Elon Musk promised to make Twitter the social media platform for the masses. Gone would be the days of the very loud radical minorities, and a new era of more reasonable people having nuanced debates on complicated issues would emerge.

As a person with a respectable follower base on X.com (formerly twitter), I really wanted the platform to do well. Not because I have illusions of becoming a big influencer and making a living doing so, but because it was a great hobby. I enjoyed doing deep dives into complicated issues long before anybody knew about me on Twitter, and I’ve enjoyed sharing my takes and approach with people on intellectually provacative subjects like like Covid-19, the Great Reset, politics, history, science, geopolitics, etc. Above all I’ve tried to strive for intellectual honesty: be honest about facts, don’t resort to logical fallacies, don’t try to appeal to people’s emotions/fears/outrage, and most importantly admit when I’m wrong or change your mind. Am I always successful? Hell no! But I do try.

Yet lately I’ve grown incredibly disillusioned with the platform because it has become a completely twisted verion of reality…something very frustrating to someone that values intellectual honesty and the concept of objective reality. One of the things I learned, the hard way, about Twitter is that you have to take time away from the platform to ground yourself or “touch grass” as some people say. Otherwise you’ll start to confuse the platform with reality. This isn’t something new…it’s always been this way. But it has gotten exponentially worse in recent years, and to understand why we need to go back only a few years.

When Elon Musk took over the platform, I was elated. I was one of the people that comprised the original “Team Reality” during the early days of Covid-19 before it was overtaken by grifters looking to push various agendas or garner clicks. And as you can imagine I was censored and suspended by the previous administration for posting things like the CDC’s own data.

Elon taking over Twitter felt like a breath of fresh air after the oppressive censorship of woke progressive leadership. I was all in on free speech and I though Elon was going to revolutionize social media.

But here we are and I can honestly say it has not gone as I had hoped. All that Elon accomplished was to exchange one extreme model with another.

Under the old regime, the platform leaned heavily into progressive biases, suppressing voices that challenged the dominant narratives on issues like public health, identity politics, or climate change. It felt like an echo chamber for the far left, where dissent was often labeled as misinformation or hate speech. Elon's vision of "maximum free speech" sounded like the perfect antidote: a marketplace of ideas where the best arguments would rise to the top, and bad ones would be debunked through open debate. In theory, good speech would drive out the bad, fostering a space for that 80% in the middle to engage reasonably, just like in his quote about maximizing human happiness.

But, what we've ended up with isn't a balanced town square; it's a platform that's swung wildly to the other extreme, amplifying radical voices and turning into a breeding ground for outrage. X has become more polarized than ever, a virtual cesspool where racism, neofascism, antisemitism, and unbridled hate flourish unchecked. Posts glorifying white supremacy, denying the Holocaust, or pushing moral relativism rack up millions of views, while nuanced takes get buried in the noise.

Why has this happened? It's not just a failure of theory; it's a combination of systemic issues that Elon either ignored or exacerbated. First, foreign bots and influence operations have warped the entire ecosystem. Russian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern bot farms, powered by AI, impersonate Americans to push propaganda, sow division, and boost divisive narratives: whether it's antisemitism, anti-Ukraine or just general anti-western propaganda. These aren't fringe actors; they're state-backed campaigns that flood the platform, artificially inflating traction for extreme views and drowning out moderate ones. In 2024 and into 2025, we've seen them manipulate everything from U.S. politics to global conflicts, turning X into a tool for foreign malign influence.

Second, the lack of even basic moderation has turned X into a free-for-all. We're not talking about censoring debate…this is about common-sense rules that 95% of us would agree on: like banning overt calls for genocide or rampant racial slurs. Without that, extremism thrives.

Third, and perhaps most damning, Elon himself has used his massive personal platform to elevate some of the most radical and dishonest influencers, mostly on the right. His feed is filled with alarmism, outrage, and conspiracy theories…and his repeated interaction with far-right accounts has only increasing their reach and influence. Meanwhile, Elon is notorious for following then unfollowing some of the more intellectually honest accounts on X when they disagree with him…which is such a bad look for him and the platform.

Some of you might think that this is a small price to pay for unfettered free speech…and I’ve also held out hope that things would get better, but they just haven’t and won’t. And that’s because X is completely disconnected from the reality that we experience on a daily basis, and polling continues to show this is the case. Ultimately, not only has X failed to cater to the 80% in the middle, but I think it’s actually driven them away.

In fact, X has become increasingly useless for the casual user because the narratives and news cycle are completely different from the rest of the world. For example, you might see Candace Owen’s “reporting” on Brigitte Macron being born a man trending and filling up your feed…but it’s not a something anybody cares about outside of the perpetually online X users. So not only can average people not relate to the trending content, but the content is completely useless for them in their real lives. Even for me, after I take a few days off it’s incredibly difficult to jump right back into things because I’m not in tune with the latest X thing.

And the problem for X is that people are starting to notice this disconnect. What makes this platform such a powerhouse is all the important people, particularly political, on here. They, and their staff, look to X for realtime feedback on issues and it really has been an incredibly powerful tool for influencing political discourse…but will it still be that when it becomes clear to everybody that X is completely decoupled from the real world? At this point, should any politician really care about the prevailing opinions on X?

If Elon truly wants to maximize human happiness, he needs to course-correct: rein in the bots, restore sensible moderation, and stop platforming radicals. Otherwise, X will continue alienating the masses it was supposed to serve, becoming a relic for the fringes rather than a platform for all. I still hope for better, but right now, I'm touching grass more often than scrolling.

Here is what is going to happen with Ukraine.

If you ignore the noise, you’ll start recognizing what’s really happening and where all of this is going.

Trump’s Stance on Security Guarantees

Let’s start with Trump as he’s currently the most important piece of this puzzle and understanding his thinking is key.

It starts with the fact that the only security guarantees Trump wants to offer are the mineral deal which he sees as aligning US and Ukraine interests. But he has no intention of risking military engagement between the US and Russia over Ukraine beyond the implicit threat of US commercial involvement. He has long held this position and he appears intent on doing so. But it is significant beyond the immediate disappointment or cheers it might bring to the extreme partisans on this issue.

This is significant for two reasons.

First it has caused Europe to finally move its “butt” because the US isn't coming in to save the day vis a vis Ukraine. That safety net will soon be gone. It's a call to action that Europe has no choice but to react to...and I think they are/will. They had 3 years to do something and their anemic response to this challenge, on their own continent, is a wake-up call they are not yet serious about security and their own defense. Hopefully this will move them to action on other issues like immigration reform because otherwise the influence of the nationalist populists will continue to grow leading eventually to a post-liberal Europe…but that’s a topic for another time.

The second, but really more important point is that this also reaffirms the US's commitment to deterrence via NATO. Recognize that NATO doesn't force anybody to do anything. Even if Article 5 is activated, the US can’t be forced to do anything it doesn't want to do. It's important so long as there is a mentality among it's members that it is "the" redline.

By refusing to bring the US (which is the same as NATO in this situation) into the Ukraine deal, Trump is indicating that NATO membership is still a redline that Russia must not cross. If it didn't matter, then he could easily extend security guarantees when it's obvious he would not engage the US militarily against Russia over Ukraine. In other words, by refusing NATO/US involvement, he is implicitly maintaining the sanctity of deterrence via NATO.

For deterrence via NATO to actually work, the US has to be willing to enforce that red line. Trump is indicating that this red line is still a red line which is why he won't casually throw it into a Ukraine peace deal.

Barrack Obama did more damage to the international world order when he issued his feckless red line warning in Syria than anything since…and that includes Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawl. That bluff exposed a perceived gap between U.S. rhetoric and action, weakening global trust in American leadership and deterrence since then.

Trump’s Threats and Bluster

Understand something about Trump: he wants to be the one who makes this peace deal happen. He understands that such a deal is the kind of thing that will define his legacy for posterity. He’s also not beneath sabotaging peace if Ukraine were to try and go behind his back and leverage the Europeans. But the point stands that Trump wants this to happen more than anybody and will continue to bring enormous pressure on the various parties to get this done…though how much of that will be applied to Russia remains a question.

The only thing I’m not sure is whether he understands that the terms of the peace deal also matter. He has the leverage to impose peace in this war, but it’s easier for him to leverage Ukraine than Russia. If he is shortsighted and just wants a quick deal it will be a a weak and unjust peace for Ukraine. If he understands the situation and sees his legacy through the long view of history, he will eventually need to apply a lot of pressure on Russia to get enough concessions so that this can be a just and lasting peace.

Trump will threaten to walk away, he will halt aid, but he’s done nothing to indicate that he does not want to be in the middle of this. JD Vance gave it away yesterday when he commented that "20k troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years" were not enough for peace. He was trying to make the point that America’s mineral deal is far superior to what a weak Europe could offer militarily. In other words, the US needs to be the main driver of this proccess if we want peace in Ukraine.

What About the Europeans?

Zelensky is traveling around Europe trying to cobble together a coalition of the willing to come up with an alternative security guarantee. There is a lot of questioning of Europe’s military and their readiness to get involved in a war.

While that criticism is merited, I don’t think anybody should sleep on what Europe can bring to bear militarily.

First they have a solid military industrial baset:

The U.S. military industrial base employs around 1.1 million people across 13,000 defense-related firms, producing roughly 40–50 combat aircraft (e.g., F-35s) and 300–400 armored vehicles annually, though it faces supply chain bottlenecks and a reliance on a few giants like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Europe’s defense sector, spanning over 2,500 companies and employing 2.5 million people, delivers 60–80 fighter jets (e.g., Eurofighter, Rafale) and 500–600 armored vehicles yearly across nations like France, Germany, and the UK, leveraging a more distributed network of firms like Airbus, Thales, and Rheinmetall for greater resilience and output. -Grok3

Second, did you know that Europeans still build ships while Americans really don’t? And I mean a lot more ships.

Europe’s overall shipbuilding capacity spans about 300 shipyards producing 1.5 to 2 million gross tonnage (GT) annually across commercial and military vessels, vastly outpacing the U.S.’s under 100,000 GT from a handful of yards focused almost entirely on naval output.

Militarily, Europe’s roughly 150 shipyards, including 20 major naval producers, deliver 300,000 to 500,000 GT of warships yearly to sustain a 1,500-ship fleet, while the U.S.’s 7 naval yards struggle to exceed 100,000 GT, supporting a 490-ship fleet with limited scalability and a decades-long maintenance backlog. -Grok3

Third and most importantly is Europe’s airforce which totals somewhere around 1,600 warplanes includin 150 Fifth Generation F-35s which will grow to over 600 with all orders placed. It wasn’t that long ago that Israel demonstrated what it’s fleet of F-35s could do when it desroyed most of Iran’s Russian made air-defense systems without breaking a sweat:

Europe doesn’t even need to have a large land army to counter Russia because Ukraine already provides that. European airsuperiority would be sufficient to turn the entire scale of the war if Russia wanted to challenge European security guarantees.

So the premise that the Europeans don’t have the military might to stand up to Russia is not necessarily so. They have everything they need except for the will.

But as we discussed earlier, this is changing.

Bringing it All Together for Peace

So where are we heading with all of this?

First, I think the US and Ukraine will eventually sign their mineral deal because peace is unlikely without Trump as the mediator. There is no love lost between Europe and Putin, and without Trump there to push and sell the deal there is little hope for a peace deal so I think the mineral deal goes through.

Second will come negotiations regarding how the war is concluded in terms of:

• Territorial concessions

• Population relocation

• Reparations

• Sanctions relief

• etc

This will take a long time as there are a lot of details to haggle over. I don’t mean to minimalize the importance of this part because this is where Ukraine gives part of it’s territory away which is what they’ve been fighting over. But for the purposes of this analysis, I’m more concerned with the last part.

Finally will be the negotiation over the future security of Ukraine. And here is where the entire situation will become very difficult.

Ukraine has two prerequisites that are essential for their own security:

• Security guarantees from Europe including boots on the ground

• No demilitarization of Ukraine - Russia wants Ukraine to disarm and limit size of army

And I think this is where Putin will balk. He will claim that this is no different than NATO at his doorstep…etc, etc, etc. We’ve heard all the arguments.

If it seems very strange that the country that invaded should have an objection to this, you are right but this has been Putin’s stance for a while now. Putin knows that Europe can be a formidable military backstop for Ukraine so agreeing to this would largely close the door on any future military adventurism. It’s not that that I think he has any specific plans at this moment, but that this would mean letting go of Ukraine…something Russia has never been able to do.

And this is where it will all come back to Donald Trump and how he decides to proceed. I have no idea what he is going to do because I am not sure that Trump knows it either. But this will be the crux of the negotiation and whether the peace deal will be fair and just ensuring longterm peace for Ukraine or whether it will be a quick and shallow ceasefire that could flare back up within a few years.

Trump has a good amount of leverage in this sense. He can threaten Putin by escalating to deescalate via increase aid/weapons. But he can also use his leverage against Ukraine to try and impose a deal, citing his mineral partnership as sufficent guarantee, inspite of their security concerns.

As I’ve written in the past, this is the key question that I don’t yet have a feel for how Trump is going to go. Some people will tell you that they already know, but I don’t think even Trump knows yet.

In any case, I am far more optimistic than I was when I wrote this tweet.

Elon Musk is here to save you, whether you like it or not!

If you follow his evolution, Elon Musk has made it his mission to address some of humanity’s biggest challenges. Through Tesla, he aims to tackle climate change; with SpaceX, he’s working to make us a multi-planetary species; and with X, he’s focused on expanding free speech. Now, he’s advising Donald Trump on reshaping global policies. With 220 million followers and a ubiquitous presence on X, he has a massive platform and a strong belief that he’s playing a critical role in our future.

But there’s a disconnect between his goals and his actions that raises questions. He’s building ties with Russia and China, advocating for peace in ways that some see as short-sighted concessions and even appeasement, and presenting his ideas as the key to history’s problems…yet the outcomes don’t always align with the promise.

Let’s examine this savior complex and why it might lead to unintended consequences.

The Savior Complex: Elon’s Brain on Overdrive

Elon’s been crystal clear about this: he’s here to save humanity

• Tesla kicked off in 2003 to kill CO2 and stop the planet from frying

• SpaceX is about Mars, a backup plan because Earth’s a ticking time bomb with nukes, asteroids, etc., threatening to end our species at any time

• X was his 2022 buy to “preserve democracy,” unbanning big names and slashing the nanny filters

• He’s fathered 13 kids (His 14th was just announced as I was revising this) with four different women, no wife in sight, because he’s hellbent on staving off population collapse to keep civilization alive

• Even his position on AI is rooted in the prime directive of ensuring that it doesn’t kill us all…side note: I’m with him on this one

• Now he sees himself as integral in negotiating a peace with Russia…hmm

This isn’t a side hustle…it’s a mission, and we need to recognize that he has a sense of this in everything he does.

It’s noble on paper, but peel it back, and you’ve got a savior complex cranked to eleven…supercharged by a brain that’s likely on the spectrum. He was very upfront that he’s “a bit autistic” in a 2013 interview, but we all knew this already.

And it tracks: laser focus on systems (rockets, cars, platforms), grand blueprints for “the greater good,” but a shaky grip on the human mess…emotions, history, the stuff that doesn’t fit in his spreadsheet.

Musk views himself as humanity’s problem-solver, addressing climate, war, and extinction with a focus that borders on obsession. His supporters see a visionary stepping in where others falter. Yet this savior complex, while earnest, doesn’t guarantee sound decisions, and that’s where the tension lies.

The Contradictions: Words vs. Deeds

Elon Musk’s big moral claims don’t always match his actions, and it’s hard to ignore the disconnect. Tesla’s mission was to crush climate change, but its Shanghai Gigafactory, raking in $5.7 billion in Q3 2024, leans on China’s coal-powered grid and lithium mines, pumping out 15-20 tons of CO2 per car. EVs shine on the road, no doubt, but their production footprint dents the “green savior” story Musk sold us.

Then there’s X, his $44 billion free speech crusade in 2022. I bought into the vision…unleash voices, ditch the filters. But now he’s hyping “citizen journalists” as the new media, letting them run wild with half-baked takes and shaky facts. Yes, free speech flows, but it’s drowning in noise.

And with 220 million followers, Musk isn’t just hosting the party…he’s picking the playlist…nudging retweets and dropping “interesting” tags to steer the spotlight. And don’t even get me started on how apocalyptic his language is…everything is always a 5 alarm fire. It’s hard not to notice X feels less like a public square and more like Elon’s personal newsletter, popping up everywhere…our X feeds speak to that.

He’s also peddling his own narratives, repeating them relentlessly, even when they bend the truth. Why push these angles? Maybe it’s about stability or survival, but I think it’s more about realizing his own vision for world order.

If you look at his geopolitics, his positions reveal selective priorities. He’s pressed Ukraine to seek peace, citing war’s toll, but hasn’t equally addressed Russia’s aggression. He’s called Taiwan an “integral part” of China, echoing Beijing’s stance, while avoiding critique of its environmental or human rights record…undoubtedly tied to Tesla’s reliance on China. This savior complex seems to bend toward practical interests, not a consistent moral framework, leaving gaps between his words and deeds.

The pieces don’t really fit, do they?

The Plan: Spheres of Influence as Salvation

Elon Musk’s savior complex has crystallized into a bold strategy: dividing the world into spheres of influence to avert disaster. He envisions the U.S. relinquishing its lone watch over global order, letting Russia and China govern their neighboring regions (Ukraine bending to Moscow, Taiwan to Beijing) as a way to sidestep wars that could undo his cosmic ambitions.

He even imagines the U.S. withdrawing from NATO, yet he doesn’t consider how the loss of America’s nuclear umbrella might trigger widespread nuclear proliferation across Europe. Picture this: Nukes in the Balkans…what could possibly go wrong!?

His routine discussions with Vladimir Putin since 2022, per the Wall Street Journal, and his fingerprints on Trump’s February 13th proposal to halve defense spending alongside these powers, hint at this design. To Musk, it’s a necessary shield: conflict consumes the resources and lives he needs for Mars, so a segmented world buys time for humanity’s survival.

But this leans on a concept Russia and China have long nurtured…the “multi-polar world”…pitched as a fairer balance of power. They’ve sold it to the West as relief from America’s overburdened role, a call to share responsibility across poles. Musk seems drawn to this, seeing it as a pragmatic scaffold for peace; a way to keep the globe steady while he builds humanity’s next chapter. But their multi-polar vision masks a deeper aim: not coexistence, but control, using spheres to anchor their authority over weaker states, a goal their actions consistently betray.

Such a plan overlooks a stubborn truth: local populations don’t bow quietly to imposed rule. Ukraine’s continued war and Taiwan’s defiance under China’s menacing threats reflect a broader reality: people chafe under external yokes, their suffering turning to resistance. Russia and China, unbound by restraint, don’t halt at influence. They stretch it into dominance, pressing borders and wills until push back flares. What Musk sees as a bulwark against war just serves as kindling that’s easily ignited under the friction of subjugation.

The cost of this misstep could be steep, unraveling the peace Musk seeks. Spheres of influence, in the hands of powers bent on expansion, don’t stabilize…they just strain over time. Resistance from those they suppress, whether through quiet dissent or open revolt, builds pressure that erupts, not into small skirmishes, but into conflicts with the weight to pull others in. Musk’s bargain, meant to save us, risks a world not of calm progress but of simmering tension, where his savior’s dream falters against the grind of human resolve and authoritarian overreach.

The Risks: A Naive Vision Risking Chaos and War

Elon Musk is not evil…he approaches his mission with genuine conviction, aiming to save humanity. His achievements with Tesla and SpaceX reflect a rare ability to turn bold ideas into reality, and there’s little doubt he believes his efforts serve a greater good. Yet beneath this drive lies a naivety…an earnest but misplaced faith that the principles guiding his companies can be applied to reshape global dynamics.

He envisions world order as a problem to be solved, much like a startup’s challenges, manageable through strategy and negotiation. His push for spheres of influence assumes a predictability he’s mastered in engineering: align the pieces, secure the outcome. But nations and powers don’t align to his experience in that world…they’re driven by forces far messier to grasp or understand.

This naivety shines clearest in his view of human nature. I think he has veered off into a domain where his genius and talents are more of a hindrance than a benefit. Understanding geopolitics is as much about understanding history as it is about understanding human nature...something that I don't think he is particularly attuned to. The stakes of this oversight are steep. Russia and China, fueled by their own imperatives, won’t conform to his orderly vision…rather they’ll exploit it, pushing boundaries he assumes they’ll respect.

What he sees as a safeguard for humanity’s future are likely to end in more chaos (frankly big wars, if not world war), not because he intends harm, but because he doesn’t grasp the currents he’s wading into. His followers may cheer the ambition, but the world defies the tidy solutions of a brilliant mind.

In this case, good intent meets a reality too tangled for one savior to unravel.

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The issue of Trump's desire to bring Greenland under American control is not hard to understand.

Greenland is largely self governing, has a population of only 56K and 68% of those people want formal independence from Denmark. And if Greenland were to become independent from Denmark, it would exit NATO

This makes it extremely vulnerable to subversive influence from US adversaries and Denmark has neither the attention nor resources to address this type of hybrid threat which would be targeted at such a small number of people.

It's about keeping Greenland within the western security orbit because ultimately, any country that controls Greenland would become a become a new strategic force in the Atlantic and Arctic, and a challenge to North Atlantic security. The US still remembers what it was like during WW2 when Germany sank 2,770 merchant ships with a relatively cost-effective submarine fleet despite not being a significant naval power at the time.

Greenland is also significant economically because The Arctic has become a new arena for strategic competition among great powers, primarily the United States, Russia, and China, due to trends in ice melting, which opens up new shipping routes and access to vast natural resources. The Arctic region is rich in untapped resources like oil, gas, minerals, and fisheries, which have become more accessible as ice recedes. The potential for new shipping routes, particularly the Northern Sea Route, shortens travel times between continents, enhancing economic and military strategic interests.

Then there’s the Arctic consideration. Historically, we have tended to think of geopolitical distances in terms of the east and west whereby vast oceans exist between the US and any potential threats. When considered this way, America’s enemies are very far away.

But if you consider that The Arctic is opening up (due to global temperature rise/ice melt) as an accessible route between the eastern and western hemisphere, then the geopolitical picture changes.

Now look at where Greenland is actually located in relationship to the US and Russia/China…it’s right in the middle! Securing control of that territory is now significant for US National Security. And unfortunately, Denmark is too small of a country to properly secure it against the hybrid threats that could bring it under foreign influence. I’ll repeat, there are only 56K people in Greenland who are easily influence-able by one side or the other.

Trump likens this issue to how Chinese influence has spread in Latin America, culminating with strategic economic and military issues for the US at the Panama Canal. Does Trump overstate the threat? Possibly, but maybe he knows more than available public information. But that’s besides the point because with National Security, the priority is to proactively secure your interests and deter foreign meddling/aggression rather than having to react to once your opponents are entrenched. The potential of a Chinese threat should be treated as an actual threat.

