Back in January 2021, I wrote a three-part series of posts [One, Two, Three] about how the Republican party was cementing itself as the bastion of delusional conspiracy theorists.
None of this should be surprising: the foundational belief about the Trump-era right is that the existing knowledge- and legitimacy-producing mechanisms have been captured by ideological/tribal enemies and can no longer be relied upon.
This reflex isn't entirely wrong - the institutions have been captured, and are generating a lot of bare-faced nonsense and propaganda - but it is incomplete. Not everything produced by those mechanisms is untrue. After all, the best propaganda has truth at its center.
The problem is that the animating political spirit of the age is negative-polarization, which focuses on destroying enemies, rather than building alternate institutions. Thus, the nu-right's irresistible instinct isn't to actually do what Tucker Carlson tried and failed with the Daily Caller - to create a parallel NY Times-quality institution without the progressive slant - but instead to just force-reject everything with the "Cathedral's" imprimatur. That winds up chucking out some babies in addition to the bathwater, and creates a lot of space for new informational entrepreneurs to operate, many of which are grifters or just wrong.
However, observing that the nu-right is suffering from a polluted information-generation and -verification process doesn't obviate the original insight - that the social institutions which ostensibly are supposed to perform this function in a neutral and public-spirited way are very much partisan, and also generative of horrific nonsense. Instead, it's indicative of the catch-22 they're in, and the difficulty of creating well-functioning knowledge- and legitimacy-dispensing institutions. After all, it's not like there's some hose of undiluted pure truth they could be drinking from.
Is calling boys girls and girls boys going off the rails? Is the sterilization of children going off the rails? I don’t dispute the moron conspiracy theorists out there. All true. But don’t allow that truth to give you a sense of comfort that you’re getting it all correct if you’re on the left. You’re bat shit crazy too. I know, this is just whataboutism. Got it. Nice defense. As long as the right is 10% crazier than you than you’re sane.
Exactly the point I was trying to make! But most people don't have some combination of the time, inclination, or ability to rederive 2+2=4 from first principles. We accept most things on faith, assuming that the institutions and people who assure us these things are true are not lying, or shading the truth out of self-interest or ideological fervor.
The problem comes when you first notice that those institutions and people *are* lying or ideologically-slanted, and in ways contrary to your interest. Suddenly the systems of trust that underlay your worldview are ripped away - the thought "if they're lying now, what was to stop them lying about all those other things" is pretty irresistible! Worse, people outside the mainstream of knowledge-generation who had been yelling that everyone was lying now look more credible and more intelligent - after all, they were apparently smart enough to call out the lying liars before you did!
It's a very hard problem, and one that's inherent to radical discourses. You see a lot of the same thing in the left-wing movements of the mid-20th century; they correctly noticed that much of the power-structures of mainstream society were opposed to them, or had otherwise shaded or hidden truths, but rapidly fell into conspiracizing.
Jonestown and the People's Temple is a prime example of this - from powerful and legitimately impressive radical community group to paranoid mass-suicide in the jungle in just a few years. Less-catastrophically, Erin Brockovich (the paralegal who got famous for assisting in a big toxic tort lawsuit against PG&E and whose story was turned into a big Julia Roberts movie) in latter days kinda went off the rails will all sorts of unsubstantiated accusations. Similarly, a lot of anti-war activists, after realizing how interlinked the press and Pentagon are, go a little (or a lot) kooky. Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, the Code Pink people, etc.
I don't envy the choice that Americans are going to have to make in a couple of months. Speaking as a Canuck ..., it seems a tough call as to which is going to be the proverbial "lesser of two weevils" -- so to speak.
Something from Sam Harris that I'd run across some time back:
SH: "At that point Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared … Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is, if we … understand he’s getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden’s deals in Ukraine or … China, it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in."
I kind of feel the same way about the Democrats and their pandering to the transloonie nutcases, to their conflation of sex and gender. The upshot of which is the butchering of autistic and dysphoric children -- crime of the century, a medical scandal to top the Tuskegee Syphilis Study compounded with "Dr." Mengele:
You know my stance on the issue and there's no dispute that ideological institutional capture is a huge problem. But as bad as things are, correction mechanisms like the Cass Review haven't gone away and are still a guard against capture. Republicans have abandoned virtually every mechanism, can you imagine a "Cass Review" for the 2020 election that folks would care about? That's the foundational distinction.
With all due respect there Yassine, I kind a think you're wearing the proverbial rose-colored glasses.
That "correction mechanisms like the Cass Review" are clearly not only not working on the Democrat side but are intentionally and willfully broken is, as they say, not a bug but a feature of the Democrats -- a serious "systemic" flaw, if not a fatal one.
For all of the rot on the Republican side, at least they're not castrating autistic children. You might note the 20-odd Republican States which have more less banned puberty blockers and "gender-affirming" surgeries" -- AKA, sterilization.
Some wag quipped that the Republicans (Nixon) put a man on the moon, but it is the Democrats (Biden) who've put men into women's sports, toilets, and change rooms.
Sure, even if I concede that the mechanism is broken, I generally expect Dems to get it right much more often on average on the whole landscape of issues. They definitely still have blind-spots, and that's a good illustration of Yglesias' point for why we need a robust and non-crazy conservative movement to be skeptical of institutional orthodoxy. If anyone was a single-issue voter on being against gender ideology, I'd tell them to vote Republican.
"Single-issue"? Like immigration? Black Lives Matter? DEI? The rot in Academia? Twitter Files? Apropos of the last, see Taibbi's latest: "Zuckerberg Defies the Borg"
Kinda think the transgender issue -- and all of its odious manifestations -- is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and is part and parcel of all of the other issues which the Democrats are dropping the ball on. Substacker, lawyer, & author Helen Dale interviewed Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater -- of the Sex Matters group -- during which they argued, not without a great deal of justification, that that issue is a "civilization threatening/ending movement":
Again, even if I concede Dems have failed on those issues (and I don't agree), I have no reason to believe that Reps offer viable solutions. They might be accidentally correct on some trans issues sometimes but right now the movement lacks the mentality to identify out solutions and lacks the competency to implement them.
Might be moot whether the Republicans could do worse. As for a "lack of competency", I see Harris is being accused of flip-flopping on "The Wall!!" -- wasn't there a Pink Floyd movie on that? 😉🙂
"As the GOP targets Harris’ border wall stance, the details matter" -- indeed they do:
At best, she's talking out of both sides of her mouth -- apparently promising money for the wall, but next to no willingness to follow through on it. Looked to be no more than a political ploy.
But I wonder if you ever read David Brooks NYTimes article which asked, "Are we the bad guys?":
"it is the Democrats (Biden) who've put men into women's sports, toilets, and change rooms."
I regret to inform you that that's been happening for more than 4 years. Decades, at least. Under Republicans as well as Democrats.
Incidentally, I worked an event at the local convention center this past weekend. Last year, my department was located on a floor that had gender-neutral restrooms, but this year, it was on a different floor that didn't. And I definitely preferred the arrangement last year.
I don't especially _want_ to use the women's restroom, but if it comes down to a choice between that and the men's—where stalls are filthy and limited in number, and where I can expect to get weird comments (or worse) if I'm at the mirror for 10 minutes fixing my makeup—then the women's it is.
It seems to me that if the Republicans were serious about stopping this, they'd advocate for more gender-neutral facilities. Why don't they?
