to be liberal you are spot on, it will backfire.
What was even more amazing was the fact that both of them had Republican parents who they both had rocky relationships because they're parents tried to force them to think like Republicans.
Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees.
It sounds like you son is a stupid kid just like all kids that age are stupid.I was.
This story is a perfect example of what Matt has been writing about lately and all the crazies on this website love. “Educated youth is being turned against everyone for not being woke. At our schools! Our schools! Oh and I am not even a Trump supporter so you can take my perfect example of how the left is using terrible tactics!”
I'm sorry to hear about what you're going through. Sounds scary.
:(
I'd strongly recommend checking out James Lindsay's work (newdiscourses.com) for navigating the clusterfuck of a minefield that is woke culture. It's not going to be easy but I've heard some parents have had success deprogramming the toxicity.
That's an awesome post I too am entirely surrounded by the blind MSM robots. My SO I live with watches MSNBC 24/7. I watch none. We almost got into a heated argument last night when he wanted to continue to argue and I told him I wouldn't. I'm sorry but if he wants the "proof" of what I believe in then he will have to do the research himself. He isn't serious about looking at the evidence and I'm not a great enough debater as well as being just plain tired to engage is what would end up name calling. I pointed out to him that during the Civil War there were family split apart brother vs. brother over it and then asked if that was where we were going.
Hilarious!!! Don’t let your marriage or your relationship with your son end because of their bs. In the end we all just die ... it’s more fun to have family and friends w you on the way.
There are good reasons why so many cultures had mechanisms to send young adult males away, at least for a time. Vision quests, religious missions, military service, and even "finding yourself" all served to sequester a lot of peak stupid from families and communities.
While I'm sorry to hear about the troubles with your son, it's heartening to hear your take on the situation. I feel like it's a small group who can see the things that, to the others, are not there. But we're growing. I hope. And while I'm no Matt Taibbi, I've tried to cover all the bases of how the national political news media and social networks have distorted and bifurcated reality. So that your son, well-intentioned and intelligent as he might be, winds up confused. If you'll permit me: https://tjbreartonx.medium.com/how-reality-got-broken-20470c95d7c8?source=friends_link&sk=557f7fb743bbeb1311de61219fb6a5eb
Who cares what a 22 year old thinks? I know they are _your_ 22 old so it hurts but isn't this just like anything else a child, lacking experience, may think? A kid with friends who've got shitty habits/beliefs who are influencing your child...Don't give yourself a heart attack over it but also don't give up trying to get through to them... your 22 yr old isn't lost nor is our country - not yet anyway.
RAW? Read Cosmic Trigger 1, 2 & 3, Illuminatus Trilogy, Schrödinger's Cat, Prometheus Rising, Wilhelm Reich In Hell & The New Inquisition in my 20s. I also used to do a lot of acid.
Wish I had some right now.
I'd love to get some life changing realization that I'll forget when I wake up.
Mr. Hoffman, don't take this the wrong way, but I've taken to greeting my son with a morning Seig Heil & a Nazi salute. I know it's a dick move & probably the wrong move but it keeps his teeth in his mouth. Things may change. Things may not.
I wish I could speak eloquently about Vietnam but I was 8 when my only sibling was drafted. I remember walking in the front door one night & hearing my parents arguing with my brother about the war. My brother said something snarky to my mother & my dad belted him. Disrespecting my mom was a big no-no in my house. My brother wanted my parents to sign a loan to get him into college & out of Vietnam. My dad was a decorated WW2 vet who believed his government & he wasn't having it. While his opinion changed over the years about the government's honesty, their rift never really healed.
In the end, my brother failed the physical & didn't have to go.
Then, around the time Platoon was released & it became weirdly fashionable to retroactively love Vietnam vets, my brother developed something I saw as Vietnam envy syndrome. He'd say really stupid shit like "What's the big deal. I could have fought in Vietnam." Don't get me wrong, I loved my brother. When he died a year & a half ago I lost my last blood relative other than my kids. We were very close. But his attitude was...ummm...a tad bit brain damaged.
My only other memories of Vietnam were those nightly reports from actual combat that Dan Rather, I do believe, gave from combat zones. Did they really do that? If they did they learned that war goes down a helluva lot easier when it's sanitized for the masses. Hence embedding & all of the other propaganda bullshit they cover their empire cake with like it was icing. The other bit was the nightly draft roll. Did they really do that or did I dream it? Now it sort of seems like a surreal lottery from hell where the winners really lose.
I'd say I salute you for your service but that phrase, like so much American pop culture ephemera, always seems to have the stench of bullshit around it to me. Since my dad & I were very close, in the 6 months before he died, I remember him telling me about his nightly dreams where his dead war buddies would visit him. That taught me that when all the propaganda & flag waving & crapola pass from people's minds, the wounds still cut deep 30, 40, 50 years later. The wars never really end for the folk we send to fight them. Instead of a salute let's just say that you have my sincerest sympathy.
Isn't it odd how nothing really changes here? When my woke son graduated from high school, his graduation ceremony involved a teacher calling up the graduate & then naming their post graduation plans; college, no college, military service. While the first 2 drew a smattering of tepid applause, the military service announcement caused the entire auditorium to erupt in cheers. To say I was gobsmacked would be an understatement. Since this was post Iraq War Part Deux, all I could think was "How fucking stupid are you motherfuckers?"
It all made me think of a book I read, years ago, about the 1st world war. In it, a WW1 vet was asked what he thought about the parades & cheering vets were given upon their return. He said that he wished he still had his gun so he could open fire on the crowds who had initially cheered him into hell.
Around every Veteran's day, there's this ever shrinking group of old vets who stand outside the local Wally World, begging for donations for disabled vets. I always stick a 20 in each time I pass them whether it's 1 time or 6 times. You may not believe that but it's the God's honest. It always makes me wonder why, if we love our vets so fucking much, do we reduce them to beggars afterwards?
I love the idea of America. The reality, not so much.
In conclusion sir, I'd shake your hand if I could shove it through this screen. Sadly I can't. You'll just have to accept the idea of a handshake. Take care sir.
Not to say that the movies are going to fix anything in reality, but I think you'd enjoy Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997) if you haven't seen it already, which in all probability you have.
Ummmm....sorry bud. I have a penis. At least I did the last time I urinated. I may have to reexamine my use of language to see where the vagina creeps in.
These transgender accusations being leveled against my paragraphs have triggered my safe space response to counter your paragraph's obvious micro-aggressions.
"having kids is like genetic Russian roulette. You never know what is going to happen when you pull the trigger."
This is a great line which I may eventually steal.
"Baby boomer males in the nineties would come up to me in a bar or at a party when they found out I served in Vietnam and say, "You know I really regret not having served in the military during the draft." ... Then there were the guys who still remained hawks about that war. Of course, they evaded the draft too. They would say, "You know, you lost that war."
These motherfuckers have always been and always will be with us. You could be at a bar in Hadrumetum in like 125 BC and they will be there and say something like "Yeah, I regret not having participated in the Siege of Carthage, but I had other priorities at the time." Dick Cheney is the apotheosis of this kind of guy.
"Into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind." Ronald Reagan.
In other words, let's build us some nukes Pa!
Now afflicted mankind is looking at us like we just wet ourselves in public.
While Ronnie wasn't technically a draft dodger, he did spend the war in America.
I remember, towards the end of his time owning brain cells, he used to tell "war stories" to crowds about those WW2 exploits he never had. A reporter figured out that Ronnie was really telling plots from war movies and passing them off as his own. By that point he probably believed they really were his life story.
The difference is that Reagan's delusions were about flying bomber planes or being George Armstrong Custer, which he "did" in the movies, and Biden's are about beating up a black dude at a swimming pool, which he may actually have done. It really illustrates how far Dominant Racist White Anglo-American Culture has come in the last few decades. Keep reaching for the stars, guys.
I don't excuse the lawlessness in DC, but the reaction to it is as scary as the act itself. I see talk of sedition charges, companies firing their employees without any sort of due process, sycophant CEOs jumping on the opportunity to denounce the violence as if they are doing it in the spirit of altruism and patriotism. Please... The mainstream media, for their part, is just lapping it up. The usual useful idiots giving air time to talk of impeachment, which would be just more wasting our time and energy, and would just serve to stoke the fire of Trump supporters even more. The big news of cabinet members leaving....whoopee, they are probably just happy they can have a couple of extra weeks off before they left and get to look virtuous for doing so. The media and both parties are so corrupt, I have a hard time seeing our way forward without a meaningful third party run or a constitutional convention to bring term limits, campaign finance reform, among other things.
Why do companies need to give employees due process? The idiot was wearing their badge and stupidly was caught on tape. He was fired for it because why should a business have to deal with that guys dumb shit.
What are you suggesting? That all companies give employees due process before firing them now? Employment at will bro.
Sure companies can do what they want, bro. The fact that he was wearing his badge kind of disproves the whole idea of this being sedition, insurrection, a coup, etc. Just using it as an example of the media serving up an inquisition, railroading...they love this stuff....bro.
“ The fact that he was wearing his badge kind of disproves the whole idea of this being sedition, insurrection, a coup, etc. “
It was all of those things.
The media had nothing to do with him getting fired. The guy walked in a building he shouldn’t have been in. The MSM had cameras there and they did what news station do when they have cameras where news is being made. They pointed the lens at the action and filmed it.
Internet sleuths found his badge and reported it to his company. The company reasonably said, “ we don’t need this shit from this idiot.” Then fired him.
The company has the right to do that. I agree with the companies right to do that. Maybe you think companies should not have the right to have employees at will. Maybe you want more oversight by the government.
Now if he was arrested for walking in the people’s building. I don’t know how I feel about that yet. I think only the people who caused damage should be arrested.
Do you disagree with what I wrote? “ Now if he was arrested for walking in the people’s building. I don’t know how I feel about that yet. I think only the people who caused damage should be arrested.”
I wouldn't be surprised if these people decide one day to annex Mexico and invade Canada, citing some "right". It's Germany in the buildup to WWII all over again.
Matt's analysis and the group's broader discussion is accurate but not the whole story.
A large subset of the American population no longer feels represented by their government. Their jobs were offshored, their heritage demonized, their communities are wastelands of decay. Downtown shopping districts -- where people could once interact as humans -- have been condensed into an Amazon van. They wander like vagabonds, bearing witness to a destruction that lacks even a culturally approved name and parades -- in a permanent state of justification -- under the euphemism "economic efficiency". They are politically, ideologically and culturally homeless.
I watched some of the videos of the events at the Capitol. It appeared at least some of the "rioters" were allowed in by security, stayed deferentially inside velvet ropes and appeared reverential in attitude. There were even videos of groups organizing to prevent destruction by would-be vandals. Afterward, there were reports many remained on the Capitol grounds to pick up trash and clean up. In my view labels like "QAnon followers" and "Trump supporters" -- while they are true in specific cases and in broad generality -- are the kind of lazy synecdoche that too easily scapegoats. It seemed to me that most at Mr. Trump's rally and speech were there because of their personal experience and direct observation of the reality around them (which he and Bernie Sanders alone among national politicians seemed willing to acknowledge) -- not because of a quack cult. It appeared the vast majority neither expected or approved of the mayhem that followed. While anecdotes are not data, I recall of one bewildered attendee who said "I organized a group to come here today but I didn't sign up for this!"
The eminently quotable Albert Camus wrote "No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people." Our cultural and political language is currently in a state of impoverishment. It's a dead zone of meaningless cliches and meretricious declamations. We may expect that from politicians -- as the politician archetype is always prone to reductive caricatures -- but from our writers, reporters, thinkers and intellectuals, we should expect more. The reality out there is far more nuanced and alive with the full dimensionality of the human condition than the stories you are telling about it.
This is kind of an annoying take unless I’m misreading it. It’s not wrong about the devastation but you manage to equate this scumbag Trump to Bernie. Yea they both are speaking to the same forgotten, impoverished class but one, Bernie, sees the problem and the other sees an opportunity - The Art of Deal. The Grift.
Trump has whipped his supporters into a fury and done nothing else for them. It’s actually perfect. As you say, a subset of the population feel like their government doesn’t represent them. Well, here these poor people have found someone who does represent them - only in word. He tells what they want to hear. Does nothing or even does them further injury. They don’t feel represented and need him to continue telling them what they want to hear. Perfect cycle.
I believe you misread it. It's about the people who were there yesterday in attendance for his speech, why they were there, and the nature of discussion about them in our culture and media.
It's not a statement in favor or against Mr. Trump or his policies. Those pros and cons were debated -- often thoughtfully and intelligently -- among hundreds of commenters on every thread here at Matt's substack site in the weeks up to the election. That topic is burnt toast in my mind. It's been kicked around here 1,000 times and everyone has their own passionate opinion.
I think your mind performed the Bernie=Trump maneuver. I certainly did not (although I will admit to having been a Bernie Bro). One can briefly note that a kangaroo and giraffe are both animals without equating them as the same animal. They are similar in some ways, but certainly very different in others.
Trump is a con artist. He has mined anger and resentment, and skillfully increased it among his supporters. He has pandered to every angry, deranged or gullible person he can reach. He echos their grievances, but his actions as POTUS served only to exacerbate them. Then, he follows up that act with more scapegoating.
His tax plan was a prime example. I as an investor, and someone who despises Trump, was gifted with enormous capital gains as a result of that cut in corporate taxes. I will wager that his most supporters have more credit card bills than investments. His tax cut was virtually worthless to them. But, he certainly scapegoated immigrants and others as a distraction.
I have very little sympathy for voters who want representation, but waste their vote on a reality show demagogue. You’ve been fleeced. Now, he wants you to do a Jonestown for him. You deserve what you get.
Ironically, most of the globalization policies were pursued in the name of "smaller government, less regulation, getting the State off of the backs of the people." Which renders the "globalist Socialist tyranny" narrative awfully hollow, unless one pulls it through the looking glass into Bizarro World.
"Their heritage demonized"- I don't think any of that would have gotten a toehold, without the crisis in confidence in American institutions brought on by the invasion of Iraq.
It's so strange to look back on the years 1999 and 2000. I opposed Bill Clinton and thought he should have resigned once his lie was caught instead of enlisting everyone in the Democratic Party to run interference for it. But only 20 years ago, the country gave the impression of being on its way to a better place.
Then one terrorist A-Team obtained cruise missile capability through the most desperate of measures, shooting its wad in one attack, and I witnessed the country throwing it all away like an elephant afraid of mice, spiraling downward into a cross-hemispheric aggressive invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the terrorism, led by a regime that the world already had on searchable parole.
After 4.5 years of spying on Trump, attacking Trump, impeaching Trump and lying about Trump, it's understandable that conservatives are frustrated. This election appeared to be full of fraud, but I never heard of an investigation. Where is the Department of Justice? Why are Democrats afraid of an election commission? What are they hiding? There are videos of cheating in Atlanta and election rules not followed in other swing states. Is this my country? I am too busy and probably too old to go and vent my frustration with other conservatives but I understand the anger. I am pissed off but as Matt said, the media is responsible for almost all of this. They lied, they made up stories...they even got Pulitzer prizes for making up "Russia Collusion" stories. Who is there to investigate, when the investigators and the media don't do their job?
I think the replies in your thread need to stick to basics: Forget the specifics on how it was done, there is no way in hell Biden received 81 million votes. Very few Americans will ever buy that.
Agreed - logically there is no way Biden got more votes than Obama and Hillary. The enthusiasm was off the charts for Trump. Almost every sub-sector of the voting block increased support for Trump including blacks, the gay population and Latinos. I'm not sure if this is accurate, but a credible statistician claimed the chance of Biden winning at 2:30 am after the vote stopped was 1 in a quadrillion. A quadrillion is a thousand trillions. Logically and statistically it doesn't make sense.
Mark, I agree. People are getting frantic and I'm sensing a change in audience on Matt's stuff, even from a year of reading on my part. Maybe that's pure perception.
Running around decrying everything, conspiratorializing everything-- it's not helping. It's easy to get upvotes for that stuff, but the real work comes in coolly assessing what is going on and not getting too sure of ourselves!
"there is no way Biden got more votes than Obama and Hillary."
Not quite.
You'd be better off saying,
"Seeing as the country's population was 10% higher in 2020 than in 2008, I can maybe see Biden getting 10% over Obama's total (of 69 mil. +), for a sum of 75 mil.
But, claiming that Biden got 81 mil.+ is all-but preposterous."
No wonder the "election fraud" case has been laughed out of court five dozen times...that's all you got?
There's nothing "all-but-preposterous" about that statistic; it's merely indicative of the fact that the actual percentage of registered voters who actually voted is currently estimated at 66.3%. That's a bump up from the 61.6% of the 2008 election, but not exactly a phenomenon that defies all rational analysis, the way some people are implying. Not only is that 66.3% a lower percentage of voter participation than many other Western democracies rack up routinely, it isn't even the highest voter participation percentage in American history.