So if you can get past his bombastic and hyperbolic rhetoric, what Trump is saying is common sense and it’s not all that hard to understand. In a world at peace, this was not an issue. But with a rising China and expansionist Russia, Greenland is vulnerable and it’s geostrategic location is increasingly more important as the Arctic becomes more accessible to shipping.

Trump is not wrong to be making this case.

At the very least, it’s a public discussion/debate worth having.

And besides, the “Make America Greenland Again” memes are just going to be so much fun!

Intro

I’m going to keep this very short because I want it to be a snapshot of what my analysis is telling me at this point in time.

“Quick Deepdive” may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s accurate in this case because I have gone very deep into the weeds in terms of gleaning information about the state of the race from the best available sources I could find.

If you’re curious about the types of sources I follow, this list by @naval has some excellent accounts to follow for information. Click on the image for the link.

So this will be a very quick and simple analysis based on some key assumptions. It would take me far too long to take you through all the podcasts, articles, tweets, data that are relevant and by that point the analysis might not even be relevant anymore.

And at the end, I'll even try to give you some pointers about what to look for in the days ahead as well as attaching some numbers in terms of probabilities!

The Situation

The Situation: This is my best and most objective approximation of the situation as it currently stands. Again, this also includes some key assumptions based on credible consensus, but these are not meant as a stand in for facts because nobody has that data yet.

A) Both sides believe internally that the sunbelt is out of reach for Harris

B) If A is true, then Kamala's only path to victory is to sweep the "blue wall" of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan

C) While these three states have been trending towards Trump in the polling, they're still essentially toss-ups and within the margin of polling errors

D) Early voting data in the blue walls states is far less dispositive than in the sunbelt

E) Neither side considers that there are any significant polling errors in the blue wall states favoring Trump

F) Given D+E, the assumption is that these states are pure toss-ups and these races will be determined by turnout

Analysis

Analysis: When you have such limited hard data, the analysis is infinitely complex. So we’re using assumptions based on things that are coming out from both sides. In other words, the situation as described above gives you the best approximation of what the two sides can agree on. Again, this is not dispositive because in 2016 both campaigns (absent a few outliers) thought Trump was going to lose going into election day.

There are there are three parts to the analysis of the relative odds of the outcome.

1) Is the sunbelt out of reach for Harris?

The first thing you'll need to do is assess to what extent the sunbelt is out of reach for Harris. I'm telling you what's being reported widely coming out of the campaigns and from credible analysts.

This is the most critical aspect of the analysis because it would mean that you have to concede that Trump is going to win Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina (Nevada isn’t really relevant either way to this analysis).

I think there is a high probability for this to be true considering aspects like polling, early voting analysis, registration, historical parallels, and trends. But there’s really no way for me to generate probabilities for this happening without very complex modelling which is going to probably lead to the same conclusions that analysts are already coming to.

But what I can tell you is that the most important thing you should be looking at in the next few days is whether or not this (Trump winning Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina) is likely to happen because it has huge repercussions for the rest of the analysis.

So if or when you come to the conclusion that the sunbelt is out of reach for Harris, then this is the only possible path to victory for her: Sweeping the vaunted Democratic Blue Wall…which has that name for a reason.

2) Are Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan truly all 50-50 tossups?

Personally, I think Trump is currently favored because:

• He’s currently leading in the polls

• Nothing in the early voting yields any significant red flags

• Polling errors in 2016 and 2020 have favored Trump in these states by a lot

But I am willing to put these points aside for the sake of this analysis and say that they are indeed real toss-ups and that they are essentially tied.

Why? Because it doesn’t really matter than much to the final probabilities…which takes us to the last point.

3) Can Harris sweep the blue wall?

What are the odds that she can win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan given points 1 and 2?

This is by far the simplest part to figure out. She has a one in two chance in each which means she’s got to win three coin flips in a row. It’s that simple.

That means 0.5^3 or 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 which comes out to a 1 in 8 chance or 12.5%.

Harris’ chances of sweeping the blue wall are currently 12.5% meaning that if Trump holds the sunbelt, as he’s currently a heavy favorite to do, then there’s an 87.5% chance he is the next President.

Conclusions

I think this gives you the simplest way to look at the election on October 31st, 2024…5 days out from election day.

First, keep an eye on whether the sunbelt is still considered unlikely for Harris. Polls in this sense are irrelevant at this point…only early voting can give you any insight at this point. And again, at this point in time her campaign is not generating enough early votes which is why there’s such confidence on the Trump side and pessimism in Harris’ camp.

Second, keep an eye on whether the races in the blue wall are still considered toss-ups heading into election day.

Finally, do the math!

You can even significantly increase Harris’ chances of winning each individual state to 60% and her odds of winning all three is still only 21.6%. In fact, you’re have to increase her individual odds of winning each state to 80% just to give her a 51.2% chance of sweeping them.

And don’t be fooled by the argument that if she wins one, then she’ll win them all because that’s how it’s happens historically. Wrong! It’s an appeal to recency bias. 10K votes either way has nothing to do with history…only chance in a pure 50-50 split which is one of the assumptions. That’s why we have point 2 of the analysis where I think it’s fair to say we’ve given Harris the benefit of the doubt in calling them true tossups. The margin is so razor thin that each state can only be viewed as statistically independent…complete toss ups as the Harris campaign will readily concede. Now if Harris were actually favored in these states, you could make the case but at best she’s 50%. So even if Harris wins Pennsylvania then her chances of sweeping the blue wall only improve to 1 in 4 or 25%.

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So if you think Trump is going to win Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, then he’s essentially got somewhere in the neighborhood of an 88% chance of becoming POTUS #47…as things currently stand.

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The joy is over.

The vibes have evaporated.

Kamala’s media blitz has tanked her polls as Americans did not like what they saw.

So what’s left to do with the election mere weeks away?

PIVOT!

Lo and behold, after telling everybody that Donald Trump was just really weird, he is once again a fascist threat to Democracy!

So how did we get here?

The Change Up

If you’d only been following American politics since July 2024, then Kamala Harris’ campaign might have struck you as a breath of fresh air. Sure, it was light on policy, but there were promises of moderate policies, calls for unity, and messages of forward-looking optimism and hopeful patriotism…it’s almost enough to make one forget four years of unpopular governance by the Biden-Harris administration!

But there’s one little problem…it was a lie.

It’s a carefully constructed communication campaign built around an empty vessel of a candidate who is sufficiently compliant to memorize all the lines she’s fed while doing everything she’s told to hide any of her authentic self as a person or politician. But this Frankenstein freak show built by PR specialists around focus groups, candidate polling, and coordinated with the praetorian guard media had been fooling a lot of people.

It started with the media finally telling the truth about Joe Biden. For the first time in ages, they were honest and critical about the Democratic Party. Journalists were doing their jobs and actually reporting. It was a bit refreshing and made the world start to feel a bit more normal.

Trump’s first assassination attempt forced the media and politicians to all take a step back and admit that the rhetoric had gone too far. They acknowledged that calling Trump a Nazi for all these years probably wasn’t really great given that it’s neither objectively true, nor did they actually believe it.

Then they do the bait and switch and suddenly Kamala is a nearly unrecognizable candidate that’s full of hope and joy and moderation! And she said just enough of the things that most Americans want to hear to give people the sense that this just might be the path back to a more sane world. Heck, we even had two national political conventions that were mostly positive in the messages they put forward.

After doing almost no real interviews for nearly two months, the ascension of Kamala culminated in the debate where soundly beat Donald Trump with the assistance of two partisan-hack ABC moderators, some coaching from Hollywood, and Trump’s inability to keep his cool after some predictable taunting.

Yup, Democrats were riding high.

But was it real?

If you trust your common sense, you knew back in July that she was a terrible candidate. A politician that crashed and burned every time the media took “another look at here”.

They gave her a look early on in the Democratic primary in 2019. And nobody liked her. Then they circled back and gave her a second look when the debates started. And nobody liked her. Then they gave her a third look when she was nominated for VP. And nobody liked her…so they sent her into the basement for the entire campaign. Then she became VP and they gave her yet another look. And nobody liked her…

The Media Blitz

But her campaign was so high on it’s own vibes, or maybe it was panicking over bad internal polls, that they decided to send Kamala out on a media blitz. Interviews, TV, podcasts, townhalls…they sent her out there to do it all.

And then something really weird happened…her polls tanked.

I mean…who could have predicted that having Kamala repeatedly saying “I come from a middle class family” or tossing yet another word salad, was a bad idea? Not even SNL could resist mocking her…

And just like that…“brat” Kamala was over…RIP to the joy and vibes.

And just like that, the Democrats were left with nothing but their predictable pivot.

The Pivot

It would be sad if it wasn’t so cynically Hillary-ous!

Really, it’s all that remains for Democrats as a campaign issue that they can prosecute in the court of public opinion.

Trump is a fascist (and let’s not forget racist!), are going to be the Kamala Harris campaign for the next three weeks.

It’s been their campaign for the past 9 years so they’ll be able to ramp it up really fast.

It’s going to be escalating, wall to wall coverage of Trump as a fascist..as if it were a 5-alarm fire!

The one soundbyte that got the most attention was, the normally sane, James Carville sounding the alarm that Trump is Nazi…it’s really all they’ve got left.

There are however a few problems…

• They’ve been saying this for nearly a decade…there isn’t anybody that hasn’t heard this case against Trump a hundred times already

• People keep trying to assassinate Trump so people may be put off by raising the temperature with such rhetoric

• They were calling Trump just really weird only a month ago…were they lying then or are they lying now? Or did they just get over a transient case of amnesia?

• Everybody can see what’s going on. It’s pathetically obvious, not to mention extremely cynical

But alas, I’ll say it again: it’s all they’ve got left.

This is what happens when you run terrible candidates and try to put forth BS narratives that defy common sense.

It’ll be a rough three weeks until Nov 5th…the temperature is going to be raised to an 11/10…and then the same genius will pontificate on how we happened upon political violence. But that’s a story for another time.

And by the way, don’t forget to vote!

The Choice That’s Upon Us

Trump vs Kamala is about what policies we get for the next 4 years and where our country (and by extension it's people if not the world) will be in 2028. Nothing more, nothing less.

Social media gives one the impression that all (or even most) people supporting Trump are part of a MAGA cult because those types of people are the most active/visible, the loudest and, let's be honest, the most obnoxious at times.

But I can assure you that the people supporting Trump come in all shapes and forms.

I'm restating the obvious, but this is a binary choice, and there's only Trump or Kamala to vote for.

Most people on the middle or right are not opposed to Trump's policies...in fact, he's the most moderate Republican candidate in recent memory.

If you're a conservative and .think he's not conservative enough, at least you'll get some of the policy you want with him. You'll get nothing with Kamala.

So what people object to are not his political agenda, but rather the man himself. But whether he becomes the next president or not, he will be out of politics come 2028 by virtue of his age.

The changes he has made to the party in terms of realigning the party towards the working/middle class is not going to change after he's out of politics. There's a new, and very normal cyclical, political realignment taking place on both sides. The idea that Republicans will get their party back if Trump loses is wrong.

There are aspect to the new Republican party that I'm not terribly keen on, but you're never going to get everything you want from a policy perspective when you're in a two party system...not even the hardcore MAGA types get everything they actually want. Rather, you're a collection of interest groups and at the end of the day you have to decide whether the totality of a party's agenda is better than the other's.

So no, Trump is not just about a MAGA cult. I know people who can't stand Trump, who have never voted for him, but would walk through fire to vote for him because of what he opposes. It's not just about Trump. It's a binary choice, and if you believe that Trump will govern better then you should vote for him.

There's also no way to predict what a Trump presidency would mean going forward beyond 2028. Anybody who thinks they can map out a path for how politics or world events will evolve in 5-10 years is delusional. We can't even predict what's going to happen next month or even next week.

“We’ll be better off without Trump” is only half of the equation. The other half is recognizing that this means Kamala as President.

The “No Longer” Trump Movement

I was one of the early supporters of Ron DeSantis’ presidential run. I’ve made the case repeatedly for why he is by far the best candidate. I also found the campaign that Trump and his surrogates ran against DeSantis very dishonest…yes it really pissed me off.

Look, I’m not MAGA nor am I very high on Trump. He has repeatedly let us down with his narcissism and undisciplined temperament. And what drives me crazy is that he doesn’t realize that he’s supposed to serve us rather than us being loyal to him.

However, he was the choice of the Republican party so he’s the candidate, full stop. As such I support him because it’s a binary choice between Trump and Kamala Harris. The policy differences between the two, and given what has happened under Biden-Harris since 2020 makes this an obvious rational choice.

That’s not how all people on the right see this election. For many of them it’s a referendum on Trump and MAGA. And we’re not talking about Never Trumpers here…I could never stand those. We’re talking about people who have supported Trump the past and can no longer do so. I get it and I won’t condemn anybody for being a conscientious objector. After all, I wrote this scathing analysis about the rise of the woke right!

But I do want people to know what they’ll get if Trump loses:

1. Four years of President “Border Czar” Kamala Harris: The influx of migrants will continue for another four years. Maybe less than with Biden, or maybe more, but nothing significant will be done to fundamently change the system.

2. Economic Stagflation: Government spending is the raison d'etre for Progressive Democrats. That’s their entire political ideology, regardless of what they might say publicly. Look at what “moderate” Tim Walz did in Minnesota after re-election as governor in 2022 when he had house majorities…he blew out the spending. Kamala will want her own signature spending bills and as such we’re likely to see a worsening of inflation while the economy is on the brink of a recession.

3. Foreign Policy Disasters: Biden-Harris has been an unmitigated disaster in foreign policy. Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel, with Taiwan looming…its been a shit show of appeasement. Kamala would be worse. She knows absolutely nothing about foreign policy or the greater world as whole….she’s clueless on this topic. I don’t subscribe to WW3 catastrophizing, but that doesn’t mean we won’t eventually get there is the incompetence continues.

4. Green Economic and Energy Policy: The artificial push for green measures to combat climate change have been disastrous for the economy. Even if you’re firmly convinced that climate represents an existential threat, you’re not

5. The Continued Long March Through the Institutions: Our country needs a major reform of institutions that have been ideologically captured by the progressive left: public administration, big government, academia…etc. You can only me changes if you win elections. Losing this election will ensure even more entrenchment by leftist ideologues.

So before you gleefully rejoice in Trump losing, keep in mind that there are consequences to losing an election.

The Final Analysis

Ultimately, it’s a very simple decision because you can not claim to know what the world will look like in 2028. The best you can do is look at where we are in 2024 and ask yourself which candidate will do a better job as president based on what you currently know.

“But at least we’ll get Trump out and take the party back to conservatism” some people say. Well not so fast.

First, this is Trump’s last hurrah and MAGA is a party of one politician: Donald J. Trump. His popularity is non-transferable as we seen by how (not) successful Kari Lake and his other endorsed candidates have been. Whether he wins or not, the Republican Party will move on after Donald Trump.

This idea that you'll get forever-Trump if he wins in November is wrong. Electing Trump does not mean that Laura Loomer is the future of the Republican party...that's an emotional reaction. What Trump is, isn't transferable to the obnoxious people on X that many of you can't stand. Trump is a movement of one and he will shortly age out of relevance as a political figure.

Second, we’re in the middle of a political realignment and the old Republican party is not coming back no matter what happens. Conservatives, of which I am one, are going to be one of multiple groups vying for ideological influence in what is essentially a coalition of different interest groups.

Be careful what you wish for. Things never seem to work out as you envision them and sacrificing an election for the possibility that the party will get better is short sighted in my opinion. I see too many people’s judgment on this clouded by emotions or personal animus against Trump himself.

We can’t predict the future, but the more information we have, the better our ability make rational decisions. Right now we have a very simple decision to make: If you actually believe that the totality of four years of Trump will be better than four years of Kamala, then you're not accomplishing anything long term by not voting for him. Don’t conflate the decision on November 5th, with the bigger question of where you want our politics to be in 2028 because it’s unknowable right now.

So unless you can convince yourself that you will be better of in the next 4 years with Kamala as President, then the most logical option is Trump.

A lot of cowardice by a lot of people who knew better, but didn’t speak out…until it was too late, that is.

As Ernest Hemingway famously said:

Intro

This piece was (and still is) meant to be a constructive criticism of some elements on the right from the point of view of a conservative that believes in many, if not most, of the same things that the people I’m going to criticize also believe in.

Still, it’s becoming more obvious that there is an element within our ranks that are losing touch with reality…though some of you will be surprised that this isn’t an article about MAGA (more on this in a bit). We’re not talking about a difference of opinions here…I can live with that. Rather we’re talking about an inability to agree on facts or on basic principles of objective morality.

Before I go further, because the first thing everyone asks is “what’s woke right?”, this is from one of my threads on X:

I call em “Woke Right” because they’ve awoken to the real truth that the rest of us just don’t get. They’re obnoxious/condescending like the woke left… Not averse to doxxing/mob tactics… Communicate en masse by repeating talking points… And dissent gets you excommunicated

They are the “Real Patriots” So if we disagree, we’re disloyal…we’re traitors Politics is performative…policy wins are for the RINO scum…anything short of “draining the swamp” is insufficiently woke And anybody that doesn’t embrace isolationism is a warmongering WW3 neocon

But they actually hate America…for different reasons than the woke left…yet in the end they reach the same conclusion The US is actually the source of all that’s bad in the world. Unsee-able forces have made America evil So we must tear it all down and rebuild in their image

Yet they share a common fatal flaw w/ the woke left. Common sense…truth…reality And some of us on the right aren’t afraid to point out the obvious It’s not about disagreements on ideology/policy It’s a pattern of behavior That’s what wokeness is…indulgent self-righteousness

It’s hard to really nail down what exactly they believe in because there’s no underlying philosophy or real leader. And surprisingly, for some of you, this is not a piece about MAGA or Trump because it’s not the same phenomenon. Most people who vote Trump or consider themselves MAGA aren’t part of this New Right that I speak of. They are still politically conservative, even if they like his more populist rhetoric.

How do I know this? Because the woke right is a phenomenon that’s largely grown to be a thing on social media and you don’t really see it very much in real life. Second, the percentages of support that Trump enjoys among Republicans is far larger than this smaller fringe right-wing populist movement that is over-represented online. And third is that Trump is a populist in rhetoric only and much of what the woke right currently believes is way beyond even that. Despite the big talk he’s actually governed as a conservative which is why he still enjoys such strong Republican support.

Anyways, I started writing this deep dive in November of 2021 when I first started noticing certain troubling patterns of behavior and other related phenomenon on the right.

Since then I’ve stopped and started rewriting it a number of times for basically three reasons:

1. I’ve struggled with the idea of being overly critical of my side, when there is so much more to be critical of on the left. The mid-terms were coming up, and then other political issues kept popping up…I could never find the right moment to finish it and put it out there.

2. It’s a deep dive and I didn’t want to be vague. And it’s been really difficult for me to put my finger on exactly what it is that’s been bothering me. I wanted to make sure that when I did write this piece that I would be able to perfectly articulate what I see as the issues.

3. I also wanted to find a moment where what I was describing was starting to make sense to people. In other words that it had been around long enough for people to have come across it on their own and could recognize what I’m talking about, because for a long time people didn’t understand it. Now I think they’re getting it.

The First Signs

So why did this journey start for me in November 2021? Republican Glenn Youngkin surprised everybody when he won the Virginia’s Governor race a year after Trump had lost Virginia by 10 points.

For me this was a sign that people were looking for normalcy…that when presented with the realities of what the progressive left was doing on things of importance to them like children’s education, most people would do the rational thing.

This was an epiphany for me. I realized that people weren’t necessarily agreeing with the progressive left, they were just holding their nose and voting for the least worst option as they saw things. For the most part people wanted a return to normality and if you can eliminate a lot of the unnecessary noise from the conversation, people would reject radical progressiveness and side with the more rational position.

I was actually quite hopeful about things moving forward, but when I tried to communicate these points over Twitter, I was surprised to see people turn on me for this message…probably the first time I’d ever felt that.

Anybody that has followed me for a while will know that I feel strongly about and have fought/pushed back on a wide range of issues championed by conservatives because I saw them as being rooted in facts and rationalism:

• Covid-19 Tyranny

• Vaccine Coercion and Mandates

• Access to repurposed drugs for Covid

• Free-Speech infringment

• Big Tech Censorship

• The Great Reset/Globalist Movement

• Neo-Marxist trends on the left in all their forms:

  • Post-Modernism,

  • Anti-Racism,

  • BLM,

  • CRT/Systemic Racism,

  • Cancel Culture,

  • Calls for Outright Socialism

  • Radical Gender Ideology

• The Downfall of American Universities because of Radical Progressivism

• Anti-Americanism

• The Flawed Science of Climate Change

• The Climate Cult - Climate Change Hysteria

Yet all of this did not earn me the benefit of the doubt with a surprising amount of people when it came to arguing positions that were outside of a newly emerging orthodoxy…many were just not interested in a more nuanced point of view.

And I remember thinking: “This is weird…where have I seen this before?”

What is the Problem?

So what is the actual problem? I’m going to try to define what it is I am seeing.

I started calling this the “Woke Right” problem because it felt very similar in behavior to the woke phenomenon on that left that I’ve been so opposed to for many years. Only this time it was much harder to pin down what “it” was because unlike the woke left, which has a clearly identifiable ideology, the woke right really doesn’t…more on why this is in a bit.

So what are some of the characteristics that I began seeing on this woke right:

• Contrarianism: Whatever the other side says, they believe in the opposite

• Outrage Culture: Everything is all outrage all of the time

• Purity Tests: Unless you can pass the purity test then you are out…you’re a Globalist or a RINO.

• Cult-like obsession with political figures: For the Left it was Obama…for the Right it’s Trump…they can do no wrong…they walk on water. For example, it’s possible to support Trump without having to swear a loyalty oath…it’s okay to criticize him when he gets things wrong.

• Cynicism: Nothing can be believed, all facts that contradict the narrative must have been fabricated. On the left this comes in the form of theories about colonialism and oppression. On the right this manifests itself as an obsession with conspiracies.

• Conspiracy Theories: I can hardly blame people after so many legitimate conspiracy theories have been proven right, but that doesn’t mean you start believing things to be true because they fit your narrative, instead of verifying whether or not they actually are. All conspiracy theories do is de-legitimize the “real conspiracies” that are taking place.

• Loss of Intellectual Integrity: Simply put, we’ve been reduced to bumper sticker sloganeering on some issues. A lot of the time it’s the same type of simpleminded single-variable analysis that we are so critical of the left for. We reference non-credible sources. We embrace the loudest voices representative of our views even if they are the dumbest people. And worst of all, there’s no intellectual introspection…we can never admit when we are wrong…or when we don’t actually know.

• Demagoguery: Appealing to people’s emotions and prejudices rather than reason is just cheap manipulation. And it never leads anywhere good because without a foundation of objective truth and reason, it all eventually either falls apart or devolves into authoritarianism. The types of people that use demagoguery are either grifters looking to manipulate for personal gain or true believers who think that the ends justify the means. These are not people who stand on values or principles, but rather the pursuit of ideological purity and naked power.