Similarly, it seems to me that if the Republicans were serious about reducing the number of young people transitioning, they'd advocate funding research into alternative treatments for dysphoria (or autism, or whatever they think the root cause is). As it stands now, their position seems to be based on the same kind of wishful thinking that the Democrats exhibit on guns: the idea that if they just pass a law banning something, that will stop people from getting it or even wanting to get it—even if it's something that's easily transported across state lines or sent through the mail, like handguns and medications.
That would do a lot to turn this into "a difference in values, rather than a disagreement over basic logic or reality", as the article says.
> "I regret to inform you that that's been happening for more than 4 years. Decades, at least. Under Republicans as well as Democrats."
Probably. The roots of it seem to go back some distance -- Kurt Andersen's "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" suggests it goes back to the Mayflower:
KA: "Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled."
Can't get more into fantasy than to think people can change sex. Steven Pinker had a tweet some 6 years ago that more or less summarized that particular problem:
SP: "I dislike Jordan Peterson's counter-Enlightenment wooliness (Christianity, Nietzsche, Jung, lobsters), but Caitlyn Flanagan explains his appeal in an era when the cultural Left seems to be trying to out-stupid the Right (impossible, but they're trying)."
Kinda think the Democrats have taken the prize there, though Christopher Rufo on the Christian Right is giving them a run for their money:
CR: "It's not a perfect term, but 'child sex-change procedure' is immediately understandable to the public and much more accurate regarding its intention—which, yes, is impossible—than 'gender-affirming care,' the new euphemism they're pushing."
Ah yes, this is another area where more work is needed to turn it into a difference of values.
"Can't get more into fantasy than to think people can change sex."
What, specifically, do you think they believe that isn't true?
Is it something objective that can be tested and disproved, like a disagreement over what exactly the medications do?
Or is it simply a disagreement over what to _call_ the thing they do?
"It's not a perfect term, but 'child sex-change procedure' is immediately understandable to the public and much more accurate regarding its intention—which, yes, is impossible"
This raises the same questions. Rufo is referring to providing medication as a "procedure", then saying its intention is something impossible. Does he think the people prescribing that medication are mistaken about what the medication can do? Or is he simply objecting to _calling_ it a "sex change", a term which he introduced himself?
Good questions, though I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at with them.
For example, you say, Yassine says, "disagreements hinged on a difference in values, rather than a disagreement over basic logic or reality." Kinda think Rufo, and the crowd he's pandering to, is more or less subscribing to the Kindergarten Cop definitions for the sexes: "boys (males) have penises and girls (females) have vaginas". From which it "logically" follows that if people change their genitalia from one type to the other then they have, ipso facto, changed sex. ("Act now! Offer ends soon! 🙄")
But that certainly seems to the basis for the common acceptance of such changes -- and has been for some time. For example:
"1952: It’s front-page news when George Jorgensen Jr. is reborn as Christine Jorgensen, gaining international celebrity and notoriety as the first widely known person to undergo a successful sex-change operation."
But what follows "logically" often very much depends on one's premises -- which tend to be axioms, articles of faith, and definitions. Hence, maybe or often, a question of values.
The folk-biology generally makes the genitalia the defining criterion -- largely why the judge in the Tickle vs Giggle case favoured the former. And why Khelif was allowed to compete in women's boxing at the Olympics.
However, the standard biological definitions generally take the presence of gonads -- functional or not depending on whether one makes the sign of the cross with two fingers or three ... -- as those defining criteria. And, in the latter case, it is simply medically impossible, at least with current technology, to replace functioning testicles with functioning ovaries or vice versa. Which is why I objected to Rufo's phrasing, particularly since it's the biology that's being pressed into service in various disputes related to transgenderism.
Something that Yassine and I more or less agree on. See his comment on a Substack post of mine, his post, "There Are No Primordial Definitions of Man/Woman", and my conversations there with him and others:
Thats because a cass review of the 2020 election would be performed by institutions filled top to bottom with lefties and they would find exactly what you would expect them to find.
In fact there have been several independent reviews of the 2020 election and all but one of them has found evidence of significant irregularities. Just last month an engineer “hacked” a voting machine in a courtroom in a few minutes.
Then there’s the tens of thousands of invalid voter registrations that are being cleared from voter rolls by states that care.
And the democrats voting unanimously to *not* ensure voters are eligible at the polls.
But you’re right, just stop being weird guys. I’m sure it’s fine.
To everyone reading, it's gracious for ReadingRainbow to give us a pitch perfect demonstration of the delusion I'm talking about. There are several red flags in the comment above that are recurring elements. Notice how they never cite sources, they instead just reference vague "several independent reviews" without linking to anything. The reason this happens is typically because they're just repeating a meme talking point they read on twitter a long time ago and therefore have no idea what they're talking about.
The vagueness is a mask and a defense mechanism; it's best to avoid specifics in order to avoid being challenged on them.
I think you're probably referring to my quote of a comment by Sam Harris: "it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in."
Haven't the foggiest idea what he might be referring to and how much water it might hold. Though one might argue that the "Trump fake electors plot" is something of a smoking gun for which Trump should be doing 20 years to life:
Hey! Another fellow Motte-er-ite! Amazing, and less surprising by the hour. It feels about 10 years in the past to me at this point but it was easily one of the most valuable and important web communities I ever participated in.
Regarding the Motte, I would consider myself one of the disaffected liberals who was there from the /r/ssc/culture_war days. There were definitely people I hated interacting with and the conservative slop was heftier than the progressive slop. But the moderation was something special. And I was exposed to stuff that was simply not filtering down to me.
There was a strong signal against the noise but as with all Internet subcultures it faded into background radiation—mostly because everything else on Reddit turned into garbage and stopped using it.
I’ll be sure to follow. Keep an eye out, there are others! ( @Tracingwoodgrains)
I've just run across your 'stack and enjoyed reading this. While I agree with your premise about nutjobs on the right, there are plenty of TDS-infected shrieking nuts on the left, many of them with their own TV shows.
There are stupid people always and everywhere believing all manner of stupid things. I will keep an eye on your space since you seem like an honest, thoughtful person with whom I almost completely disagree.
I like substantive disagreement, so welcome! You will never ever hear me claim that there are no notjubs on the left, nor will I deny that TDS is a real thing for some people. My archive has plenty of evidence of both. The fundamental distinction will remain however, the conservatives have no error-correction tools to keep their wingnuts from taking over. If the Republican leadership had gotten together and successfully pressured Trump off the GOP presidential ticket, I would not have written this post. The fact that such a hypothetical is so unthinkable is what I find concerning about its current culture.
Please could you go into your 100% Open Borders stance in an article.
I understand that there’s a case to be made for open borders à la Brian Caplan, where non citizens may not have access to welfare/citizenship, however wouldn’t a 100% open borders policy just lead to mass slums in Europe?
As long as the gigantic productivity divide between Europe and Africa remains, millions would rather be homeless in W. Europe than remain in their home countries, leading to slum development as seen in Calais, and outside the Spanish enclaves in Morocco - and that’s without open borders.
Interested to see what other people’s opinions are as well.
The case is basically the same one Caplan presents. Some aspects of my support for open borders are based on material consequences (specifically how much immigrants benefit) but some are based on not violating the principle of free movement. That means that there are instances where I prioritize the principle even if negative material consequences can be demonstrated. A lot of other policies have a similar tension for me, for example I like gun rights even if I acknowledge it contributes to more homicides.
Interesting. I think that there is a gulf between European and American attitudes towards immigration - probably influenced by history and geography a lot.
Please consider writing an article about this issue because I would like to learn more about the pro open-borders ideas.