Anyway, that 66.3% is not only indexed to the larger national population of 2020 that you mentioned, it's also an increase in voter participation of about 7.6% over the 2008 election.
( But how effortless it is for a knee-jerk partisan "skeptic" to impeach those numbers, for no other reason than the fact that the Washington Post published the story..."No way, because Washington Post!"
You want to forget the specifics and stick to common sense? So, has the media been hyper-focused on Trump nearly to the exclusion of everything else for four years? If you think that’s true, and I’d agree, then it should be completely believable that there was record turnout to prevent Trump from serving a second term. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s Trump versus the entire [extraordinarily powerful and influential] establishment, and then say it makes no sense that the establishment was able to generate enormous antipathy that drove voter turnout and lost him the election.
Anecdotally, I despise Biden (from the left) but voted for him because I think Trump’s presidency—not just the man, but all that entails: the media’s histrionic reaction to him, our loss of meaning and purpose being replaced by idol worship, the hatred destroying families—is cancerous. These are rather abstract reasons to vote because they have little to do with policy, but neither candidate was offering jack shit that I could support, so I voted to change the conversation. Many, many people did the same. I don’t doubt the numbers at all. Trump voters are very loyal to Trump. Biden voters are not loyal to Biden, but they are tired of the bullshit.
«then it should be completely believable that there was record turnout to prevent Trump from serving a second term.»
The rise in both Republican and Democratic votes is ridiculously huge, look at the numbers (Eligible, Total, Republican, Democratic) for the past 20 years:
2020: E: 239.2m, T: 158.5; R: 74.2m, D: 81.3m
2016: E: 230.9m, T: 137.1; R: 63.0m, D: 65.9m
2012: E: 222.5m, T: 129.2; R: 60.9m, D: 65.9m
2008: E: 231.3m, T: 131.5; R: 60.0m, D: 69.3m
2004: E: 203.5m, T: 122.3; R: 62.0m, D: 59.0m
2000: E: 194.3m, T: 105.4; R: 50.5m, D: 51.0m
As D Trump said in his speech last week, he would have been very pleased to increase his votes from 63m to 66m-67m, as that would have guaranteed him victory :-).
For a double check, I had randomly a look at results of House races in Georgia for the past 6 elections, and the Democratic surge is also unprecedentedly huge:
You make some fair points about how big his opposition was and possibly, how that Biden could have garnered 80 million votes. This election, idea that mail in ballots are not full of fraud (in some states mysteriously this occurred the same day!), the affidavits of illegality and just massive statistical anomalies leave doubt. I wish there would have been a proper investigation to comfort me and the other 74 million Trump voters that Biden clearly and cleanly won. I will always have doubt but it's time to move on. Unfortunately the Democrats just won't stop and are suppressing free speech, shutting down conservative apps and attempting to impeach (again) this president for nonsense (again). They are making this country more divided, more hateful and more angry. But many of your points are excellent.
You also make good points, though I admit I’m not aware of large statistical anomalies (feel free to link me because I’d like to see what you see). if it’s any consolation, I am also very disturbed by the collective efforts of tech companies and the feds to the platform Trump and his supporters. I’m against it on principle but I also think it’s an imbecile’s solution to a complex problem. And, I fear the backlash will be so much worse. Anyway, thank you for the thoughtful, open-minded reply.
Whoops, that’s what I get for trying to dictate my comment to my phone instead of typing it. It should’ve said: I’m also disturbed by the efforts of the feds and big tech to de-platform Trump and his supporters. Thanks, I’ll check out your link!
" I wish there would have been a proper investigation to comfort me and the other 74 million Trump voters that Biden clearly and cleanly won."
The court decisions are sufficient to close the case. Unlike the allegations of pro-Biden vote fraud, the claims made by the Trump campaign in their lawsuits are provably false, and in some cases they're so disingenuous and misleading that they arguably provide grounds for disbarment of the counsel for the plaintiffs, in the opinion of some legal professionals. That's a matter for a different set of hearings. But unlike the vote fraud insinuations made by Trump supporters, there's a hard-data foundation of evidence to argue a case of unethical conduct by some of Trump's legal team. In that regard, it's also worth noting that Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.3 billion lawsuit against Trump campaign counsel Sidney Powell for slander and libel. https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/dominion-sues-sidney-powell-for-more-than-1-3-billion-in-first-lawsuit-over-post-election-conspiracy-theories/
The Trump campaign lost at least 60 of their lawsuits "demanding an investigation." The ballots were counted and recounted and hand-recounted.
The "vote fraud conspiracy" side has no data to support their position. But I realize that isn't enough for "skeptics" who argue from every opportunity to advance a suspicion based on every opportunity to point out an absence of data. To support a position based entirely on their Feels.
And no one gets to support a position based on the number of people who might believe it, i.e., "74 million Trump Voters Can't Be Wrong."
In the first place, at least some of those voters have by now conceded that there's no basis in evidence for the position that there was vote fraud.
Secondly, while I get that passions can run high in the immediate aftermath of an election where one's favored candidate has been defeated, if tens of millions of adult Americans are still clinging to baseless delusions of vote fraud a year from now, that will be just plain pathetic. We'll all just have to wait for things to get aired out to know for sure about that situation.
You can’t legally count ballots without observers present. State law mandates them. By legal definition the count was not certifiable. Moreover, the number of ballots counted far exceeds Biden’s margin of victory by at least a factor of 10. And when they showed up in the totals, the ballots were more than 95% for Biden. This percentage was far and away different than the ballots counted before or after. Hmm
I haven't spent a lot of time reviewing a claim that's been dismissed by both Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and his voting system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling.
"...A state election board monitor, who asked for his name not to be used due to safety concerns, told Lead Stories on the phone on December 3, 2020, that he was present at the vote counting location beginning at 11:52 p.m., after leaving briefly at earlier in the evening. He then stayed until about 12:45 a.m., when the work that night was completed.
The deputy chief investigator for the secretary of state's office was present beginning at 12:15 a.m. November 4, he said.
The election monitor also told Lead Stories that between 8 p.m. on November 3, 2020, and 12:43 a.m. on November 4, 2020, the scanners had scanned about 10,000 ballots.
According to the Georgia Secretary of State's office, Biden received 2,474,507 votes, while Trump received 2,461,837 -- a winning margin of 12,670 votes for Biden.
Sterling said when he looked at the results, "there was nothing abnormal in the distribution of votes...
...Section § 21-2-408 of the Code Of Georgia, which addresses poll watchers, explains that political bodies and parties are "entitled" to have official poll watchers. The secretary of state's chief counsel told Lead Stories it was not a requirement that observers be present for counting to continue -- only that it is their right to be there is they choose."
Mike, I invite you to find me link support for your claim: "You can’t legally count ballots without observers present. State law mandates them. By legal definition the count was not certifiable..."
Because if you're right about that, it looks like you have a scoop on your hands! And in that case, the record really needs to be corrected. You can start by informing the chief legal counsel for the office of the Secretary of State of Georgia.
I'd also like reference support for this claim: "... the number of ballots counted far exceeds Biden’s margin of victory by at least a factor of 10."
According to the information in the link I just quoted from, that margin of victory was 12,670 votes. You're telling me that the poll workers got 126,700 votes out of those bins (not "suitcases", as has been alleged, and not "hidden" in any meaingful sense- they weren't wheeled in out of nowhere, they were under a table), and that one or more of the poll workers took advantage of a time gap that was apparently just over one hour (10:35pm to 11:52pm) as part of a conspiracy to "stuff the ballot box" with them? With 126,700 votes? For that matter, with 12,670 votes? The math doesn't add up.
I've saved the assertions of those claiming "skepticism" of the version of events supplied by the office of the Georgia Secretary of State for last:
I think the support for the claim that the claim of suspicious behavior was "not debunked" is awfully thin gruel- no, that's giving the writers more credit than they deserve. They're straw-grasping, at best; at worst, they're engaged in attempts to willfully mislead gullible people who are already inclined to believe the worst, based on the most minute traces of discrepancy. Like the human election observer knocking off for a little over an hour, while the office remained under camera scrutiny- camera scrutiny that incidentally showed that the ballots in those boxes had already been slit open and remained only to be scanned. THE FACT THAT THE ELECTION OBSERVER'S NAME IS NOT PUBLICLY DISCLOSED IN THE NEWS ARTICLE IS THE RESULT OF UNSCRUPULOUS ATTEMPTS AT INTIMIDATION OF POLL WORKERS, NOT EVIDENCE OF ELECTION FRAUD. You can be assured that the person exists, and that everyone in the office of the Georgia Secretary of State who needs to know has verified their existence. As have officials at the Georgia Department of Public Safety, almost certainly.
Because this is what it's come to.
To revisit the original allegation I was replying to,
So I figured out what you are the mascot for. Now please tell me the qualifications required to be an elections official in Ga. In Florida you only need to win a popularity contest, there is no talent portion. I suspect the same is true in Ga. There is NO other requirement than to be a qualified voter, pay a registration fee (or petition equivalent) and win enough votes. There is no preparation, no educational requirement. There is less qualification required that for most of the positions they oversee the elections for.
I happened to be an FSU Student Government Elections Commissioner in the early 1970's, charged with running the student body elections. When a bored Flambeau reporter covering the candidates decided to run for Homecoming Chief, one of my people tried to turn down the application because this was a woman and the Chief was traditionally a man. I informed them that rejection was not possible because the qualification rule lacked any mention of gender. No one seems to have considered this possibility. (By the way, it is the winners of the election that end up with the power to decide how the next election is to be conducted). It was the highest turn-out anyone could remember and in a close race the Marching Chief drum major won. Nothing in life prepared me for this. I suspect the same is true of most of the local elections supervisors and the pandemic. By the way all of our votes were hand-counted paper ballots. The labor involved in handling all of this was enormous.
The geniuses who modified a trusted system in favor of one of convenience knew exactly what they were doing. Sure some of the states had converted over to mail ballots as a regular rule and they were set up for it. most weren't. I can assure you that even six months is not enough time to revamp an existing election process and not expect problems, including preventing people from trying to take advantage of the confusion.
Frankly, it is a huge leap of faith that anyone could expect a complete novice to come in and actually run an election office, then we completely change the way we conduct the election. And since whoever was in charge would be instantly become a pariah if they admitted widespread fraud, well the line forms on the left, and guess what, there is no one in it.
Whether this election represented the will of the people will be debated from now on. The decision to change the system that close to a contentious election was ill-conceived. Perhaps the lesson learned here is that we require new system to allow for all legal voters to be heard from, so next time we aren't conveniently given a reason to doubt the result when "our guy " doesn't win. Don't wait for a convenient excuse to change the rules at the last minute to anyone's advantage.
And not that you believe me, or if I even care, I never voted for "The Donald".
Yet you're the one saying that the side advocating ever-more-insecure balloting is going to be ethical, based on...what previous evidence? Or is it just because they "reassure you it's fair"?
Doesn't speak highly for your perspicacity, Pierot.
Wonderful. So if everything is fine, why not allow forensic exams of ballots to answer the many affidavits that disagree with your version of events. It's not a hard ask. Take a random sample (like in AZ) and do the work (in AZ the subpoena was actually ignored). If there's something there, dive deeper, if not, publish the outcomes and show Trump supporters there's no there there. To adjudicate the vast majority of the vote tells you there's a problem. You have 4.5 years of bs from the same media sources you quote, fabricating mucho nonsense. The distrust is there. Best way to deal with it is to be transparent - "transparent elections"
Alrighty then. So...we're just gonna call that The New Democracy??
And we'll have a nice segment of the populace to blame when things (predictably) go to shit. I suggest, as a model, Zimbabwe. When the economy cratered because Mugabe, his family and his thugs, err...I mean, his "Comrades of the Revolution", were stealing every thing, they found plenty of "enemies". Same happened in Rwanda, except there, the ethnic/tribal component lead to attempted genocide (TWICE!)
Oh, but it can't happen here because the Dems said they wouldn't cheat to attain permanent power.
It's like nobody here has ever heard of Chicago politics.
Sorry I should have said you have to allow observers to be present. You cannot kick them out and then count. Did that happen. "Well, on election night, ABC News reported that ballot counters were sent home at the time that the Republican observers said everyone was told counting had stopped. Their source? Regina Waller:" She is the Public Affairs Manager for Elections. "Local NBC journalists on site that night independently confirmed “they were told counting was done for the night” and given no indication it would continue before the next morning. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution even reported of a “plan” to stop scanning ballots at the same time the poll watchers said things were shut down:" Well there is a lot more debunking "Lead Stories" article with a copious number of citations. This from a source you already cited, but either dismissed their many citations and links or perhaps never read. https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/07/no-the-georgia-vote-counting-video-was-not-debunked-not-even-close/ Note the title address many of the assertions you took from the "Leads Stories"
Oh, I read every word of it. I just didn't find their conclusions- such as they are- to have any merit. Once the factual details in that story is reduced to the relevant controversy at hand and then filled out with additional factual details available from other sources that the Federalist authors left out of their account, it becomes obvious how threadbare the insinuations are.
I said "insinuations", not "claims", because they're too shrewd to actually make any claims of fraud. Because they got nothing, once it comes to making an affirmative case with positive evidence of election fraud. That's why they're making such a mountain out of a molehill. They're trying to raise deep dark doubts based on one hour and 17 minutes of work by four poll workers- under cameras- while an election observer had gone on a break, perhaps under the misapprehension that his role was being covered, or that the entire staff had in fact been dismissed for the evening. It's a minor human being crossed wires communication snafu, not the Denouement Pivotal H-Hour of the Big Steal.
A supervisor of the count apparently told the staff to knock off and go home, only to be informed soon afterward that the Secretary of State wanted the count to continue as long as possible. At that point there were only four ballot tallying people left in the building, but since much of the preparation work had already been done- the sealed ballots had been slit open, and needed only to be fed into the scanner- it stands to reasons that not many people were required for that task. ( Unless, like, you've never worked in an office, and don't realize that- if you can indulge an analogy- there's no reason for twelve people to be assigned to working four copiers.)
According to the people reviewing the entirety of the footage, there's nothing on the cameras indicating that anything out of the ordinary was happening with the ballots. I get that we have to take their word for it; it's possible that if the entire footage of the day was released online for public review, that might persuade a few of the unconvinced. although it's a dead-bang certainty that others would just go into full-on Faked Moon Landing mode. You know: "the fact that they feel like they have to release what they claim is ALL of the footage shows that they're scared, and covering up something." &c
There's no way for anyone to be rescued from that rabbit hole by anyone else; they have to learn that for themselves. So what would be the use of making the unabridged video available, okay?
As the Lead Stories link notes, the ballots were not in "suitcases"; they weren't wheeled into the room like they were in an episode of the TV series The Good Wife, or "suddenly discovered" concealed in some out of the way nook in the room. They were in GI unlocked totes in plain sight under GI folding tables, and the workers pulled them out and did...exactly the same mundane routine stuff that anyone does when they're tasked with mundane routine clerical work.
So it's obvious from comparing the two sources that the Federalist article is misleading by omission. Above all, there's no narrative to be supplied that can possibly account for a count of faked ballots sufficient to steal the Georgia state electoral votes. The Federalist story knows better than to make their editing obvious, because it interferes with their shyster strategy to cultivate murky conspiracism about "fraud" in the minds of overly credulous readers who get snared into confusing the stem-winding narrative and name-check allusions of the Federalist non-story with their own inchoate suspicions. So you have to read the omitted details in the Lead Stories account in order to find the rest of the facts (some of which I excerpted in a previous post in this reply thread.)
If you don't think that's how it is, I repeat my request: provide some plausible story about how the poll workers conspired to commit this felony under the nose of the cameras, using the amount of ballots found in the four containers in question, during the 1 hour and 17 minutes between when the scanning resumed at 10:35pm and the election observer returned at 11:52pm. I don't want to hear irrelevant tangents about "amateur poll workers" and "crafty professional politicians", I want this worked out with Newtonian physics. Or, I don't care, miraculous mulitplication, like the loaves and fishes, or an Ocean's 4 Mission Impossible Hollywood scenario. But you advocates of the "conspiracy to commit vote fraud" position, give me your best prosecution case on those actions. It might be laughable, but at least it would be less disingenuous than the sleight of hand that the Federalist is trying to pull.
I've read the Federalist for years, incidentally. I've occasionally found stories and views that I agreed with there. Some of the writers have shown that they know how to construct an argument. But the fawning and twisted narratives they've run in the Trump years have been disastrous for their credibility.
That link is pettifoggery. Their argument basically rests on an assumption that the covid epidemic couldn't possibly have played a significant role in shifting the absentee vote count of 2020 when compared with 2016, which is laughable. In any event, "statistical anomalies" alone are not sufficient to overturn a vote.
"Courts have frequently rejected Republican challenges to the 2020 presidential vote because they want evidence that a case involves enough fraud to alter the vote’s outcome in a particular state."