I’m writing this knowing that many don’t want to hear this…they think the left is so bad that it’s pointless to do introspection around a few rough points that they don’t consider that big of an issue. I see it differently. I write this because I think the cowardice of people who knew better on the left to stand up against the worst elements in their woke movement is what has brought us here.

So again, how did the left get to be morally bankrupt?

Gradually, then suddenly…that’s how it happens.

So what are the actual issues they believe in? That’s harder to say because it’s not really an ideological movement. It’s populism so it’s mostly a rejection of elitism, which I would actually agree with. The problem is that because they lack an ideological mooring, the policies they advocate for are largely driven by the mob…or in today’s social media landscape: the loudest influencers farming for engagement.

Some people take offense when I criticize populism because they see it as a righteous movement against the tyranny of the elite. I totally get it because the entire Covid experience was one big campaign for the necessity of a populist back-lash. Covid tyranny was so obvious and visceral, and spread out over such a large period of time, that it changed us…it made us very cynical of authority on the one hand, while simultaeously making us more tribal and thus susceptible to our own team’s narratives. By necessity, we were drawn into a new way of thinking and processing the world around us. And the populist narrative was by far the most dominant one that resonated with us.

Let’s Talk About Populism

Since we’re talking about populism, let’s first define it so that we’re clear about what we are talking about:

Populism can lead to both positive and negative externalities.

The positives are more evident initially as it begins with a righteous fight to protect the liberty and freedom of the masses versus an overbearing or corrupt ruling class.

On the other hand, over time, it becomes clear that a number of significant problems begin to arise:

• There’s no underpinning ideology: Why is this bad? Because then you are beholden to the whims of the new leadership class who are not moored to any basic principles that were agreed upon. The best example is the difference between the American Revolution which sought to create a firm ideological basis for their independence movement and compare that to the French Revolution which was dominated by a populist movement against the monarchy. Unbound by any principles, the revolution became a struggle for power that devolved into chaos and and a reign of terror.

• It’s essentially a form of identity politics: two groups are pitted against each other. I think most people reading this already understand the problems inherent to identity politics. The difference is that “the elite” class is not at all defined so eventually it becomes a movement where anybody that disagrees with you is cast out as an “other”.

Populist movements start with good intentions but eventually devolve into a struggle for power. And that power comes via a form of mob rule with leaders telling the people what they want to hear, while denouncing anybody calling for rational discourse as a traitor.

Look, populism isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it needs to be channeled towards something constructive lest it devolve into a naked fight for power. Normally we adhere to values to restrain the worst instincts of men by mooring them to a set of principles. But populism has no such constraints.

It can't be left to the whim of the mob which reflexively migrates towards “the next thing”.

There was a time when I supported the populist backlash which I saw as a righteous reaction to the complete over-reach of the left during Russiagate, Covid-19 and the summer of George Floyd. It was a perfect storm of betrayal by the left and our most important institutions which they had come to dominate. It reminded me in many ways of the types of tactics described by Orwell and which I knew of, from being born in communist Eastern Europe.

But what tends to happen with populist movements is that they get taken over by grifters who are willing to shout the loudest in order to exploit peoples’ legitimate grievances. Couple this with social media’s incentive structure to tap into people’s outrage for clicks and engagement and you’ll quickly understand how we went from righteous populist ire to stupid populism in no time at all.

How did we get here?

I’ve thought about this quite a bit and I think it was a series of phenomenon and events that brought us here.

1. Trump Derangement Syndrome: TDS is real and was on full display for 4 years of Trump’s presidency. The amount of lying and gaslighting that we were exposed to about Trump during this period created and supported the notion that the left had completely lost it’s mind and become unhinged to the point where they saw the means justifying the ends in all things Trump…an obviously dangerous and immoral way to behave in a Democracy.

2. Russiagate: This was so egregious and it so dominated the public discourse for years that it became a daily reminder of the corruption and overreach of Democrats in their attempts to get Trump by any means possible.

3. Covid-19: This was not supposed to be political. We were all in it together, but it also devolved into partisanship. I’m not going to go too deep into this, because I’ve written many articles on this and could write many more, but suffice it to say that this was the largest betrayal of public trust of my lifetime. Covid-19 tyranny absolutely smashed the social contract which is the underpinning of the governments legitimacy to rule.

   

   I really can’t emphasize enough how important the social contract is and how dangerous and irresponsible it was for our governments to trample on it for years on end.

4. The Summer of George Floyd: We were subject to months of “mostly peaceful protests” which were actually riots and force-fed copious amounts of critical race theory meant to convince us of just how evil and racist our country was. It was probably peak-gaslighting.

5. Election 2020: Between the changing of voting rules and media collusion to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, there are legitimate gripes by Republicans for how the scales were tipped in Biden’s favor. Beyond this, there are many other reasons why Republicans felt the election was “stolen”…yet none of these concerns were ever really addressed in real-time or very widely thereafter. Instead people were told to just accept the results which was a bitter pill to swallow on the heels of Covid and the BLM riots. Instead of explaining to people what they were getting wrong, they were instead called crazy and told to shut up.

6. Trump Kicked off Social Media: This is was the culminating moment for the rise of the woke right because up until this moment the right had a leader and a voice in Trump. And for all his faults, Trump is not a stupid man. He preached a sort of rhetoric that unified both conservatives and the populists. He said what the populists wanted to hear but gave conservatives rational policies that they wanted. With Trump’s bans from social media he essentially exited the scene of political discourse.

In the absence of Trump as the voice of the right, a new type of populist movement emerged on social media. A movement that spoke in the name of Trump and the MAGA movement, but which also sought to find their own voice in the aftermath of the previous four years of crazy political conflicts and culture wars. And thus the era of the New Right was born…this is what I initially called them…but then quickly turned into the Woke Right. Influencers of all levels of intellect, scruples and motivations could now suddenly fill the void left by Trump’s exit.

And fill it they did.

Then Elon Musk purchased Twitter.

And with the influx of previously banned accounts as well as maximum free speech, everything just got really loud, really fast.

This is not a criticism of Elon or X or free speech. I’ve been an outspoken advocate for the necessity of free speech over censorship at all costs:

In fact, free speech is how people are getting to see this reality sooner rather than later. Instead of festering under the surface we get to see what people are really thinking in real-time.

Still, free speech also requires that influential people with big followings stand up and speak out against bad speech in all it’s forms even when that makes them unpopular with their own followers. The whole idea of good speech trumps bad speech only works if people are willing to recognize the bad speech and say something about it.

And I have to say that I’ve not seen many of the credible thought leaders on the right actually speak out against this stuff. Audience capture is something that every public intellectual should be extremely careful about because it will warp their sense of reality.

Is it really a big deal?

As it turns out there are real world consequences which are reflected in the world view that many on the right are now choosing to embrace as a result of the woke right narratives:

• Isolationism: Driven by the failure of America’s wars on terror, they have become extremely cynical about US involvement abroad. I think that’s reasonable, but their solution isn’t to learn from those mistakes…it’s to disengage completely from world affairs. We’re talking about dramatically changing a foreign policy that has ushered in the greatest 80 year period of human prosperity in history…yet the people who are calling for this have zero understanding about the complexities of that system, second and third order consequences or even how that system might actually benefit America. Instead, we get bumpersticker slogans like: “no more endless wars”, “it’s not in our interest”, “why do you join and fight” and “we need to get our house in order first”. And my problem isn’t so much that they’re pushing for isolationism but rather that they can’t argument their point of view beyond repeating certain narratives. And there’s nobody with whom to have an actual debate on the topic because there’s no understanding of it beyond the idea that it sounds right. It is absurd simple minded thinking, yet this is the stuff being peddled by the woke right.

• Anti-Americanism: They believe the US is responsible for many evils in the world. Unlike the woke left which see the west as evil because they are colonizers and oppressors, the woke right believes in globalist/elitist conspiracy theories. It’s all about the military industrial complex, shadowy intelligence agencies or The World Economic Forum. Not that there isn’t reason to be critical of all of those, but it always goes too far. The issue is that in the end the woke left and woke right both agree that America is the problem and as such this frequently leads to them sympathizing with foreign entities that are, objectively speaking, enemies of the US. Look, criticizing your own government is an important part of the democratic process because it’s how we course-correct for bad policy. But that doesn’t mean you should ever conflate these criticisms with the propaganda put forth by foreign adversaries who would seek to divide us internally. One should be able to simultaneously criticize our government and still hold the opinion that America is a great country in comparison to the rest of the world, and has been a global force for good in the last century, despite its shortcomings.

• “Tear it Down” Revolutionary Radicalism: This one drives me crazy because it’s the farthest thing from conservatism. Conservatives try to conserve things and oppose radical change, but the woke right seems to think the revolutionary approach is better. The funniest example of this was when the same people that were screaming about the absurdity of the “defund the police” movement all of a sudden wanted to “defund the FBI”. I really couldn’t believe it when I heard people starting to say this because it’s just as absurd an approach and non-conservative notion. While I agree there are problems with the FBI’s behavior in recent years, and I also share in the anger (even rage) towards them, we’re supposed to skip straight to tearing it down? Without any suggestion of what replaces it? We’re talking about federal law enforcement after-all…we’re talking about losing institutional competencies built up over decades. It’s radical and irrational thinking, yet this was the issue for which I received the worst ratio ever since I’ve been on X. Again, maybe the solution is to close down the FBI and start over, but nobody saying that has made a well documented and logical case for why that is the best policy…just bumpersticker sloganeering to get the mob on their side.

• Performative Politics: There is a small but very loud, highly visible and influential politicians on the right whose entire purpose is virtue signaling to build social capital, rather than engaging on policy in a realistic way. The incentive structure within politics, especially in Congress, is for this type of activism as it brings fame, acclaim and helps with fundraising. But…

• Political Gridlock: But the problem is that all this does is lead to nothing getting done. If there is no compromise, then there is no governance. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing with the current Republican congress which has become an absolute joke. The counter to this is that unless they hold the line, they’ll never gather enough support to push their agenda. Mmm, yeah…I’ve seen the same thing from the squad on the left. Political activism and politics are not the same thing. They may strive towards similar political objectives, but it’s ultimately the job of the politician to negotiate the best possible deal for their constituents. Blocking things, like the Just Stop Oil activists, without an actual plan to change policy doesn’t move your agenda forward…it just annoys people trying to get on with their lives.

• Lost Opportunity Cost: There are consequences to losing elections. The woke right isn’t winning many elections nationwide and if Trump wins, it will be in spite of his woke right wing. There is a political price to be paid for performative politics that accomplishes nothing. The same way most people can’t stand AOC and the squad, people also can’t stand people like Margery Taylor Green (the GOP AOC) or Matt Gaetz. Maybe you like them, but the swing voters that decide elections certainly don’t. You don’t get policy changes if you don’t win elections and this small, yet loud minority has already hit a wall in terms of support on the right.

• Antisemitism: While not everybody on the woke right is antisemitic, it seems like all the right-wing anti-semites are woke right. And yet they try and call themselves conservatives or MAGA/America First!?

  

  They are anything but that. Trump is the most pro-Israel American president ever, yet this woke-rightster would invoke America First in the name of his ignorance fueled antisemitism. Or look at Nick Fuentes who is now a main stream figure for these people because “he makes a lot of sense”…this despite being an unabashed white supremacist.

  

  While Candace Owens publicly distances herself from Fuentes, look at the responses to her tweets. It’s a veritable All-Star cast of X’s biggest antisemitic accounts who pretend like they aren’t because they’ve rebranded themselves “anti-zionists". Whether it’s ignorance or actual hate it doesn’t really matter…it’s disgraceful and a black eye for the right. Yet again, I repeat that the Woke-Right is not antisemitic per se. But they do very little to push back against this element which has burrowed their way into their coalition.

• Free Pass to the Radical Progressives: The woke right serves to deflect attention from the left’s own radicalism. We should be able to call out radical woke progressives, who wield actual power in our institutions, and contrast them with a reasonable and rational right position. Instead, conservatives are criticized for the behavior of the woke right and in the mind of moderates and independents we’re viewed as just as bad as the radical left…it’s all a wash in their minds. The problem is that the woke right yields no significant power, while the woke left does. So basically the woke right is just providing cover for the radical left to continue their march through our institutions while serious people on the right are marginalized as radicals.

I could go on and on. Everyday there are more examples of this. The only thing that is clear is that they will adopt any position that is contrary to “the establishment” even if it means weaving conspiracy theories to explain every new political development or world event. The problem is that lately, being a conservative or being educated and knowledgeable will disqualify you because it means you’re part of the establishment.

Now add to this the problem of bots and foreign manipulation of social media. Just like the woke left, the woke right is the darling of countries like Russia and China which seek to promote the most radical points of views on both sides in an effort to divide us and sow chaos.

Where does Trump fit?

Is Trump woke right? You might think that from his rhetoric at times, but his policy has always been conservatism mixed with a streak of populism and outside the box thinking. No, it’s not 5D chess but there was enough common sense to challenge some long held bipartisan beliefs to be a welcome change from the old stale conservative perspective.

The issue with Trump is two fold. First, he does nothing to push back against the woke right because so long as you’re nice to him, he will not criticize you. Not even sure how aware he is with this whole phenomenon because he’s no longer on X. Second, is that he’s surrounded himself with a lot of people that I would categorize as woke right, or thereabouts. So it’s definitely problematic seeing him publicly associating himself with these folks. I think we’ll know a lot more of where Trump is when he selects his VP candidate because the wokeness is strong in many of the rumored candidates.

Final Thoughts

This is a serious problem for right and for the country as a whole. Instead of moderation being the solution…an obvious alternative to a radical turn by the left…the woke right now makes the right look similarly radical. So if you’re in the majority of people that lie closer to the political center you just throw your hands in the air and look for the least worst option…even if it’s not the politics or policies you want.

The other problem is that these people (woke on both sides) are not persuading anybody. They behave as if they will eventually get everybody onboard because the rest of the people will awaken to their truth…people just haven’t figured it all out yet like they have. That’s never happening because they are pushing a whole lot of crazy. But they are influential with the larger activist base so they do very well in primaries even if they are nominating garbage candidates. So we’re all sort of hostage to them because of what is now a broken primary system.

Ultimately it all comes down to facts, logic and strong principles. Unless you stand on a foundation built on these, it eventually crumbles under the weight of all the bullshit.

So I leave you with this final thought in the form of a political cartoon which so aptly sums up the underlying problem. I won’t say much beyond this: always challenge what you believe to be true and hold the people you depend on for information and analysis accountable. I can assure you that too many of them on the right have been letting you down.

In the aftermath of the October 7th terrorist attacks we have seen an unprecedented amount of both veiled and in your face antisemitism. Instead of the world rallying around the victims of this heinous terrorist attack, as happened with the US after 9/11, it only took a few days (or hours in the case of some Muslims) for the defenders of Palestine to shift the narrative away from October 7th and towards their historic grievances which was Hamas’ objective all along.

This has been one of the most disheartening world events of my lifetime, because the amount of antisemitism that’s been on display means that we’ve learned nothing from history.

Antisemitism is a reality in the Arab/Muslim world and anybody that denies this is ignorant…you only need to listen and actually believe what they are shouting to the rooftops.

But the antisemitism in the West is a reflection of what’s wrong with our society, not what is wrong with the Jews.

Just look at the intersectional coalition that are attacking Israel to understand this:

I’m sorry, but the company you keep matters. For the most part, these are the groups of people that are currently the biggest threat to Western civilization, and each and everyone of them is aligned with Palestinians against Israel.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali brilliantly summed up the three greatest threats to the West in this recent article for Unherd (probably the most intellectually honest media platform on the planet):

I’m not saying all the people that have come out in support of Palestinians are antisemites. Some people actually see any death as a tragedy and think that peace would be possible if only we all sat down at a table and talked this out. I think they are naive, ignorant and don’t understand the moral imperatives of the present situation, but I’m not sure that they actually hate Jews…and maybe ignorance is not an excuse, but that’s a debate for another day.

In any case, this ignominious coalition have put together a number of communication strategies, narratives and talking points to promote their agenda. There are many false, logically fallacious and immoral arguments currently being made in support of the Palestinian cause.

So in this article I’m going to break down how many of their arguments aren’t meant to communicate, but rather to manipulate.

Tactic: Shift the debate towards the historical context

This is the most common and the most effective tactic that they use because what they do is try to lump October 7th into the greater and more complicated story of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The effect is to minimize October 7th and deny Israel the moral high ground for their justifiable military response.

It is both immoral and dangerous to make this argument.

First, there is never any justification for terrorism. This was always a non-negotiable stance of the West. No, you don’t get to justify terrorism because you have some grievance…no matter how legitimate that grievance is.

Second, and this is the big one, if you accept this argument then you are legitimizing terrorism as a political tool and are inviting more of it in the future.

Hamas is an evil and barbaric death-cult that must be destroyed because they brutally massacred civilians. There is no nuance necessary in this context.

We could have had the bigger picture discussion on October 6th and we will have that discussion again after the military operation concludes, but for the time being if you’re talking about historical grievances then you are legitimizing terror.

You are sending the message to every terrorist organization on the planet that terror is a viable political tool so long as you have enough useful idiots willing to do PR for your cause…and there’s never been more useful idiots abound than today.

Tactic: Every death is a tragedy

Through the use of horrific anecdotal evidence, they will try to make you feel every single death is a preventable tragedy. They want to humanize the victims so that your compassion and empathy override the reality of the situation which is that war is always an atrocity.

But they don’t cover all wars or all victims of war this way. Just the Palestinian victims.

What they are doing here is trying to convince you that this conflict should be analyzed using only one variable: deaths.

If you follow their posts on X, it’s a never ending stream of war porn showing the most grotesque pictures of dead civilians. All they’re really proving is that war is horrific and should be avoided at all cost, but in their simple minds they think they’re exposing Israel.

There are no perfect solutions to the current situation. Israel really has no other choice but to wage this war because after 10/7, Hamas can not be allowed to continue to exist. We’ve eradicated other terror groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS because the nature of their crimes were too horrific to live with.

So if you can understand that this war is necessary and just, then you have to understand that civilian deaths happen because there are no perfect options, just tradeoffs.

This is the same exact tactic that was used during Covid-19 to justify their mandates and lockdowns. The argument was that if you don’t comply then people will die…you’ll kill grandma. They refused to analyze the situation through a more complex framework of understanding all the costs and benefits because it was easier to appeal to the emotional argument that human deaths are tragic.

In this case they’re making the case that war is horrific, but that just deflects from the current context of 10/7.

Again, it’s single variable analysis: “War is bad because people die, so there should be no war, and if you don’t agree then you’re a neocon or warmonger”. This is a favorite argument of the new right or conspiratorial right. The same people that were calling out the left for lack of critical thinking are now doing the same exact thing and thinking they’re somehow clever.

Narrative: We don’t hate Israel, we just want peace for all people

False, peace is not on the table. It has never has been on the table.

Palestinian leaders have only one condition for peace: the dissolution of Israel.

You might want to believe people when they tell you what they think. Maybe this could change with future leadership, but so far Hamas have never compromised on this issue.

So you are being disingenuous if you say that if Israel just made some concession then peace could be possible.

The dissolution of Israel is never going to happen and pretending that this is not Hamas’ objective is intellectually dishonest.

Narrative: The dissolution doesn’t mean Jews need to leave the land…they can stay and share it with the Arab people under the flag of Palestine.

I’ve seen this argument made and the naivety of these people is astounding.

Hamas has shown no willingness to co-habitate with Jews, but even if that were theoretically possible, the whole purpose of Israel is a state for the Jewish people. A nation that is strong enough to defend Jews because history has shown that others will not stand up for them…and that’s certainly being demonstrated today.

A one state solution would mean a majority Muslim population which undermines the entire purpose for a Jewish state. That would mean that Jews would be entrusting their entire security needs to Palestinians which is crazy.

It would also mean Jews submitting to governance by Arab Muslims who don’t have a particularly good track record for governance or respecting human rights in the region. It would essentially be the end of the only real Democracy in the region.

And this is not even going into the history of very successful ethnic cleansing of Jews in every single Muslim country in the region.

If this conflict has demonstrated anything, it is that Jews were correct in seeking to secure a homeland, because they cannot depend on others to come to their defense. This has been sadly confirmed by the reaction of many in the west.

Narrative: This is a land grab by Israel

Israel will not move a single Israeli to live in Gaza. I would condemn any Israeli attempt to seize parts of Gaza for use by Israelis, but that’s not the case.

First off, I don’t believe they want anything to do with Gaza. They would govern it out of necessity until a suitable government could be established, but I don’t think they want to repeat their past experience. Remember that Egypt governed Gaza for a long period and they also don’t want anything to do with them.

Second, there would be zero international support for this and at the present Israel needs its foreign partners more than ever.

But I will say that I think illegal settlements by Israelis in the West Bank are wrong and seriously undermine the Jewish cause. This is an issue for another day, but Israel deserves some blame for the existence of this narrative and this is something that they are going to have to come to terms with internally.

Talking Point: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people

Israel is targeting Hamas because of a war that was started by Hamas on 10/7.

There is no debate to be had that Israel has the right to wage this war.

Wars are horrific.

Civilian deaths in wars are tragic, but also inevitable.

Hamas increases these deaths by breaking the rules of war and hiding military targets among the civilian population. The attempts to pretend this isn’t the case are just laughable and the people trying to prove otherwise are propagandists or conspiracy theorists.

Israeli soldiers that commit war crimes are prosecuted in Israel.

The eyes of the entire world are on how Israel conducts this war and there is no evidence that Israel has policies or rules of engagement that are different from how the US has conducted similar operation in Iraq.

Don't believe me? Here's what @SpencerGuard, a scholar and expert on urban warfare, writes for CNN:

John Spencer has been a trusted source by CNN on urban warfare since the Russians invaded Ukraine, yet now he’s lying all of a sudden? No, I don’t think so.

Narrative: Israel’s response is disproportionate to the attack of 10/7

Again, there’s no debate over whether this is a just war…so the reality is that in war civilian deaths, while tragic, are inevitable.

And wars are never fought proportionately. Rather, the idea is to respond dis-proportionally because the objective is to win the war.

But then the argument is that far too many civilians are dying.

Look, we don’t know how many civilians have died because everybody just repeats numbers provided by Hamas which has lied repeatedly. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that Hamas is inflating these numbers. A New York Times report from 11/21 states that they have not seen a single civilian in their visit into Gaza City.

But even if the numbers are that high, who is really responsible?

• Hamas started this war.

• Hamas hides their military infrastructure within civilian buildings.

• Hamas tries to prevent civilians from evacuating areas that Israel have deemed military targets

So Israel has neither the obligation to constrain it’s military operation’s response, nor responsible for how this war impacts civilians, yet they do make efforts to minimize civilian casualties.