I really wouldn't be able to top what Bryan Caplan has already done. I probably agree with everything he has said on this issue, and he's addressed many specific concerns: https://openborders.info/
No, not present day Texas. Back when it was still part of Mexico. A bunch of Americans moved in, decided they didn’t want to be a part of Mexico and then decided to join the USA. Mexico was like “hey no you can’t do that” and they had a big war.
In a world of unrestricted immigration China could easily do the same thing today. Plonk a couple million loyal Chinese in Western Australia, get them to declare WA is China now, claim all the mineral resources they spend so much buying from us currently. Of course this would probably start a war, just as the USA did when they annexed Texas, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen.
I still support a lot of immigration, but this is one reason why I say that 100% open is going too far.
When Trump won the primary first time around, my family put their hands in the middle and pledged that if Trump won the election we would leave. Six months later, we put our house on the market and came home after 25 years in the lovely USA.
But, as Yassine says: it's different this time. Last time around Trump was surrounded by Adults in the Room and the worst we could expect was policies that we didn't agree with. But even those Adults in the Room said Trump is not fit to be President and he won't have them this time around.
It’s true that he won’t have the adults in the room to counsel him if he wins again, but if it’s any consolation, I also think it means he'll be lacking the competence to actually implement his crazy schemes.
Authors like Hanania and you have helped me to recognize and ameliorate my penchant for conspiracy thinking. Being open minded and distrusting is a recipe for rabbit holes and wingnuttery.
Sad to hear about what happened to The Motte. I stopped keeping up with it consistently after it moved away from Reddit, and the few times I tried to weigh in on a subject with which I have personal experience, the responses I got were so hostile and incurious that I gave up.
I think you underestimate just how much the conspiratorial thinking, as delusional as it is, is grounded in real misgivings about the direction of this country. Do you not remember what we learned about the rise of the Third Reich in grade school? The Treaty of Versailles and the humiliation of Germany was the source of the resentment that eventually led to the mad conspiracy theories and the Holocaust. Nazism grew on fertile soil. Perhaps if Hitler had been destroyed early on, WW2 might not have happened. But it might have happened anyway, and the insanity of Hitler's ideology might merely have been an epiphenomena that would have been replaced by some other epiphenomenal ideology. That, I believe, is the place that we find ourselves in today. And as someone who *is* voting for Trump, I *don't* see these problems going away even if he is defeated. I see this country sliding deeper into a hell that was not caused by Trumpism, but by something more fundamental, in the first place. It is my opinion that we must address that thing that is more fundamental if we want to have any hope of dispelling the delusional thinking and behavior that is flourishing today.
This is a strange comment - by the logic of *your own analogy*, you are voting for Hitler. (To be clear, I am not saying Trump=Hitler, I’m saying that *you* are analogizing Trump~=Hitler while affirming that you are voting for Trump).
I’m only using the Hitler analogy to express how Nazism wasn’t about Nazism. It was about something more fundamental. The same is true about what is going on in American politics today. I’m not suggesting that what is going on in American politics today is as bad as Nazism. It isn’t. I do think it will get there (on both sides of the political spectrum) if we interpret the current dysfunction as simply the product of a few bad apples. If you want to read anything deeper into what I’m saying than that, you’re free to. But I didn’t mean it and I don’t think it.
Oh, I dunno, the entire russiagate conspiracy theory was so loopy that it would have gotten you laughed out of the 1962-era John Birch Society as a loon with an overactive imagination, yet it remains a Team D Article Of Faith.
"Russiagate" as a term has been thoroughly abused into ambiguity. The indefensible loony versions are "Russia hacked the voting systems and switched the results so Trump can win" or "Trump has been an undercover KGB asset since the 1980s". The other version is "there was a high degree of involvement between Trump associates and Russia" which resulted in multiple convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials
I don't know anyone that denies the latter as it's all well-documented, but just saying "Russiagate was a hoax" is used to obscure it by implying the former.
It also includes candidate Trump publicly requesting an adversarial state continue to hack his political opponent for electoral gain.
But as you said none of this counts because he's not a literal russian asset. This is frustrating enough in maga land. Although at least understandable given they've already fallen down the delusion well.
Russiagate hoax being parroted in "heterodox" discourse is more frustrating to me tho. It's the same negative partisanship of "owning the PMC". Which is just a gussying up "owning the libs" with some class consciousness and faux nuance.
Ultimately, Mueller's investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"
It was fabricated out of whole cloth. What did happen was the Obama administration/Clinton campaign used federal law enforcement agencies to illegally surveil a political opponent during an election.
Everyone seeing this comment should note the bait and switch. ReadingRainbow makes up their own definition of "Russiagate" and pats themselves on the back for refuting a strawman. They also repeat meme talking points like "Obama illegally surveilled Trump" but they'll never ever be able to provide a source for this claim.
The FBI withheld exonerating information from the FISA court to keep the Page wiretap open. The CIA told the FBI that Carter Page was their asset, not the Russians, yet the FBI kept the investigation ongoing.
Your summary is inaccurate and misleading. To take just one person, Paul Manafort was the Trump campaign chair and he was convicted (among other finance fraud) of laundering millions of dollars in offshore accounts he received from pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. The only way you can say that Russiagate was totally made up is if you somehow exclude Manafort from your definition of Russiagate.
Question: don't you find so, that behind every utterly crazy conspiracy theory, there is a saner one, just people somehow did not get that message? A saner version for election fraud theory is that in the long run, a more diverse society is more likely to move towards a liberal direction. I mean at the very least the immigrants notice the conservatives don't like them and vote appropriately.
And to the extent that they do vote liberal it’s because they want free shit and know they are never going to have to pay for it.
Look at which demographics are net tax contributors to the federal government vs which aren’t. You fill find a direct correlation to party demographics.
Right-wing delusionalism is a thing - amusing, pathetic and scary sometimes. But remember when we were being told the current president was “as sharp as a tack”?
All very interesting, and convinces me that Trump is cynically manipulating the audience he thinks will get him elected. Right now, I don’t think it’s going to work. Is your concern is that it will? The election is Harris’s to lose, I think.
But the problem as I see it is that whereas Trump poses some undesirable possibilities if he is elected, Harris poses a lot of undesirable certainties if she is elected.
Trump’s first term was not everything, or even a whole lot, of what I would have wished for, but I give him a B minus, overall, with heavy weight on SC appointments & foreign policy. Obama/Biden/Harris was disastrous on all fronts, home and abroad, but in my more immediate concern, abroad. If she’s elected, we will lose the seemingly inevitable regional hot war with China. I’m not sure it will be any different with Trump, but maybe he’ll make us better prepared not to lose as badly.
So I’m willing to risk Trump & hope, if not for the best, that the system will prevent the worst, which I have little hope it will do with Harris in office and the inevitable Democratic Congress if she wins.
Trump can win if there are enough crazy stupid people, and his victory would vindicate that ideology. I love this country but my least favorite thing about it is how high Trump is polling despite the cavalcade of insanity he represents.
I don't see what exactly has been "disastrous" about Obama/Biden/Harris. They've been fine to me, just like Trump as president was mostly fine until he had to deal with multiple crises in 2020 at which point his reflex is to prioritize his own interests over anything else. An example would be how he insisted that Grand Princess passengers to stay on the ship so that the covid cases wouldn't count on American stats.
And I agree with Saul Glasman below, Trump and his entourage are not people I would trust to competently build and deploy institutional capacity.