I guarantee you, the courts have paid more attention to the relevant issues and claims than any Internet reader of that document could hope to assess.
"Republicans argue that since their observers couldn’t watch the vote count, they can’t provide that evidence and have asked for discovery."
There's no need for anyone to grant credibility to any "evidence discovery" that opens with an unqualified claim that's provably false. There's no need to read any further. The courts obviously concur with that conclusion; I can't think of another election that's been as heavily litigated, or another example of litigation of the same basic issue where so many of the cases filed were tossed out of court after court on first hearing.
It isn't that the courts (including the Supreme Court, twice) have been setting an unacceptably high bar to granting a fair hearing to the plaintiffs. The cases have no merit.
You obviously expect me to do all of the analytical work on that nonsense, in order to provide you with an opportunity to condemn me for not sharing its conclusions by imputing motives to me for rejecting its claims. Well, tell it to the judges. Find a way to fit them into that elaborately detailed yet coherent conspiracy narrative to demonstrate collusion and fraud that you have yet to provide in even the barest outline.
I'm done with this. At least the judges were getting paid for having their time wasted and their intelligence insulted. Unfortunately, the named members of the Georgia voting implementation team can't close the book as easily as myself. They have to deal with slanders, libel, death threats and the requirement for armed bodyguards and police protection parked in front of their houses.
That Hemingway piece is pretty damning. I guess the reason I hadn't seen it before is because it was censored, and for what? Because the fact checker's, "Lead Stories", claimed "GOP observers did NOT swear in affidavits they were told to leave" polling area. Hemingway links one of the affidavits where the statement is clearly made.
Most people are well aware that these "fact checks" are biased (as is MH), but that check was such a blatant and easily refutable lie one wonders why they would make it as it leads those probing to believe the entire report indeed has merit, regardless of excuses made by polling managers retrospectively.
Well, we know Democrats did prevent observers from watching in Pennsylvania for some length of time which is evidenced by one of the only suits Trump did win. That is just what I quickly picked out. Not wasting time reading anything further.
That's irrelevant. To give you an idea of how irrelevant it is: in the 2020 election, Georgia voting system implementation manager Gabriel Sterling voted for Donald Trump for President. So did his boss, Brad Raffensberger. You know, the guy that Donald Trump called on the phone the other day, idly wondering about whether 11,780 ballots with Trump's name on it might have slipped under some couch cushions, waiting to be miraculously discovered.
Anyway, like I said, irrelevant. But if you have something relevant to support your claims, I'm up for reviewing it.
I heard Gabriel Sterling say it on the radio, as part of his eloquent smack-down of the lunatic fringe "Stop The Steal" faction; it's as powerful a piece of oratory as anything I've heard in years, all the more so because he was delivering his remarks unscripted.
Raffensberger, I read that last night. In the article I read, he said that not only did he vote for Trump, but- at least at the time of the article's publication- he wouldn't rule out doing it again.
But I decided not to link to the reference. Keyword searches are good skill-builders.. Independent research legwork is healthy exercise. People should do more of those for themselves. They often have a way of being wonderfully sobering. But, well, you do have to read critically, and one might have to scroll a ways down the search page in order to find the contrasting points of view that are necessary to assessing fact claims more complicated than declarations about a voting decision in an election.
And yes, I do understand that all we have from Sterling and Raffelsberger is their word on the question. But they appear to be ordinary American citizens, of the sort who are embedded in social circles aware of their political leanings, and with at least a few people in a position to contradict them if they made untrue statements on the question of their political leanings and their vote choice.
I realize that a "skeptic" could easily open another trap door in the non-falsifiability appeal, and demand that I interview their friends and family in person...and then insist that I run background checks on them...and how do I know beyond all doubt that the camera footage from the Fulton County voting tabulation office wasn't actually CGI...etc...etc.
& with each extra demand placed on the Suspects, it gets easier for the "skeptics" to avoid having to answer questions about exactly how long Sterling and Raffelberger would have had to be covertly embedded as sleeper agents awaiting activation to aid in the Fulton Country, Ga. Ocean's IV portion of the multi-state Steal ordered from On High, by the Open Secret Globalist Billionaire Elite Socialist Plutocrat Conspiracy.
If you want to attack the mainstream media -- fair enough. Matt has written thoughtfully about the bias in mainstream media on this blog and in his book, and it's certainly eye-opening. That said, where is the fact-based evidence that this election was "full of fraud"? Furthermore, by not acknowledging Trump's own torrent of lies to the public over the last four years, you yourself seem as inherently biased as the media you are attacking.
because an election investigation legitimizes totally bogus claims!! Why don't you let the cops roll up to your house en masse, search your entire house and the FBI examine your internet history? You have nothing to hide, right?
My guess is even if you have nothing to hide you wouldn't want that. That's what your asking to do to an entire country that clearly voted fair and square.
If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar ... and why?
You're minimizing the role of people in sending their own selves up.
As for the "CIA conspiracy run it" nonsense, that's just another shortcut easy answer. It's an 8th grader level of insight. I've been through an awful lot of conspiracy research, and one of my big takeaways is that massive top-down engineered conspiracies run by super-Machiavellian masterminds are a fiction.
The craftiest people in conspiracies are the middlemen. The medium of the Internet has supplied them with a force multiplier for propaganda and confusion hypnosis. Their greatest asset is the naivete of uncritical thinkers. And its flip side, preemptive cynicism.
Mascot, this is a very valuable comment IMHO, and parallels what I have come to realise over the years. Thanks.
"...The craftiest people in conspiracies are the middlemen. The medium of the Internet has supplied them with a force multiplier for propaganda and confusion hypnosis. Their greatest asset is the naivete of uncritical thinkers. And its flip side, preemptive cynicism..."
The critique of today's "journalism" by Matt, Krystal and Saagar is part of, but not the whole, story. The assertion that we have gone from the anodyne broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC of decades ago to the bipolar "news" broadcasts solely when Roger Ailes and FOX news came on the scene, leaves out a significant phase that made the receptivity of FOX so significant. The missing phase is the rather corrupting influence of New Journalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Journalism) introduced by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, David Halberstam in the 1970's. Wikipedia - " It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction and emphasizing "truth" over "facts", and intensive reportage in which reporters immersed themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. This was in contrast to traditional journalism where the journalist was typically "invisible" and facts are reported as objectively as possible." Wikipedia includes a comment that New Journalism is generally considered to have ended in the early '80's. My take is that it was the beginning of "pushing a narrative" that not only didn't end in the '80's but became increasingly pervasive to the present day. This "story-telling" has now resulted in competing narratives and the phenomena described in this video. The only additional observation is the seeming participation of Matt, Krystall and Saagar in inadvertently pushing the narrative that this lies at the feet of FOX and Republican (the only named culprits in their video). Actually the history goes much further back than that, as can be understood by reading The Image by the noted American historian Daniel J. Boorstin.
I'm generally a fan of New Journalism -- particularly Wolfe and HST -- and think it was an effort to illuminate the truth that journalists are human beings with preconceived ideas about the world and that objectivity and the "invisible" reporter were fictions.
That said, this is an excellent, thought-provoking comment. What happens to the news when it becomes narrative, and the reporter becomes the protagonist of their own?
The person who really gets overlooked in all of this is Robert Anton Wilson. Who, like Wolfe and HST, might be cited as having a "mixed influence"- Wilson was part Art Bell, part Socrates. But from my subjective point of view, the guy was invaluable in teaching me how to think critically. Notwithstanding occasionally profound differences in our points of view.
(R. A. Wilson was a neopagan rebelling against Roman Catholic authoritarianism, while my own story features a more secular upbringing, and I now identify as a non-demoninational Christian- G. K. Chesterton, Stanley Hauerwas, those cats. Whether or not I'm a "real" Christian is not for me to decide; I'm just doing the best I can. But if you don't think I'm a theist of some sort, try me. Not that I'm posting this info to start something in that regard; Matt has enough trouble with off-topic digressions, overgrowing the comments like kudzu vines.)
Anyway, Bob A. Wilson. I recommend his first big smash hit, Cosmic Trigger, published 1977. That book lays the groundwork for the concentration of interests he pursues in his later works.
Not nearly enough people get that. They're adept at pointing out the other side's bullshit. But they take their own bullshit too seriously to be honest about its possible limits and flaws.
Being un-serious is not necessarily appropriate 100% of the time; if you've lived your entire life without ever feeling a requirement to get serious, you're more fortunate than anyone I ever heard of. The course of human events occasionally requires seriousness in order to ward off terrible suffering or death. And grief is part of being a feeling human being.
But such luminaries as Robert Anton Wilson, Wavy Gravy, and Don Juan Matus agree that as the default position, unseriousness can't be beat ;-D
To mention only one superlative benefit of unseriousness, being able to laugh at oneself makes it much easier to change one's mind when the facts warrant it.
(American question: what is this "oneself", "one's", third-person singular convention all about? every time I write it, I think it makes me sound like I'm having tea with the Queen of England...)
Not to be a rain cloud but I'm fairly sure that Don Juan was a literary creation of Castaneda. A cobbled together composite using different aspects of different "holy men" sprinkled with a dash of bullshit.
Allegedly Castaneda never left California. He was also an alleged habitual liar who invented his family background along with his own birthdate.
When he died he had been leading a cult-like group of women known as "The Witches," many of whom disappeared upon his death. There were rumors that they all killed themselves.
I know. I'm fine with that. I have too many reservations about institutional religion in general and some aspects of the doctrine in particular to throw in with the RC Church myself, but despite its flaws and its parallel structures and the episodes of corruption and power drunkenness in high places, I think it's restored and redeemed by the faith of the ordinary people- and, strange as it might seem to those who are unaware of it, its formidable intellectual tradition. J. S. Bach, Dante Alghieri, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Garry Wills, Penny Lernoux, Dorothy Day, Teilhard de Chardin, Jerry Brown, Kevin Starr, the younger Catholics writing in publications like First Things...I have enormous respect for all of those writers and thinkers. For that matter, some of the "lapsed" Catholics of the modern age keep a sense of spiritual questing in their life and work: Robert Stone. Tim Leary. Robert Anton Wilson. As arch and ironic and witheringly sarcastic and contemptuous as all of them often sound when offering their observations on the Church, its history, its priesthood, the hierarchy, the Pope, and Christianity, they can't quite seem to quit the transcendent quest. If they had only went all in for humanist Egotism and the Will to Power over all, they might have hit the big time in their lifetimes, but they couldn't quite get to do it. They couldn't quite stop fucking around, having a good time for its own sake. Like Chesterton. Bob Anton Wilson...I suppose that I might find out one day that he's actually a nightmarishly evil person. All that sketchy company he's kept, and the Crowleyan fascination, and all that...ritual magic, trying to game the system, it's a fool's errand. But in the proto-Woke social climate of the Berkeley of the 1980s., Wilson always stood up for the autonomous individual, religious tolerance, and the libertarian philosophical ideal of tolerance in general. He rebuked the self-ordained Enlightened Humanist Progressive conceit that demonized Christians as if they were the source of all militarism, intolerance, and evil on earth. Bob Wilson didn't have to do that. There was no payoff for him in speaking up for Christians, who were beginning to be openly stereotyped en masse as the very embodied identity of the Oppressor, due to a Left backlash of pique and resentment in the era of the face of the ascendant politicized Republican Christianity represented by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. But Robert Anton Wilson prized the ideals of fair-mindedness and transcendent agnosticism, and he was opposed to hating people. Even weird monotheists with mystical blood rituals and arcane notions about the transcendent benefits of an internally consistent code of selfless and pure moral behavior, notwithstanding the continual failures on their part to uphold that standard in practice.
The other Christian reference tag about RAW that stays in my head is the review blurb on some Dadaist playlet that was one of his last books (I've read just about all of them, and bought most of them new; And/Or Press. Paperbacks, some of them with terrible bindings, fell apart in your hands...)
I forgot who the review was by, but it went like this:
"I'm a Christian; I hope Wilson is wrong. Funny, though."
Managing to achieve the Funny is not a bad score, in this life.
Thanks for the interesting aside. I had not heard of RAW -- will check him out. I spent my undergraduate years studying classical and medieval philosophy & theology; i.e., immersed in that 'formidable intellectual tradition' you mention. My personal favorite contemporary-ish representative of it is Evelyn Waugh, who sounds like a bit of a mirror image of RAW. After declaring himself an atheist in high school and attempting suicide shortly after Oxford, he became intellectually convinced of Christianity and spent the rest of his life as a rather caustic defender of the Catholic Church... but could never quite shake his delight in the things of this world and died of a sudden heart attack at age 63 (on Easter Sunday!), after living pretty hard for basically his entire adult life. The books he wrote in the meantime are pure delight. I feel terrible for young Christians who have a spark of intellectual life in them but aren't aware of this stuff.
You'd probably enjoy Gary Lachman's books. His latest, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, is quite good.
Not sure how much validity I give to Chaos Magic, but there are a lot of people who insist it works. I reserve judgement because I've never tried it.
I do believe that reality is malleable & open to interpretation. That it isn't the old "seeing is believing" trope. It's more like you see what you believe you're going to see.
Oh boy. Magic works to the extent that you can talk yourself into believing it. The problem is what happens when you wish you hadn't done that, and you want to get out of it. I don't think there are any accomplished human sorcerers. There are only sorcerer's apprentices. From my point of view, that scene in Fantasia with Mickey and the brooms and buckets is a perfect depiction of Chaos Magic. Except that in real life, once the power is summoned and unleashed, there's no way for the apprentice to retain any power to get the brooms and buckets to quit. If you want to see a real world example of chaos magic, have a look at the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And approximately every aggressive invasion of a foreign land, ever.
I'm definitely aware of the possibility of the Uncanny and Extraordinary aspects of reality cropping up in my existence. It's usually great when that happens (not always.) Like, awesome. I've tried to keep my eye out for it, to be a little quicker on the uptake about noticing it when it happens. The notion of Opportunity is inherently magical, I think.
But I don't mess with trying to work the system with magic. I just try to do my natural best. I'm bad enough at that.
oh, yeah. The best anyone can do is to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio. That's what parallel processing, comparator circuity, and feedback networks are for, in the perceptual, cognitive, and semantic circuits. Defeat the SNAFU Principle. Status Hierarchy is not your friend.
The Ego is supposed to be a guardian. But it has tyrannical tendencies; we must work ceaselessly to keep it from becoming our jailer, and jailing us for life. I realize that axiom goes up against a mega-avalanche of social conditioning, but if you don't get that, there's no end to how much you can be worked.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I, too, enjoyed reading Wolfe and HST. They could prick one's interest to delve further into the subjects they wrote about. However, for the most part, their subjects (and narratives) were distant enough to be less harmful than the "New Journalists" of today, especially those who, as Matt has described in earlier articles, don't have the time, inclination and/or experience to adequately research what they're writing about, only a personal attitude or publisher/producer-directed party line.
Good point. I think Wolfe and HST were most interested in people at the margins. Mailer was all about promoting Mailer. The New New Journalism, if we want to call it that, is conversely a collective project to control the national political and economic narrative.
I was so horrified when watching what was happening at our Nation’s Capital on Wednesday, but what was worse was what I witnessed on social media between family and friends. I deleted my accounts after reading so much hate between people who I know love each other. The problem is when you put the word “All” in front of whatever group of people you are referring to...All Republicans, All Democrats, All Christians, All Muslims, All men, All women, etc. We are all human beings first and foremost, and we are Americans before anything else. There are “fringe” radical humans in every single one of the fore mentioned groups, and when we take the small percentage of those radicals and group them together with the majority, we are not only lying to ourselves, but creating a hateful divide that we will not be able to mend until we stop this. The media definitely fuels this behavior and it is disturbing and disgusting. I am a Christ following, conservative Trump supporting Republican that loves my Country, my family, my fellow Americans and the human beings of this World. I am appalled by the actions of the “Trump Supporters” that engaged is such destructive and illegal behavior! Everyone of us is unique, and to be lumped in with lunatics that act out in violence is so utterly offensive. Peace will not be attained until we stop being intolerant towards others that have different points of view. I fear the conservative voice will be pushed into silence if we are continually being grouped with the radical fringe. I will not be silenced, my voice is equally as important as anyone else’s. We all should be unified against violence, this should not be a divisive argument.
I know. Pretty stable stock market for a fascist coup (or whatever phrase prevailed at the most recent focus group). I don't want to say hardly anyone takes the media seriously any more, but hardly anyone takes the media seriously any more.
Perhaps the worst scam in US history is neoliberals’ Russia-gate. They lost to a TV host. Instead of reflection, they latched onto a moronic conspiracy theory and stayed with it for now 5th year. Now that the Trump nightmare has defeated himself – how many Dem congressman/senators will finally publicly state that
- The entire anti-Russian narrative and “Ukraine impeachment” were deliberate fabrications
- And request resolution of Biden-Hunter corruption (Ukraine, laptop, China)
Dems should finally come clean that the entire anti-Russian narrative is a 4+ year deliberate fabrication -- while nothing was done for M4A, STOP sanctions, #3K/month to all, etc..