Again, under the international rules of war, they are required to do their best to minimize civilian deaths, but civilians do not make valid military targets immune from attack.

So then the narrative inevitably turns to the next argument that they use:

Narrative: Israel is killing for revenge, not for war

I am sure that revenge is in the hearts of some Israelis. And maybe that creates some situations where some Israelis behave reprehensibly. I don’t deny that this can happen, but to use individual instances of such behavior or statements as a reflection of the Israelis as a whole is not consistent with the facts.

As far as how this war is being conducted, Israel is already held to a higher standard than any other western military.

For example, they announce their targets in advance so that civilians have time to evacuate. That’s unheard of in a war.

They also try to use anecdotes of hateful statements made by Israelis in the past. You can’t condone that, but it’s a reality of human nature. There is fear, anger and hate…and people say terrible things.

But you can only evaluate Israel, as a whole, through the lens of how their military is conducting this operation and so far there is no evidence that they are acting outside of appropriate rules of engagement.

Talking Point: There are even Jews that have come out in support of Palestine

Again, there are plenty of useful idiots abound. There are also LGBTQ people that “stand with Palestine” even though they’d be murdered if they ever set foot in Gaza.

Talking Point: Israel/Netanyahu created Hamas

This falls into the category of conspiracy theories where things are taken out of context to misrepresent reality. There’s a very good technical explanation which would require way too much space for the purpose of my article.

Here is the detailed explanation for anybody that wants to go down this rabbit hole:

Talking Point: We just want freedom for Palestinians

The only stated goal of Hamas is the elimination of Israel.

Again, the idea that peace is even possible is nonsense.

And their supports believe in the same exact thing.

Watch this report by Unherd where they ask people exactly what they are protesting for. When they say "Freedom for Palestine", they unambiguously mean the expulsion of all Jews from Israel.

So it’s not like there is a disconnect between the people and the leadership.

I was shocked to recently discover that it wasn’t just Hamas that was killing Israeli civilians on 10/7. Some of the worst atrocities were actually perpetrated by Gazan civilians who partook in the massacre.

They use words like freedom, peace and justice to manipulate, not to communicate. There is no interest in peace or a two state solution so when you align yourself with this cause, keep in mind that you’re not just calling for peace. You are aligning yourself with people that want to see Israel cease to exist.

Narrative: Killing Palestinians just leads more people to become radicalized against Israel

Radicalization happens at the educational and cultural level.

Palestinian children are being radicalized as a matter of policy, not because their relatives were killed and they’ve organically migrated to radicalization.

And by the way, the United Nations funds the indoctrination of school children through UNRWA which is basically just an extension of Hamas at this point.

If you are teaching children to hate, then they will be radicalized to hate for the rest of their lives.

The fact of the matter is that we are already dealing with a radicalized Palestinian population. 75% of Paestinians support the terrorist massacre of 10/7. That’s the very definition of radicalization.

So ultimately it’s a silly premise. How are you going to radicalize a society that has already been inducted into a death cult? It makes absolutely no difference if 85% rather than 75% are radicalized...it’s still the vast majority.

And until you get rid of the cult leaders who push this type of radicalization, you’re not going to begin to see any positive changes for Palestinians.

Talking Point: Gaza is an open air prison

The events of 10/7 demonstrated that whatever security measures were put in place by Israel to protect themselves from Hamas terrorists were insufficient to protect against the worst massacre of Jews since The Holocaust.

Ask yourself why such security measures are necessary.

Hamas makes propaganda videos about how they repurposed water pipes to make rockets.

Of course Isreal has to be vigilant about what is transported into Gaza because Hamas is going to use anything they can get their hands on to attack and kill Israelis.

I’d also like to hear an explanation of what Israel should have done. Allow Hamas to bring in all kinds of rockets and weapons? That’s what happened with Hezbollah to their north and now there are many thousands of Iranian rockets pointed at Israeli cities.

Argument: At some point, the number of civilian deaths will be too high to further justify a military operation by Israel

This is a point I heard Piers Morgan make on his recent show during an interview of Eylon Levy. His argument is that at some point the sheer weight of Palestinian civilians death will create too much of a moral burden for Israel to continue military operations.

First, I want to say that I think Piers has been fair in his coverage of events so I’m not suggesting he’s part of any propaganda. And he’s not wrong in his reasoning because if this military operation were to kill one million civilians then we’d all agree that was too steep a price to pay. So where does one draw that line?

First, I should emphasize that we don’t really know what civilian deaths are beyond what Hamas says they are. I don’t trust them because they’ve lied repeatedly and because it’s impossible to have accurate figures in the fog of war.

Second, we should recognize that civilian deaths are the objective for Hamas. It’s the only leverage that they have in compelling the west to force Israel to stand down. So giving into this argument is to allow Hamas to win and further embolden more global terrorism because they know that they can always turn western public opinion with endless pictures of dead children on social media.

Third, the nature of war has not changed. Social media is just showing us what war has always looked like. It’s a form of manipulation meant to weaken our collective will to fight back. The problem is there is no forthcoming compassion from the people on the other end of this conflict. It’s a sort of pacifist dilema where our values are weaponized against us even though we aren’t the ones who started the conflict.

Fourth, Palestinians civilians are not completely without blame in this conflict. As I mentioned, 75% support the terror attacks of 10/7 and 76% support Hamas. They voted Hamas into power. Gazan civilians participated in some of the most gruesome attacks on 10/7. Yes, it was not just Hamas…Palestinian civilians participated in the massacres. So I think it’s fair to say that the civilian population does bear some blame for what is currently happening in Gaza.

Fifth, this is a radicalized population not unlike the citizens of Germany and Japan after WW2. No civilian death toll was considered too high in order to accomplish the objective of unconditional surrender. Fascist regimes can not be allowed to continue to exist because they will continue to generate the same problems and conflicts.

And finally, I think we need to look at the problem in terms of the future. There are no good solutions at the moment. There are only horrible options for the short term. But those options need to be weighed against their future consequences. If Hamas is allowed to remain in power, they will have won. And there were be consequences to this in the future because death cults do what death cults do. It will only extend the suffering of the Palestinian people indefinitely to allow them to exist under this type of leadership. You’re just creating more pain over a longer period of time, but you’re fooling yourself into thinking that is compassionate because you are spared seeing death and suffering in the short term.

These are very complicated issues to parse and ultimately I don’t have an answer to how many civilian deaths is too many. I don’t even think there is one, but what we need to do is not to confound the analysis through emotional thinking. As horrible as that sounds, there are no great solutions…just tradeoffs.

Final thoughts

I’ve been asked repeatedly whether I am Jewish as if that would explain my very strong convictions about the nature of the present moment. Well I’m not. I have no particularly strong links with Israel beyond the fact that I’ve educated myself on the region as it is frequently a driver of world events. I’ve never posted anything about Israel before, although I have commented in the past that I’ve seen growing anti-semitism.

So why do I care? Why wade into such a polarizing topic?

First, because it’s the moral thing to do. I’ve been horrified to watch the world turn on Israel after enduring what they did on 10/7. I’ve been disgusted by the mainstreaming of antisemitism in western society.

I believe that holding onto objective morality is critical for our society, and I’ve been shocked to see how so many can shift so quickly into embracing moral relativism. The inability of people to understand very simple concepts about right and wrong baffles me. And it probably scares me because it shows how little we’ve learned from history. And just how malleable most people are unfortunately.

The second reason is more pragmatic. If you think this is only about “The Jews” or about Israel, you are wrong. You need to also see this through the prism of the current attack on western civilization by a number of forces; both internal and external. I look at what the Jewish people are currently facing as the proverbial canary in a coal mine situation. Something has gone seriously wrong with our society for this to be happening. This is the point that Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes in the Unherd article I shared earlier so if you didn’t read it yet, I urge you to circle back and understand the issue she is highlighting. There is no guarantee that western civilization will endure if we don’t fight for the values that are important to us.

Finally, there’s the obvious issue of Islamic terrorism which is still a clear and present danger. The situation in Israel has been a PR win for Hamas and will embolden other terrorist groups to bring the terrorist attacks back to western soil. Our divided response only legitimizes terrorism as a viable political tool. I’m not sure why people can’t see this. It hasn’t been that long since we all faced waves of terrorism in the west. In fact, the lull in recent years has been the exception rather than the rule during my lifetime.

If we don’t learn from history then we will be doomed to repeat it.

I came across this clip of a little girl reasoning that if people can identify as deer, then we should be able to hunt them. It’s hilarious because it’s so absurd, and makes fun of the notion that people can choose their own identity. But upon further reflection, I think it’s genius…this girl just invented “The Deer Test”!

My initial reaction was to laugh as it reminded me of this parody article from World News Daily Report from a few years ago.

It’s such a ridiculous notion that it took a child’s mind to delve a little deeper into what’s going on here. But a little bit of critical thinking will prove that there’s essentially no difference between identifying as the opposite sex and identifying as a deer.

That clip alone wasn’t enough for me to come to this conclusion…incidentally I came across this article about a recent ruling that allows a trans-woman (biological man) to compete against biological females in USA Powerlifting.

You can see the court ruling here.

The court ruling that JayCee Cooper can participate as a woman is essentially based on the issue of “harm from separation and segregation” or basically discrimination:

“Cooper was discriminated against because of her sexual orientation and because of her sex.”

Small side note here. This ruling repeatedly cites a 2020 SCOTUS decision that was meant to basically extend civil rights legislation to cover the LGBTQ community. But that’s obviously not what it is being used for in this case. Thanks Neil Gorsuch…you walked right into that one!

So following this court decision, it is established that “identifying” as a woman is sufficient to qualify for the protections afforded by law against discrimination.

This means that under the law, this man is considered a woman. It doesn’t make sense to me but that’s what it means. You can’t be a man and be entitled to legal protections accorded to women.

So let’s look closer at what this legal decision establishes.

If law A is applicable only to a person B, and law A is applied to person C, then person C must be the same as a person B. In order for person C to legally become a person B, it was sufficient for person C to “identify” as a person B.

Therefore, a person’s right to “identify” as something else supersedes other considerations (like biology) under the law.

So if a person identifies as a deer, then by the court’s own logic that person is legally a deer. It might not be a biological deer, but that consideration obviously doesn’t matter.

Unfortunately deer do not have any particular rights and can be hunted during deer hunting season so it would not be illegal to shoot the deer that was born a biological human.

All I have done here is to take the court’s logic and apply it to arrive at a ridiculous conclusion such as the idea that you could legally hunt a human being.

That’s “The Deer Test” in a nutshell.

If the legal logic used by a court to adjudicate “Trans Rights” can lead to the legalized hunting of human beings then you have failed “The Deer Test”.

That little girl deserves a medal.

We’ve lost our ever-loving minds! People have come to believe that safety is all that matters. Even people who would otherwise consider themselves to be critical thinkers have lost all perspective when it comes to being safe.

The term "safetyism" refers to a cultural trend that places an emphasis on physical and emotional safety above all else. It’s a cultural trend in the west which is pervasive in both the United States and throughout Europe, with many people advocating for policies and practices that prioritize safety and risk avoidance over other considerations.

It’s especially visible as a parent where intuition and common sense as to how far to go to protect your children has shifted 180 degrees since my childhood. I grew up as a latchkey kid in Queens, NYC starting in first grade. This type of parenting is unthinkable, if not illegal, by today’s standards but back then I was in the majority of my class with a key tied around my neck.

We’ve come so far and I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s because there’s so much information available to us today via the internet that we overestimate the dangers. Or maybe it’s the cyclical nature of things as theorized in the Fourth Turning…but that’s a deep dive left for another day.

While the desire for safety and security is understandable, the trend towards safetyism has the potential to be dangerous. It leads to a loss of perspective and an overemphasis on risks that are statistically unlikely or not very significant.

I’m not much of an expert on social science so I won’t go much further into analyzing why this is happening and to what extent this is responsible for the change in attitudes of our youth as outlined in The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. What I will comment on is what this mentality is doing to our society and why it should concern you.

The obvious example to look at is Covid-19. During the pandemic, governments around the world implemented strict lock downs, mandates and other measures in the name of public health and safety without much regard for anything else. There was little consideration for things like:

• Scientific Evidence - in fact pre-pandemic science was clear that this should not be the way to manage a pandemic

• Societal Cost-Benefit Analysis - public health officials somehow forgot that their job was to do what is best for society as whole, not try to save every single life at any cost…things like life years lost were not accepted as metrics for decision making thereby conflating the value of the life of a child with that of a terminally ill 90 year old

• Unintended Consequences - I’m always flabbergasted when I think that public health officials decided to run a giant lock down experiment on hundreds of millions of people (billions if you count the non-western world) without even considering that, beyond predictable tradeoffs that they ignored, they don’t know what they don’t know…this was never even considered

I predicted in August of 2020 that lock down deaths would outnumber Covid deaths and though we’ll never really know for sure, it was predictable that there would be serious health consequences.

While these measures were intended to protect people from the virus, they also had significant economic, social, health and psychological costs which we will be figuring out for decades to come. Fauci and his ilk will be long gone when the bill comes due.

But the danger of safetyism extends beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. If we continue to prioritize safety and risk avoidance above all else, this will have serious implications for democracy and individual autonomy.

Think about it: Faced with a virus that has an Infection Mortality Rate (IFR) of 0.2%, which skews overwhelmingly to the very old and sick, our fellow citizens considered it reasonable to surrender all their rights and freedoms for illogical policies which didn’t even address the fundamental of the problem.

Moreover, many were happy to become informers and enforcers for the new authoritarian norm!

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As the Milgram Experiment showed, we are far too malleable and adaptable for our own good. Now, add safetyism on top of that and you have a dangerous combination: Scared, Compliant and Malleable.

Safetyism breeds authoritative tyranny through the expansion of the government's role in regulating behavior. When safety is seen as the highest priority, it becomes easy for politicians and bureaucrats to justify new laws and regulations that restrict individual liberties.

Take a second to watch this video as it is both hilarious and representative of how legitimate safety concerns, taken to their extremes, become nonsense:

Even speech has become an issue of safety…words and ideas can now be considered violence.

If safety is seen as the highest priority, any dissenting opinion or action that is perceived to put safety at risk can be seen as a threat. This leads to a culture of fear and intolerance, where those who question the safety orthodoxy are ostracized or even punished.

We’re living this reality today, where any speech or expression that is perceived as putting safety at risk is censored or punished. From the suppression of controversial ideas in academic settings to the policing of social media for content that is deemed unsafe or offensive, when safety is seen as the highest priority, it becomes easy to justify censorship and the suppression of free speech as necessary for the greater good.

Yet we know what happens if you limit free speech and stifle important conversations and debates.

Remember: The price of free speech is bad speech

Or in Elon Musk’s case: $44 Billion and the denigration of his good name and reputation 😂

The most insidious way that safetyism can lead to authoritative tyranny is through the creation of a surveillance state: a situation where people are constantly monitored and tracked, with their every move scrutinized for signs of unsafe behavior. This creates a chilling effect on individual freedom and leads to a society where people are afraid to speak out or express themselves for fear of being monitored and punished. China is already there.

Sort of makes you question why some people are calling for the defunding of police…although never assume malice when stupidity is far more likely!

While safety is undoubtedly an important value in society, an excessive focus on safety leads to the erosion of individual liberty and the rise of authoritative tyranny.

When safety is seen as the highest priority, it becomes easy for politicians and bureaucrats to justify new laws and regulations that restrict individual liberties, suppress dissenting views, and create a culture of fear and intolerance.

To prevent the rise of authoritative tyranny, we must insist on the need for absolute respect of individual freedom and diverse viewpoints.

And most importantly, be suspicious of anybody trying to scare you. In the case of real emergencies, panic is not how authorities deal with the crisis:

And finally, we get to the mother of all safetyist issues: Climate Change

There is no subject where more has been done to instill fear, stifle scientific debate and censor in order to accumulate vast amounts of power.

I took a big interest in his back in 2021 and took my time to do independent research on the top. I went in with no preconceived notions and tried my best to understand where the science was at:

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Gummi Bear's Anthropogenic Climate Change Deep Dive - Part 1

Introduction I’ve been curious about climate change ever since I first saw Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Back then I flirted with doing a deep dive but considered the topic way too complicated. I finally decided to look into Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) because it's now a driving force for policy and it will cost each of us a lot of money movi…

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5 years ago · 110 likes · 71 comments · Gummi Bear

Needless to say, it’s far more a political issue than it is about the saving the planet. But again, they use fear to sell it to the masses in order to accumulate power so that they can “save humanity”. It’s not even a secret…the WEF is quite open about it in their “Great Reset” initiative.

What’s left for us to do? We mustn’t allow ourselves to be afraid. Safety is nothing more than a tradeoff…safety is an illusion meant to control us. Reject safetyism and realize that courage is the only way forward.

“Nice motivational quote, Gummi” you might be thinking, but that’s not much help when people are genuinely afraid of something.

Fair enough. In truth critical thinking is influenced by many factors including one’s emotions. It depends on how we rationalize and then prioritize things like facts, assumptions and feelings. And this leads to a mistake made by many critical thinkers: because it is logical we then think that the conclusion must also be true.

The solution is: Look to your Values because they are what save you when all your humanly instincts tell you otherwise…that the ends justify the means for example. Ask yourself if the actions that you think appropriate conflict with what you know to be your core values.

Values exist to protect us against our worst instincts…even when those instincts are telling us that safety is all that matters.

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As I’m writing this, we’re already on the Twitter Files: Part 5.

To Recap:

• Twitter Files Part 1: The Hunter Biden Laptop (@mtaibbi)

• Twitter Files Part 2: The Secret Blacklists (@bariweiss)

• Twitter Files Part 3: The Removal of Donald Trump 1 (@mtaibbi)

• Twitter Files Part 4: The Removal of Donald Trump 2 (@ShellenbergerMD)

• Twitter Files Part 5: The Removal of Donald Trump 3 (@bariweiss)

But what I want to focus on is part two because I think it’s the most important thread, and if you bear with me a second I’ll explain why.

Here’s the thread:

Basically, it was revealed that Twitter has a system of throttling accounts that they do not agree with, but which have not broken any terms of service. So all those years of Twitter officials pretending that Twitter does not shadow-ban (or blacklist) conservatives was a big lie.

But what really struck me was when I saw these screenshots of people’s accounts.

Most people were shocked and/or outraged that shadow-banning was occurring or that it was directed at some groups of people, but for me the take-away was how this resembled the stuff of the cold war secret police under the Iron Curtain.

For some context, I was born in communist Eastern Europe. My parents were blacklisted as college professors for refusing to inform on their colleagues which eventually led them to defect and we ended up in America.

This is the short version, but the full story spans many years and traverses multiple hardships. What happened seems obvious now, but when you’re living through it you don’t really know what’s going on.

That’s because the system isn’t straightforward…it’s non-transparent, and obscure. It’s meant to keep you walking on eggshells because it doesn’t make the rules obvious. But what you do know is that somewhere out there are these unknown people who maintain a dossier with your name on it. And that file defines your status in society.

Twitter functions much in the same way. You’re not sure if your tweets didn’t get any engagement because they sucked or because somebody at the levers of power throttled your account. Other people looking on may think that your ideas or arguments are inferior to others.

It’s not clear why you get suspended at times. You’re not sure how many more strikes you have: some people get 5 or 6 suspensions and are still not banned while others get banned on their first offense. You’re always fearful that the next tweet might be your last one.

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Twitter has really created a basic version of a social credit score system.

The only difference between the old-school paper dossier system used under the iron curtain and the new social credit score system that is being implemented in China is technology.

Take a moment to read this thread, because the similarities to what Twitter’s moderation system represents and the communist system to control society is not that dissimilar.

This was on full display during the Covid-19 pandemic. Let’s put aside the anonymous and non-credentialed accounts, although I obviously think many of us made important contributions to public discourse on the topic.

Instead, let’s just consider the “credible” academics who’s credentials could not be challenged. What emerged was a tiered system of “academic virtue” which was really just a scientific social credit score system. If you espoused the government’s version of the science, your voice was heard far and loud. If you strayed from “the science” you were blacklisted by Twitter.

Case study: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Public Health at Stanford University, was blacklisted by Twitter. Here’s the screenshot:

Dr. Bhattacharya’s transgression was that, along with Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, he was a co-author in 2020 of the Great Barrington Declaration which advocated for more targeted Covid-19 measures as well as the use of risk-benefit analysis in the crafting of public health policy. And there’s actually nothing controversial about these recommendations because these were the recommendations of the CDC and WHO’s own pandemic response before Covid-19 emerged:

We already know know from internal correspondence between Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, that the two “public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists”:

And this was reflected in how that Twitter and other media institutions/tech platforms adopted policies to deal with scientific dissent. In essence we actually got to see a scientific social credit score system play out in real time, and with real-world consequences.

Dr. Bhattacharya agrees that what we’re seeing play out is a “social credit system” which rewarded bad ideas.

As we await further Twitter File releases, we’re still waiting for the hammer to drop proof that government health officials colluded with Twitter to police free speech on Covid-19 science and pandemic response. But again, whether the government pressured Twitter to do this or not is superfluous to my point.

If you’re still not seeing that this is the basic frame work for a social credit score system or think it’s not a big deal, consider that this is the tip of the iceberg and what’s under the water .

Obviously we’re not fully there yet, but this is not an accident…there are people out there who already think this way:

• They have no qualms over quashing political (or other) free speech

• They believe they can deciding what information is correct

• Or they hide behind partisan “fact checkers” who really just espouse the point of view of their political side

• They conflate hate with opinions they disagree with

And our tech industry is full of these people!

In reality, the only obstacle to having a social credit score system is the vigilance of society. Because given enough time, these tech companies will create and implement such systems. Beyond that, all you need is one good crisis for government to move in and adopt these types of systems for “public safety”.

It’s not a conspiracy theory. It is the natural inclination of progressives combined with technology that is growing beyond our ability to comprehend its consequences. It’s coming…it’s definitely coming. After all, they’ve already implemented an ESG system for corporations.

The Twitter Files represent an important moment of public debate about social media, tech censorship and the 1st amendment. But I feel like people are so caught up in the political partisanship that they don’t understand the bigger implications…we’re heading towards a society where social credit score systems will be normalized.

These systems, once created, won’t care that they were created by one political ideology or the other. They will just be used to wield power over everybody.

Still not getting it?

Just check your phone…

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The Twitter Files released so far reveal the behind the scenes machinations that led to Twitter’s censoring of information related to Hunter Biden’s’ laptop weeks before the 2020 Presidential Elections.

It’s obvious that they started with the objective of blocking the story and then back-filled the reasoning with mumbo-jumbo about terms of services.

It was so egregious at the time that Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna sent this message to the Vijaya Gadde (former general counsel and the head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter) about how Twitter’s actions were a “violation of the 1st Amendment principles”.

Also, Twitter wasn’t the only tech platform or media group that worked to actively suppress this story. Remember when publicly funded NPR said it was a “waste of our time”?