Respectfully, I think that the Obama/Biden/Harris-led Democrats have been incredibly disastrous. They've presided over (and arguably helped inflame) a massive spike in racial grievance politics, and a significant degradation of relations between racial groups, including supporting outright lies and propaganda in "Ethnic Studies" curricula across the nation. They've also engaged in blatant racial and sexual discrimination (including in healthcare prioritization and delivery - something that gets called an atrocity when it's old white people doing it) and spoils system politics, undermined the rule of law on the border and student loan debt, suborned criminal harassment and political prosecution of their opponents, exploded the U.S. debt, and incurred significant consumer pain through overheated inflationary spending. They've also failed to exercise leadership to put forward any solution to the massive housing crunch that their immigration policies have exacerbated, or the shockingly-rickety state of the U.S.'s utility infrastructure and power grid. Their major diplomatic initiatives in Ukraine and the MidEast have also been flops.
I don't think Trump is all that competent, and we already have evidence that he doesn't give two figs for fiscal discipline. But I don't think he'll actively discriminate against me and mine the way the Democrats have and will, and more importantly the press, the legal community, and civil society will actually mobilize against Trump's failings, whereas they consistently line up to at best defend, and at worst gaslight the public about the Dem's failings.
Trump might talk tough on China but he can be easily swayed, as his flip-flop on TikTok showed. Meanwhile, building military readiness for China requires institutional capacity, something Harris might be able to muster but which will definitely be impossible for Trump's slate of goons and cronies.
Nowadays, I wonder if it's maybe not exact, but uncomfortably close. It does seem to capture some of a dynamic that's real. If it was toned down a little, just a shade from the literal "Nazi" hyperbole, it would match a lot of what's apparent. That is, "You said I support a racist, so I'll go join this group of cranks and authoritarians, and it's all your fault because of what you did!".
I'm really not sure what to do, in practice. It's just not realistic to expect all liberals and leftists to never offend right-wingers, and to police the country to make sure nobody anywhere ever advocates for a policy that right-wingers hate. It's a big country, and it's absurd to imagine the rantiest right-wingers will have veto power over everything in it. But the moment there's anything at all, like the guy in the cartoon, they'd claim that liberals made them do it.
There's some really worrisome implications which follow. Again, I'm at a loss.
I think this dynamic and real and goes both ways. Republicans called Obama a socialist and a lot of lefties said “well I like Obama I guess I’m a socialist too”.
People got called racist for eg opposing immigration and said “well fine I guess I’m racist then.”
I think the solution is to recognise that attacking your mainstream opponents as extremists legitimises extremism in their eyes rather than delegitimising leftism/rightism, and that if you think extremists on the other side are bad then you should employ more discretion in your language.
To add to this, I don’t think it’s a binary problem. You can’t exercise total message discipline over half the population. But you can have *less* extremism-accusation, or you can have *more* extremism accusation.
And I think people react differently to being accused of some form of extremism once to being accused of it 200 times. The first time, you say “no I’m not”. The 200th time you say “who cares what you think” or “so what if I am”.
Different people will have different cutoff points. And of course some people will be extremists regardless of what anyone says. But while I don’t think there’s a path to *everyone* being sane and reasonable, there is a path to the world becoming somewhat less insane and unreasonable.
But the problem remains - because even if I, personally, "employ more discretion", there's going to be plenty of people who don't. And I can't police them, and it's often not clear it'd be proper to do so. Because "discretion" can mean accepting the framework of the most hypersensitive extremists, the veto from right-wing ranters. That's not practical or reasonable. For a specific example, TheMotte was/is filled with people who I think do reasonably warrant being called "racists", and I'm well aware of everything they'd say in response. Handing them this veto, saying they can't be called racists because of their sensitivities, seems to me both morally wrong and politically impossible. It's going straight into the cartoon above.
If someone said that the Holocaust didn't happen, and it's a myth created by Jewish power-mongers, would I need to employ more discretion and never, ever, call them antisemitic? If I did, should people finger-wag that's contributing to polarization, as antisemitism only means hatred of Jews but the claims are merely discussing history and politics? Because that's what has to follow. Can you see where that ends up?
Note, I agree, some left-wingers are too broad in accusations. Granted! The point here is that some right-winger are too narrow. And critically, it's unreasonable to expect the entire political world to agree to such narrowness, even if again the left can go overboard in the opposite direction.
I agree completely (including about some of the Motte posters). There is nothing wrong - and quite a bit right - about calling actual racists racists.
I think both sides need to marginalise and disown their extremists. The people who say Hitler was right or that Hamas did nothing wrong are disgusting.
The problem comes when people start throwing around communist accusations because someone supports publicly funded healthcare, or racist accusations because someone supports secure borders. That sort of rhetoric is unjustified and counterproductive, and we need to build the norms within our own movements that such language is discrediting, unserious, and relegated to fringe weirdos that respectable people will distance themselves from.
You don’t have to fabricate authoritarian bogeymen they are already in office.
It’s incomprehensible the kind of bubble you must live in. The people systematically violating the first amendment rights of millions of Americans while using kangaroo court lawfare to target political opponents while holding protesters in federal detainment for years without charges are the bad guys.
To everyone, this is another example of ReadingRainbow just recycling meme talking points they can't substantiate. For instance, they'll never be able to point to any actual specific example of a single protestor "in federal detainment for years without charges". It's a talking point they've hallucinated but continue to repeat credulously.
> Combined with his very visible cognitive downward spiral
Why do you believe this? My impression has been that he always speaks in a rambling and somewhat incoherent way, but I haven't noticed any significant change recently compared to 2016.
It's true that he's always spoken in a weird way but I see a marked change from 2016. The highlights are: heavier slurring, lots of mispronunciations, and frequent name confusion. The weirdest one has been referred to as "glitching" where he sort of gets stuck on a word and you see him grimace, one of his shoulders goes up, and he tries to massage over it by saying "I tell you what" or a similar filler phrase. I don't have time to compile a full collection of examples but David Pakman regularly posts examples on his YouTube channel under very clickbaity titles.
Difficult to exaggerate how disingenuous it is for liberal elites to question Trump’s mental fitness after the last 4 years of gaslighting the country about how everything with Biden was fine and anybody who suggested otherwise was a right wing conspiracy theorist. Shameful, really.
Even if that's true, only one side managed to kick out their old senile guy at the top. That's a damning indictment for the other side refusing to face the music.
It all goes back to climate science denial. Back in the 1990s, the best and brightest on the right (Cato, AEI, Heritage) didn't want to accept the political implications of climate change, so they preferred to listen to a bunch of hacks, mostly the leftovers of the tobacco industry campaign against smoking restrictions. That inevitably led them to conspiracy theories in which scientists were making up their findings either in the service of world government or (more prosaically) to get more grant funding.
None of this should be surprising: the foundational belief about the Trump-era right is that the existing knowledge- and legitimacy-producing mechanisms have been captured by ideological/tribal enemies and can no longer be relied upon.
This reflex isn't entirely wrong - the institutions have been captured, and are generating a lot of bare-faced nonsense and propaganda - but it is incomplete. Not everything produced by those mechanisms is untrue. After all, the best propaganda has truth at its center.
The problem is that the animating political spirit of the age is negative-polarization, which focuses on destroying enemies, rather than building alternate institutions. Thus, the nu-right's irresistible instinct isn't to actually do what Tucker Carlson tried and failed with the Daily Caller - to create a parallel NY Times-quality institution without the progressive slant - but instead to just force-reject everything with the "Cathedral's" imprimatur. That winds up chucking out some babies in addition to the bathwater, and creates a lot of space for new informational entrepreneurs to operate, many of which are grifters or just wrong.