Trump was an incompetent amateur surrounded by religious extremists. The next “Trump” will be far more dangerous since corrupt Dem party without change is walking dead
Agree completely with all of this. The Ds/RINO Rs still can’t admit the emperor has no clothes. Trump, unfortunately, is like a drunk dude streaking in a thong.
Waitwaitwait...given the distribution of massive fucktardery in the population (including politicians), isn't there an equal or greater likelihood that we get some outsider/populist who ISN'T a self-defeating narcissist??
It does not matter, and probably they had to do that if they wanted to keep their jobs. They have rather to be considered exceptionally brave to allow Matt Taibbi to make his point to their audience, knowing of course in advance he would. It is because of courageous people like this poking small holes in the propaganda that we may still have some hope.
It's too absurd. In the midst of the INSURRECTION! OMG! OMG! coverage we see that Pelosi got re-upped as speaker with no commitment whatsoever to M4A. I seem to recall all of the D candidates raising their hands like 8 year olds when asked if they supported this. So, "the squad" showed what craven frauds they are, just as Jimmy Dore predicted. At the same time I saw D senators interviewed and yakking about the "60 votes needed yadda yadd". So, no move to end the filibuster, either.
Meanwhile, on the R side, we have the Weeping Turtle and the fist-pumping, Ivy League young man of the people douchebag. Oh, and Lindsey Graham saying he's "done" with Trump. Really brave there, Lindsey.
The crowd storming the Capital reminded me more of Revenge of the Nerds than the storming of the Bastille. Maybe it was the guy in the buffalo hat. Many of the cops were just too fat to do anything about it. Or something.
Unscripted Joe Biden reminds me more and more of Charles Manson for some reason. His #2 has her own astroturfed "digital army" apparently. Soul of the Nation and the K-Hive, baby!
"The crowd storming the Capital reminded me more of Revenge of the Nerds than the storming of the Bastille. Maybe it was the guy in the buffalo hat."
People who think that was serious political violence have clearly never had any direct exposure to serious political violence, or they are deliberately lying to overhype the "threat."
I think the discourse is really about this: "The sanctity of our Capitol, with its holy statues, daises, lecterns and podia has been violated! The rabble had the audacity to disrupt our pomp and circumstance!"
Manson had humor and charisma at least. I’d compare Biden to 1983 Constantine Chernenko-who had way more blood on his hands than Charlie Manson-he helped run the anti-nomad/pastoralist campaign n Kazakhstan that killed up to a million people and provided the game plan for the Holodomor campaign and in Ukraine a year or two later.
I vividly remember Linsey G. begging for help on of all places Facebook, for his re-election campaign fund. Follow the money. Until all $ are removed from the parties and election advertising, this will get worse. $Billions to elect politicians to work for people who make an average of $15-$25/hour.
Watched it earlier this afternoon. Well done. Your book "Hate Inc" proved to be prescient, but I do think the system is working exactly how people with power want it to (divide and conquer).
Last night I listened to the Grayzone's analysis of the Capital fiasco --- Blumenthal, Parampil, Haiphong, Mate, and Norton. And as you might expect, there is a lot of anger with both the DNC and RNC at this point. I am wondering how far we are to really organizing a third party --- that can begin to knock out big structural issues (healthcare, defense budgets, lobbying pay to play systems of influence, and education instead of penury).
The orchestrated event, interpretation of the event, and broad blanketing of mainstream voices identically reacting to the event (similar to the roll-out the post 9/11 response) will make it much more difficult to form a third party. We will all be under very close, hostile, observation. It's a long, slow coup, and we the people are the losers.
This "interview" is hilarious, three lefties pretending to be objective. The people who "lit the match", the crazy rightwing uncle, and a couple of other examples all come from a left perspective. It was like listening to three children saying we are a little bad but they are really, really bad. These people see themselves as the adults in the room and the people they look down on, the easily manipulated, need their guidance.
I enjoy reading Matt's pieces but stuff like this makes it somewhat difficult to take him too seriously.
"It was like listening to three children saying we are a little bad but they are really, really bad."
You described Krystal Ball's routine perfectly. "We are a little bad but they are really, really bad" is her entire schtick. Every segment, every day. I listened for a few weeks, but it got tiresome and I quit.
Saager said, "Matt, the floor is yours." Krystal gave two minute speeches, and then asked for agreement. I think she's supposed to be the "cool, young" voice for the DNC. Sort of, "I really wanted Bernie, honest, but I support everything the Swamp Dems want to do because the Repubs are just unacceptably horrible." Maybe toss is a "Boo war!" every now and then.
It’s a social thing-it’s still not cool to be honest about the Clinton-Obama neoliberals machine. Taibbi might rant on here for us crazies, but he tones it down for his media buddies, imo.
I agree. You don't go on as a guest to attack your hosts. You bring up different topics around Krystal as opposed to Megyn Kelly as opposed to Bret Weinstein. Better a toned-down Matt on Rising than their normal parade of guests.
That’s possible, but it could be a diversionary tactic, causing the left to ignore his leadership in his local skin-head’s gang. I think he might be the cymbal section in their marching band.
I quite agree with Scott's and other commenters' critique of the Right/Left dialectic . . . but, there is some shallow truth still in it and that truth is bizarrely consistent over time. This 1960 quote from the 20th century's master philosopher, Albert Camus, is apropos of that.
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . . .
"We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty."
-Albert Camus from "Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays", 1960
Your metaphor is open to many interpretations. I'd say "Maybe!"
It's strange how that 30 degree difference is so stable through space and time, a form of translation invariance that must have fairly deep psychological roots in our brain and language processes.
Exactly! Matt is playing to the right wing crazies like you because no one else will read his shit on substack. So you get libs trying to be “the adults.”
"Apparently you too are reading his shit on Substack"
I think it is apparent. I don't think it makes sense for people to pay Matt to make comments for porn. I am 39 so I still like girls for actual porn. Like on youjizz-you know, classy sites unlike here.
I poll watched and my friend Christine volunteered for mail-in voting in 2016 in different US counties both of us lost faith in the integrity of our elections back then. If our voting system was ridden of any possible fraud and people abandoned the 2 party system and instead looked solely at how our elected officials voted on legislation that's a start.
Ah, nice to see what you look like! Are you going to actually say Ted Cruz and all these people shouldn't investigate this mess?? And are responsible like this chick claims? She is doing JUST what you are talking about!! You don't call her on it. Come on, MATT. I read New York Times, I'm a teacher and I listen to all of it. And you just talka bout FOX News? When you KNOW the left media is the one really doing this? And y ou don't call her on it? Oh, boy, now I can't keep reading you. You know full well THEY are doing the same thing!! Did they say this about BLM and Antifa? Ok, not going to give you the $5/month anymore. You should have called them on this. Ok, now you at least say the mainstream media is also doing it, but you didn't tell them the truth. Or stand up to these people when you know they are equally to blame. And do you REALLY believe Donald Trump is any more dangerous than this globalist elitism? You will find out soon. SHE was NOT encouraging. She was part of the crap. And you know it.
One of the more amusing extremes of the media is calling a small mob of sad characters an attempted coup or even "just" a protest with an insurrectionist character. From the same media I have seen no evidence of tanks or ground bombers attacking the capitol, or infantry or special forces brigades surrounding it.
It is hard to believe that the president of the USA who is also a billionaire can only raise a small mob of sad characters to perform a coup on his behalf.
The capitol is pretty much a fortress, Washington is heavily garrisoned, the security services monitor constantly all possible troubles: it is astonishing that a small mob of sad characters were allowed to get as far as they did. I wonder who is going to benefit from the inevitable turn of the screw on civil liberties, I doubt it will be the outgoing president.
this is obvious gang-counter gang psyops employed push thru Reichstag Fire-like "emergency" security laws that have been on the shelf waiting for the right pretext. Welcome to fascism with a democratic face.
The mob breaking into the Capitol on June 6, 2021 and the Reichstag fire have nothing in common. Zero. You sound like you don't even know what the Reichstag fire was, or what it led to. Except, perhaps, that there was a fire. Which there wasn't at the Capitol, and I think we can all be thankful for that, because nothing would have stopped an arsonist who wanted to get one going.
There was no false flag of anti-Trump agents provocateurs leading the charge on the Capitol- and I think that the criminal trials will make this plain. And there will be trials- not summary detention under martial law, as you're tacitly hinting with your hype.
Continue being an useful idiot. It suits you. The FBI and CIA have been doing this kind of shit since the 50's. Continue cheering them on. They'll come for you too, eventually.
My 22 year old, college from his bedroom son, informed me that anyone against woke/cancel/antifa culture is a Nazi. When I asked him if he thought I was a Nazi, he smirked & shrugged, which was an obvious passive aggressive affirmation of my Nazi-ness. While I don't feel like a Nazi, it took most of will power to not go all SS on his punk ass. So much so that it's pushed my heart into a crazy 2 day arrhythmia.
It's been a tense 2 days here. I wouldn't be surprised if this ends my 30 year marriage.
The irony I suppose is that I didn't even vote for Trump, just pointed out the bullshit around Trump.
I used this McCluhan quote before. Didn't think I'd be the idiot.
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”
I appreciate all of your takes. I tried discussion but the smirk and the fact that my social justice offspring, who has never actually helped another human in his life, started condescending to me like I was a feeble minded 4 year old.
I know that my son's political ideology is puddle deep. He used to get every bit of political "incite" from John Oliver & Trevor Noah. I suspect it hasn't changed.
What has changed has been his choice of friends once he hit high school. He qualified for gifted classes & literally every one of his new friends were young lefties with daddy issues who hated their upscale Republican fathers.
He then followed them to the same college where woke mania circulated like syphilis
at a low rent brothel.
Again, I don't know where this is heading but I suspect it won't be good.
I want to offer you some words of encouragement. Your son may not always act like the know-it-all that he is right now. I was a high school teacher for many years and many a parent expressed concern over their adolescent's attitudes and behaviors, the worst of which was most often directed toward the parents themselves. Often, the teens were much better behaved at school. Why? Because they know home is the safe place to rebel or be a sh*t. Their parents love them, and they know it.
I also mentored many new, young teachers. Like the high schoolers, the 20-somethings think they know much more than they do. Still, in both cases, what I often saw over the course of time was a softening of their insistence that they were always right. There is way too much hyper "wokeness" at many colleges today. Good thing is, after college, life eventually has to be faced, and that's often a much need cold slap of reality. Hang in there.
Thanks for your time. I suppose that what bugs me is that up until college we used to talk things through. For example, before he left for college I wanted to know his drug usage. But I knew he'd lie because he knew it would freak out his mother. So I offered a confidential full disclosure drug quid pro quo. I'd reveal my drug usage if he'd tell me his drug usage. By his age I had done considerably more drugs than he did. I told him to talk to me before he did anything stupid. Consequently, after that discussion, he pretty much stopped doing anything.
I also have a 17 year old son. I treat him like an adult. I've never been good at condescending crapola with my children. Life isn't a party. At times it's harsh and psychologically crippling. Putting happy wappy blinders on your kid usually just means that they won't see the punch coming. At least if you can see the punch coming you can duck if you're lucky. If not, you can at least brace yourself.
Americans seem to be under some mistaken delusion that this comfy capitalist shopping mall will just go on forever & ever amen. That, to me, is a very dangerous thought that history doesn't support in the least.
Thanks again.
A plug for Trevor Noah...his book, Born A Crime, I think is terrific...a first person account of growing up during apartheid using the wit and wisdom he is so gifted with.
You should sit down and ask you 22 year old son what Nazism is. Have him explain the qualities and ideology of National Socialism.
I suspect he doesn't know. In much the same way people argue that you are wrong because "science has proven it so", not understanding that science does not deal in absolutes. That is, science can't prove anything. Absolutes are the realm of religion.
https://www.thoughtco.com/can-science-prove-anything-3973922#:~:text=Science%20can%20collect%20data%20to%20support%20a%20hypothesis%2C,been%20researching%2C%20teaching%2C%20and%20writing%20for%2023%20years.
National Socialism is based, philosophically on intolerance of other people's views, bigotry, as well as the demonization of the other, those who are not part of your tribe, and militarization against, which is the hallmark of an authoritarian ideology. Combine this with the militarization of society, even the government and youth corps had military rank, and you end up with fascism.
Of course, to get National Socialism, you also need to have a strong system of racial purity and a belief that all people should have their hand held by and cared for by the government. In truth, I have found that woke/cancel/antifa is closer to Nazism than most other ideologies in the US today.
Antifa specifically espouses violence to silence those who disagree with their views, much like Hitler's Brown shirts which predated his rise to the Chancellorship.
I realize that this is a very superficial overview. I am not a historian, I am a philosopher, but your son is being indoctrinated, and it is up to you, as his parent, to teach him how to think, and how to test what people are telling him.
Liberal arts is considered a useless field of study, which is why all of the rich and powerful make sure that their children are educated in it, because it teaches you how to think and be your own person.
And it only becomes marketable if you want to be run a company, or be your own boss, rather than following someone else's orders.
Teach your son how to think, he will appreciate you for it later.
The only thing you can do is let him go off into his life the way he wants to.
Raising kids is hard, but it's far more painful and terrifying to see them go out on their own than to see them stumble as they learn to walk as babies.
"Choose your battles". If your kid is just being an idealistic kid, fine. It shows he has a heart.
He'll learn to temper that like we all did, but if you choose to battle over it, it may drive a wedge between you forever.
So... when he acts like a cunt, just accept that this is where he is right now -caught up in his generations rise to actual fascism. One day he and his cohorts will understand.
We're going to be visiting some bad places as a country in the next ten years. Tell him no matter what that you love him and always have. That'll never change.
Let him be.
He'll become rightfully disillusioned with his little woke revolution when he sees first hand how it's subjective... and one day he and his buddies will be on the receiving end of it -when the Stats no longer needs them to round up "the landlords".
Man I never had you pegged as an optimist.
My 16 year old is a huge trump supporter and it’s been a tough 4 years as I am not. I know my case is extremely unique since we live in a very liberal area and he is so young but my son met trump in 2016 when trump visited my fathers former fire house in nyc on 9/11 and with the influence of my parents he became a huge supporter at the age of 12!! This terrified me.
I never get called a nazi but I do get called a liberal like it’s a curse word on a daily basis. Not as hurtful but it still doesn’t feel good to have your kid talk down to you like you’re an idiot.
My parents were super conservative and I rejected that which they never respected so I wanted to try something different.
My approach was to tell him that he is his own individual and that if he wants to support trump, or any other politician, all that I ask is he knows the issues and understands them well enough that he can defend his support. I will say that even my most liberal, trump hating friends have made a point to tell me that he at least knows his stuff and debates them with respect and knowledge even if they don’t agree. So I didn’t fail as a parent completely, I guess.
Here’s the good news, by not pushing my own beliefs on him I do believe that he was able to see things more clearly than most of his peers do because he had his own convictions. As of this past month he’s even started to move more to the center and is willing to acknowledge some of Trump’s wrong doings and we have been able to have some civil political conversations.
The biggest highlight was watching him argue with my mother on Xmas that Trump needs to concede and move on for the good of the country. He even criticized Bush, Romney, turtle man McConell and the republican establishment that she loves. I must say it was a proud mama moment.
My advice is to let your son have his beliefs and respect them but insist that your son respects his own beliefs enough to understand them himself.
If that fails you could tell him that to prove you aren’t a nazi you are donating his inheritance to the holocaust museum in his name😂
Hang in there, it’ll get better
"we have been able to have some civil political conversations."
That's crucial.
Next step is, to emphasize the value of that, and to *fairly* point out the failures of some/ many folks, on each side, to adhere to such standards.
One way to start is with examples of each side throwing Straw Men at each other.
Among my favorites are "Gore claimed to have *invented* the internet", and "Trump *called (all) Mexicans* rapists.
Yes, we have been finding common ground on politicians we don’t like as well as pointing out all the hypocrisies on both sides. So much to agree on sadly.
Throwing Straw Men at others sabotages rigorous inquiry, and also provokes others toward mistrust of such saboteurs.
For what, the ego trip of "winning" an argument?
Your situation is slightly different in that your kid is still young enough to be at home all of the time. Mine is only here because it's winter & Covid. If he were at school it would be a lot easier to out wait him. I never pushed my beliefs on him.
I remember 2 left wing co-workers discussing "how to raise a child to turn out liberal." Thought the idea was absurd. Forcing teenagers to think the way you want them to think is one idea doomed to nothing but failure.
What they'd end up with is Republican or apolitical kids who wouldn't give a shit about their parent's lectures on politics.
I know someone who said her child in 2nd grade made an advent calendar to count down the days until Trump is out of office. So many people appeared to believe her child came up with it on her own. Ha!