We all saw this happening in real-time in the MSM. They absolutely refused to consider that the laptop was real, even though all reporting by right-wing media was confirming it’s authenticity by contacting involved parties such as Tony Bobulinski.

They even got former intelligence officials to chime in so as to run cover for the largest media blackout of a story since WW2.

I disagree with what they did, but I get it. They saw Trump as an existential threat and were willing to sacrifice any remaining credibility to ensure that he was not re-elected.

This should be a familiar gambit by now:

1. Lie big now

2. Win politically

3. Deal with the inevitable blow-back later

They all eventually recognized that the story was in fact real. It only took CBS two years to do so…

But they’ve never accepted responsibility for the fact that it was done intentionally. According to MSM, this was just journalistic error…nothing more. The only problem is that the same journalistic errors were repeated over and over, against just one political party throughout MSM and carried over into social media platforms.

The Twitter Files are significant because they roll back the curtain to show that these were not good faith errors. For the first time we can definitively conclude that there was collusion to prevent the release of information which could have altered the 2020 election.

These aren’t arguments or interpretations at this point, they are facts. Media and big tech’s coverup of the Hunter Biden Laptop story to benefit Joe Biden is a FACT and it was WRONG.

I’m not interested in arguing whether there was anything of relevance on the laptop or if it was prepared as an October surprise. I don’t want to hear about how they couldn’t verify the story…they never tried. It was an unprecedented coverup of a relevant story of public interest in order to favor one political party.

It was a historic shattering of conventional political norms that would have otherwise been inconveivable just a few years before.

Lex Fridman is absolutely correct in this tweet, but with one major caveat: people on the left need to admit that this actually happened.

Except we’re never going to get this from the left as we see from this reply to Lex’s tweet.

I suppose if one ignores things like context, norms, precedents, historical patterns of behavior, simple logic and common sense, one might conclude that Twitter officials acted in good faith…but in my opinion this would require a plethora of intellectual dishonesty with some pretzel like contortions of reality.

Other reactions have been:

• It’s a nothingburger

• Nothing new to see here

• Elon Musk is a white supremacist

• Complete silence

My favorite take though was this one. The poster is basically saying to Republicans: “Get over it loser, so what if we colluded to cover up Hunter Biden’s laptop”

I must admit that I have a bit more respect for this one because at least its honest.

The reality is that this is where we are. No matter what the Twitter Files have and will reveal, there will be no acknowledgment that something fundamentally wrong occured.

It’s a never ending bait and switch. They keep pretending that there are still norms that they adhere to and when engaged to point out that the norms don’t actually exist or are being broken, they inevitably:

• cancel/silence

• defame/denigrate

• gaslight

This was evident a long time ago, but maybe this is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Maybe this time they have gone way too far.

If you take the time to listen to this episode of the JRE podcast, where you essentially have Tim Pool going up against Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde, you’ll understand. Tim repeatedly pushes her with facts, examples and arguments and she just continually denies, deflects and insists everything is fine…it’s fair…it’s transparent.

Recommend you listen to get a feeling for how hopeless it is to try to engage with these people in good faith:

But at least the bloom is finally off the rose officially. If the left is unwilling to at least acknowledge that what happened with the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop was at least seriously wrong then we’re done talking.

No amount of civil discourse aiming to bridge ideological divides can ever get us to a point of common ground because one side is fundamentally dishonest intellectually.

There is no longer anything resembling norms that we can look to for a semblance of what normal society should be.

What we are left with is just a struggle for power.

This is what the Twitter Files really tell us.

And note that I haven’t even started to get into the issues of political interference by state actors such as the FBI or the DoJ. It’s superfluous for my point, but that’s also looming and if even more damning.

So what do you do when intellectual honesty is dead? What do you do when it’s just about power?

These are tough questions for me. The most important part of my Twitter bio is the part about “Intellectual Honesty”. I truly believe in this concept and I get incredibly frustrated when I see people on my side not adhering to this.

On the other hand, we’re dealing with an opponent that has no qualms about intellectual dishonesty…or as they see it: “their truth”.

The Mind Set

Philosophically, there’s only way forward: projecting strength is the only things that will matter and this strength can only be achieved through political power.

I think more and more people are starting to get this and we’re already seeing some differences.

• BLM is on the ropes

• The tide is turning on CRT and Radical Gender Theory

• ESG is starting to come under scrutiny

Even if it stumbles sometimes, the movement has already begun.

I’m going to tell you a story about what is going to happen and if you’re a Democrat you might not like how this is going to go:

• If they want to divide us by identity groups, we’ll identify as Americans

• If they want to indoctrinate our children, we’ll take over the school boards

• If they want mail in voting, we’ll become better at mail-in voting activism

• If Trump is too crass and undisciplined then we’ll elect DeSantis who knows how to make our case better

• If they want to silence us, we’ll create our own media institutions, take over your platforms and boycott your woke corporations

• If they want to marginalize us economically, we’ll create a parallel economy

There will be mistakes, but we’ll get better because we’re more motivated, more determined and there really is no other option. And if we have to, we’ll play the game by the left’s rules.

I have no doubt about any of this because this is what history says that will happen. The pendullum always swings back and the left’s refusal to return to any semblance of reality just means that the eventual blow-back will be that much bigger.

Don’t believe me?

I submit the most recent Munk Debate:

Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi arguing that mainstream media cannot be trusted (48% starting audience agrees)

vs

Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg arguing that mainstream media can be trusted. (52% starting audience agrees)

Of note is that generally speaking the population tends to break into three groups of roughly similar sizes: Left, Right and Independents/Moderates.

The debate resulted in the largest swing in the event’s history, moving from a 48%-52% voter deficit to a 67%-33% win.

Alternate link: https://vimeo.com/munkdebates/review/775853977/85003a644c

What you should take away from this that when facts and arguments are actually considered in a neutral setting for the exchange of ideas, the middle third agrees with the right.

But philosophy alone isn’t enough. There also needs to be a strategy.

The Strategy

As I see it, 2024 is the most important election of our lifetime. I know everybody always says this but there are reasons that this time it actually is. All efforts need to be made in the next two years to ensure that 2024 unfolds perfectly.

To win in 2024, we must first understand what happened in 2022.

The 2022 midterms were actually good news for the right, because it told them what not to do in 2024.

First, it exposed the size of the Republican party’s Trump problem when it didn’t cost them too badly. Going into the midterms I had accepted that Trump would be the 2024 nominee. But the red-wave never materialized and Trump turns out to be a major reason why. Moving forward, the right needs to move away from Trump and I believe this has already begun.

I know the Trump issue is a touchy subject with people on the right and I plan to do an entire article explaining why I don’t think Trump can win any longer. But in short, he has too much baggage, too much wear and tear, and there is nothing he can do to change the minds of about half the country that doesn’t like him.

Second, they got just enough power (the House) so that they can block Biden’s agenda, without being perceived as the ruling party. Moving forward, if Trump is no longer on the political agenda, then 2024 should be a referendum on Biden who is still a spectacularly unpopular president.

Finally, they now have the right potential presidential candidate in Ron DeSantis who managed to turn Florida from a purple state into a Republican +20 state in just four years. This is political talent that Republicans have not had since Reagan.

And DeSantis has a Reagan-esque opportunity to govern for 8 years because the similarities of Biden (and the present day) to the Carter presidency (and all that went down in the 70s) opens the door for DeSantis to be elected with a real mandate for change.

And this is the crucial thing. The presidency doesn’t mean anything if you can’t actually make any changes to the system.

If you want to make changes you need to project an air of calm and normality to the American people, while you push forward against the will of the MSM and liberal establishment that will fight you tooth and nail.

This is exactly what DeSantis has been able to do in Florida through preparation, competence, and discipline. They’ve tried repeatedly to tear him down, but nothing sticks because he doesn’t make mistakes…this is so crucial.

DeSantis manages to repeatedly communicate the political points that Republicans win on with independents and moderates, without coming off as radical, while also being able to speak to the Trump electorate.

I believe that DeSantis has the ability to govern non-controversially as President, while also making the kinds of structural reforms to government necessary to make a difference on issues that matter.

And I almost forgot, the Democrats are very vulnerable in the 2024 Senate races because they have to defend 23 of 33 seats.

And there’s a Republican SCOTUS.

So if you want the good news, it is that all the stars are aligning for a big Republican victory in 2024. But don’t count out the Republicans’ ability to F-it all up.

So don’t lose hope…don’t ever lose hope.

Believe it or not, there are more than enough sane people on the left, right and center to save this country and modern civilization from imploding.

But we can’t lose sight of the ball because we need to win and win big.

“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”

COVID Twitter exploded yesterday with the release of a new article by Professor Emily Oster calling for a “Pandemic Amnesty” for the people who got the pandemic response so wrong.

On it’s face it seems to be a fairly tame call for civility:

“We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty….we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.”

I mean, she’s one of us right? Afterall, they called her names too!

But buried in this piece is also the following bread crumb:

“Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.”

Are you kidding me?

I’m sorry to be harsh but Professor Oster is nothing but a Covid-19 grifter who is actually advocating for Pandemic Amnesia, not Amnesty.

I know that quite some time has passed, but I think it’s important to remember some of the basic problems that brought us to this juncture.

Things We Should Never Forget

1: Lockdowns were Never Part of the Plan

The WHO and CDC had publicly available pandemic plans in place based on a century’s worth of experience.

Do you know what wasn’t in these plans? Widespread lockdowns and mask wearing.

Do you know what was in these plans but completely absent from the Covid response? Risk-benefit analyses and the consideration of ethical issues.

They threw the entire pandemic playbook out the window and instead decided to adopt the China Covid Strategy.

And it was a disaster…they just created greater hardship for millions of people as well as a host of second order events which we’re seeing today in terms of health, mental health, excess mortality, inflation, the economy, education of children, etc.

2: They Shut Down Access to Repurposed Drugs

The establishment not only shut down all debate about repurposed drugs (HCQ, Ivermectin), they also moved aggressively to even restrict access to such treatments under the supervision of your own doctor.

I believe that many lives could have been saved with early treatment. On the flipside, there’s no evidence that public health would have been negatively affected if it had turned out that these repurposed drugs were not effective.

There’s no reason for having suppressed this information or to have unilaterally interfered with Doctors’ ability to treat patients as they wish.

The science of repurposed drugs:

3: They Lied about the Nature of the Virus

They refused to acknowledge anything that was widely known to be true about the “novel” virus:

• It behaves like other coronaviruses

• There are significant numbers of asymptomatic cases

• Pre-existing immunity exists (indicating T-Cell immunity)

• Vaccines for respiratory viruses don’t provide sterilizing immunity, thus don’t stop transmission

• Natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity and long lasting

4: Vaccine Mandates

Mandating somebody to get vaccinated with an experimental mRNA vaccine for a respiratory virus that, depending on age/health, poses fairly little risk is unethical and an abuse. Add in the fact that the vaccines don’t offer sterilizing immunity and now there is also no community benefit from the vaccine.

These things were pretty clear early on. Any discussion about mandates should have ended when it became clear that vaccines don’t stop transmission.

5: The Stupid Post-Vaccine Mandates

For some unexplained reason, they thought it would make sense to keep vaccinated and non-vaccinated people separate after everyone who wanted the vaccine was able to get one. Again, this makes no sense if the vaccine doesn’t provide sterilizing immunity.

Remember when they said this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? They lied.

The correct action would have been to go back to normal. Instead they kept us on pandemic watch indefinitely while establishing no endpoint for ending measures.

6: The Vaccination of Children

This one is particularly personal for me because I did not want to vaccinate my children, but circuimstanced forced me to do so with one of my daughters.

The risk reward proposition for these vaccines do not lead to the conclusion that children should be vaccinated. Even the notion that they’re saying grandma is garbage because they don’t prevent the transmission of the virus.

This is probably the most evil thing that they did during the pandemic and we must never forget this.

7: School Lockdowns

An update from the National Assessment of Educational Progress was released last week and the results were devastating according to the WSJ:

“It’s hard to understate the human damage that these dry statistics represent. The learning loss is considerable and will take years to make up, if it ever is. Children who fall behind in reading skills have difficulty learning other subjects. The numbers also mean that millions of young Americans don’t know even the basics of writing and arithmetic.”

Predictably, it was the most vulnerable children that were affected by these school lockdowns.

But these are the same children that health authorities claimed to be protecting when they declared “racism a public health emergency”.

The hypocrisy has no end…

Ultimately, school lockdowns are the perfect example of policy making bereft of any risk/benefit analysis.

Final Thoughts

I’ve tried to link some of the threads I wrote over the pandemic covering the things that we should not chose to forget because:

1. They were a big fricking deal while they were happening.

2. Just like I have documented this throughout the pandemic by repeatedly pointing out obvious policy mistakes, so have many many others.

There have been many loud and prominent voices calling for a different approach…one based on objective reasoning…not the subjective argument of “any death is unacceptable”.

In facts we’ve been screaming these things, despite the threat of being suspended or banned.

@Justin_Hart has the receipts:

Funny, I don’t remember anybody on the other side asking that we receieve Amnesty…in fact I think they wanted us all gone.

Seems like they want one rule for thee and another for me!

So what should we do beyond remembers?

I’m sharing this article written by @AJKayWriter because she did a great job in calling for some commonsense measures which have to occur before there is any talk of moving forward:

AJ Kay Writes:

“Here is our best shot at some semblance of stability in the short term :

Acknowledgment – We won’t get anywhere until the people who affected these catastrophic errors acknowledge their harm. This isn’t about “being right” – it’s a matter of human decency. Admitting a mistake - especially one that hurt people - goes a long way toward healing. The longer people refuse to admit their errors, the more the harm will continue to compound.

Accounting – We need to know what decisions were made and by whom. I cannot emphasize enough how crucial this is to moving forward. We cannot solve problems if we don’t know who or what caused them. And it should be understood that anyone who resists this process does not have problem-solving as their primary motivation.

Accountability – The people who made those decisions need to be held accountable. Leadership is not just about the right to make decisions – it’s about taking responsibility for those decisions. If an elderly person died alone at your direction, you are disqualified. If children were denied schooling, safeguards, and social interactions under your watch, you’ve already had your interview and failed. People who were hurt don’t want those who caused the disaster in charge of the recovery efforts. The judgment of these ‘leaders’ has been tested and found lacking.

New Leadership/Representatives – The people who orchestrated and carried out these policies should step down/be removed and replaced, ideally with people who, throughout the hysteria, kept a cool head and proposed viable solutions. Without new leadership, we can expect the same results next time.

Safeguards – We need policies that check the powers that allowed this to happen. Endless emergency declarations and science funding mechanisms that hold researchers’ careers hostage to a prescribed narrative, for example, both need to be eliminated.

Commitment – The clean-up required here is immense and may take generations of repair. We must commit to checking out every second and third-order effect and correcting it to stay on course.”

If we choose to forget the tyrannical policy disasters of the pandemic without even acknowledging them, much less fixing them, then we are all complicit. It’s that simple.

I’ll end this article with a message I received from a friend that I found to be pretty spot on:

“Demanding that the people who are still excluded from power give “amnesty” to the evil people who still wield power is a take, I suppose. Really she is calling for unconditional surrender the moment we have a slight opening. So many people on our side (rationality and data) fell for Oster’s game because they were so happy to see a woman with class and respectability siding slightly with us, but she was always playing a game.”

Of course it’s all a game.

Needless to say: Randi Weingarten of the teacher’s union would very much like for us to develop “Pandemic Amnesia”:

But we’re not having it. We can’t.

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Let’s not forget that Democrats were far more skeptical going into the 2020 Elections than Republicans were (click on graphic for poll). Winning can make you forget these types of thing.

Anyways, I’m going to try to objectively list the top ten reasons why I believe the majority of Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Before you dismiss this out of hand as crazy Trump supporters, consider that the majority of independents also suspected election fraud. There’s something to this story and it’s important that people understand why.

The list will be compiled in order of increasingly credible reasons for there to exist doubts. So #10 will be the most batshit crazy reason while #1 would represent the most legitimate greivance in my opinion.

But first, some disclaimers:

• I did a deep dive into this subject during November/Early December of 2020 on this topic. I looked at all the numbers, all the theories and all the evidence available back then.

• I don’t believe that there is sufficient evidence to prove that voting fraud altered the outcome of the 2020 election, though the absence of evidence is not evidence of the absence of fraud. Mass absentee ballot voting makes any election more vulnerable to fraud and thus will always generate voting integrity skepticism.

• I also don’t think it is useful to dwell on past results beyond the lessons necessary to address potential issues of voter integrity moving forward. The election is conducted based on rules that are decided before voting begins. If those rules are broken for electoral benefit then your only recourse is to prove that fraud via the judiciary. If you can’t then you move on. That’s the only system that can exist because no election is perfect.

What Trump or other politicians said about the election are not covered in the list because that’s baked into the cake. Despite what Democrats might think, Republicans aren’t skeptical about the election because Donald Trump said so. Talk to any Republican and you will hear a number of reasons, most of which I think I cover in this list.

Without further delay, here is the list.

7-10: The Demonstrably False Reasons

10: Dominion Voting Machines (or other IT systems) were Hacked

Voting machines can be hacked.

CNN has reported on this extensively:

NBC also did so:

Having said that, the allegations by Sidney Powell about Dominion voting machines being hacked were complete garbage.

When sued by Dominion, Powell’s defense argued that

"no reasonable person would conclude that the statements [by Powell about the 2020 election] were truly statements of fact…it was clear to reasonable persons that Powell's claims were her opinions and legal theories."

Of course, Dominion made the entire thing look even more suspicious by not communicating at all about allegations that were rampant all over conservative media. Normally the most important thing to do in a crisis is to communicate rapidly, but they never said anything (maybe they couldn’t) which led to the sense that something was off.

Yes, you can find individual cases of machines being unsecured, connected to the internet or having yielded questionable errors, but they do not add up to massive voter fraud.

Still, I personally think that electronic voting is a bad idea because of security concerns. Paper ballots would offer far more transparency and, despite what the voting machine industry says, it would not take that long to hand count the ballots…we’ve done it for most of our history. And you’d be surprised how many modern countries do exactly this.

9: Election Result Feed - Vote Switching

This is one of the most convincing ways to prove voting fraud because it apparently shows “vote switching” on live TV:

Basically, you can see how the Republican candidate’s votes total goes down while the Democrat’s go down with the new update.

But that’s misleading.

What I learned after working with the live election data feed for many many hours is that the information is communicated in terms of total votes and percentage (to one decimal point) of that vote for each candidate. The live broadcast does the math for you and calculates the number of votes, but that is purely based on the percentage.

Therefore, as the percentages change throughout the night, the number of total votes can appear to decrease. Every time there is a change in decimal points it causes a sharp drop/increase to what appears to be the total vote count.

Still, if you are not familiar with this then it’s easy to see how it appears that vote switching is occurring in real-time.

8: Shrinking Leads - Inability to count all votes in one day

There was one winner on election night and that lead slowly evaporated over the coming days.

This is explained by the counting of absentee ballots which broke overwhelmingly in favor of Biden. This then leads to suspicion about Biden’s margins in those ballots as it then appears that they are “finding” the necessary votes after the fact.

The optics of this entire thing were terrible. There appeared to be pauses in the voting in some states. There were huge data dumps that happened at odd hours. We already mentioned the decimal point live election result feed.

While one party was celebrating, the other party was looking carefully at any reports of fraud and thinking that something was fishy.

What slowly emerged post election over a couple of days was the feeling that the election was being systematically stolen, and for the most part MSM was nowhere to be seen. Instead of making election integrity an important new story whereby reporters actually investigated the claims being made, they completely ignored it until it was too late.

On the flip-side, social media and partisan conservative media were reporting all the stories about potential election fraud. What resulted was actually very predictable.

I wrote this on November 9th, 2020 because I saw where this was going…it was obvious that we were heading towards some sort of violence because you can’t just ignore that kind of building anger in large parts of your population without giving it any kind of outlet…eventually it explodes and you get Jan 6th.

7: The Eye Test

Many people just can’t comprehend how Biden could have possibly won. They look around them and they see no Biden flags, or bumper stickers…heck, they don’t even think they know a Biden voter.

They find it incredibly unlikely that Biden hid in his basement during the entire campaign and was absolutely horrible as a campaigner yet still got 81 million votes…the most ever in history.

Trump’s rallies was overflowing with people and enthusiasm…Biden couldn’t fill up a used-car parking lot.

In reality, an enthusiastic vote counts the same as an unenthusiastic vote. The 2020 election was a referendum on Trump and Biden was the beneficiary of a lot of unenthusiastic voters who just did not like Trump.

4-6: Things that Make People Very Suspicious

6: Statistical Anomalies

There are actually some statistical anomalies that are not entirely without merit:

• Probably the most famous was the “Bellweather Counties” observation: Biden defeated Trump in only 1 of 19 “Bellweather Counties” which are counties where a majority of voters have supported the election winner in 8 of the last 9 elections.

• Biden won far more votes than Trump or Obama while winning far fewer counties than Trump or Obama.

• During my research, I found this anomaly which I thought was pretty relevant: In terms of votes that were available to Biden via absentee ballots in Pennsylvania by political identification of the voters, voting patterns would have had to be quite anomalous to coincide with his vote totals.

These anomalies exist, and while people have offered explanations or rebuttals for the phenomenon, they are not dispositive.

Ultimately, anomalies don’t really prove anything. Maybe people are finding them because they’re looking really hard for them. Regardless, they do cause suspicion.

Note: There have been other claims of statistical anomalies that have not panned out. For example, this popular analysis seemed to show an anomaly, but this was later explained by the phenomenon of vote-splitting that occurs in both parties.

5: Denial of Access to Republican Election Watchers

Many remember the scandal over the purported suitcases of votes being counted after hours in Georgia. What most don’t remember is that this initially became an issue because they were counting after Republic observers were told to leave.

YouTube has scoured most of the videos of Republican election observers reporting that their access to the voting process was encumbered or denied by confrontational elections workers. This is the one I could still find related to this phenomenon.

But this was a widespread problem and on voting day, social media was full of eye-witness accounts by election observers that reported not being able to verify that voting was proceeding transparently.

At the time, this created a great deal of consternation for Republicans because it was coupled with the ongoing counting which was slowly turning the election in Biden’s favor.

The prevailing sentiment was that they wouldn’t be trying to obscure the counting process if they weren’t trying to hide something.

The evidence here is anecdotal so it is dismissed out of hand by the left, but you can be certain that people on the right saw this phenomenon happening in realtime and these testimonials by hundreds of observers in all the major swing states left a lasting impression.

4: Election Tools: Drop Boxes and Voter Registries

There is probably no greater symbol of election integrity skepticism than ballot drop boxes. When Republicans hear the word “Drop Box”, they think “Ballot Harvesting”.

Democrats have actually made ballot harvesting legal in some states, although I think it ultimately hurts them more than it helps them because those states are already deep blue. What Republicans see is an incredibly corrupt tactic that favors activism over civic responsibility and which is very susceptible to fraud.