However, observing that the nu-right is suffering from a polluted information-generation and -verification process doesn't obviate the original insight - that the social institutions which ostensibly are supposed to perform this function in a neutral and public-spirited way are very much partisan, and also generative of horrific nonsense. Instead, it's indicative of the catch-22 they're in, and the difficulty of creating well-functioning knowledge- and legitimacy-dispensing institutions. After all, it's not like there's some hose of undiluted pure truth they could be drinking from.
Yes, being skeptical of institutions is often a very good instinct to have, but it's very easy for that to go off the rails.
Is calling boys girls and girls boys going off the rails? Is the sterilization of children going off the rails? I don’t dispute the moron conspiracy theorists out there. All true. But don’t allow that truth to give you a sense of comfort that you’re getting it all correct if you’re on the left. You’re bat shit crazy too. I know, this is just whataboutism. Got it. Nice defense. As long as the right is 10% crazier than you than you’re sane.
You must be new here, welcome.
It’s easier to stay on the rails. That’s what the rails are for.
There is no rational thought presented here, just vibes. Sounds familiar.
"This reflex isn't entirely wrong - the institutions have been captured, and are generating a lot of bare-faced nonsense and propaganda..."
This is true, but it doesn't mean that 2+2 is no longer 4, just because Ezra Klein says it is.
Even liars tell the truth sometimes.
Exactly the point I was trying to make! But most people don't have some combination of the time, inclination, or ability to rederive 2+2=4 from first principles. We accept most things on faith, assuming that the institutions and people who assure us these things are true are not lying, or shading the truth out of self-interest or ideological fervor.
The problem comes when you first notice that those institutions and people *are* lying or ideologically-slanted, and in ways contrary to your interest. Suddenly the systems of trust that underlay your worldview are ripped away - the thought "if they're lying now, what was to stop them lying about all those other things" is pretty irresistible! Worse, people outside the mainstream of knowledge-generation who had been yelling that everyone was lying now look more credible and more intelligent - after all, they were apparently smart enough to call out the lying liars before you did!
It's a very hard problem, and one that's inherent to radical discourses. You see a lot of the same thing in the left-wing movements of the mid-20th century; they correctly noticed that much of the power-structures of mainstream society were opposed to them, or had otherwise shaded or hidden truths, but rapidly fell into conspiracizing.
Jonestown and the People's Temple is a prime example of this - from powerful and legitimately impressive radical community group to paranoid mass-suicide in the jungle in just a few years. Less-catastrophically, Erin Brockovich (the paralegal who got famous for assisting in a big toxic tort lawsuit against PG&E and whose story was turned into a big Julia Roberts movie) in latter days kinda went off the rails will all sorts of unsubstantiated accusations. Similarly, a lot of anti-war activists, after realizing how interlinked the press and Pentagon are, go a little (or a lot) kooky. Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, the Code Pink people, etc.
I don't envy the choice that Americans are going to have to make in a couple of months. Speaking as a Canuck ..., it seems a tough call as to which is going to be the proverbial "lesser of two weevils" -- so to speak.
Something from Sam Harris that I'd run across some time back:
SH: "At that point Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared … Whatever the scope of Joe Biden’s corruption is, if we … understand he’s getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden’s deals in Ukraine or … China, it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in."
https://nypost.com/2022/08/21/the-lefts-mask-slips-on-brazen-trump-bias/
I kind of feel the same way about the Democrats and their pandering to the transloonie nutcases, to their conflation of sex and gender. The upshot of which is the butchering of autistic and dysphoric children -- crime of the century, a medical scandal to top the Tuskegee Syphilis Study compounded with "Dr." Mengele:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/opinion/gender-affirming-care-cass-review.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ek4.WYYy.3PjXOAQyHVS3&smid=url-share
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/06/18/new-title-ix-regulations-blocked-six-more-states
"The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls":
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CN32BXC2/ref=cbw_us_ca_dp_narx_gl_book
Going to be, should be, hell to pay for that.
You know my stance on the issue and there's no dispute that ideological institutional capture is a huge problem. But as bad as things are, correction mechanisms like the Cass Review haven't gone away and are still a guard against capture. Republicans have abandoned virtually every mechanism, can you imagine a "Cass Review" for the 2020 election that folks would care about? That's the foundational distinction.
With all due respect there Yassine, I kind a think you're wearing the proverbial rose-colored glasses.
That "correction mechanisms like the Cass Review" are clearly not only not working on the Democrat side but are intentionally and willfully broken is, as they say, not a bug but a feature of the Democrats -- a serious "systemic" flaw, if not a fatal one.
For all of the rot on the Republican side, at least they're not castrating autistic children. You might note the 20-odd Republican States which have more less banned puberty blockers and "gender-affirming" surgeries" -- AKA, sterilization.
Some wag quipped that the Republicans (Nixon) put a man on the moon, but it is the Democrats (Biden) who've put men into women's sports, toilets, and change rooms.
Sure, even if I concede that the mechanism is broken, I generally expect Dems to get it right much more often on average on the whole landscape of issues. They definitely still have blind-spots, and that's a good illustration of Yglesias' point for why we need a robust and non-crazy conservative movement to be skeptical of institutional orthodoxy. If anyone was a single-issue voter on being against gender ideology, I'd tell them to vote Republican.
"Single-issue"? Like immigration? Black Lives Matter? DEI? The rot in Academia? Twitter Files? Apropos of the last, see Taibbi's latest: "Zuckerberg Defies the Borg"
https://www.racket.news/p/listen-to-this-article-zuckerberg
Kinda think the transgender issue -- and all of its odious manifestations -- is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and is part and parcel of all of the other issues which the Democrats are dropping the ball on. Substacker, lawyer, & author Helen Dale interviewed Helen Joyce and Maya Forstater -- of the Sex Matters group -- during which they argued, not without a great deal of justification, that that issue is a "civilization threatening/ending movement":
https://lawliberty.org/podcast/when-does-sex-matter/
Biden and Harris and the Democrats are, at best, fiddling while Rome burns.
Again, even if I concede Dems have failed on those issues (and I don't agree), I have no reason to believe that Reps offer viable solutions. They might be accidentally correct on some trans issues sometimes but right now the movement lacks the mentality to identify out solutions and lacks the competency to implement them.
Might be moot whether the Republicans could do worse. As for a "lack of competency", I see Harris is being accused of flip-flopping on "The Wall!!" -- wasn't there a Pink Floyd movie on that? 😉🙂
"As the GOP targets Harris’ border wall stance, the details matter" -- indeed they do:
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/08/harris-has-not-flipped-on-trump-border-wall/
At best, she's talking out of both sides of her mouth -- apparently promising money for the wall, but next to no willingness to follow through on it. Looked to be no more than a political ploy.
But I wonder if you ever read David Brooks NYTimes article which asked, "Are we the bad guys?":
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/trump-meritocracy-educated.html
"it is the Democrats (Biden) who've put men into women's sports, toilets, and change rooms."
I regret to inform you that that's been happening for more than 4 years. Decades, at least. Under Republicans as well as Democrats.
Incidentally, I worked an event at the local convention center this past weekend. Last year, my department was located on a floor that had gender-neutral restrooms, but this year, it was on a different floor that didn't. And I definitely preferred the arrangement last year.
I don't especially _want_ to use the women's restroom, but if it comes down to a choice between that and the men's—where stalls are filthy and limited in number, and where I can expect to get weird comments (or worse) if I'm at the mirror for 10 minutes fixing my makeup—then the women's it is.