Yes, very different since mine was so young but he was staying with my mom a lot since she lives next to us and the 24/7 Fox News that he was watching and her rhetoric was challenging to counter. Mine was def not the normal situation but I feel for you.
It’s good you don’t push your beliefs on him and maybe remind him of that and ask for the same respect.
As far as your friends trying to raise their kids to be liberal you are spot on, it will backfire.
What was even more amazing was the fact that both of them had Republican parents who they both had rocky relationships because they're parents tried to force them to think like Republicans.
Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees.
It sounds like you son is a stupid kid just like all kids that age are stupid.I was.
This story is a perfect example of what Matt has been writing about lately and all the crazies on this website love. “Educated youth is being turned against everyone for not being woke. At our schools! Our schools! Oh and I am not even a Trump supporter so you can take my perfect example of how the left is using terrible tactics!”
Luckily my story pleases all since it contains those daddy issues that seem to drive most liberals into a frothing frenzy.
Somehow I'm not finding this particularly amusing or crazy champ.
Passive aggressive attitude and a demand for facts and frankness mix like oil and water. Sorry to hear about this-I appreciate your takes on here.
I'm sorry to hear about what you're going through. Sounds scary.
:(
I'd strongly recommend checking out James Lindsay's work (newdiscourses.com) for navigating the clusterfuck of a minefield that is woke culture. It's not going to be easy but I've heard some parents have had success deprogramming the toxicity.
Wow! My sister is on the verge of leaving her husband after this past week.
That's an awesome post I too am entirely surrounded by the blind MSM robots. My SO I live with watches MSNBC 24/7. I watch none. We almost got into a heated argument last night when he wanted to continue to argue and I told him I wouldn't. I'm sorry but if he wants the "proof" of what I believe in then he will have to do the research himself. He isn't serious about looking at the evidence and I'm not a great enough debater as well as being just plain tired to engage is what would end up name calling. I pointed out to him that during the Civil War there were family split apart brother vs. brother over it and then asked if that was where we were going.
Hilarious!!! Don’t let your marriage or your relationship with your son end because of their bs. In the end we all just die ... it’s more fun to have family and friends w you on the way.
There are good reasons why so many cultures had mechanisms to send young adult males away, at least for a time. Vision quests, religious missions, military service, and even "finding yourself" all served to sequester a lot of peak stupid from families and communities.
While I'm sorry to hear about the troubles with your son, it's heartening to hear your take on the situation. I feel like it's a small group who can see the things that, to the others, are not there. But we're growing. I hope. And while I'm no Matt Taibbi, I've tried to cover all the bases of how the national political news media and social networks have distorted and bifurcated reality. So that your son, well-intentioned and intelligent as he might be, winds up confused. If you'll permit me: https://tjbreartonx.medium.com/how-reality-got-broken-20470c95d7c8?source=friends_link&sk=557f7fb743bbeb1311de61219fb6a5eb
I suggest asking your son to watch Russell Brand's yt channel. Funny and insightful!
Who cares what a 22 year old thinks? I know they are _your_ 22 old so it hurts but isn't this just like anything else a child, lacking experience, may think? A kid with friends who've got shitty habits/beliefs who are influencing your child...Don't give yourself a heart attack over it but also don't give up trying to get through to them... your 22 yr old isn't lost nor is our country - not yet anyway.
If it helps any, Spiderbaby, notwithstanding out occasional differences of opinion, I think you're a sane person. And certainly less unhinged than your kid. You should read Cosmic Trigger. https://pushoran.vivelefringe.org/file-ready/cosmic-trigger-i-final-secret-of-the-illuminati
If you use that link, I guess you need to read it in a hurry.
Hopefully, the book will do for you what it did for Philip K. Dick.
RAW? Read Cosmic Trigger 1, 2 & 3, Illuminatus Trilogy, Schrödinger's Cat, Prometheus Rising, Wilhelm Reich In Hell & The New Inquisition in my 20s. I also used to do a lot of acid.
Wish I had some right now.
I'd love to get some life changing realization that I'll forget when I wake up.
Dick's Valis Trilogy is a masterpiece of faction.
I can relate to that, man
Mr. Hoffman, don't take this the wrong way, but I've taken to greeting my son with a morning Seig Heil & a Nazi salute. I know it's a dick move & probably the wrong move but it keeps his teeth in his mouth. Things may change. Things may not.
I wish I could speak eloquently about Vietnam but I was 8 when my only sibling was drafted. I remember walking in the front door one night & hearing my parents arguing with my brother about the war. My brother said something snarky to my mother & my dad belted him. Disrespecting my mom was a big no-no in my house. My brother wanted my parents to sign a loan to get him into college & out of Vietnam. My dad was a decorated WW2 vet who believed his government & he wasn't having it. While his opinion changed over the years about the government's honesty, their rift never really healed.
In the end, my brother failed the physical & didn't have to go.
Then, around the time Platoon was released & it became weirdly fashionable to retroactively love Vietnam vets, my brother developed something I saw as Vietnam envy syndrome. He'd say really stupid shit like "What's the big deal. I could have fought in Vietnam." Don't get me wrong, I loved my brother. When he died a year & a half ago I lost my last blood relative other than my kids. We were very close. But his attitude was...ummm...a tad bit brain damaged.
My only other memories of Vietnam were those nightly reports from actual combat that Dan Rather, I do believe, gave from combat zones. Did they really do that? If they did they learned that war goes down a helluva lot easier when it's sanitized for the masses. Hence embedding & all of the other propaganda bullshit they cover their empire cake with like it was icing. The other bit was the nightly draft roll. Did they really do that or did I dream it? Now it sort of seems like a surreal lottery from hell where the winners really lose.
I'd say I salute you for your service but that phrase, like so much American pop culture ephemera, always seems to have the stench of bullshit around it to me. Since my dad & I were very close, in the 6 months before he died, I remember him telling me about his nightly dreams where his dead war buddies would visit him. That taught me that when all the propaganda & flag waving & crapola pass from people's minds, the wounds still cut deep 30, 40, 50 years later. The wars never really end for the folk we send to fight them. Instead of a salute let's just say that you have my sincerest sympathy.
Isn't it odd how nothing really changes here? When my woke son graduated from high school, his graduation ceremony involved a teacher calling up the graduate & then naming their post graduation plans; college, no college, military service. While the first 2 drew a smattering of tepid applause, the military service announcement caused the entire auditorium to erupt in cheers. To say I was gobsmacked would be an understatement. Since this was post Iraq War Part Deux, all I could think was "How fucking stupid are you motherfuckers?"
It all made me think of a book I read, years ago, about the 1st world war. In it, a WW1 vet was asked what he thought about the parades & cheering vets were given upon their return. He said that he wished he still had his gun so he could open fire on the crowds who had initially cheered him into hell.
Around every Veteran's day, there's this ever shrinking group of old vets who stand outside the local Wally World, begging for donations for disabled vets. I always stick a 20 in each time I pass them whether it's 1 time or 6 times. You may not believe that but it's the God's honest. It always makes me wonder why, if we love our vets so fucking much, do we reduce them to beggars afterwards?
I love the idea of America. The reality, not so much.
In conclusion sir, I'd shake your hand if I could shove it through this screen. Sadly I can't. You'll just have to accept the idea of a handshake. Take care sir.
Not to say that the movies are going to fix anything in reality, but I think you'd enjoy Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997) if you haven't seen it already, which in all probability you have.
Ummmm....sorry bud. I have a penis. At least I did the last time I urinated. I may have to reexamine my use of language to see where the vagina creeps in.
LOL, I too was uncertain of your gender until now
These transgender accusations being leveled against my paragraphs have triggered my safe space response to counter your paragraph's obvious micro-aggressions.
Sorry. I couldn't resist.
Not a problem.
It's the name of an old Lon Chaney exploitation movie from the 60s.
"having kids is like genetic Russian roulette. You never know what is going to happen when you pull the trigger."
This is a great line which I may eventually steal.
"Baby boomer males in the nineties would come up to me in a bar or at a party when they found out I served in Vietnam and say, "You know I really regret not having served in the military during the draft." ... Then there were the guys who still remained hawks about that war. Of course, they evaded the draft too. They would say, "You know, you lost that war."
These motherfuckers have always been and always will be with us. You could be at a bar in Hadrumetum in like 125 BC and they will be there and say something like "Yeah, I regret not having participated in the Siege of Carthage, but I had other priorities at the time." Dick Cheney is the apotheosis of this kind of guy.
Here's a blast from the past.
"Into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind." Ronald Reagan.
In other words, let's build us some nukes Pa!
Now afflicted mankind is looking at us like we just wet ourselves in public.
While Ronnie wasn't technically a draft dodger, he did spend the war in America.
I remember, towards the end of his time owning brain cells, he used to tell "war stories" to crowds about those WW2 exploits he never had. A reporter figured out that Ronnie was really telling plots from war movies and passing them off as his own. By that point he probably believed they really were his life story.
Corn Pop. 'Nuff said.
The difference is that Reagan's delusions were about flying bomber planes or being George Armstrong Custer, which he "did" in the movies, and Biden's are about beating up a black dude at a swimming pool, which he may actually have done. It really illustrates how far Dominant Racist White Anglo-American Culture has come in the last few decades. Keep reaching for the stars, guys.
Ronnie had his "beat up a black dude" moment once he got his Contra War cooking on all burners.
A nice white trail from the Contras to the crackhouses.
He even had time for a side gig selling missiles to the Iranians.
Still waiting for the Netflix show about Iran-Contra. Seems like a big fat target full of easily dramaticized details.
I don't excuse the lawlessness in DC, but the reaction to it is as scary as the act itself. I see talk of sedition charges, companies firing their employees without any sort of due process, sycophant CEOs jumping on the opportunity to denounce the violence as if they are doing it in the spirit of altruism and patriotism. Please... The mainstream media, for their part, is just lapping it up. The usual useful idiots giving air time to talk of impeachment, which would be just more wasting our time and energy, and would just serve to stoke the fire of Trump supporters even more. The big news of cabinet members leaving....whoopee, they are probably just happy they can have a couple of extra weeks off before they left and get to look virtuous for doing so. The media and both parties are so corrupt, I have a hard time seeing our way forward without a meaningful third party run or a constitutional convention to bring term limits, campaign finance reform, among other things.
Why do companies need to give employees due process? The idiot was wearing their badge and stupidly was caught on tape. He was fired for it because why should a business have to deal with that guys dumb shit.
What are you suggesting? That all companies give employees due process before firing them now? Employment at will bro.
Sure companies can do what they want, bro. The fact that he was wearing his badge kind of disproves the whole idea of this being sedition, insurrection, a coup, etc. Just using it as an example of the media serving up an inquisition, railroading...they love this stuff....bro.
“ The fact that he was wearing his badge kind of disproves the whole idea of this being sedition, insurrection, a coup, etc. “
It was all of those things.
The media had nothing to do with him getting fired. The guy walked in a building he shouldn’t have been in. The MSM had cameras there and they did what news station do when they have cameras where news is being made. They pointed the lens at the action and filmed it.
Internet sleuths found his badge and reported it to his company. The company reasonably said, “ we don’t need this shit from this idiot.” Then fired him.
The company has the right to do that. I agree with the companies right to do that. Maybe you think companies should not have the right to have employees at will. Maybe you want more oversight by the government.
Now if he was arrested for walking in the people’s building. I don’t know how I feel about that yet. I think only the people who caused damage should be arrested.
Do you disagree with what I wrote? “ Now if he was arrested for walking in the people’s building. I don’t know how I feel about that yet. I think only the people who caused damage should be arrested.”
You think the capital doesn’t belong to the American people?
I wouldn't be surprised if these people decide one day to annex Mexico and invade Canada, citing some "right". It's Germany in the buildup to WWII all over again.
Most companies can fire employees at will.
Matt's analysis and the group's broader discussion is accurate but not the whole story.
A large subset of the American population no longer feels represented by their government. Their jobs were offshored, their heritage demonized, their communities are wastelands of decay. Downtown shopping districts -- where people could once interact as humans -- have been condensed into an Amazon van. They wander like vagabonds, bearing witness to a destruction that lacks even a culturally approved name and parades -- in a permanent state of justification -- under the euphemism "economic efficiency". They are politically, ideologically and culturally homeless.
I watched some of the videos of the events at the Capitol. It appeared at least some of the "rioters" were allowed in by security, stayed deferentially inside velvet ropes and appeared reverential in attitude. There were even videos of groups organizing to prevent destruction by would-be vandals. Afterward, there were reports many remained on the Capitol grounds to pick up trash and clean up. In my view labels like "QAnon followers" and "Trump supporters" -- while they are true in specific cases and in broad generality -- are the kind of lazy synecdoche that too easily scapegoats. It seemed to me that most at Mr. Trump's rally and speech were there because of their personal experience and direct observation of the reality around them (which he and Bernie Sanders alone among national politicians seemed willing to acknowledge) -- not because of a quack cult. It appeared the vast majority neither expected or approved of the mayhem that followed. While anecdotes are not data, I recall of one bewildered attendee who said "I organized a group to come here today but I didn't sign up for this!"
The eminently quotable Albert Camus wrote "No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people." Our cultural and political language is currently in a state of impoverishment. It's a dead zone of meaningless cliches and meretricious declamations. We may expect that from politicians -- as the politician archetype is always prone to reductive caricatures -- but from our writers, reporters, thinkers and intellectuals, we should expect more. The reality out there is far more nuanced and alive with the full dimensionality of the human condition than the stories you are telling about it.
This is kind of an annoying take unless I’m misreading it. It’s not wrong about the devastation but you manage to equate this scumbag Trump to Bernie. Yea they both are speaking to the same forgotten, impoverished class but one, Bernie, sees the problem and the other sees an opportunity - The Art of Deal. The Grift.
Trump has whipped his supporters into a fury and done nothing else for them. It’s actually perfect. As you say, a subset of the population feel like their government doesn’t represent them. Well, here these poor people have found someone who does represent them - only in word. He tells what they want to hear. Does nothing or even does them further injury. They don’t feel represented and need him to continue telling them what they want to hear. Perfect cycle.
I believe you misread it. It's about the people who were there yesterday in attendance for his speech, why they were there, and the nature of discussion about them in our culture and media.
It's not a statement in favor or against Mr. Trump or his policies. Those pros and cons were debated -- often thoughtfully and intelligently -- among hundreds of commenters on every thread here at Matt's substack site in the weeks up to the election. That topic is burnt toast in my mind. It's been kicked around here 1,000 times and everyone has their own passionate opinion.
I think your mind performed the Bernie=Trump maneuver. I certainly did not (although I will admit to having been a Bernie Bro). One can briefly note that a kangaroo and giraffe are both animals without equating them as the same animal. They are similar in some ways, but certainly very different in others.
Gotcha now. Thanks for the reply. I understand why that element is over done for you and you're on to exploring other parts of the complex.
Trump is a con artist. He has mined anger and resentment, and skillfully increased it among his supporters. He has pandered to every angry, deranged or gullible person he can reach. He echos their grievances, but his actions as POTUS served only to exacerbate them. Then, he follows up that act with more scapegoating.
His tax plan was a prime example. I as an investor, and someone who despises Trump, was gifted with enormous capital gains as a result of that cut in corporate taxes. I will wager that his most supporters have more credit card bills than investments. His tax cut was virtually worthless to them. But, he certainly scapegoated immigrants and others as a distraction.
I have very little sympathy for voters who want representation, but waste their vote on a reality show demagogue. You’ve been fleeced. Now, he wants you to do a Jonestown for him. You deserve what you get.
Ironically, most of the globalization policies were pursued in the name of "smaller government, less regulation, getting the State off of the backs of the people." Which renders the "globalist Socialist tyranny" narrative awfully hollow, unless one pulls it through the looking glass into Bizarro World.
"Their heritage demonized"- I don't think any of that would have gotten a toehold, without the crisis in confidence in American institutions brought on by the invasion of Iraq.
It's so strange to look back on the years 1999 and 2000. I opposed Bill Clinton and thought he should have resigned once his lie was caught instead of enlisting everyone in the Democratic Party to run interference for it. But only 20 years ago, the country gave the impression of being on its way to a better place.
Then one terrorist A-Team obtained cruise missile capability through the most desperate of measures, shooting its wad in one attack, and I witnessed the country throwing it all away like an elephant afraid of mice, spiraling downward into a cross-hemispheric aggressive invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the terrorism, led by a regime that the world already had on searchable parole.
Dude, it's all over but the crying.
After 4.5 years of spying on Trump, attacking Trump, impeaching Trump and lying about Trump, it's understandable that conservatives are frustrated. This election appeared to be full of fraud, but I never heard of an investigation. Where is the Department of Justice? Why are Democrats afraid of an election commission? What are they hiding? There are videos of cheating in Atlanta and election rules not followed in other swing states. Is this my country? I am too busy and probably too old to go and vent my frustration with other conservatives but I understand the anger. I am pissed off but as Matt said, the media is responsible for almost all of this. They lied, they made up stories...they even got Pulitzer prizes for making up "Russia Collusion" stories. Who is there to investigate, when the investigators and the media don't do their job?