Right or wrong, the point is that Republicans are incredibly suspicious of the concept of Drop Boxes because it allows the dropping off of multiple votes at the same time. This is legal in the context of one person dropping off multiple votes for family members, but there is no way to distinguish between this and people dropping off harvested votes.

Another constant in US elections is that voter registries are a mess. Simply put they are not accurate.

They have a really bad reputation historically as they were seen as a tool by which local political machines could mobilize “the dead” to vote en masse.

Republicans think that the registries are bloated with dead people and out of state voters which can be used to “find” votes after the fact.

Whether by bureaucratic incompetence or via other considerations, this continues to be a problem which is greatly amplified anecdotally by social media.

Also, voter registries are digital so they’re also vulnerable in that way.

1-3: Legitimate Reasons for Election Integrity Skepticism

3: Courts/Election Officials Changing Voting Laws and Procedures

In short, there was a lot of legal positioning by Republicans and Democrats with regards to the rules by which elections would be conducted. Unfortunately for Republicans, the Democrats were far more aggressive and successful at this and managed to use Covid-19 to their party’s benefit. Sometimes it wasn’t even based on judicial decisions, but rather decision by local election officials.

For example, in Wisconsin a rare provision for “indefinitely confined” was used to request 200k such ballots without photo ID.

In Pennsylvania, the Democratic-majority in the States Supreme Court modified election law (Act 77) enacted by the State Legislature after legal challenges by Democrats:

• They permitted the use of drop boxes, even though Act 77 did not.

• They extended the deadline to receive mail-in ballots to 5pm on the Friday following the election, even though Act 77 did not.

• They effectively ruled that mail-in ballots don’t need to go through a signature verification process, even though Act 77 required it.

The problem is that the US Constitution very clearly states that how elections are held is under the purview of the State Legislature so there exists a question about the Constitutionality of the modifications granted by the State Supreme Court.

The Constitution says:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof

I think there is a legitimate question of how much the courts should be allowed to intervene in how elections are conducted and even if it is constitutional.

Then there is the issue that courts (including SCOTUS) do not want to touch issues of electoral procedure after the votes have been cast because the idea of disenfranchising votes would be scandalous.

I think it is important that all sides have confidence in the rules under which elections are conducted.

Unfortunately there will always be differences of opinion about what constitutes a “fair” rule so it’s likely this will continue to be a problem for both sides moving forward.

2: Mainstream Media/Social Media/Tech Bias - Especially Hunter Biden Laptop Story

America is accustomed to the media putting their thumb on the scale when reporting to the general public. They were even more active this around…Biden essentially stayed in his basement while the mainstream media ran cover for his campaign.

But they are less accustomed to Social Media and Big Tech adding their thumbs.

And they’re even less accustomed to all three applying their full weight to the scale.

This happened during the 2020 election.

For example, Google manipulated their search engine results to favor Democrats. This came out via a Project Veritias investigation which was sufficiently credible for it to be covered by Senator Ted Cruz in a senate hearning:

Congressman Dan Crenshaw also covered the Project Veritas report in a congressional hearing:

In fact, even today, in putting together this article, I had difficulty Googling a lot of material from back in 2020 about election fraud. I had to switch to DuckDuckGo to actually be able to find information that I remembered seeing since then.

This is unfair, but I’d say that Republicans have even gotten used to these subtle attempts to influence public opinion.

However, what happened with the Hunter Biden Laptop story blatantly exceeded anything that could be considered within the bounds of normalized fairplay.

This bombshell story was systematically denied and suppressed by everybody. Twitter even locked the NY Post out of their account for reporting the story.

More than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter calling it Russian disinformation…this was then run nonstop by the media.

The only problem is that the story was real. Every news agency eventually had to admit this, but it was too late by that moment.

And not only was it real, but it had the potential to significantly alter the result of the Presidential election.

A poll found that 16% of Biden voters would not have voted for him if they had know about the story…that’s more than enough to significantly change the outcome.

Btw, good luck finding this article via Google!!

Here were the results of the poll:

Anybody with a shred of intellectual honesty should see that Republicans have a point here. This was blatantly unfair.

1: Mass Mail-In Voting

Republicans simply do not trust the process of mail-in voting.

A quick look at how voting is conducted around the world shows that the US is in the minority in allowing most citizens to vote by mail.

Vote by mail was used in France until 1975 when it was banned because of fears regarding fraud.

I think the best argument against the use of mail-in voting was given by AG Bill Barr before the 2020 election.

First Bill Barr makes the case that mail in voting as a practice is not secure and is vulnerable to “fraud and coercion”.

“The bipartisan commission chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker said back in 2009 that mail in voting is fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion”

“Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion. For example we indicted someone in Texas…1,700 ballots collected from people who could vote. He made them out to vote for the people he wanted.”

The second point he makes is that voter registries are not accurate and that mailing ballots to people is likely to result in ballots getting to the wrong people.

“People who get them are not the right people. They are people who have replaced the previous occupant and they can make them out. Sometimes multiple ballots come to the same house with several generations of occupants. Do you think that’s a way to run a vote?”

The final point that he makes is probably the most important one: Don’t mess around with election integrity in the current political context.

This is playing with fire. We’re a closely divided country here. And people have to have confidence in the results of the election and the legitimacy of the government. And people trying to change the rules to this methodology, which as a matter of logic is very open to fraud and coercion, is reckless and dangerous and people are playing with fire.

The Democrat counter to this is that no fraud, sufficient to change the outcome of the election, was ever proven therefore the election was not stolen.

While true, I think that misses the point.

First, the absence of evidence of fraud is not evidence of the absence of fraud. If the system itself if vulnerable to fraud, then there will be suspicion of the results even if that fraud cannot be definitively proven.

Second, the accuracy of mail-in voting is very difficult to verify. Signature verification can be effective in validating the identity of the voter, but it doesn’t eliminate the issue of coercion.

Also, in the states that decided the Presidential election (Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) only Arizona has signature verification.

If Trump had won George, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin then he wins the Electoral College 278-260. The mail-in ballots in those states can never be properly verified to ensure their legitimacy.

Conclusions:

I was seeing the phenomenon in real-time back in November 2020. Republicans were extremely suspicious that the election had been stolen and nobody was paying attention to their concerns.

Januar 6th was not a surprise to me given what I was seeing in terms of half the country thinking that Democracy had been stolen away from them.

If you compare this to Russiagate, where Democrats were very concerned that Russian collusion played a part in the 2016 election, then you see the double standard that Republicans perceive. Democrats got a special investigation and three years of non-stop media investigations and reports. Republicans were told they were nutters.

And I’m pretty sure that if the roles were reversed and Biden had lost, we would have had never ending scrutiny about election integrity over much of the same reasons. Let’s not forget that Democrats were suspicious of the election long before Republicans took up this cause.

You don’t need to agree with Republicans on election integrity, but I do think you should try to understand it from their perspective because calling them election deniers doesn’t help us get closer to a system where everybody has confidence in elections.

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As the CDC prepares to vote on whether to include the Covid-19 vaccine in the childhood immunization schedule, it is important that we take into account a number of critical issues:

1. There’s no scientific or medical imperative to recommend this vaccine en masse

2. There are no long term safety studies for the vaccine

3. It places an enormous burden on states to adopt it

4. It will destroy public trust, earned over the last 50 years, in the existing vaccine schedule

5. The vaccine was just approved for inclusion in the “"Vaccines for Kids" program thus ensuring accessibility for any children that want or need it

Most of you already know that children are not particularly at risk for severe illness from Covid-19, so there is very limited benefit in terms of protection.

Also, vaccine makers recently revealed that vaccines do not prevent the spread of transmission so there is also no societal benefit from vaccinating children.

Finally, these vaccines have not been studied long term and serious side effects like myocarditis have already been documented.

So there is clearly no rush for this vaccine to be incorporated into any childhood vaccine schedule.

This is clear to anybody that is paying the slightest bit of attention.

But the CDC will then try to convince you that it’s not a big deal because inclusion in the schedule does not mean that it is mandated…that can only occur at the state level!

In this one tweet, the CDC tries to absolve itself of any possible responsibility for the vaccine being mandated.

But that’s incredibly misleading.

As we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic, CDC “guidance” was frequently used to justify mandates. Then there’s also the risk of liability if you don’t follow the CDC “guidelines”.

The CDC and states can then engage in a game of responsibility ping-pong where either sides lays the blame on the other, but the outcome is still the same: mandates.

There is no doubt that some states will move quickly to mandate C-19 vaccines for all children because in many areas the pandemic has become a political issue, more than a health crisis.

It’s why the CDC plays such an important role.

The CDC has the responsibility to offer the best possible scientific and medical guidance because no state has the same staff, experts or resources to legitimately claim to know better.

But possibly the greatest damage will be caused by what this decision does to public trust about the current immunization schedule.

The CDC has spent over 50 years building confidence in the traditional schedule (e.g.: measle, mumps, rubella, polio…etc). With confidence in public health already in tatters after the controversial pandemic measures, adding the C-19 vaccine to the traditional schedule would severly erode public trust in these vaccines.

Most people already know or believe that the vaccine doesn’t make sense for children, so if it is included then what does this say about the other vaccines? How can those also be trusted? It will open up a pandora’s box of vaccine skepticism.

And let’s not conflate being included in the vaccine schedule with having access to the vaccine. The C-19 vaccine was just included in the CDC’s “Vaccines for Kids” program (not to be confused with schedule) thus ensuring that it is available free of charge to any child that wants or needs it.

I’ve lost faith in the CDC and public health which is why I don’t expect them to do the right thing and will probably add it to the childhood vaccine schedule…but who knows?

Update: it passed 15-0

Fuck those corrupt assholes.

Before I get into the article, I recommend you save a picture of this chart produced by Dr. Robert Rohde (@RARohde) from @BerkleyEarth. Every politician should be made to acknowledge the current reality of our energy situation because energy policy is about tradeoffs, not absolutism and virtue signaling.

We haven’t had to worry about energy in my lifetime. It was abundant, cheap and readily available so we simply never thought much about it. Sure there were the occasional spike in prices at the pump, but the prices always seemed to rebound and it came to be seen as a transient problem.

So against this backdrop of energy apathy, a new movement was born in the 1980s and 1990s: The Modern Global Warming Movement (later renamed “Climate Change”. It came to prominence in 1998 with the famous publication my Michael E. Mann et al of what came to be known as the “Hockey Stick” showing how global temperature was stable for a thousand years before we started pumping CO2 in the atmosphere.

Al Gore proceeded to make this chart famous in his 2006 Documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”…and the rest is history.

I was curious to understand the science behind climate change to see if it was actually settled science. Or even if it was very probable. I spent 9 months researching every bit of information I could find. If you’re curious about my conclusions as to what the science says, here’s my deep dive below…but they’re fairly irrelevant to the purpose of this article.

Gummi Bear Deepdives and Articles

Gummi Bear's Anthropogenic Climate Change Deep Dive - Part 1

Introduction I’ve been curious about climate change ever since I first saw Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Back then I flirted with doing a deep dive but considered the topic way too complicated. I finally decided to look into Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) because it's now a driving force for policy and it will cost each of us a lot of money movi…

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5 years ago · 98 likes · 64 comments · Gummi Bear

Yes, the science of climate change is irrelevant at the moment. It’s a red herring. It’s something that distracts from the bigger issues we are facing which is how do we craft pragmatic and responsible energy policy?

So as much as it pains me to say that science is not relevant…that the truth does not matter…I have to do it because what matters at this point is our energy policy.

Let’s face it, the science is too complicated, there’s too much hardcore math and physics and data. 99.9% of the people are just going to trust the expert that they like because the science is inaccessible to them. Climate Change is such a widely held belief that it's difficult to think that large changes in public opinion are possible any time soon. (If you are interested in continuing to pursue the truth about Climate Science, I recommend following people like Alex Epstein (@AlexEpstein).)

So what do I suggest we do? Let’s beat them at their own game. Accept their set of facts and then show why they’re drawing the wrong conclusions and proposing disastrous policies. Therefore:

1. We accept the findings of UN’s The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - and keep in mind the IPCC reports do not say anything close to what is reported in the news about climate change…it’s not nearly as bleak as portrayed.

2. We ask the next logical question which is what should we do about it?

Here we enter the world of what I call “Climate Pragmatism”

Two prominent names you might recognize:

Michael Shellenberger (@shellenbergerMD)

Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg)

If one is pragmatic then the logical approach is to ask what can and should realistically be done in the face of anthropogenic climate change. Also, keep in mind that the IPCC reports do not predict the types of disasters that are reported in the news and certainly not with total certainty as is portrayed.

To understand these questions let’s consider two extreme positions:

• We do nothing and adapt to whatever happens

• We do everything, regardless of other considerations

Between these two extreme positions there exist a lot of tradeoffs between lowering CO2 emissions and the associated costs which are reflected in a reduced standard of living.

To offer an extreme example: we could decide to halve our consumption of fossil fuels overnight, but then we would need to accept the tradeoff which would be mass starvation, economic collapse, and systemic anarchy. Some might argue that with the Great Reset, that’s actually the objective :)

So the starting point for any discussion needs to be the acknowledgment of:

• Our total energy needs

• The availability of energy from different sources

Here I will again share the first chart in this article because it makes certain realities very clear:

1. Renewables represent a minuscule source of energy so far. What this chart won’t tell you is that they are also intermittent, have large operating costs, require lots of mined natural resources, require lots of land,s and need to be replaced frequently on an earthly time scale (10-20 years).

2. We are pretty much maxed out on Hydropower because almost all good sites have already been developed.

3. Nuclear Energy, which is a non-greenhouse gas emitting, is decreasing as an energy source. That’s a bit strange if climate change is an existential threat…

4. Most importantly, fossil fuels are by far the most important source of energy and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Therefore, don’t mess with their availability should be a cardinal rule.

I believe every politician should be made to look at this chart and acknowledge that fossil fuels are still extremely important for our future prosperity.

There should be a number of important elements to be considered for any energy policy:

Future Fossil Fuel Availablity: Any energy policy should account for how that policy will affect future fossil fuel supplies because you can’t just snap your fingers and get more. Investment in fossil fuel extraction requires years of lead time, so an energy crisis today cannot be easily fixed anytime soon.

Quality of Life Tradeoffs: There are very real tradeoffs to consider when enacting green policies and those tradeoffs almost never affect the wealthy or people who are making those policies. For example, subsidizing solar energy creates an excessive burden on the poor. Why? First, because energy is a larger percentage of their total budget so rising energy costs hit their overall budget harder. The second is because rich people can afford to buy into the energy grid by purchasing solar panels, thereby passing on even more of the burden to the poor.

Global Impact: Many green policies only give the appearance of being green because climate change is a global problem. You’re not really going green if you are just outsourcing or shifting the problem to another part of the planet. Here I’ll give the example of how American natural gas producers are being held to unrealistically high standards as far as methane leakage from wells in the name of the environment. But if you shut down the American well, the supply will just be replaced by a Russian well which has nowhere near the same environmental production standards as in the US.

Incurring big costs in the US or EU to reduce CO2 needs to be considered within the realities of global CO2 emissions.

Cost Benefit Analysis: Simply put, sometimes it makes more sense to adapt to the consequence of climate change than to try to prevent it. Here we need to keep in mind that increased warming created by increasing CO2 decreases logarithmically. At some point, it won’t make much more of a difference how much more CO2 we put into the atmosphere because the greenhouse capacity will be essentially saturated (if it isn’t mostly so already).

Use the Energy Crisis to Put Energy Policy on the Ballot

After years of irrational Green Energy Policy, the roosters are finally coming home to roost in a spectacular way.

The pain will be seen or felt by everybody and so it is imperative to use this crisis to drive home the point that the POLICY is nonsense and does not solve the problems they claim to.

For example:

There are tons of fallacies in the policies they are proposing so with everybody’s attention on energy, now is the time to counter their narratives with reasonable, factual and accurate criticism as well as common sense solutions.

You are doing climate alarmists a favor if you engage them on the SCIENCE of climate change because then they’ll just call you a climate denier and point to all their “science”.

Instead, politicians need to make Energy Policy the priority.

They need to be able to:

• Understand the basics of energy challenges we face

• The realities of our energy needs

• The pro and cons as well as limitations of different energy sources

• Alternative solutions not being talked about (e.g. nuclear)

• Propose common sense solutions

I am not an energy policy expert so I will not go any further, but I’ve mentioned some people that are in this article.

My point is that there is no better moment to start talking about common sense Energy Policy and make it a strength of your policy platform.

Never Let a Good Energy Crisis go to Waste: It's Time to Make Energy Policy a Voting Issue.

Epilogue:

Writing this required a change in my thinking because I’ve been very vocal about pointing out that the “science” underpinning anthropogenic climate change is very weak. But in reality, it is more strategically advantageous to accept “the science” (IPCC Reports), because the reports don’t say nearly what the media or politicians claim.

Also, in pragmatic terms, this is an issue that needs to be fought and won at the political level and politicians are all about policy. Add to this the unique crisis that we are facing at the moment, and it makes more sense to shift the focus to energy policy because there’s been a lot of very stupid energy policy in the past decade. And it is very simple to demonstrate that these policies were poorly conceived and will not come close to making a difference in the grand scheme of things.

I swear…the only constant in politics is incompetence.

Raiding Trump using the Presidential Records Act? You can’t be serious.

Democrats are so ensconced in their progressive echo chamber that they couldn’t predict what the reaction to this would be…that blows my mind.

Here’s the thing: beyond the MAGA types, Trump’s supporters have a complicated relation with him as a politician.

I am one such person:

• On an emotional level, I like the fact that he’s a big middle finger to the progressive left. I think it is fantastic that he shines a big spotlight on the regressive behavior of progressives. He gets them to expose their true selves for all to see. Having said that, I also realize that this makes him less appealing to moderates so there are times when I think it would be better for him to tone it down.

• I believe that his policies and record as President were excellent, particularly on foreign policy. Initially I did not like his isolationist rhetoric, but that is not how he actually governed. He showed that it’s also possible to speak loudly and carry a big stick (sorry Teddy!). His adminstrations' work on peace in the middle east was nothing short of remarkable.

• He’s been treated more unfairly than any other politican in modern history. On the flip side, he gives his critics lots of material to work with. Here, I wish he was more disciplined and didn’t let his ego get in the way so often.

• I have a big problem with his handling of the 2020 Election. Even if you truly believe that Trump actually won the election, there is no scenario whereby Trump could have remained President in the absense of comprehensive proof about large scale electoral fraud. The idea that the VP and a slate of alternative electors could somehow change certified electoral results is crazy. Can you imaging what Republicans would do if their candidate wins in 2024 and Kamala decides to intervene!?! Ultimately, it doesn’t even serve him well politically to keep harping on the election, but he can’t seem to let it go.

• I also have some criticisms about the “New Right” movement that is coalescing around Trump’s former MAGA base. Although this has taken on a life of its own beyond what Trumpism was about. More on this in another post.

This tweet sums up what was my position pretty well. I will support Trump if it comes to him being the Republican nominee, but I think he’s better off playing King Maker or golf, or both.

There are lots of people on the right that have mixed feelings about Trump. With the implosion of the Biden Presidency and a national wave of Republican support (e.g. Youngkin), I saw sense in moderating Conservative rhetoric to focus more on issue of common importance and mutual values, rather than owning the libs. In other words, let’s turn down the volume on the outrage and vitriol just a bit…we’re winning…let’s not be like them.

Afterall, the two sides can’t keep hating and yelling past each other forever…there needs to be a rapprochement…at some point…right?

NOPE, WRONG

It took me all of 5 seconds to recognize the significance of the Mar-A-Lago FBI raid. It was obviously wrong and completely outrageous…an obvious politicization of the judicial system. And while I don’t like the whole RINO thing, I do question Republicans that have not spoken out about this because the issue here is not Trump!

So ultimately, all it took was an FBI raid of Mara-A-Lago to remind everybody on the right how Trump came to be President in the first place. So long as this is how progressives behave, there can be no common ground on other issues because this strikes against fundamental values that we all should agree on.

This is a big fricking deal. Like really big. Rubicon type of big. This has never happened before. I’m not saying anybody is above the law, but you need more than the Presidential Records Act to go after a former President and potential future Presidential nominee. Phrases like “Banana Republic” are completely justified in this case…even if some might find them a little racist

So, as a rule of thumb: don’t politicize the Department of Justice (DOJ)! It’s that simple. You can have all the partisan congressional hearings you want, but don’t bring law enforcement into Politics except as a means of last resort against grievous corruption.

Except that is exactly what Democrats have done for the past 6 years, and the result is that half the country (including a majority of independents) have lost complete faith in the DOJ and FBI.

This time it was so blatant and in your face that the right has almost immediately unified around Donald Trump…the Democrats did this.

It was only 9 months ago that Republicans celebrated Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia where Trump was a completely marginalized figure. There was even lots of talk about the future of the post-Trump Republican Party.

Now Trump is back in the role that he most covets: The outsider taking on the Washington DC swamp/elitists who will gladly take the arrows aimed at the rest of us.

“In Reality They're Not After Me, They're After You...I'm Just In The Way”

I’ve been wanting to do a deep dive on Russia and Ukraine for a while because I’m taken aback by some of the Pro-Russia, Anti-Ukraine sentiment on the right.

I finally got around to writing this in response to this recent tweet of mine about Tucker Carlson where it seems quite a lot of folks disagree with me.

Anyways, I will break down this deep dive into two main parts:

Part 1: Why Tucker Carlson Is Wrong - A point by point rebuttal of the narrative Tucker outlines

Part 2: The Russian Narrative - An analysis of the overall narrative that has been pushed by Russia and accepted by quite a few people

I also have a short conclusion and a FAQ section at the end.

Part 1: Why Tucker Carlson Is Wrong

Alright, let’s dig into this because it seems that lots of people commenting on this tweet vehemently disagree with me.

Let’s first establish what Tucker is saying here:

• Democrats have convinced themselves that Russia stole the 2016 election

• That is why they are taking us to war with Russia - on some level the core motivation is just that

• We know the war in Ukraine is not about saving democracy

• We know it’s not about protecting the borders of a sovereign nation - the US doesn’t care about its borders

• We know that the war is not about helping the Ukrainian people because more will die thanks to the Biden Administration's support for Ukraine - If you cared about the Ukrainian people, you would push for a settlement now

• Instead, the war in Ukraine is designed to cause regime change in Russia

• Final Conclusion: This would be payback by Democrats for Election Interference - the inevitable end state of Russia-gate

Okay, let’s take it point by point then.

Democrats have convinced themselves that Russia stole the 2016 election

Many have and you can’t discount this as a motivation (even if subconscious) for people on the left to hate Russia.

And let’s not forget Ukraine-gate which is also probably a reason why a lot of people on the left support Ukraine.

But what Democrats think should not play any role in one’s ability to objectively analyze an issue. This is pure contrarianism and it’s now as prevalent with some people on the right as it was with the entire left during Trump’s presidency.