It seems to me that if the Republicans were serious about stopping this, they'd advocate for more gender-neutral facilities. Why don't they?
Similarly, it seems to me that if the Republicans were serious about reducing the number of young people transitioning, they'd advocate funding research into alternative treatments for dysphoria (or autism, or whatever they think the root cause is). As it stands now, their position seems to be based on the same kind of wishful thinking that the Democrats exhibit on guns: the idea that if they just pass a law banning something, that will stop people from getting it or even wanting to get it—even if it's something that's easily transported across state lines or sent through the mail, like handguns and medications.
That would do a lot to turn this into "a difference in values, rather than a disagreement over basic logic or reality", as the article says.
> "I regret to inform you that that's been happening for more than 4 years. Decades, at least. Under Republicans as well as Democrats."
Probably. The roots of it seem to go back some distance -- Kurt Andersen's "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" suggests it goes back to the Mayflower:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
Archive link: https://archive.ph/prYcS
KA: "Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled."
Can't get more into fantasy than to think people can change sex. Steven Pinker had a tweet some 6 years ago that more or less summarized that particular problem:
SP: "I dislike Jordan Peterson's counter-Enlightenment wooliness (Christianity, Nietzsche, Jung, lobsters), but Caitlyn Flanagan explains his appeal in an era when the cultural Left seems to be trying to out-stupid the Right (impossible, but they're trying)."
https://x.com/sapinker/status/1029084788446113792
Kinda think the Democrats have taken the prize there, though Christopher Rufo on the Christian Right is giving them a run for their money:
CR: "It's not a perfect term, but 'child sex-change procedure' is immediately understandable to the public and much more accurate regarding its intention—which, yes, is impossible—than 'gender-affirming care,' the new euphemism they're pushing."
https://christopherrufo.com/p/sex-change-procedures-at-texas-childrens/comment/16196340
Talk about pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Ah yes, this is another area where more work is needed to turn it into a difference of values.
"Can't get more into fantasy than to think people can change sex."
What, specifically, do you think they believe that isn't true?
Is it something objective that can be tested and disproved, like a disagreement over what exactly the medications do?
Or is it simply a disagreement over what to _call_ the thing they do?
"It's not a perfect term, but 'child sex-change procedure' is immediately understandable to the public and much more accurate regarding its intention—which, yes, is impossible"
This raises the same questions. Rufo is referring to providing medication as a "procedure", then saying its intention is something impossible. Does he think the people prescribing that medication are mistaken about what the medication can do? Or is he simply objecting to _calling_ it a "sex change", a term which he introduced himself?
Good questions, though I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at with them.
For example, you say, Yassine says, "disagreements hinged on a difference in values, rather than a disagreement over basic logic or reality." Kinda think Rufo, and the crowd he's pandering to, is more or less subscribing to the Kindergarten Cop definitions for the sexes: "boys (males) have penises and girls (females) have vaginas". From which it "logically" follows that if people change their genitalia from one type to the other then they have, ipso facto, changed sex. ("Act now! Offer ends soon! 🙄")
But that certainly seems to the basis for the common acceptance of such changes -- and has been for some time. For example:
"1952: It’s front-page news when George Jorgensen Jr. is reborn as Christine Jorgensen, gaining international celebrity and notoriety as the first widely known person to undergo a successful sex-change operation."
https://www.wired.com/2010/12/1201first-sex-change-surgery/
But what follows "logically" often very much depends on one's premises -- which tend to be axioms, articles of faith, and definitions. Hence, maybe or often, a question of values.
The folk-biology generally makes the genitalia the defining criterion -- largely why the judge in the Tickle vs Giggle case favoured the former. And why Khelif was allowed to compete in women's boxing at the Olympics.
However, the standard biological definitions generally take the presence of gonads -- functional or not depending on whether one makes the sign of the cross with two fingers or three ... -- as those defining criteria. And, in the latter case, it is simply medically impossible, at least with current technology, to replace functioning testicles with functioning ovaries or vice versa. Which is why I objected to Rufo's phrasing, particularly since it's the biology that's being pressed into service in various disputes related to transgenderism.
Something that Yassine and I more or less agree on. See his comment on a Substack post of mine, his post, "There Are No Primordial Definitions of Man/Woman", and my conversations there with him and others:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/rerum-cognoscere-causas/comment/58702961
https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/there-are-no-primordial-definitions?publication_id=394017&triedRedirect=true
https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/there-are-no-primordial-definitions/comment/58369967
Thats because a cass review of the 2020 election would be performed by institutions filled top to bottom with lefties and they would find exactly what you would expect them to find.
In fact there have been several independent reviews of the 2020 election and all but one of them has found evidence of significant irregularities. Just last month an engineer “hacked” a voting machine in a courtroom in a few minutes.
Then there’s the tens of thousands of invalid voter registrations that are being cleared from voter rolls by states that care.
And the democrats voting unanimously to *not* ensure voters are eligible at the polls.
But you’re right, just stop being weird guys. I’m sure it’s fine.
To everyone reading, it's gracious for ReadingRainbow to give us a pitch perfect demonstration of the delusion I'm talking about. There are several red flags in the comment above that are recurring elements. Notice how they never cite sources, they instead just reference vague "several independent reviews" without linking to anything. The reason this happens is typically because they're just repeating a meme talking point they read on twitter a long time ago and therefore have no idea what they're talking about.
The vagueness is a mask and a defense mechanism; it's best to avoid specifics in order to avoid being challenged on them.
Asking sincerely, what corruption are we supposed to know that Trump is involved in? The Russiagate hoax?
I think you're probably referring to my quote of a comment by Sam Harris: "it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in."
Haven't the foggiest idea what he might be referring to and how much water it might hold. Though one might argue that the "Trump fake electors plot" is something of a smoking gun for which Trump should be doing 20 years to life:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Hey! Another fellow Motte-er-ite! Amazing, and less surprising by the hour. It feels about 10 years in the past to me at this point but it was easily one of the most valuable and important web communities I ever participated in.
Regarding the Motte, I would consider myself one of the disaffected liberals who was there from the /r/ssc/culture_war days. There were definitely people I hated interacting with and the conservative slop was heftier than the progressive slop. But the moderation was something special. And I was exposed to stuff that was simply not filtering down to me.
There was a strong signal against the noise but as with all Internet subcultures it faded into background radiation—mostly because everything else on Reddit turned into garbage and stopped using it.
I’ll be sure to follow. Keep an eye out, there are others! ( @Tracingwoodgrains)
I've just run across your 'stack and enjoyed reading this. While I agree with your premise about nutjobs on the right, there are plenty of TDS-infected shrieking nuts on the left, many of them with their own TV shows.
There are stupid people always and everywhere believing all manner of stupid things. I will keep an eye on your space since you seem like an honest, thoughtful person with whom I almost completely disagree.
I like substantive disagreement, so welcome! You will never ever hear me claim that there are no notjubs on the left, nor will I deny that TDS is a real thing for some people. My archive has plenty of evidence of both. The fundamental distinction will remain however, the conservatives have no error-correction tools to keep their wingnuts from taking over. If the Republican leadership had gotten together and successfully pressured Trump off the GOP presidential ticket, I would not have written this post. The fact that such a hypothetical is so unthinkable is what I find concerning about its current culture.
Yassine, thank you for the article.
Please could you go into your 100% Open Borders stance in an article.
I understand that there’s a case to be made for open borders à la Brian Caplan, where non citizens may not have access to welfare/citizenship, however wouldn’t a 100% open borders policy just lead to mass slums in Europe?