I think the replies in your thread need to stick to basics: Forget the specifics on how it was done, there is no way in hell Biden received 81 million votes. Very few Americans will ever buy that.
Agreed - logically there is no way Biden got more votes than Obama and Hillary. The enthusiasm was off the charts for Trump. Almost every sub-sector of the voting block increased support for Trump including blacks, the gay population and Latinos. I'm not sure if this is accurate, but a credible statistician claimed the chance of Biden winning at 2:30 am after the vote stopped was 1 in a quadrillion. A quadrillion is a thousand trillions. Logically and statistically it doesn't make sense.
Good things elections aren't decided by anecdotes. "There is no way in hell", what compelling evidence!
Mark, I agree. People are getting frantic and I'm sensing a change in audience on Matt's stuff, even from a year of reading on my part. Maybe that's pure perception.
Running around decrying everything, conspiratorializing everything-- it's not helping. It's easy to get upvotes for that stuff, but the real work comes in coolly assessing what is going on and not getting too sure of ourselves!
"there is no way Biden got more votes than Obama and Hillary."
Not quite.
You'd be better off saying,
"Seeing as the country's population was 10% higher in 2020 than in 2008, I can maybe see Biden getting 10% over Obama's total (of 69 mil. +), for a sum of 75 mil.
But, claiming that Biden got 81 mil.+ is all-but preposterous."
No wonder the "election fraud" case has been laughed out of court five dozen times...that's all you got?
There's nothing "all-but-preposterous" about that statistic; it's merely indicative of the fact that the actual percentage of registered voters who actually voted is currently estimated at 66.3%. That's a bump up from the 61.6% of the 2008 election, but not exactly a phenomenon that defies all rational analysis, the way some people are implying. Not only is that 66.3% a lower percentage of voter participation than many other Western democracies rack up routinely, it isn't even the highest voter participation percentage in American history.
Anyway, that 66.3% is not only indexed to the larger national population of 2020 that you mentioned, it's also an increase in voter participation of about 7.6% over the 2008 election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/elections/voter-turnout/
( But how effortless it is for a knee-jerk partisan "skeptic" to impeach those numbers, for no other reason than the fact that the Washington Post published the story..."No way, because Washington Post!"
So have it your way, clowns: the reference source used by the Post is here https://uselectionatlas.org/ )
Make that "for a sum of 76 mil.+".
You want to forget the specifics and stick to common sense? So, has the media been hyper-focused on Trump nearly to the exclusion of everything else for four years? If you think that’s true, and I’d agree, then it should be completely believable that there was record turnout to prevent Trump from serving a second term. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s Trump versus the entire [extraordinarily powerful and influential] establishment, and then say it makes no sense that the establishment was able to generate enormous antipathy that drove voter turnout and lost him the election.
Anecdotally, I despise Biden (from the left) but voted for him because I think Trump’s presidency—not just the man, but all that entails: the media’s histrionic reaction to him, our loss of meaning and purpose being replaced by idol worship, the hatred destroying families—is cancerous. These are rather abstract reasons to vote because they have little to do with policy, but neither candidate was offering jack shit that I could support, so I voted to change the conversation. Many, many people did the same. I don’t doubt the numbers at all. Trump voters are very loyal to Trump. Biden voters are not loyal to Biden, but they are tired of the bullshit.
«then it should be completely believable that there was record turnout to prevent Trump from serving a second term.»
The rise in both Republican and Democratic votes is ridiculously huge, look at the numbers (Eligible, Total, Republican, Democratic) for the past 20 years:
2020: E: 239.2m, T: 158.5; R: 74.2m, D: 81.3m
2016: E: 230.9m, T: 137.1; R: 63.0m, D: 65.9m
2012: E: 222.5m, T: 129.2; R: 60.9m, D: 65.9m
2008: E: 231.3m, T: 131.5; R: 60.0m, D: 69.3m
2004: E: 203.5m, T: 122.3; R: 62.0m, D: 59.0m
2000: E: 194.3m, T: 105.4; R: 50.5m, D: 51.0m
As D Trump said in his speech last week, he would have been very pleased to increase his votes from 63m to 66m-67m, as that would have guaranteed him victory :-).
For a double check, I had randomly a look at results of House races in Georgia for the past 6 elections, and the Democratic surge is also unprecedentedly huge:
2020: R: 2.49m, D: 2.39m
2018: R: 1.99m, D: 1.81m
2016: R: 2.27m, D: 1.50m
2012: R: 2.10m, D: 1.45m
2010: R: 1.53m, D: 0.94m
2008: R: 1.88m, D: 1.86m
That sounds about right!
You make some fair points about how big his opposition was and possibly, how that Biden could have garnered 80 million votes. This election, idea that mail in ballots are not full of fraud (in some states mysteriously this occurred the same day!), the affidavits of illegality and just massive statistical anomalies leave doubt. I wish there would have been a proper investigation to comfort me and the other 74 million Trump voters that Biden clearly and cleanly won. I will always have doubt but it's time to move on. Unfortunately the Democrats just won't stop and are suppressing free speech, shutting down conservative apps and attempting to impeach (again) this president for nonsense (again). They are making this country more divided, more hateful and more angry. But many of your points are excellent.
You also make good points, though I admit I’m not aware of large statistical anomalies (feel free to link me because I’d like to see what you see). if it’s any consolation, I am also very disturbed by the collective efforts of tech companies and the feds to the platform Trump and his supporters. I’m against it on principle but I also think it’s an imbecile’s solution to a complex problem. And, I fear the backlash will be so much worse. Anyway, thank you for the thoughtful, open-minded reply.
Hey TD - this is long but it is interesting and difficult to dispute. It's from the Epoch Times but those interviewed are data experts. https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-with-data-scientists-public-data-shows-432000-trump-votes-removed-in-pennsylvania_3645160.html
Whoops, that’s what I get for trying to dictate my comment to my phone instead of typing it. It should’ve said: I’m also disturbed by the efforts of the feds and big tech to de-platform Trump and his supporters. Thanks, I’ll check out your link!
" I wish there would have been a proper investigation to comfort me and the other 74 million Trump voters that Biden clearly and cleanly won."
The court decisions are sufficient to close the case. Unlike the allegations of pro-Biden vote fraud, the claims made by the Trump campaign in their lawsuits are provably false, and in some cases they're so disingenuous and misleading that they arguably provide grounds for disbarment of the counsel for the plaintiffs, in the opinion of some legal professionals. That's a matter for a different set of hearings. But unlike the vote fraud insinuations made by Trump supporters, there's a hard-data foundation of evidence to argue a case of unethical conduct by some of Trump's legal team. In that regard, it's also worth noting that Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.3 billion lawsuit against Trump campaign counsel Sidney Powell for slander and libel. https://lawandcrime.com/2020-election/dominion-sues-sidney-powell-for-more-than-1-3-billion-in-first-lawsuit-over-post-election-conspiracy-theories/
The Trump campaign lost at least 60 of their lawsuits "demanding an investigation." The ballots were counted and recounted and hand-recounted.
The "vote fraud conspiracy" side has no data to support their position. But I realize that isn't enough for "skeptics" who argue from every opportunity to advance a suspicion based on every opportunity to point out an absence of data. To support a position based entirely on their Feels.
And no one gets to support a position based on the number of people who might believe it, i.e., "74 million Trump Voters Can't Be Wrong."
In the first place, at least some of those voters have by now conceded that there's no basis in evidence for the position that there was vote fraud.
Secondly, while I get that passions can run high in the immediate aftermath of an election where one's favored candidate has been defeated, if tens of millions of adult Americans are still clinging to baseless delusions of vote fraud a year from now, that will be just plain pathetic. We'll all just have to wait for things to get aired out to know for sure about that situation.
"Forget the specifics on how it was done" = nevermind the evidence. Jesus fucking Christ, has reading Matt not taught you anything?
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/politics/georgia-election-officials-show-frame-by-frame-what-really-happened-fulton-surveillance-video/T5M3PYIBYFHFFOD3CIB2ULDVDE/
You can’t legally count ballots without observers present. State law mandates them. By legal definition the count was not certifiable. Moreover, the number of ballots counted far exceeds Biden’s margin of victory by at least a factor of 10. And when they showed up in the totals, the ballots were more than 95% for Biden. This percentage was far and away different than the ballots counted before or after. Hmm
I haven't spent a lot of time reviewing a claim that's been dismissed by both Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and his voting system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling.
But lucky you, I can make the time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/us/politics/trump-georgia-election-fraud.html
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2020/12/fact-check-video-from-ga-does-not-show-suitcases-filled-with-ballots-pulled-from-under-a-table-after-poll-workers-dismissed.html
"...A state election board monitor, who asked for his name not to be used due to safety concerns, told Lead Stories on the phone on December 3, 2020, that he was present at the vote counting location beginning at 11:52 p.m., after leaving briefly at earlier in the evening. He then stayed until about 12:45 a.m., when the work that night was completed.
The deputy chief investigator for the secretary of state's office was present beginning at 12:15 a.m. November 4, he said.
The election monitor also told Lead Stories that between 8 p.m. on November 3, 2020, and 12:43 a.m. on November 4, 2020, the scanners had scanned about 10,000 ballots.
According to the Georgia Secretary of State's office, Biden received 2,474,507 votes, while Trump received 2,461,837 -- a winning margin of 12,670 votes for Biden.
Sterling said when he looked at the results, "there was nothing abnormal in the distribution of votes...
...Section § 21-2-408 of the Code Of Georgia, which addresses poll watchers, explains that political bodies and parties are "entitled" to have official poll watchers. The secretary of state's chief counsel told Lead Stories it was not a requirement that observers be present for counting to continue -- only that it is their right to be there is they choose."
Mike, I invite you to find me link support for your claim: "You can’t legally count ballots without observers present. State law mandates them. By legal definition the count was not certifiable..."
Because if you're right about that, it looks like you have a scoop on your hands! And in that case, the record really needs to be corrected. You can start by informing the chief legal counsel for the office of the Secretary of State of Georgia.
I'd also like reference support for this claim: "... the number of ballots counted far exceeds Biden’s margin of victory by at least a factor of 10."
According to the information in the link I just quoted from, that margin of victory was 12,670 votes. You're telling me that the poll workers got 126,700 votes out of those bins (not "suitcases", as has been alleged, and not "hidden" in any meaingful sense- they weren't wheeled in out of nowhere, they were under a table), and that one or more of the poll workers took advantage of a time gap that was apparently just over one hour (10:35pm to 11:52pm) as part of a conspiracy to "stuff the ballot box" with them? With 126,700 votes? For that matter, with 12,670 votes? The math doesn't add up.
I've saved the assertions of those claiming "skepticism" of the version of events supplied by the office of the Georgia Secretary of State for last:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/state-farm-arena-footage-shows-poll-workers-staying-behind-pulling-out-suitcases-with-ballots_3603293.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-12-03-3
https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/07/no-the-georgia-vote-counting-video-was-not-debunked-not-even-close/
I think the support for the claim that the claim of suspicious behavior was "not debunked" is awfully thin gruel- no, that's giving the writers more credit than they deserve. They're straw-grasping, at best; at worst, they're engaged in attempts to willfully mislead gullible people who are already inclined to believe the worst, based on the most minute traces of discrepancy. Like the human election observer knocking off for a little over an hour, while the office remained under camera scrutiny- camera scrutiny that incidentally showed that the ballots in those boxes had already been slit open and remained only to be scanned. THE FACT THAT THE ELECTION OBSERVER'S NAME IS NOT PUBLICLY DISCLOSED IN THE NEWS ARTICLE IS THE RESULT OF UNSCRUPULOUS ATTEMPTS AT INTIMIDATION OF POLL WORKERS, NOT EVIDENCE OF ELECTION FRAUD. You can be assured that the person exists, and that everyone in the office of the Georgia Secretary of State who needs to know has verified their existence. As have officials at the Georgia Department of Public Safety, almost certainly.
Because this is what it's come to.
To revisit the original allegation I was replying to,
GK: "There are videos of cheating in Atlanta."
Present the evidence for your side of the case.
So I figured out what you are the mascot for. Now please tell me the qualifications required to be an elections official in Ga. In Florida you only need to win a popularity contest, there is no talent portion. I suspect the same is true in Ga. There is NO other requirement than to be a qualified voter, pay a registration fee (or petition equivalent) and win enough votes. There is no preparation, no educational requirement. There is less qualification required that for most of the positions they oversee the elections for.
I happened to be an FSU Student Government Elections Commissioner in the early 1970's, charged with running the student body elections. When a bored Flambeau reporter covering the candidates decided to run for Homecoming Chief, one of my people tried to turn down the application because this was a woman and the Chief was traditionally a man. I informed them that rejection was not possible because the qualification rule lacked any mention of gender. No one seems to have considered this possibility. (By the way, it is the winners of the election that end up with the power to decide how the next election is to be conducted). It was the highest turn-out anyone could remember and in a close race the Marching Chief drum major won. Nothing in life prepared me for this. I suspect the same is true of most of the local elections supervisors and the pandemic. By the way all of our votes were hand-counted paper ballots. The labor involved in handling all of this was enormous.
The geniuses who modified a trusted system in favor of one of convenience knew exactly what they were doing. Sure some of the states had converted over to mail ballots as a regular rule and they were set up for it. most weren't. I can assure you that even six months is not enough time to revamp an existing election process and not expect problems, including preventing people from trying to take advantage of the confusion.
Frankly, it is a huge leap of faith that anyone could expect a complete novice to come in and actually run an election office, then we completely change the way we conduct the election. And since whoever was in charge would be instantly become a pariah if they admitted widespread fraud, well the line forms on the left, and guess what, there is no one in it.
Whether this election represented the will of the people will be debated from now on. The decision to change the system that close to a contentious election was ill-conceived. Perhaps the lesson learned here is that we require new system to allow for all legal voters to be heard from, so next time we aren't conveniently given a reason to doubt the result when "our guy " doesn't win. Don't wait for a convenient excuse to change the rules at the last minute to anyone's advantage.
And not that you believe me, or if I even care, I never voted for "The Donald".
"So I figured out what you are the mascot for."
That fiat declaration does not speak highly for your perspicacity, Clouseau.
Yet you're the one saying that the side advocating ever-more-insecure balloting is going to be ethical, based on...what previous evidence? Or is it just because they "reassure you it's fair"?
Doesn't speak highly for your perspicacity, Pierot.
I absolutely believe you never voted for Donald. Regardless, your response to Mascot is incoherent. You should know this.
I suppose my point is that most elections are run by amateurs and most politicians are professionals. What chance do they stand?
Wonderful. So if everything is fine, why not allow forensic exams of ballots to answer the many affidavits that disagree with your version of events. It's not a hard ask. Take a random sample (like in AZ) and do the work (in AZ the subpoena was actually ignored). If there's something there, dive deeper, if not, publish the outcomes and show Trump supporters there's no there there. To adjudicate the vast majority of the vote tells you there's a problem. You have 4.5 years of bs from the same media sources you quote, fabricating mucho nonsense. The distrust is there. Best way to deal with it is to be transparent - "transparent elections"
And no, I'm not a Trump voter.
Why? I know why. Two reasons:
1) The establishment, including those in charge of those decisions, hates the man.
2) So do half the people, and that half would have burned the nation down if original call was reversed.
Alrighty then. So...we're just gonna call that The New Democracy??
And we'll have a nice segment of the populace to blame when things (predictably) go to shit. I suggest, as a model, Zimbabwe. When the economy cratered because Mugabe, his family and his thugs, err...I mean, his "Comrades of the Revolution", were stealing every thing, they found plenty of "enemies". Same happened in Rwanda, except there, the ethnic/tribal component lead to attempted genocide (TWICE!)
Oh, but it can't happen here because the Dems said they wouldn't cheat to attain permanent power.
It's like nobody here has ever heard of Chicago politics.