And keep in mind that there is an entire continent of people in Europe that don’t know much and really don’t care about Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections. Yet they’ve adopted the same position vis-a-vis Russia as the majority of the US.

That is why they are taking us to war with Russia - on some level the core motivation is just that

First I would say that the US and NATO have no interest in getting into a hot war with a nuclear power such as Russia. The number of people calling for actual war is negligible in both political parties because it has long been established that war between nuclear powers carries too great a risk.

But you might say that we are encouraging war by provoking Russia with our support of Ukraine. But there is no precedent for this being the case. This is why they’re called proxy wars and not actual wars. The US supplied arms to the Afghan rebels. China and Russia supplied arms to the Vietcong. This has been standard fare for a long time.

So in fact what we have here is a case of saber-rattling by Russia. They make threats and the west is supposed to back down. But that’s a terrible way to run foreign policy with devastating historical consequences.

Think of the precedent that is being established:

• If you have nuclear weapons then you can invade another country with no fear of outside intervention

• If you don’t have nuclear weapons, you are at the mercy of any foreign invader that does

• Threaten other countries with your nuclear weapons and they will back down

This alone should scare you because it creates a major incentive for every country to go nuclear. A world where every sovereign country has nuclear weapons is pretty terrifying.

Backing down from these threats is not a precedent that you want to create.

So I see no evidence that the US or NATO is trying to take us to war with Russia. Here I see a dishonest sleight of hand where Tucker conflates a hot war with a proxy war when the two have very different meanings and connotations.

One question I get is whether I think that the US government is pushing the US towards war with Russia. There is a difference between standing your ground against unreasonable threats by a hostile nation and trying to provoke war. Arming Ukraine is completely within the bounds of established international precedent.

Now, if the issue of actual military intervention ever comes up then it’s a different discussion. But we are not anywhere close to this. Putin has so far won the public opinion battle on military intervention with his nuclear threats.

Could things change in this respect? Only if public opinion significantly shifts, but I’ve seen no indication of this so far:

We know the war in Ukraine is not about saving democracy

I’m not even sure what Tucker means by this.

The main issue was never democracy, but rather national sovereignty. But democracy is also a factor insofar as the West has tried to support Ukraine in its pursuit of becoming a western democracy.

Have we become so cynical that we no longer care about such things? When you become so contemptful of your own country that you believe it doesn’t have a moral leg to stand on, you are now sharing an opinion with the far left. You may have arrived at the conclusion from a different perspective, but you’ve essentially decided that your country lacks any moral virtue.

But in comparison to what? No country is perfect, so who exactly are you comparing yourself to?

This is a point I make often when I say that we shouldn’t want to hate our neighbors. As much as we may disagree with them politically, we have far more in common with our fellow Americans with which we fundamentally disagree, than we do with countries like Russia or China.

Many Americans are so consumed in hatred of the other side that they have lost sight of this fact. I disagree with people on the left, I argue with them, I get really angry with them sometimes…but I never allow myself to hate them.

Anyways, maybe you think that Ukraine is hardly a democracy because it is so corrupt and is full of neo-nazis.

Every single post-communist democracy in Eastern Europe has followed more or less the same path in transitioning to becoming a western democracy.

I got this from an old diplomat who had worked extensively in the region…he said this about the path that former Eastern-bloc countries must traverse to become modern democracies:

1. They spend the first phase of their development trying to overcome the legacy of communism → this is the exercise of establishing democratic norms

2. The next phase is spent trying to stamp out corruption → this is the exercise of establishing the rule of law and strengthening the judiciary and adjacent institutions

3. And the final phase is about modernizing their economy → this is the exercise of developing a functional market economy. This is when the Oligarchs start to get pushed out of the economy as these are not purely businessmen but beneficiaries of economic cronyism

All the countries making this transition do so with lots of support from both the European Union, EU countries, and the US. It’s a messy process where the west uses both sticks and carrots to help these countries build and strengthen their democratic institutions. The west offers financial and technical support but also intervenes politically at times in unpopular ways. Progress is slow, but when seen over the course of decades progress is also evident.

That’s where Ukraine is. They’ve transitioned past communism to democracy but they still have big problems with corruption. The west works to help modernize and professionalize the Justice Ministries in these countries, but it takes time because mindsets are hard to change.

This is actually the reason why people like Hunter Biden get fat contracts from Eastern Europe. Local oligarchs think that the West controls these prosecutors and they can influence their corruption dossiers. Mostly it’s a grift because they can’t. But in the case of Hunter and Joe Biden and the firing of that prosecutor…that was pretty egregious because that is the only reason Hunter was getting paid.

What about the Neo-nazis you might say? I have looked into it and I readily admit this is a problem.

I’ve done quite a bit of research to try and understand this phenomenon. This is the best source I’ve found for a balanced point of view.

Quick summary:

• There are real groups with Neo-nazi ideologies

• They’re relatively small at only 1.6% politically, but very dangerous nonetheless

• Russia overstates this problem, the west mostly ignores it

• Their ideology makes for great fighting units which is why they’re currently tolerated

• There is a concern about modern weapons being in their hands

I make no excuses for this, but I also don’t think this should be used to label the Ukrainian people or its government as Nazis. Nor is it any justification for Putin to invade.

If you were to ask Ukrainians about this problem, they think the problem is vastly overstated. Most of the people labeled Neo-nazis are actually strongly nationalist and are ideologically motivated by expelling Russia from sovereign Ukrainian territory. They get thrown in with other actual Neo-nazis making the problem appear bigger than it actually is.

Here is a very detailed perspective by Ukrainian liberal human rights activist Olexandra Matviychuk about the Azov Regiment which gets so much attention on the Neo-nazi subject:

And I can’t help but notice the similarities of this tactic which is being used to cast aspersions on the Ukrainian people to those used by the left to label the MAGA movement as white supremacists. Think about that for a second.

Finally, if your interpretation is that Democrats don’t care about democracy because of their politics on voting, censorship, etc, then I think you need to consider that the type of anti-Democratic activity that we are talking about in the US is orders of magnitude removed from the situation in Ukraine. Right now both the right and the left in America are accusing each other of putting Democracy in peril, but Americans have no idea how strong their Democracy is compared to other countries. In Ukraine the consequences of losing this war are living in a society where political opponents are murdered, there is no free speech and elections are a sham…in other words an authoritarian state.

We know it’s not about protecting the borders of a sovereign nation - the US doesn’t care about its own borders

Conflating Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine with the US’s illegal immigration problem is nonsense. Just because the phrase “sovereign border” can be applied to both issues does not mean they have anything in common.

However, the issue of the sovereignty of nations is a crucial one and it’s one of the most important reasons why the west must care about what happens in Ukraine.

Allowing Russia to achieve fundamental territorial gains from invading Ukraine would open up a pandora’s box of issues related to historical territories/borders and independence movements by ethnic minority populations in all other countries.

These are powderkeg issues in a world where sovereign borders can again be called into question. You might think that we’ve gotten past these issues in the West but we haven’t. Let’s not forget that it wasn’t that long ago that we had violence in Europe by the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, Basque Separatists in Spain, and the disaster of Yugoslavia’s breakup.

Ethnic tensions are very easy to stir up because humans are tribalist by nature. Every country in Europe has significant ethnic minority groups with historical grievances that go back hundreds of years.

Now try extending this problem to the rest of the world…

Here is Kenya’s ambassador to the UN explaining the dangers of trying to relitigate the borders of sovereign nations.

This situation echoes our history. Kenya and almost every African country was birthed by the ending of empire. Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropols of London, Paris and Lisbon, with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart.

Today across the borders of every single African country live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later.

Looking back, it was a huge mistake to appease Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but here we are.

Precedents matter, but they matter a whole lot in this case.

We know that the war is not about helping the Ukrainian people because more will die thanks to the Biden Administration's support for Ukraine - If you cared about the Ukrainian people, you would push for a settlement now

It is true that if Ukraine were to fold to Russia, they would save a lot of Ukrainian lives. But the same would have been true in the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the World Wars. Yet Americans chose to fight.

Who are we to decide for Ukrainians whether they should fight for their liberty or not? The idea that the US is pushing Ukraine into a confrontation with Russia is to deny that Ukrainians have any agency in the matter.

Look at Afghanistan where the US actually pushed the government and the people hard to fight for their liberty and freedom against the Taliban. They folded in weeks because the Taliban had more resolve than they did.

Does Tucker even know what the people of Ukraine actually think about the idea of surrendering or conceding territory to Russia? The fact that they are fighting and refusing to surrender says all you need to know about how Ukrainians feel. Everything I’ve seen so far paints a picture of a united people that are mobilized and resolute in their commitment to expelling Russia from their territory.

If there is one thing the world should have learned by now from Vietnam and Afghanistan is that an invader will never win so long as the locals have the will to resist indefinitely. Right now that is what the Ukrainian people are saying.

The idea that we, in the West, know best what is best for the Ukrainian people is textbook paternalism.

I’d also like to share this opinion from a Ukrainian citizen on Tucker’s take about saving Ukrainian lives. As much as we can try to understand this conflict, we will never understand it as well as somebody that has lived this reality:

“Spoken by someone who doesn't know (or purposefully ignores) our history with Russia. Every time in history, in any form, when Ukraine conceded to Russia, yeah at the start some lives was saved, but in the end thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and then tens of millions of Ukrainians died. Even now almost every family in Ukraine has dead relatives BECAUSE of Russia. For example, in my family 4 brothers of my grandma died in The Holodomor, and her husband was used as a cannon fodder for Germans. So yes, we know and remember what Russia brings, and we will not surrender this time.

We know there is no true "settlement" with russia as long as it exists as a remnant of an empire and is not broken down into states. This is very wishful thinking by westerners who think you can reason with Russia as a whole.

And it's when they IGNORE the things that happen right now, like Mariupol, Bucha, Borodyanka and other horrors inflicted on our people RIGHT NOW IN FRONT OF THE CAMERAS that they have the gall to tell us to surrender”

Instead, the war in Ukraine is designed to cause regime change in Russia

The only regime change that could occur in Russia is from within. If this were to happen it would be as a result of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and the consequences that followed this decision of his own making.

The west has cohabitated with Putin for over 20 years. Germany sought to bring them closer to the west through economic collaboration. They viewed their energy policy as a form of economic diplomacy thinking that Putin would behave so long as they depended on German markets. The UK turned a blind eye to Russian oligarchs for decades leading to London’s nickname of Londongrad. The US cared so little about the region that they allowed Putin to annex Crimea without any significant sanctions. All that the west wanted was for Putin to behave and not invade other sovereign countries.

But are they trying for regime change now that the invasion has taken place? I’m sure they would like for that to happen, but they will not risk taking any action to actively pursue this.

To understand why, I’ll share this example from nuclear war game theory based on the work of Nobel Prize winner Thomas C. Schelling.

Imagine two people are playing chess and each is trying to win. Underneath their table is enough TNT to blow both of them up and each player has a detonator. Therefore each player is incentivized to play the game in such a way that they can win, but not by such a great margin that they would provoke their opponent into a rash decision.

At the national security level both the US and Russia understand these things and it’s why conflicts between nuclear powers have always been waged via proxy wars and incremental ebbs and flows in hostilities, but never through dramatic escalation (Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest but never escalated).

Therefore, regime change has never and will never be on the table in terms of US military or covert actions. Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham can wish for it, but these are just political declarations, not policy.

Final Conclusion: This would be payback by Democrats for Election Interference - the inevitable end state of Russiagate

It’s possible that some part of Democrats’ motivation is linked to animosity over the perceived injustice of Russian election interference, but to ascribe most of it to this is to ignore all the other legitimate reasons for the US to support Ukraine.

This is what I mean when I say Tucker is projecting. He is seeing the Ukraine conflict only through the lens of internal American politics. He’s doing what we’ve been accusing the left of doing which is engaging in single variate analysis when the problem is far more complex than just left-right politics.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is actually a political disaster for the Biden presidency because it contributes to inflation which is currently the biggest political issue in the US. Americans care much more about the gas pump than they do about Ukraine, so this would be a pretty big price to pay just to get revenge on Russia.

Also, this isn’t really an issue that has divided Americans along political lines…yet.

Americans broadly support America’s aid to Ukraine and right now that is the only thing that is being talked about. Again, all this talk about proxy wars is just meant to push a narrative because “support to Ukraine” is the same thing as a “proxy war”.

Part 2: The Russian Narrative

The narrative being put forth by Russia and which is accepted by many on the right is the following:

• The US promised not to expand NATO one inch further to the east after the breakup of the Eastern Bloc

• Since then NATO kept expanding and getting closer to Russia thereby creating grave security concerns which went unheeded by the west

• In 2014 the US facilitated a “coup” in Ukraine after the Euromaidan Protests

• A civil war erupted when Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east objected to breaking with Russia and since then Ukraine has waged genocide against the Russian speaking minority of Ukraine while

• Ukraine is a corrupt country that serves as a piggy bank for the Democratic party and particularly the Biden family

• The US has intentionally stoked Ukraine into provoking Russia in the hopes of creating a proxy war that can destabilize Putin

Quick Sidenote: I wish I could spend more time on who Putin is, not because I want to convince you that he is evil, but to convince you of what you should expect from a former KGB agent. Just do a little digging into something called the Ryazan Incident (it will blow your mind) and you will begin to understand Putin and what he does a lot better.

During the cold war, the KGB was the most effective intelligence agency on the planet. Whereas the CIA was more advanced technologically, the KGB dominated in human intelligence, psyops, disinformation, and propaganda.

The KGB was actually far less interested in intelligence gathering than they were in influence operations: rewriting history and manipulating public opinion. The Soviet Union had more people working on disinformation than they did in the armed forces and defense industry. This book goes into the extent to which the Soviet Union spread disinformation throughout the world.

And in fact, the legacy of those operations is still being felt today. As Christopher Monckton explains in this clip, they were able to recruit one million Soviet agents of influence (western Marxist sympathizers) who were in contact with the Soviet disinformation services. All of this is documented.

The Soviet Union is no more but the Marxists have remained in positions of power in our most influential western institutions and we’re currently dealing with the consequences of the capture of these institutions by that ideology. These are not conspiracy theories. It is how the KGB operated and it is how Putin thinks and works.

Jokes aside, disinformation is the name of the game and they invented it. So you have to be really careful how you parse information coming from Russia. I get accused of not being objective because I was born in communist Eastern Europe…I would counter that by saying that I know how to spot the Russian BS better.

This reminds me to address an argument that I keep hearing about how we shouldn’t look back in history to understand what is going on today in Ukraine. Russel Brand calls it “infinite regress” and argues that we should instead focus only on recent history in order to understand the conflict.

As a fan of history, I disagree wholeheartedly with this approach. There is a lot to be learned from history because human nature doesn’t change and cultures change very slowly in time.

Also, and possibly, more importantly, is that if we look only at recent events then your interpretation is more vulnerable to the narratives that Putin has been weaving.

So again, let’s take the Russian narrative and evaluate it point by point.

The US promised not to expand NATO one inch further to the east after the breakup of the Eastern Bloc

This is actually incorrect although those words were used in a different context. What was discussed at the time was regarding the reunification of Germany and the agreement was that NATO troops would not be deployed into East Germany.

“NATO will not move one inch further east” was launched by Putin in 2007 in his speech at the 43rd Munich Security Conference and he’s been repeating it ever since. The fact that James Baker and others did actually say something to that extent is true, but it was not referring to NATO expansion.

But don’t take my word for it. This is what Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview.

RBTH: One of the key issues that has arisen in connection with the events in Ukraine is NATO expansion into the East. Do you get the feeling that your Western partners lied to you when they were developing their future plans in Eastern Europe? Why didn’t you insist that the promises made to you – particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that NATO would not expand into the East – be legally encoded? I will quote Baker: “NATO will not move one inch further east.”

M.G.: The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a singe Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification. Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in that context. Kohl and [German Vice Chancellor Hans-Dietrich] Genscher talked about it.

Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled. The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed; no weapons of mass destruction would be placed there. It has been observed all these years. So don’t portray Gorbachev and the then-Soviet authorities as naïve people who were wrapped around the West’s finger. If there was naïveté, it was later, when the issue arose. Russia at first did not object.

The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.

Gorbachev who was at those meetings had this to say when asked specifically about “NATO will not move one inch further east”:

• “The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all”

• “NATO’s military structures would not advance and that additional armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the territory of the then-GDR after German reunification”

• “The agreement on a final settlement with Germany said that no new military structures would be created in the eastern part of the country; no additional troops would be deployed”

All these things were captured in a treaty that was signed because that’s how diplomacy works. You don’t just make verbal promises.

On the other hand, I would point out that it was Russia that broke the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances whereby Russia provided security guarantees to Ukraine upon agreeing to relinquish nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union. That was a signed treaty…not words spoken decades earlier that were taken out of context.

And oh yeah, the US and UK were also signatories of the Budapest Memorandum and were supposed to be guarantors of Ukrainian security.

Since then NATO kept expanding and getting closer to Russia thereby creating grave security concerns which went unheeded by the west

There are two questions that need to be answered to evaluate this claim:

1. Is NATO expansion an actual security threat to Russia?

2. Does Putin actually perceive NATO to be a security threat?

To the first question, I would say that NATO is absolutely not a security threat to Russia, and here are my reasons:

• NATO’s charter provides for a purely defensive alliance. It just ensures that an attack on one is an attack on all. Even if NATO didn’t exist there would be other collective security alliances between western democracies.

• NATO expansion was not driven by NATO looking to find new members, but rather by new members asking to join. The countries of Eastern Europe did not trust Russia because of its imperialist history, and quite frankly I hope you now see why they did so.

• The giant elephant in the room is the nuclear deterrence thing. NATO would intervene militarily in Ukraine if Russia were not a nuclear power. The fact that they are not doing so is proof of the fact that NATO would never invade Russia, even if they had reasons to do so.

• There are no such things as surprise wars. There are months if not years of build-up to war. The reasons for war must be explained to the general population so that they understand why fighting and dying is necessary. This is especially so in the democracies that make up NATO where popular support for a war is essential. In over three decades since the end of the cold war, there has never been any discussion in any NATO country about the possibility of invading or attacking Russia.

I just don’t buy that “NATO is a security threat to Russia” as a serious argument.

The second question of whether Putin perceives NATO expansion as a threat is a bit more complicated because it’s not just an issue of military security, but rather the security of his position. Putin knows that NATO is not a military threat, but the prospect of a successful western democracy of 40 million fellow slavs is a threat to his power.

Consider that every single former communist country that has joined EU/NATO has a higher per capita GDP than Russia. And this is in the absence of wealth from vast natural resources like in Russia.

So in a sense, Putin is serious when he says Ukraine is a threat, but not for the reasons that he gives. It’s actually for personal political reasons.

A thriving modern democracy in Ukraine is a disaster for Putin’s regime because it would provide a stark contrast to what Russia is offering its citizens.

The “NATO is a security threat” narrative is utter nonsense. And even if you want to argue that Putin actually believes this, that doesn’t mean that the world needs to cater to his paranoia.

In 2014, the US facilitated a “coup” in Ukraine after the Euromaidan Protests

First off, I want to say that I watched Oliver Stone’s entire documentary on the Euromaidan so I understand the Russian narrative because that is all you’ll see in it. How do you create a documentary where you only interview Putin, Yanukovych, and his ministers and think it has any credibility?

Again, entirely too much credit is being given to the US for events that are largely on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people.

Of course, the USA was interested in a more pro-west administration. But they did nothing significant to facilitate this. I laughed really hard during the documentary when they blamed US-funded NGOs for fomenting revolt in Ukraine. Every single country finances these types of programs through its embassies. To think that these NGOs have the power or influence to cause events such as the Euromaidan protests is ridiculous on its face.

No, what happened here was not a coup. It was a revolt or even a revolution, but not a coup. And it was definitely not "facilitated by the USA".

Here are the words of a Ukrainian who lived this reality.

We were enraged by this. There was no need to facilitate anything from outside. When the first baton dropped, Yanukovich was doomed. Also many theorize snipers were russian, but sadly investigation was buried by the still pro-russian government. There was only one part of the protest which looked "financed" and it was a scene local politicians used trying to get some "clout" with protesters but in vain.

Everything was crowdfunded, all my friends made food for local protesters. When the violent protest started, everyone! (and you can see this in videos and photos) including most ready groups of nationalists, were wearing makeshift "armor" and weapons. Maybe the USA funded some secret nano plywood shields and tungsten planks?

What about Victoria Nuland’s phone call where she strategized about who should be in the new government?

This speaks more to the arrogance of the US state department than any conspiracy. As I mentioned earlier, the US/EU sometimes intervene in local politics in these countries in heavy-handed ways. Here you are seeing an example of the attitude of some state depart officials and how they behave in these countries. People like Victoria Nuland can exert great pressure on these governments and politicians, but they have no power to force them to do anything. Again, the game is carrots and sticks.

In short, to understand what really happened in the last week leading to the fall of the Yanukovych government:

• Shootings broke out where mostly protesters but also police were being killed. Hundreds of deaths occurred.

• It is not clear who these snipers were and who ordered them to shoot - everybody blamed everybody else for orchestrating this, but to this day there is no agreement on who was behind it.

• The European Union sent in mediators who helped broker an agreement between Yanukovych and the opposition - it was agreed that they would have early elections

• Opposition leaders took back this news to the protesters and were firmly rebuffed - they were booed off the stage. The leadership of the far-right also rejected the deal.

• By this point, the writing was on the wall and the security forces of the regime started to disintegrate. Some armed forces turned against the Yanukovych government.

• Yanukovych and much of his government fled the country - and that was it.

There is a lot of room for speculation about whether the shootings were a false flag operation or whether it was Russia/Yanukovych. We don’t know.

And for all the talk about the US and CIA being involved, people forget the very obvious fact that Russian intelligence was heavily involved in trying to prop up the Yanukovych government.

Nothing in all of this speaks to this being a US-backed coup and if you say this to a Ukrainian, they will laugh at you.

A civil war erupted when Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east objected to breaking with Russia and since then Ukraine has waged genocide against the Russian speaking minority of Ukraine while

It’s very difficult to call what occurred between 2014 and 2022 a civil war. Ask Ukrainians about what happened and they will firmly reject the notion of civil war and will tell you it is actually Russian territorial occupation.

Here are some facts which are known to Ukrainians, but don’t seem to have reached the west:

• It's hardly a "civil" war when most of the fighting was done by the regular Russian army.

• Yes, there are local separatists (mostly descendants of ethnic Russians), but "many", as in thousands or tens of thousands, but not hundreds of thousands and definitely not millions.

• It would be more accurate to say that the separatists are backing Russia, not vice versa.

• Russian speakers have never been oppressed or threatened by Ukrainians - Rather what happened is that post-2014 a strong nationalist pro-Ukrainian movement was begun but the focus was never Russian-Speakers in Ukraine but rather Russia itself

• The important commanders of the “separatists” are almost exclusively Russian like Igor Girkin (Strelkov)

• They introduced the Russian ruble as the currency of the region

• What about claims of genocide against 14 thousand Russian speakers? False, there have been a total of 3,400 civilian death attributable to both sides over 8 years of war.