As long as the gigantic productivity divide between Europe and Africa remains, millions would rather be homeless in W. Europe than remain in their home countries, leading to slum development as seen in Calais, and outside the Spanish enclaves in Morocco - and that’s without open borders.
Interested to see what other people’s opinions are as well.
The case is basically the same one Caplan presents. Some aspects of my support for open borders are based on material consequences (specifically how much immigrants benefit) but some are based on not violating the principle of free movement. That means that there are instances where I prioritize the principle even if negative material consequences can be demonstrated. A lot of other policies have a similar tension for me, for example I like gun rights even if I acknowledge it contributes to more homicides.
Interesting. I think that there is a gulf between European and American attitudes towards immigration - probably influenced by history and geography a lot.
Please consider writing an article about this issue because I would like to learn more about the pro open-borders ideas.
I really wouldn't be able to top what Bryan Caplan has already done. I probably agree with everything he has said on this issue, and he's addressed many specific concerns: https://openborders.info/
My case against fully open borders is Texas.
No, not present day Texas. Back when it was still part of Mexico. A bunch of Americans moved in, decided they didn’t want to be a part of Mexico and then decided to join the USA. Mexico was like “hey no you can’t do that” and they had a big war.
In a world of unrestricted immigration China could easily do the same thing today. Plonk a couple million loyal Chinese in Western Australia, get them to declare WA is China now, claim all the mineral resources they spend so much buying from us currently. Of course this would probably start a war, just as the USA did when they annexed Texas, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen.
I still support a lot of immigration, but this is one reason why I say that 100% open is going too far.
When Trump won the primary first time around, my family put their hands in the middle and pledged that if Trump won the election we would leave. Six months later, we put our house on the market and came home after 25 years in the lovely USA.
But, as Yassine says: it's different this time. Last time around Trump was surrounded by Adults in the Room and the worst we could expect was policies that we didn't agree with. But even those Adults in the Room said Trump is not fit to be President and he won't have them this time around.
I think it's properly dangerous this time.
It’s true that he won’t have the adults in the room to counsel him if he wins again, but if it’s any consolation, I also think it means he'll be lacking the competence to actually implement his crazy schemes.
Yeah - No consolation here!
Authors like Hanania and you have helped me to recognize and ameliorate my penchant for conspiracy thinking. Being open minded and distrusting is a recipe for rabbit holes and wingnuttery.
Some distrust is necessary, but it's a challenge to keep it within bounds: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bounded-distrust
I would also be interested to hear about examples of what you've recognized and how.
Sad to hear about what happened to The Motte. I stopped keeping up with it consistently after it moved away from Reddit, and the few times I tried to weigh in on a subject with which I have personal experience, the responses I got were so hostile and incurious that I gave up.
"incurious" is an excellent description of the problem
I think you underestimate just how much the conspiratorial thinking, as delusional as it is, is grounded in real misgivings about the direction of this country. Do you not remember what we learned about the rise of the Third Reich in grade school? The Treaty of Versailles and the humiliation of Germany was the source of the resentment that eventually led to the mad conspiracy theories and the Holocaust. Nazism grew on fertile soil. Perhaps if Hitler had been destroyed early on, WW2 might not have happened. But it might have happened anyway, and the insanity of Hitler's ideology might merely have been an epiphenomena that would have been replaced by some other epiphenomenal ideology. That, I believe, is the place that we find ourselves in today. And as someone who *is* voting for Trump, I *don't* see these problems going away even if he is defeated. I see this country sliding deeper into a hell that was not caused by Trumpism, but by something more fundamental, in the first place. It is my opinion that we must address that thing that is more fundamental if we want to have any hope of dispelling the delusional thinking and behavior that is flourishing today.
This is a strange comment - by the logic of *your own analogy*, you are voting for Hitler. (To be clear, I am not saying Trump=Hitler, I’m saying that *you* are analogizing Trump~=Hitler while affirming that you are voting for Trump).
I’m only using the Hitler analogy to express how Nazism wasn’t about Nazism. It was about something more fundamental. The same is true about what is going on in American politics today. I’m not suggesting that what is going on in American politics today is as bad as Nazism. It isn’t. I do think it will get there (on both sides of the political spectrum) if we interpret the current dysfunction as simply the product of a few bad apples. If you want to read anything deeper into what I’m saying than that, you’re free to. But I didn’t mean it and I don’t think it.
What real misgivings did I overlook?
Oh, I dunno, the entire russiagate conspiracy theory was so loopy that it would have gotten you laughed out of the 1962-era John Birch Society as a loon with an overactive imagination, yet it remains a Team D Article Of Faith.
"Russiagate" as a term has been thoroughly abused into ambiguity. The indefensible loony versions are "Russia hacked the voting systems and switched the results so Trump can win" or "Trump has been an undercover KGB asset since the 1980s". The other version is "there was a high degree of involvement between Trump associates and Russia" which resulted in multiple convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials
I don't know anyone that denies the latter as it's all well-documented, but just saying "Russiagate was a hoax" is used to obscure it by implying the former.
It also includes candidate Trump publicly requesting an adversarial state continue to hack his political opponent for electoral gain.
But as you said none of this counts because he's not a literal russian asset. This is frustrating enough in maga land. Although at least understandable given they've already fallen down the delusion well.
Russiagate hoax being parroted in "heterodox" discourse is more frustrating to me tho. It's the same negative partisanship of "owning the PMC". Which is just a gussying up "owning the libs" with some class consciousness and faux nuance.
This is from your own source:
Ultimately, Mueller's investigation "did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"
It was fabricated out of whole cloth. What did happen was the Obama administration/Clinton campaign used federal law enforcement agencies to illegally surveil a political opponent during an election.
Everyone seeing this comment should note the bait and switch. ReadingRainbow makes up their own definition of "Russiagate" and pats themselves on the back for refuting a strawman. They also repeat meme talking points like "Obama illegally surveilled Trump" but they'll never ever be able to provide a source for this claim.
The FBI withheld exonerating information from the FISA court to keep the Page wiretap open. The CIA told the FBI that Carter Page was their asset, not the Russians, yet the FBI kept the investigation ongoing.
Ok, so now we're reduced to "X degrees of separation".
Nope, I didn't say anything about nor do I believe that Trump was involved.
That's the gist of "some Trump associate had some tie with a Russian person".
Your summary is inaccurate and misleading. To take just one person, Paul Manafort was the Trump campaign chair and he was convicted (among other finance fraud) of laundering millions of dollars in offshore accounts he received from pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. The only way you can say that Russiagate was totally made up is if you somehow exclude Manafort from your definition of Russiagate.
Manafort was convicted of a process crime, and his work on behalf of Yanukovich was basically to act as a pro-US voice.
When Trump got elected, Bannon had to call the general Kremlin operator, the Trump administration literally didn't have anyone they could call.
Question: don't you find so, that behind every utterly crazy conspiracy theory, there is a saner one, just people somehow did not get that message? A saner version for election fraud theory is that in the long run, a more diverse society is more likely to move towards a liberal direction. I mean at the very least the immigrants notice the conservatives don't like them and vote appropriately.
Maybe? Sane-washing is a thing, but some theories are too insane to make it through the laundry cycle intact.
This seems like a textbook motte-and-bailey fallacy.
The immigrants don’t get to vote you loon.
And to the extent that they do vote liberal it’s because they want free shit and know they are never going to have to pay for it.
Look at which demographics are net tax contributors to the federal government vs which aren’t. You fill find a direct correlation to party demographics.