Sorry I should have said you have to allow observers to be present. You cannot kick them out and then count. Did that happen. "Well, on election night, ABC News reported that ballot counters were sent home at the time that the Republican observers said everyone was told counting had stopped. Their source? Regina Waller:" She is the Public Affairs Manager for Elections. "Local NBC journalists on site that night independently confirmed “they were told counting was done for the night” and given no indication it would continue before the next morning. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution even reported of a “plan” to stop scanning ballots at the same time the poll watchers said things were shut down:" Well there is a lot more debunking "Lead Stories" article with a copious number of citations. This from a source you already cited, but either dismissed their many citations and links or perhaps never read. https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/07/no-the-georgia-vote-counting-video-was-not-debunked-not-even-close/ Note the title address many of the assertions you took from the "Leads Stories"
Were the votes anomalous. In depth statistical analysis. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3756988
Peter Navarro's report makes a good starting point for all this. Yes, he is on the White House staff, but he has impeccable academic credentials. Harvard trained and still a professor emeritus in the California system. https://bannonswarroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/The-Immaculate-Deception-12.15.20-1.pdf
"This from a source you already cited, but either dismissed their many citations and links or perhaps never read. https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/07/no-the-georgia-vote-counting-video-was-not-debunked-not-even-close/ Note the title address many of the assertions you took from the "Leads Stories"
Oh, I read every word of it. I just didn't find their conclusions- such as they are- to have any merit. Once the factual details in that story is reduced to the relevant controversy at hand and then filled out with additional factual details available from other sources that the Federalist authors left out of their account, it becomes obvious how threadbare the insinuations are.
I said "insinuations", not "claims", because they're too shrewd to actually make any claims of fraud. Because they got nothing, once it comes to making an affirmative case with positive evidence of election fraud. That's why they're making such a mountain out of a molehill. They're trying to raise deep dark doubts based on one hour and 17 minutes of work by four poll workers- under cameras- while an election observer had gone on a break, perhaps under the misapprehension that his role was being covered, or that the entire staff had in fact been dismissed for the evening. It's a minor human being crossed wires communication snafu, not the Denouement Pivotal H-Hour of the Big Steal.
A supervisor of the count apparently told the staff to knock off and go home, only to be informed soon afterward that the Secretary of State wanted the count to continue as long as possible. At that point there were only four ballot tallying people left in the building, but since much of the preparation work had already been done- the sealed ballots had been slit open, and needed only to be fed into the scanner- it stands to reasons that not many people were required for that task. ( Unless, like, you've never worked in an office, and don't realize that- if you can indulge an analogy- there's no reason for twelve people to be assigned to working four copiers.)
According to the people reviewing the entirety of the footage, there's nothing on the cameras indicating that anything out of the ordinary was happening with the ballots. I get that we have to take their word for it; it's possible that if the entire footage of the day was released online for public review, that might persuade a few of the unconvinced. although it's a dead-bang certainty that others would just go into full-on Faked Moon Landing mode. You know: "the fact that they feel like they have to release what they claim is ALL of the footage shows that they're scared, and covering up something." &c
There's no way for anyone to be rescued from that rabbit hole by anyone else; they have to learn that for themselves. So what would be the use of making the unabridged video available, okay?
As the Lead Stories link notes, the ballots were not in "suitcases"; they weren't wheeled into the room like they were in an episode of the TV series The Good Wife, or "suddenly discovered" concealed in some out of the way nook in the room. They were in GI unlocked totes in plain sight under GI folding tables, and the workers pulled them out and did...exactly the same mundane routine stuff that anyone does when they're tasked with mundane routine clerical work.
So it's obvious from comparing the two sources that the Federalist article is misleading by omission. Above all, there's no narrative to be supplied that can possibly account for a count of faked ballots sufficient to steal the Georgia state electoral votes. The Federalist story knows better than to make their editing obvious, because it interferes with their shyster strategy to cultivate murky conspiracism about "fraud" in the minds of overly credulous readers who get snared into confusing the stem-winding narrative and name-check allusions of the Federalist non-story with their own inchoate suspicions. So you have to read the omitted details in the Lead Stories account in order to find the rest of the facts (some of which I excerpted in a previous post in this reply thread.)
If you don't think that's how it is, I repeat my request: provide some plausible story about how the poll workers conspired to commit this felony under the nose of the cameras, using the amount of ballots found in the four containers in question, during the 1 hour and 17 minutes between when the scanning resumed at 10:35pm and the election observer returned at 11:52pm. I don't want to hear irrelevant tangents about "amateur poll workers" and "crafty professional politicians", I want this worked out with Newtonian physics. Or, I don't care, miraculous mulitplication, like the loaves and fishes, or an Ocean's 4 Mission Impossible Hollywood scenario. But you advocates of the "conspiracy to commit vote fraud" position, give me your best prosecution case on those actions. It might be laughable, but at least it would be less disingenuous than the sleight of hand that the Federalist is trying to pull.
I've read the Federalist for years, incidentally. I've occasionally found stories and views that I agreed with there. Some of the writers have shown that they know how to construct an argument. But the fawning and twisted narratives they've run in the Trump years have been disastrous for their credibility.
"Were the votes anomalous. In depth statistical analysis. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3756988 "
That link is pettifoggery. Their argument basically rests on an assumption that the covid epidemic couldn't possibly have played a significant role in shifting the absentee vote count of 2020 when compared with 2016, which is laughable. In any event, "statistical anomalies" alone are not sufficient to overturn a vote.
"Courts have frequently rejected Republican challenges to the 2020 presidential vote because they want evidence that a case involves enough fraud to alter the vote’s outcome in a particular state."
I guarantee you, the courts have paid more attention to the relevant issues and claims than any Internet reader of that document could hope to assess.
"Republicans argue that since their observers couldn’t watch the vote count, they can’t provide that evidence and have asked for discovery."
No, Republicans could watch the vote count. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/11/06/trump-and-allies-keep-claiming-republican-poll-watchers-were-banned-thats-a-lie/?sh=746cc9a744da
There's no need for anyone to grant credibility to any "evidence discovery" that opens with an unqualified claim that's provably false. There's no need to read any further. The courts obviously concur with that conclusion; I can't think of another election that's been as heavily litigated, or another example of litigation of the same basic issue where so many of the cases filed were tossed out of court after court on first hearing.
It isn't that the courts (including the Supreme Court, twice) have been setting an unacceptably high bar to granting a fair hearing to the plaintiffs. The cases have no merit.
You obviously expect me to do all of the analytical work on that nonsense, in order to provide you with an opportunity to condemn me for not sharing its conclusions by imputing motives to me for rejecting its claims. Well, tell it to the judges. Find a way to fit them into that elaborately detailed yet coherent conspiracy narrative to demonstrate collusion and fraud that you have yet to provide in even the barest outline.
I'm done with this. At least the judges were getting paid for having their time wasted and their intelligence insulted. Unfortunately, the named members of the Georgia voting implementation team can't close the book as easily as myself. They have to deal with slanders, libel, death threats and the requirement for armed bodyguards and police protection parked in front of their houses.
That Hemingway piece is pretty damning. I guess the reason I hadn't seen it before is because it was censored, and for what? Because the fact checker's, "Lead Stories", claimed "GOP observers did NOT swear in affidavits they were told to leave" polling area. Hemingway links one of the affidavits where the statement is clearly made.
Most people are well aware that these "fact checks" are biased (as is MH), but that check was such a blatant and easily refutable lie one wonders why they would make it as it leads those probing to believe the entire report indeed has merit, regardless of excuses made by polling managers retrospectively.
https://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-07-at-11.48.29-AM.png
https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20420331-mitchell-harrison-affidavit
Well, we know Democrats did prevent observers from watching in Pennsylvania for some length of time which is evidenced by one of the only suits Trump did win. That is just what I quickly picked out. Not wasting time reading anything further.
Mascot....whoever you are....thanks for this.
Oh, and I have never voted for Trump.
That's irrelevant. To give you an idea of how irrelevant it is: in the 2020 election, Georgia voting system implementation manager Gabriel Sterling voted for Donald Trump for President. So did his boss, Brad Raffensberger. You know, the guy that Donald Trump called on the phone the other day, idly wondering about whether 11,780 ballots with Trump's name on it might have slipped under some couch cushions, waiting to be miraculously discovered.
Anyway, like I said, irrelevant. But if you have something relevant to support your claims, I'm up for reviewing it.
How do you know who they actually voted for?
I heard Gabriel Sterling say it on the radio, as part of his eloquent smack-down of the lunatic fringe "Stop The Steal" faction; it's as powerful a piece of oratory as anything I've heard in years, all the more so because he was delivering his remarks unscripted.
Raffensberger, I read that last night. In the article I read, he said that not only did he vote for Trump, but- at least at the time of the article's publication- he wouldn't rule out doing it again.
But I decided not to link to the reference. Keyword searches are good skill-builders.. Independent research legwork is healthy exercise. People should do more of those for themselves. They often have a way of being wonderfully sobering. But, well, you do have to read critically, and one might have to scroll a ways down the search page in order to find the contrasting points of view that are necessary to assessing fact claims more complicated than declarations about a voting decision in an election.
And yes, I do understand that all we have from Sterling and Raffelsberger is their word on the question. But they appear to be ordinary American citizens, of the sort who are embedded in social circles aware of their political leanings, and with at least a few people in a position to contradict them if they made untrue statements on the question of their political leanings and their vote choice.
I realize that a "skeptic" could easily open another trap door in the non-falsifiability appeal, and demand that I interview their friends and family in person...and then insist that I run background checks on them...and how do I know beyond all doubt that the camera footage from the Fulton County voting tabulation office wasn't actually CGI...etc...etc.
& with each extra demand placed on the Suspects, it gets easier for the "skeptics" to avoid having to answer questions about exactly how long Sterling and Raffelberger would have had to be covertly embedded as sleeper agents awaiting activation to aid in the Fulton Country, Ga. Ocean's IV portion of the multi-state Steal ordered from On High, by the Open Secret Globalist Billionaire Elite Socialist Plutocrat Conspiracy.
No, sorry, didn't mean to like that. That's bologne. I've seen that garbage. It doesn't make sense.
If you want to attack the mainstream media -- fair enough. Matt has written thoughtfully about the bias in mainstream media on this blog and in his book, and it's certainly eye-opening. That said, where is the fact-based evidence that this election was "full of fraud"? Furthermore, by not acknowledging Trump's own torrent of lies to the public over the last four years, you yourself seem as inherently biased as the media you are attacking.
because an election investigation legitimizes totally bogus claims!! Why don't you let the cops roll up to your house en masse, search your entire house and the FBI examine your internet history? You have nothing to hide, right?
My guess is even if you have nothing to hide you wouldn't want that. That's what your asking to do to an entire country that clearly voted fair and square.
If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar ... and why?
Who? The CIA.
Why?
Why do they destabilize and reform every other government or sovereignty on the planet?
For profit, of course.
Welcome to the Nicaragua Club. You were raised in and have believed in your Banana Republic your whole life, and it's a scam.
You're minimizing the role of people in sending their own selves up.
As for the "CIA conspiracy run it" nonsense, that's just another shortcut easy answer. It's an 8th grader level of insight. I've been through an awful lot of conspiracy research, and one of my big takeaways is that massive top-down engineered conspiracies run by super-Machiavellian masterminds are a fiction.
The craftiest people in conspiracies are the middlemen. The medium of the Internet has supplied them with a force multiplier for propaganda and confusion hypnosis. Their greatest asset is the naivete of uncritical thinkers. And its flip side, preemptive cynicism.
Mascot, this is a very valuable comment IMHO, and parallels what I have come to realise over the years. Thanks.
"...The craftiest people in conspiracies are the middlemen. The medium of the Internet has supplied them with a force multiplier for propaganda and confusion hypnosis. Their greatest asset is the naivete of uncritical thinkers. And its flip side, preemptive cynicism..."
The critique of today's "journalism" by Matt, Krystal and Saagar is part of, but not the whole, story. The assertion that we have gone from the anodyne broadcasts of ABC, CBS and NBC of decades ago to the bipolar "news" broadcasts solely when Roger Ailes and FOX news came on the scene, leaves out a significant phase that made the receptivity of FOX so significant. The missing phase is the rather corrupting influence of New Journalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Journalism) introduced by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, David Halberstam in the 1970's. Wikipedia - " It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction and emphasizing "truth" over "facts", and intensive reportage in which reporters immersed themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. This was in contrast to traditional journalism where the journalist was typically "invisible" and facts are reported as objectively as possible." Wikipedia includes a comment that New Journalism is generally considered to have ended in the early '80's. My take is that it was the beginning of "pushing a narrative" that not only didn't end in the '80's but became increasingly pervasive to the present day. This "story-telling" has now resulted in competing narratives and the phenomena described in this video. The only additional observation is the seeming participation of Matt, Krystall and Saagar in inadvertently pushing the narrative that this lies at the feet of FOX and Republican (the only named culprits in their video). Actually the history goes much further back than that, as can be understood by reading The Image by the noted American historian Daniel J. Boorstin.
I'm generally a fan of New Journalism -- particularly Wolfe and HST -- and think it was an effort to illuminate the truth that journalists are human beings with preconceived ideas about the world and that objectivity and the "invisible" reporter were fictions.
That said, this is an excellent, thought-provoking comment. What happens to the news when it becomes narrative, and the reporter becomes the protagonist of their own?
The person who really gets overlooked in all of this is Robert Anton Wilson. Who, like Wolfe and HST, might be cited as having a "mixed influence"- Wilson was part Art Bell, part Socrates. But from my subjective point of view, the guy was invaluable in teaching me how to think critically. Notwithstanding occasionally profound differences in our points of view.
(R. A. Wilson was a neopagan rebelling against Roman Catholic authoritarianism, while my own story features a more secular upbringing, and I now identify as a non-demoninational Christian- G. K. Chesterton, Stanley Hauerwas, those cats. Whether or not I'm a "real" Christian is not for me to decide; I'm just doing the best I can. But if you don't think I'm a theist of some sort, try me. Not that I'm posting this info to start something in that regard; Matt has enough trouble with off-topic digressions, overgrowing the comments like kudzu vines.)
Anyway, Bob A. Wilson. I recommend his first big smash hit, Cosmic Trigger, published 1977. That book lays the groundwork for the concentration of interests he pursues in his later works.
You could say we're smack dab in Chapel Perilous.
My biggest lesson from RAW was his idea of model agnosticism. Take no one's bullshit as objective reality including your own.
Not nearly enough people get that. They're adept at pointing out the other side's bullshit. But they take their own bullshit too seriously to be honest about its possible limits and flaws.
Being un-serious is not necessarily appropriate 100% of the time; if you've lived your entire life without ever feeling a requirement to get serious, you're more fortunate than anyone I ever heard of. The course of human events occasionally requires seriousness in order to ward off terrible suffering or death. And grief is part of being a feeling human being.
But such luminaries as Robert Anton Wilson, Wavy Gravy, and Don Juan Matus agree that as the default position, unseriousness can't be beat ;-D
To mention only one superlative benefit of unseriousness, being able to laugh at oneself makes it much easier to change one's mind when the facts warrant it.
(American question: what is this "oneself", "one's", third-person singular convention all about? every time I write it, I think it makes me sound like I'm having tea with the Queen of England...)
Not to be a rain cloud but I'm fairly sure that Don Juan was a literary creation of Castaneda. A cobbled together composite using different aspects of different "holy men" sprinkled with a dash of bullshit.
Allegedly Castaneda never left California. He was also an alleged habitual liar who invented his family background along with his own birthdate.
When he died he had been leading a cult-like group of women known as "The Witches," many of whom disappeared upon his death. There were rumors that they all killed themselves.
OT but Chesterton ended up Catholic
I know. I'm fine with that. I have too many reservations about institutional religion in general and some aspects of the doctrine in particular to throw in with the RC Church myself, but despite its flaws and its parallel structures and the episodes of corruption and power drunkenness in high places, I think it's restored and redeemed by the faith of the ordinary people- and, strange as it might seem to those who are unaware of it, its formidable intellectual tradition. J. S. Bach, Dante Alghieri, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Garry Wills, Penny Lernoux, Dorothy Day, Teilhard de Chardin, Jerry Brown, Kevin Starr, the younger Catholics writing in publications like First Things...I have enormous respect for all of those writers and thinkers. For that matter, some of the "lapsed" Catholics of the modern age keep a sense of spiritual questing in their life and work: Robert Stone. Tim Leary. Robert Anton Wilson. As arch and ironic and witheringly sarcastic and contemptuous as all of them often sound when offering their observations on the Church, its history, its priesthood, the hierarchy, the Pope, and Christianity, they can't quite seem to quit the transcendent quest. If they had only went all in for humanist Egotism and the Will to Power over all, they might have hit the big time in their lifetimes, but they couldn't quite get to do it. They couldn't quite stop fucking around, having a good time for its own sake. Like Chesterton. Bob Anton Wilson...I suppose that I might find out one day that he's actually a nightmarishly evil person. All that sketchy company he's kept, and the Crowleyan fascination, and all that...ritual magic, trying to game the system, it's a fool's errand. But in the proto-Woke social climate of the Berkeley of the 1980s., Wilson always stood up for the autonomous individual, religious tolerance, and the libertarian philosophical ideal of tolerance in general. He rebuked the self-ordained Enlightened Humanist Progressive conceit that demonized Christians as if they were the source of all militarism, intolerance, and evil on earth. Bob Wilson didn't have to do that. There was no payoff for him in speaking up for Christians, who were beginning to be openly stereotyped en masse as the very embodied identity of the Oppressor, due to a Left backlash of pique and resentment in the era of the face of the ascendant politicized Republican Christianity represented by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. But Robert Anton Wilson prized the ideals of fair-mindedness and transcendent agnosticism, and he was opposed to hating people. Even weird monotheists with mystical blood rituals and arcane notions about the transcendent benefits of an internally consistent code of selfless and pure moral behavior, notwithstanding the continual failures on their part to uphold that standard in practice.