In World War 2 about 150,000 Russians fought in the Russian Liberation Army under the command of Germany against Stalin’s Red Army. That didn’t make it a civil war.

An analogy would be if US forces would enter Canada, enlist the help of a few thousand US sympathizers, and then wage war against the Canadian army while calling it a Civil War.

Take a look at this tweet about the Donetsk pro-Ukrainian demonstration from 2014. I implore you to read the comments from Ukrainians, many of who were there, and have a different version of what happened.

What happened with this demonstration? Titushky (mercenary agents) were brought in to beat up the people and disperse them.

Here’s an example of an account from someone who was there:

People who were there will all tell you that it was a Russian occupation, not a civil war. In the aftermath over a million people fled this area, so when they talk about popular support, keep in mind that a lot of the population is no longer there.

In truth, this has nothing to do with Russian speakers in Ukraine. Most Russian speakers stand with Ukraine. They frame it in this way so that they can claim that it is a vulnerable minority that is being oppressed. But in fact, this is about being Pro-Russian or Pro-Ukrainian. A Pro-Russian Ukrainian is actually therefore considered a collaborator with the Russian occupiers who want to annex the region.

If the separatists were so committed to the cause, then why does Russia need forced conscriptions? “Forced conscription in Lugano looks like this”:

The other part of this story is that these “conscripts” will get little to no training or equipment and will be used as cannon fodder.

And if this is a civil war, why does Russia need to mass issue Russian passports to the locals?

Let’s face it, this is not a civil war. It’s a Russian occupation.

Finally, I wanted to show you a blatant example of how Russian propaganda is being used to demonize Ukrainians as the evil Nazis in this civil war.

This is former President Petro Poroshenko talking about the separatist regions. Listen to it and you will come away horrified by his callousness towards his fellow Ukrainians:

There’s only one problem. It’s propaganda.

First of all, it is taken out of context. This is how the speech starts and the point he is making is that Ukraine offers a better future and this is evident from the liberated territories where citizens can restart living normal lives.

“This war cannot be won by weapons. Each bullet gives birth to two enemies. And every day of the world, when the Ukrainian state demonstrates in the liberated territories, what citizens, who sang a month ago to the pseudo-separatist regime, understand today, that they get warmth, they get light, they can finally send their children to school, they can begin to receive pensions, pay the loss of the breadwinner, on disability, they get a job, they get paid”

The second problem is one of past and future tenses. The video makes it seem as if he is talking in the future tense when he is in fact talking in the present tense. The point he is making is that people in the occupied regions don’t have what normal citizens in the rest of Ukraine have.

I remember seeing this video for the first time and because of this and some other materials I saw, I had started to think that maybe Ukrainians are just as bad and corrupt. But when you dive deep into the subject matter the narrative crumbles.

Ukraine is a corrupt country that serves as a piggy bank for American politicians and particularly the Biden family

As I explained earlier, Ukraine has problems with corruption and one of the symptoms of this is the emergence of oligarchs that get very rich through their political connections.

There is nothing unique about this phenomenon. There were oligarchs that emerged after the cold war ended in all the former communist countries.

As the rule of law is established in these countries, the oligarchs start to get pushed out because of all the skeletons in their closets (bribes, illegalities, etc).

As rule of law is established and prosecutors open cases against them, they reach out to buy American influence hoping it will help their dossier.

Here is a case involving Rudolph Giuliani working for a Romanian Oligarch, Gabriel “Puiu” Popoviciu, who had serious legal problems.

Giuliani tried to intervene on his behalf.

In 2018, Giuliani wrote a letter to Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in which he decried the “excesses” of Romania’s National Anticorruption Directorate and called for an amnesty for people who had been convicted of crimes initiated by that body in recent years.

Even former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh got money from this particular client.

Who did this Oligarch use before hiring Freeh and Giuliani? He was working with Hunter Biden in 2015.

It’s the same phenomenon in Ukraine.

So here’s the thing, why lay all the blame on countries like Ukraine and Romania? Those oligarchs are private citizens and can spend their money as they like.

Wouldn’t it be better to ask why the US tolerates a system where former politicians and public officials sell their influence in America to shady clients all around the world? And the oligarchs are actually okay compared to some of the other leaders with US representation.

The US has intentionally stoked Ukraine into provoking Russia in the hopes of creating a proxy war that can destabilize Putin

What I’m particularly struck by is Putin’s success in framing the conflict as one between Russia and the West. It’s as if the Ukrainians are just these puppets trapped between great powers and don’t have hundreds of years of their own history with Russia.

Puppets run and hide as happened in Afghanistan. The fact that Ukrainians have chosen to stand and fight and die should make it clear that they have agency in this conflict.

Maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to listen more closely to what the Ukrainian people are saying because it seems to me that they’ve earned that right through enormous sacrifice.

Have we become so cynical that we can no longer see past local political grievances? The conflict in Ukraine has far less to do with the US, EU, or NATO and everything to do with Russia vs Ukraine.

Of course, framing it this way would be very unpopular in Russia, where there are close ties between the populations. This is why Putin prefers to make it a conflict between Russia and the US/NATO.

So every time somebody like Tucker Carlson goes out there and confirms Putin’s narrative he is stabbing Ukrainians in the back. He is giving Putin the “proof” that he needs to feed back to his population. Because if seen as a conflict between Russia and the US/NATO, Russians are far more likely to support the war and its consequences (sanctions, deaths, etc).

Final Thoughts

Some people say I’m biased because I was born in communist Eastern Europe, but I am not alone among conservatives who think this way. Many conservative intellectuals who have been on the front lines fighting against the left are in full agreement with my point of view: Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Douglas Murray are just a few.

I’m adding here an interesting answer that Douglas Murray gave in a recent interview on UnHerd with Freddie Sayers because I think there is some truth to it.

Freddie Sayers: What would your message be to political actors and people in the discourse on the right of politics in the US who find themselves oddly sympathetic to Putin and are found stopping just short of defending him? What’s your message to them?

Douglas Murray: How can you be so foolish as to fall for this man? There is a type of cynicism…which is cynical about everything other than the things it ought to be most cynical about.

We know this in the information age. People who are understandably suspicious of mainstream media…like utterly justifiably suspicious of mainstream media because they’ve seen the Washington Post lie, and they’ve seen the NY Times lie. And then they end up, falling for say Russia Today.

This is a completely avoidable trap, but unfortunately, as I say there is a tendency at the endpoint of some form of modern cynicism that you’re cynical about everything other than the thing you ought to be most cynical about, and a lot of people, sadly, particularly of our generation and particularly the generation younger than us now have very little understanding of what actual propaganda is like from other regimes around the world.

Just this week the China Daily News publishes a cartoon of Uncle Sam covered in corpses and it says America always George Floyds, separations at the border. Do you think the CCP cares about racist killings, do you think the CCP cares when they are separating a million people from their families in one particular province? Do you think they care? Of course they don’t.

A certain type of younger people, in particular, absorbs this and thinks that these people are telling the truth. That used to be a problem on the gullible left and it’s now a problem on the gullible right. You now have people on the gullible right who believe the propaganda pushed out by the Kremlin and by the CCP and there’s a reason.

And the reason is that idiotic actors in our own societies in the west browbeat us with false claims about the Kremlin for years. We were told that the Kremlin bought Brexit. I hate these people for wasting our time and for running down our moral resources and others on this crap. All of these people who have no evidence and didn’t even bother to find out why the British people might have voted to leave the European Union legitimately. They didn’t bother. They invented Kremlin conspiracies.

In the same way in America, a whole class of journalists and politicians didn’t bother to try to work out why the American people might legitimately voted in this man Trump. They didn’t bother. They went immediately for Russian conspiracies.

One of the many reasons I deeply resent these people is because they made millions of people in the west ignore all claims of Russian propaganda. They made people more idiotic because they used false claims, never paid any price for that, never paid any price for their lies. In some cases they’re still pumping those lies around.

So there are plenty of people in the west, now again sadly of the left and the right, who say “I don’t want to hear about this Kremlin stuff because you threw it at us for years and it wasn’t true then and we don’t think it’s true now”.

No! Sometimes it’s true…sometimes it’s true. This is one of the consequences of lies and of pumping lies into society without any cost. You make society stupider and you make it more vulnerable.

We should have unending contempt for the people who have done this as well as trying to correct the people who have very sadly fallen into that trap.

Douglas Murray is a bit brutal in how he puts things, but overall I think he is correct.

I’m not saying that the Democrats understand the situation any better than “Russia bad…because Trump”. I understand the revulsion to the Ukraine virtue-signaling happening on the left. But you have to look past that.

The people who are advocating these non-interventionist policies in Ukraine because of “The Democrats” never seriously looked into the Ukraine conflict before Russia’s invasion. So we have a scenario where a lot of people are catching up on history in a world filled with Putin‘s propaganda. And lo and behold they arrive at the same conclusions as Russia would like them to believe. How convenient.

On the other hand, people with in-depth knowledge and understanding of Ukraine and its history with Russia that predates the invasion have a completely different understanding of the facts because they’ve lived those events in real-time and have a more nuanced understanding. That’s why Europeans as a whole get it a lot better than do Americans unfortunately.

I would compare this to the really poor reputation that Donald Trump has in Europe. Most Europeans do not understand Trump’s appeal to the Republican party and largely consider him a buffoon. That’s not surprising given:

1. The narratives that have been created about Trump by the media

2. The lack of a nuanced understanding of local American politics and the ongoing culture war

The further away you are from the source, the more gets lost in translation.

So now we get to the final important question which is why did Putin invade Ukraine?

It is pure ambition. As Putin nears 70, he wants to cement a legacy for himself, and adding the Ukrainian territory and people back into Russia would put him in the history books alongside Russia’s greatest leaders.

More accurately it would be termed imperialist ambition because what he covets most of all is to reassemble the Soviet Union.

It’s not like he’s been secretive about it. He actually wrote all of this down in an essay he penned last summer.

“The Russian leader uses the essay to reiterate his frequently voiced conviction that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,” while blaming the current collapse in bilateral ties on foreign plots and anti-Russian conspiracies.

The Ukrainian people on the other hand want no part in this delusion and are willing to fight for their independence.

Again, why anybody would believe Putin’s stories about foreign plots and conspiracies is beyond me.

At this point, the final argument I always get is: “Fine, we all agree Putin is a bad guy, and Ukraine is in a bad situation, but why should we care about what’s happening on the other side of the planet?”

Earlier I stated a couple of geopolitical reasons related to the importance of respecting sovereign borders and not allowing abuses under the shield of a nuclear threat.

But I would think that caring about such things is what makes America such a great country…

Here you have Ukraine, a country that has charted its own path, against the will of its Russian neighbor. They are enduring unspeakable horrors as a result of wanting a Western/European future that entails freedom and democracy. The consequence of losing is for them to live under authoritarianism.

Isn’t this exactly the story of America?

Wasn’t it America that taught the world the virtue of standing for liberty and freedom?

If we turn our backs on Ukraine, then we no longer stand for any of that.

It’s okay to be cynical. But don’t give in to the progressive narrative that America has lost its moral virtue.

Don’t lose sight of what makes America a great country.

FAQ

Tucker is just anti-war, what’s wrong with that?

I have no issue with him being anti-war.

I do have a problem with him claiming that we are in a war or in danger of being in a war when that is not the case. A proxy war just means that we are supplying the Ukrainians. By this definition, Sweden is also in a proxy war. It’s semantic games.

I also have an issue with the isolationism he is pushing without acknowledging the underlying issues. It’s easy to say “no more wars”, but that’s a hippie trope from the 70s. This is a very complex issue with pretty vast ramifications.

So what would it mean for the US to become isolationist?

There are no direct threats to the mainland and we already have nuclear deterrence. If the US stops projecting power across the world, then why have such an army?

It sounds a hell of a lot like what the progressive left has been pushing forever which is probably why we’ve not adopted such an extreme policy has never been adopted.

Forget about American isolationism in the past because we are living in a completely different world. An economically integrated world that is vastly more complex than it was 100 years ago when we tried that policy.

The world we live in today has largely been shaped by post WW2 American hegemony. It is American power that has ensured the global stability which has enabled the largest decrease in extreme poverty in world history. It’s not a coincidence.

From this point of view, the US has been the greatest force for good in human history.

Now imagine what happens if the US exited the world stage. There would then be an enormous power vacuum which would quickly be filled by countries like Russia, China, and Iran who have regional and global expansionist ambitions.

The current Russia-Ukraine war is a direct result of American weakness. Putin didn’t do this under Trump. He took Crimea under Obama and invaded Ukraine under Biden.

Trump showed that there is a blueprint whereby you can project strength while also avoiding unnecessary wars.

Doesn’t Russia deserve to have its spheres of influence? Why is the US interfering in their backyard?

Spheres of influence have not been a thing since the end of the cold war. The only exception is Russia which keeps insisting that its sphere of influence must be respected.

The Ukrainian people strongly disagree. They don’t want to be under Russia’s sphere of influence. And honestly, why should they?

This is an outdated model of international affairs which robs sovereign countries of agency in determining their future path.

What about John Mearsheimer and his predictions about Ukraine?

I would argue that all Mearsheimer does is repeat the same talking points as Putin.

Putin basically says “this is how I see things and if you don’t agree with me then I will crush Ukraine”.

Then Mearsheimer comes out and says that Ukraine will be crushed unless we listen to what Putin wants.

Well, what if we disagree with Putin and think he’s full of shit? What if the Ukrainian people have the right to decide their own future and Putin doesn’t get to have a say in what that is.

I understand that many people saw him as some guru because he predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine. Good for him, but all he’s done is repeat Putin’s narrative word for word.

What about the Bio-labs?

I was curious just like everybody else.

I did look into it. There’s nothing there.

It’s too bad because it would have made for some great content, but there’s nothing to see.

Yes, there are US labs there doing research. It’s part of a larger US program that extends outside of just Ukraine. They are not making bioweapons.

This has been part of a Russian disinformation campaign run since at least 2015.

You would think that if this were a real threat, Russia would have captured one of these labs to expose the truth.

What happened instead? The story quickly disappeared.

Isn’t Putin fighting for traditional conservative values and the Christian faith?

Russia is about as religious as Belgium and the Netherlands…which means not very.

And I’m not sure that invading your neighbor and slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians is a very Christian thing to do by Putin.

Yes, Russian society is more conservative than the west but it is the same way in all of Eastern Europe. There is nothing special about Putin in this sense.

Putin has tried to craft this persona but it has nothing to do with reality.

Final Final Thought!

I’m not sure that I have changed any minds with this.

But I do hope I’ve given you another perspective to consider.

What I hope that people would take away from this is that the story here is not the West vs Russia. That is a flat-out falsehood necessary for Putin to frame this war so that it is palatable for Russians.

Blaming the West as always being wrong and evil is a progressive tactic…don’t do that.

Don’t let partisanship blind you to the fact that this is about Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.

The left needlessly turned Covid-19 into a partisan issue. I hope the right doesn’t repeat the same mistake and make Russia-Ukraine partisan.

Elon Musk Buys Twitter

The world's most famous African American has finally done it. Only cost $44 billion, not a small sum by any stretch, but Elon Musk has managed to take Twitter private.

Somehow I had the feeling that he was the one who was going to give the world the free platform that it needed. If you can look past my inexplicable misspelling of “speech” (twice), this tweet was fairly prescient:

To be clear, I followed up this tweet with a clarification of what “bad speech” is:

This is exactly what Elon has stated his policy to be: if it is not illegal then it should be allowed.

So why did I think Elon would or should be the one to do it?

• I think it’s pretty obvious that there was a desperate need for this in terms of maintaining the integrity of the public dialogue necessary for people to feel they have a functional democracy

• He’s not really a Republican nor a Democrat…he’s more akin to a classic liberal or slightly less of center

• A track record of innovation and success with technology companies

• He has the resources to make sure it’s done the right way

I wrote that over a year ago, but I think over time he has also come around to my first point which is that it is essential for our future.

Musk was 100% correct when he said:

“having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.”

Why is Twitter Relevant?

Before I move on, I want to address this question. After all, Twitter is the smallest and least profitable of the major social media platforms. It does not have the reach of Facebook or TikTok, and as a tech company does not have the financial clout of Google, Amazon, or Apple. So who really cares about Twitter because it’s not even really that representative of the real world?

All these things are true, but Twitter has something that others don’t: a concentration of thought leaders comprising all major fields…especially those of cultural and political importance.

Therefore, even if Twitter isn’t always representative of the conversations being had by normal people, it has an oversized influence on politics and culture. This is how you get to the point where a small but loud political minority can mainstream fringe ideas like Critical Race Theory and Gender Theory.

On the other hand, Twitter is also the place where a handful of relatively obscure accounts, such as my @gummibear737, were part of the “Team Reality” movement which fought back against Covid-19 disinformation and tyranny. Eventually, with facts and logic, we were able to create a powerful counternarrative that sought to frame Covid-19 in an appropriate context.

Btw, there’s even a book out about Team Reality now!

Twitter is the “public square” where influential people publicly debate the most relevant (though not always most important) issues of the day. This might seem backward because it leaves so many people out of the discussion, but in reality, these discussions were already occurring behind the scenes in elite circles for all of human history. Now you get to see it play out in real-time.

It’s also somewhat of a meritocracy because if you can post interesting content, you can grow your follower base and be a bigger part of the discussion.

It’s not perfect, but it’s the closest thing that we have to a global public town square.

Can Elon Musk be trusted to take over Twitter?

For the record, I think Elon is a breath of fresh air. I don’t always agree with him, but he is honest and real and you know where he stands. Sometimes he is brilliantly insightful, sometimes he’s willing to say the quiet part out loud and sometimes he’s completely goofy. I’m fine with all of it because I think his heart is in the right place.

And don’t forget that acquiring Twitter is not without risk. I got this DM from a Twitter buddy of mine recently:

“Musk is taking an enormous risk with this deal… It’s borderline sacrificial

If he’s doing this for the reasons he says he is…then he deserves the Nobel peace prize…

Because the bank could easily own TSLA in a year or two if things go the wrong way…”

I believe Elon when he says that it’s not about the money with his purchase of Twitter.

What will change with Elon Musk’s ownership?

Elon Musk has promised free speech. Unless it is illegal, he wants to allow it.

I fully agree with him on this.

However, I came across this tweet which struck me as a bit strange.

It is implied that the extremes of the right and the left would be less prominent in the future of Twitter. I get the intent: these extremes are currently over-represented and suck a lot of the oxygen out of the Twitter space. However, you can’t minimize their voice without resorting to some kind of censorship. Deboosting somebody’s account is a type of free speech censorship.

I’m not sure how Elon plans on addressing these issues or implementing his plan. His Twitter feed reads like a stream of consciousness so I don’t read too much into what he tweets because he’s mostly just thinking out loud.

But I am fairly certain that he will figure it out and we will see a platform where free speech is broadly permitted and content moderation is transparent.

So why is the left losing their minds over Elon’s acquisition of Twitter?

The answer is pretty simple.

This tweet by Elon Musk states an inconvenient truth for the left. It is a conclusion that more and more people in the middle are coming to. I resisted identifying as a conservative for a long time because I considered myself right of center…but I can no longer see the center anymore from where I’m currently at. That’s how far it has moved.

Some necessary background

A while back the left decided that hate speech is violence. The logical conclusion for them was that censorship was, therefore, necessary to ensure a “safe and inclusive” environment.

Then came the issue of disinformation/misinformation and it was determined that this was also a very dangerous thing because it is how Trump got elected. The logical conclusion was that this also needed to be censored.

Unfortunately, this is a slippery slope, and pretty soon hate speech/disinformation became anything that the left doesn’t agree with.

Hence Twitter became a place with no transparent rules about what was allowed and the Overton Window kept getting smaller and smaller and moving further and further left.

The inconvenient truth

The left has been trapped in a progressive echo chamber for so long that they have lost touch with average people.

And platforms like Twitter cover for them by censoring those who would call out their crazy positions and ideas.

For example, elementary school children should not be taught about sex or gender…full stop. This is not a controversial position for the overwhelming majority of parents. Yet if you go by what is said on social media, you would think that trans children are being bullied and persecuted.

We’ve been living in a modern-day version of The Emperor’s New Clothes where we are supposed to pretend that crazy is normal:

• Defund the Police

• Radical Gender Theory

• Critical Race Theory

Social media censorship has been necessary to prop up these ideas by protecting their advocates from debate and criticism.

It’s been incredible to see so many people on the left go nuts about the prospect of having free speech and debate on Twitter. They are terrified (or should I say triggered) by the notion of being challenged to debate their ideas.

Twitter moving forward and the rise of Gen-X

I think the tide is turning and we are starting to see a backlash to the insanity of woke progressives. Elon’s acquisition of Twitter is by far the most significant development in this sense:

A word about Gen-X

It shouldn’t be lost on you that Elon Musk is a prime example of Gen-X.

And it is Gen-X that is starting to stand up and say enough is enough.

It’s funny because this was the generation that mostly just wanted to be left alone, but at some point, it was too much to remain quiet.

For those of you who don’t know, Gen-X tends to be:

• Independent and resourceful → many were latch key kids and learned to be independent as children

• Cynical about politics → The Clintons and the Bushes will do that to you

• Open-minded → First generation to grow up in a post civil-rights movement world - fairly liberal on social policy

• Commonsensical → Don’t like fancy stuff, don’t bend to trends, work hard-play hard mentality

But probably most important is that Gen-X is the only generation that is tech-savvy, but not tech-dependent.

And reluctantly, Gen-X has started to stand up and speak out.

Elon Musk is probably the greatest manifestation of this phenomenon. I don’t sense that this is an issue he is taking on because he’s passionate about politics or culture wars.

He’s taking it on reluctantly because there isn’t really any other option.

I’m Gen-X and that’s how I came into it. I never really followed politics during the Obama presidency or before. But as more of the crazy aspects of modern culture have revealed themselves, I also felt compelled to speak out.

This is far from over

We’ve got younger generations that have been raised on safety-ism.

Maybe they will grow out of it as they get older, but we’re in uncharted territory here. Usually, young people eventually get slapped back to reality upon encountering the real world.

But we’re living in a world where people spend all day on their phones and the government can print all the money it wants. Societal collapse can happen much faster in this kind of environment.

So it is important not to let up and get complacent because the backlash against Elon and Twitter has already begun.

I expect every bad thing in the future to be blamed on Twitter.

It didn’t take long after I wrote this:

For AOC to predict that all future hate crimes will be the fault of Twitter:

I knew this would be their line of attack because their worldview crumbles under scrutiny and the only way to prevent that is through censorship or cancellation.

After all, if speech is violence then no debate can ever take place again.

I think it is imperative that more people join Twitter and see this battle of ideas play out in real-time.

Still…in the grand scheme of things, this is a good day.

Big props to Elon Musk for taking this leap…he deserves all the memes.