The other Christian reference tag about RAW that stays in my head is the review blurb on some Dadaist playlet that was one of his last books (I've read just about all of them, and bought most of them new; And/Or Press. Paperbacks, some of them with terrible bindings, fell apart in your hands...)
I forgot who the review was by, but it went like this:
"I'm a Christian; I hope Wilson is wrong. Funny, though."
Managing to achieve the Funny is not a bad score, in this life.
Thanks for the interesting aside. I had not heard of RAW -- will check him out. I spent my undergraduate years studying classical and medieval philosophy & theology; i.e., immersed in that 'formidable intellectual tradition' you mention. My personal favorite contemporary-ish representative of it is Evelyn Waugh, who sounds like a bit of a mirror image of RAW. After declaring himself an atheist in high school and attempting suicide shortly after Oxford, he became intellectually convinced of Christianity and spent the rest of his life as a rather caustic defender of the Catholic Church... but could never quite shake his delight in the things of this world and died of a sudden heart attack at age 63 (on Easter Sunday!), after living pretty hard for basically his entire adult life. The books he wrote in the meantime are pure delight. I feel terrible for young Christians who have a spark of intellectual life in them but aren't aware of this stuff.
You'd probably enjoy Gary Lachman's books. His latest, Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, is quite good.
Not sure how much validity I give to Chaos Magic, but there are a lot of people who insist it works. I reserve judgement because I've never tried it.
I do believe that reality is malleable & open to interpretation. That it isn't the old "seeing is believing" trope. It's more like you see what you believe you're going to see.
Oh boy. Magic works to the extent that you can talk yourself into believing it. The problem is what happens when you wish you hadn't done that, and you want to get out of it. I don't think there are any accomplished human sorcerers. There are only sorcerer's apprentices. From my point of view, that scene in Fantasia with Mickey and the brooms and buckets is a perfect depiction of Chaos Magic. Except that in real life, once the power is summoned and unleashed, there's no way for the apprentice to retain any power to get the brooms and buckets to quit. If you want to see a real world example of chaos magic, have a look at the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And approximately every aggressive invasion of a foreign land, ever.
I'm definitely aware of the possibility of the Uncanny and Extraordinary aspects of reality cropping up in my existence. It's usually great when that happens (not always.) Like, awesome. I've tried to keep my eye out for it, to be a little quicker on the uptake about noticing it when it happens. The notion of Opportunity is inherently magical, I think.
But I don't mess with trying to work the system with magic. I just try to do my natural best. I'm bad enough at that.
oh, yeah. The best anyone can do is to keep a high signal-to-noise ratio. That's what parallel processing, comparator circuity, and feedback networks are for, in the perceptual, cognitive, and semantic circuits. Defeat the SNAFU Principle. Status Hierarchy is not your friend.
The Ego is supposed to be a guardian. But it has tyrannical tendencies; we must work ceaselessly to keep it from becoming our jailer, and jailing us for life. I realize that axiom goes up against a mega-avalanche of social conditioning, but if you don't get that, there's no end to how much you can be worked.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I, too, enjoyed reading Wolfe and HST. They could prick one's interest to delve further into the subjects they wrote about. However, for the most part, their subjects (and narratives) were distant enough to be less harmful than the "New Journalists" of today, especially those who, as Matt has described in earlier articles, don't have the time, inclination and/or experience to adequately research what they're writing about, only a personal attitude or publisher/producer-directed party line.
Good point. I think Wolfe and HST were most interested in people at the margins. Mailer was all about promoting Mailer. The New New Journalism, if we want to call it that, is conversely a collective project to control the national political and economic narrative.
I was so horrified when watching what was happening at our Nation’s Capital on Wednesday, but what was worse was what I witnessed on social media between family and friends. I deleted my accounts after reading so much hate between people who I know love each other. The problem is when you put the word “All” in front of whatever group of people you are referring to...All Republicans, All Democrats, All Christians, All Muslims, All men, All women, etc. We are all human beings first and foremost, and we are Americans before anything else. There are “fringe” radical humans in every single one of the fore mentioned groups, and when we take the small percentage of those radicals and group them together with the majority, we are not only lying to ourselves, but creating a hateful divide that we will not be able to mend until we stop this. The media definitely fuels this behavior and it is disturbing and disgusting. I am a Christ following, conservative Trump supporting Republican that loves my Country, my family, my fellow Americans and the human beings of this World. I am appalled by the actions of the “Trump Supporters” that engaged is such destructive and illegal behavior! Everyone of us is unique, and to be lumped in with lunatics that act out in violence is so utterly offensive. Peace will not be attained until we stop being intolerant towards others that have different points of view. I fear the conservative voice will be pushed into silence if we are continually being grouped with the radical fringe. I will not be silenced, my voice is equally as important as anyone else’s. We all should be unified against violence, this should not be a divisive argument.
Anyone notice that the stock market was up while the "government was being toppled"?
I know. Pretty stable stock market for a fascist coup (or whatever phrase prevailed at the most recent focus group). I don't want to say hardly anyone takes the media seriously any more, but hardly anyone takes the media seriously any more.
Yup-the markets love stability and like it or not, the neoliberal oligarchs in DC see a new mandate to “stabilize” in the wake of the riot.
Perhaps the worst scam in US history is neoliberals’ Russia-gate. They lost to a TV host. Instead of reflection, they latched onto a moronic conspiracy theory and stayed with it for now 5th year. Now that the Trump nightmare has defeated himself – how many Dem congressman/senators will finally publicly state that
- The entire anti-Russian narrative and “Ukraine impeachment” were deliberate fabrications
- And request resolution of Biden-Hunter corruption (Ukraine, laptop, China)
Dems should finally come clean that the entire anti-Russian narrative is a 4+ year deliberate fabrication -- while nothing was done for M4A, STOP sanctions, #3K/month to all, etc..
Trump was an incompetent amateur surrounded by religious extremists. The next “Trump” will be far more dangerous since corrupt Dem party without change is walking dead
Agree completely with all of this. The Ds/RINO Rs still can’t admit the emperor has no clothes. Trump, unfortunately, is like a drunk dude streaking in a thong.
"corrupt Dem party without change is walking dead"
Biden is just about literally the walking dead. He's the party's apotheosis.
Not going to happen. Not until they are yanked from power.
The entire anti-Russia narrative and Ukraine impeachment were deliberate fabrications. Okay... to what end?
About that it was analyzed numerous times.-, so I am concluding you just want to correspond rather than think ...
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup
Waitwaitwait...given the distribution of massive fucktardery in the population (including politicians), isn't there an equal or greater likelihood that we get some outsider/populist who ISN'T a self-defeating narcissist??
Dumb optimism, I know.
So funny to watch the hosts miss Matt's point and obliviously push their preferred narrative anyway.
It does not matter, and probably they had to do that if they wanted to keep their jobs. They have rather to be considered exceptionally brave to allow Matt Taibbi to make his point to their audience, knowing of course in advance he would. It is because of courageous people like this poking small holes in the propaganda that we may still have some hope.
It's too absurd. In the midst of the INSURRECTION! OMG! OMG! coverage we see that Pelosi got re-upped as speaker with no commitment whatsoever to M4A. I seem to recall all of the D candidates raising their hands like 8 year olds when asked if they supported this. So, "the squad" showed what craven frauds they are, just as Jimmy Dore predicted. At the same time I saw D senators interviewed and yakking about the "60 votes needed yadda yadd". So, no move to end the filibuster, either.
Meanwhile, on the R side, we have the Weeping Turtle and the fist-pumping, Ivy League young man of the people douchebag. Oh, and Lindsey Graham saying he's "done" with Trump. Really brave there, Lindsey.
The crowd storming the Capital reminded me more of Revenge of the Nerds than the storming of the Bastille. Maybe it was the guy in the buffalo hat. Many of the cops were just too fat to do anything about it. Or something.
Unscripted Joe Biden reminds me more and more of Charles Manson for some reason. His #2 has her own astroturfed "digital army" apparently. Soul of the Nation and the K-Hive, baby!
"The crowd storming the Capital reminded me more of Revenge of the Nerds than the storming of the Bastille. Maybe it was the guy in the buffalo hat."
People who think that was serious political violence have clearly never had any direct exposure to serious political violence, or they are deliberately lying to overhype the "threat."
I think the discourse is really about this: "The sanctity of our Capitol, with its holy statues, daises, lecterns and podia has been violated! The rabble had the audacity to disrupt our pomp and circumstance!"
Manson had humor and charisma at least. I’d compare Biden to 1983 Constantine Chernenko-who had way more blood on his hands than Charlie Manson-he helped run the anti-nomad/pastoralist campaign n Kazakhstan that killed up to a million people and provided the game plan for the Holodomor campaign and in Ukraine a year or two later.
I vividly remember Linsey G. begging for help on of all places Facebook, for his re-election campaign fund. Follow the money. Until all $ are removed from the parties and election advertising, this will get worse. $Billions to elect politicians to work for people who make an average of $15-$25/hour.
Bernie Sanders' success at the small-cap crowdfunding model ultimately produced a lot of negative externalities.
Watched it earlier this afternoon. Well done. Your book "Hate Inc" proved to be prescient, but I do think the system is working exactly how people with power want it to (divide and conquer).
Last night I listened to the Grayzone's analysis of the Capital fiasco --- Blumenthal, Parampil, Haiphong, Mate, and Norton. And as you might expect, there is a lot of anger with both the DNC and RNC at this point. I am wondering how far we are to really organizing a third party --- that can begin to knock out big structural issues (healthcare, defense budgets, lobbying pay to play systems of influence, and education instead of penury).
The orchestrated event, interpretation of the event, and broad blanketing of mainstream voices identically reacting to the event (similar to the roll-out the post 9/11 response) will make it much more difficult to form a third party. We will all be under very close, hostile, observation. It's a long, slow coup, and we the people are the losers.
Yep. We're being driven headlong into a complete and total fascist state -our next Minister of Misinformation was just appointed: Redd Herring.
This "interview" is hilarious, three lefties pretending to be objective. The people who "lit the match", the crazy rightwing uncle, and a couple of other examples all come from a left perspective. It was like listening to three children saying we are a little bad but they are really, really bad. These people see themselves as the adults in the room and the people they look down on, the easily manipulated, need their guidance.
I enjoy reading Matt's pieces but stuff like this makes it somewhat difficult to take him too seriously.
"It was like listening to three children saying we are a little bad but they are really, really bad."
You described Krystal Ball's routine perfectly. "We are a little bad but they are really, really bad" is her entire schtick. Every segment, every day. I listened for a few weeks, but it got tiresome and I quit.
Saager said, "Matt, the floor is yours." Krystal gave two minute speeches, and then asked for agreement. I think she's supposed to be the "cool, young" voice for the DNC. Sort of, "I really wanted Bernie, honest, but I support everything the Swamp Dems want to do because the Repubs are just unacceptably horrible." Maybe toss is a "Boo war!" every now and then.
It’s a social thing-it’s still not cool to be honest about the Clinton-Obama neoliberals machine. Taibbi might rant on here for us crazies, but he tones it down for his media buddies, imo.
I agree. You don't go on as a guest to attack your hosts. You bring up different topics around Krystal as opposed to Megyn Kelly as opposed to Bret Weinstein. Better a toned-down Matt on Rising than their normal parade of guests.
LOL wait until Brennan and Clapper want to go on their show to "set the record straight".
hahahaha
Not a fan of K Ball, but she consistently is critical of “Clinton-Obama neoliberals.”
That’s possible, but it could be a diversionary tactic, causing the left to ignore his leadership in his local skin-head’s gang. I think he might be the cymbal section in their marching band.
Enquiring minds want to know... 👁👁
I've never heard of either of them, now I am sorry I have ...
Bah, just ignore them.
They aren't really aware of the charade they're willingly participating in.
She is kind of hot though. That's something, I guess.
Always a plus for a news reader type. She is indeed good looking.
Saagar Enjeti is a "lefty"? How often do you watch the show?
He's actually supposed to be the "right wing" side of the dichotomy.
I never heard of the guy until this. I didn’t hear him say anything that would lead me to consider him to be objective.
You live up to your moniker.
I consider that to be a compliment, thank you!
You are welcome!
I quite agree with Scott's and other commenters' critique of the Right/Left dialectic . . . but, there is some shallow truth still in it and that truth is bizarrely consistent over time. This 1960 quote from the 20th century's master philosopher, Albert Camus, is apropos of that.
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . . .
"We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty."
-Albert Camus from "Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays", 1960
Isn’t all of that somewhat like saying the left intersects a plane at a 90 degree angle and the right intersects the same plane at a 120 degree angle?
Your metaphor is open to many interpretations. I'd say "Maybe!"
It's strange how that 30 degree difference is so stable through space and time, a form of translation invariance that must have fairly deep psychological roots in our brain and language processes.
Why do you ignore the curvature, or lack thereof, the universe?
Exactly! Matt is playing to the right wing crazies like you because no one else will read his shit on substack. So you get libs trying to be “the adults.”
"right wing crazies like you because no one else will read his shit on substack"
Apparently you too are reading his shit on Substack, or perhaps you don't read his articles and only come here for the comments.
TK is becoming the Bizarro-world version of Playboy; a magazine nobody reads for the articles, but they're here for the porn.
"Apparently you too are reading his shit on Substack"
I think it is apparent. I don't think it makes sense for people to pay Matt to make comments for porn. I am 39 so I still like girls for actual porn. Like on youjizz-you know, classy sites unlike here.
While it is quite plain that Krystal and Saagar are pretty lefty, it doesn't equate to them being part of the bigger problem; that's the State.
Sure, the State uses whatever mask it finds to be working at the time, and in decades past it used "conservatism" as a mantle.
You lost me when you started flinging poo around under the heading, "Right v Left".
Gotcha!
Stop fixating on the mask that the State wears and start seeing the cunts behind it.
I poll watched and my friend Christine volunteered for mail-in voting in 2016 in different US counties both of us lost faith in the integrity of our elections back then. If our voting system was ridden of any possible fraud and people abandoned the 2 party system and instead looked solely at how our elected officials voted on legislation that's a start.
Ah, nice to see what you look like! Are you going to actually say Ted Cruz and all these people shouldn't investigate this mess?? And are responsible like this chick claims? She is doing JUST what you are talking about!! You don't call her on it. Come on, MATT. I read New York Times, I'm a teacher and I listen to all of it. And you just talka bout FOX News? When you KNOW the left media is the one really doing this? And y ou don't call her on it? Oh, boy, now I can't keep reading you. You know full well THEY are doing the same thing!! Did they say this about BLM and Antifa? Ok, not going to give you the $5/month anymore. You should have called them on this. Ok, now you at least say the mainstream media is also doing it, but you didn't tell them the truth. Or stand up to these people when you know they are equally to blame. And do you REALLY believe Donald Trump is any more dangerous than this globalist elitism? You will find out soon. SHE was NOT encouraging. She was part of the crap. And you know it.
One of the more amusing extremes of the media is calling a small mob of sad characters an attempted coup or even "just" a protest with an insurrectionist character. From the same media I have seen no evidence of tanks or ground bombers attacking the capitol, or infantry or special forces brigades surrounding it.
It is hard to believe that the president of the USA who is also a billionaire can only raise a small mob of sad characters to perform a coup on his behalf.
The capitol is pretty much a fortress, Washington is heavily garrisoned, the security services monitor constantly all possible troubles: it is astonishing that a small mob of sad characters were allowed to get as far as they did. I wonder who is going to benefit from the inevitable turn of the screw on civil liberties, I doubt it will be the outgoing president.
this is obvious gang-counter gang psyops employed push thru Reichstag Fire-like "emergency" security laws that have been on the shelf waiting for the right pretext. Welcome to fascism with a democratic face.
we are marching to dystopia, dystopia, dystopia
we are marching to dystopia
dystopia HURRAH!
The mob breaking into the Capitol on June 6, 2021 and the Reichstag fire have nothing in common. Zero. You sound like you don't even know what the Reichstag fire was, or what it led to. Except, perhaps, that there was a fire. Which there wasn't at the Capitol, and I think we can all be thankful for that, because nothing would have stopped an arsonist who wanted to get one going.
There was no false flag of anti-Trump agents provocateurs leading the charge on the Capitol- and I think that the criminal trials will make this plain. And there will be trials- not summary detention under martial law, as you're tacitly hinting with your hype.
Continue being an useful idiot. It suits you. The FBI and CIA have been doing this kind of shit since the 50's. Continue cheering them on. They'll come for you too, eventually.