Right-wing delusionalism is a thing - amusing, pathetic and scary sometimes. But remember when we were being told the current president was “as sharp as a tack”?
Yeah, that was bad. Good thing they (eventually) course-corrected.
They “course corrected” by pretending it never happened and placing a babbling Xanax mom that no one voted for in his place.
More people voted for Andrew Yang than Kamala Harris when given a chance.
All very interesting, and convinces me that Trump is cynically manipulating the audience he thinks will get him elected. Right now, I don’t think it’s going to work. Is your concern is that it will? The election is Harris’s to lose, I think.
But the problem as I see it is that whereas Trump poses some undesirable possibilities if he is elected, Harris poses a lot of undesirable certainties if she is elected.
Trump’s first term was not everything, or even a whole lot, of what I would have wished for, but I give him a B minus, overall, with heavy weight on SC appointments & foreign policy. Obama/Biden/Harris was disastrous on all fronts, home and abroad, but in my more immediate concern, abroad. If she’s elected, we will lose the seemingly inevitable regional hot war with China. I’m not sure it will be any different with Trump, but maybe he’ll make us better prepared not to lose as badly.
So I’m willing to risk Trump & hope, if not for the best, that the system will prevent the worst, which I have little hope it will do with Harris in office and the inevitable Democratic Congress if she wins.
Trump can win if there are enough crazy stupid people, and his victory would vindicate that ideology. I love this country but my least favorite thing about it is how high Trump is polling despite the cavalcade of insanity he represents.
I don't see what exactly has been "disastrous" about Obama/Biden/Harris. They've been fine to me, just like Trump as president was mostly fine until he had to deal with multiple crises in 2020 at which point his reflex is to prioritize his own interests over anything else. An example would be how he insisted that Grand Princess passengers to stay on the ship so that the covid cases wouldn't count on American stats.
And I agree with Saul Glasman below, Trump and his entourage are not people I would trust to competently build and deploy institutional capacity.
Half the country are “crazy stupid people”?
Maybe they are rational individuals making an informed choice based on their best interests?
No? It’s just the people voting for the incoherent proto-communist who received zero votes and has no platform who are being reasonable?
Respectfully, I think that the Obama/Biden/Harris-led Democrats have been incredibly disastrous. They've presided over (and arguably helped inflame) a massive spike in racial grievance politics, and a significant degradation of relations between racial groups, including supporting outright lies and propaganda in "Ethnic Studies" curricula across the nation. They've also engaged in blatant racial and sexual discrimination (including in healthcare prioritization and delivery - something that gets called an atrocity when it's old white people doing it) and spoils system politics, undermined the rule of law on the border and student loan debt, suborned criminal harassment and political prosecution of their opponents, exploded the U.S. debt, and incurred significant consumer pain through overheated inflationary spending. They've also failed to exercise leadership to put forward any solution to the massive housing crunch that their immigration policies have exacerbated, or the shockingly-rickety state of the U.S.'s utility infrastructure and power grid. Their major diplomatic initiatives in Ukraine and the MidEast have also been flops.
I don't think Trump is all that competent, and we already have evidence that he doesn't give two figs for fiscal discipline. But I don't think he'll actively discriminate against me and mine the way the Democrats have and will, and more importantly the press, the legal community, and civil society will actually mobilize against Trump's failings, whereas they consistently line up to at best defend, and at worst gaslight the public about the Dem's failings.
Trump might talk tough on China but he can be easily swayed, as his flip-flop on TikTok showed. Meanwhile, building military readiness for China requires institutional capacity, something Harris might be able to muster but which will definitely be impossible for Trump's slate of goons and cronies.
Trump remains weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
That is not an endorsement of Harris.
When I first saw this cartoon, I thought it was an over-the-top strawman:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786532/-Cartoon-You-made-me-become-a-Nazi
Nowadays, I wonder if it's maybe not exact, but uncomfortably close. It does seem to capture some of a dynamic that's real. If it was toned down a little, just a shade from the literal "Nazi" hyperbole, it would match a lot of what's apparent. That is, "You said I support a racist, so I'll go join this group of cranks and authoritarians, and it's all your fault because of what you did!".
I'm really not sure what to do, in practice. It's just not realistic to expect all liberals and leftists to never offend right-wingers, and to police the country to make sure nobody anywhere ever advocates for a policy that right-wingers hate. It's a big country, and it's absurd to imagine the rantiest right-wingers will have veto power over everything in it. But the moment there's anything at all, like the guy in the cartoon, they'd claim that liberals made them do it.
There's some really worrisome implications which follow. Again, I'm at a loss.
I think this dynamic and real and goes both ways. Republicans called Obama a socialist and a lot of lefties said “well I like Obama I guess I’m a socialist too”.
People got called racist for eg opposing immigration and said “well fine I guess I’m racist then.”
I think the solution is to recognise that attacking your mainstream opponents as extremists legitimises extremism in their eyes rather than delegitimising leftism/rightism, and that if you think extremists on the other side are bad then you should employ more discretion in your language.
To add to this, I don’t think it’s a binary problem. You can’t exercise total message discipline over half the population. But you can have *less* extremism-accusation, or you can have *more* extremism accusation.
And I think people react differently to being accused of some form of extremism once to being accused of it 200 times. The first time, you say “no I’m not”. The 200th time you say “who cares what you think” or “so what if I am”.
Different people will have different cutoff points. And of course some people will be extremists regardless of what anyone says. But while I don’t think there’s a path to *everyone* being sane and reasonable, there is a path to the world becoming somewhat less insane and unreasonable.
But the problem remains - because even if I, personally, "employ more discretion", there's going to be plenty of people who don't. And I can't police them, and it's often not clear it'd be proper to do so. Because "discretion" can mean accepting the framework of the most hypersensitive extremists, the veto from right-wing ranters. That's not practical or reasonable. For a specific example, TheMotte was/is filled with people who I think do reasonably warrant being called "racists", and I'm well aware of everything they'd say in response. Handing them this veto, saying they can't be called racists because of their sensitivities, seems to me both morally wrong and politically impossible. It's going straight into the cartoon above.
If someone said that the Holocaust didn't happen, and it's a myth created by Jewish power-mongers, would I need to employ more discretion and never, ever, call them antisemitic? If I did, should people finger-wag that's contributing to polarization, as antisemitism only means hatred of Jews but the claims are merely discussing history and politics? Because that's what has to follow. Can you see where that ends up?
Note, I agree, some left-wingers are too broad in accusations. Granted! The point here is that some right-winger are too narrow. And critically, it's unreasonable to expect the entire political world to agree to such narrowness, even if again the left can go overboard in the opposite direction.
I agree completely (including about some of the Motte posters). There is nothing wrong - and quite a bit right - about calling actual racists racists.
I think both sides need to marginalise and disown their extremists. The people who say Hitler was right or that Hamas did nothing wrong are disgusting.
The problem comes when people start throwing around communist accusations because someone supports publicly funded healthcare, or racist accusations because someone supports secure borders. That sort of rhetoric is unjustified and counterproductive, and we need to build the norms within our own movements that such language is discrediting, unserious, and relegated to fringe weirdos that respectable people will distance themselves from.
You don’t have to fabricate authoritarian bogeymen they are already in office.
It’s incomprehensible the kind of bubble you must live in. The people systematically violating the first amendment rights of millions of Americans while using kangaroo court lawfare to target political opponents while holding protesters in federal detainment for years without charges are the bad guys.
TDS is alive and well.
To everyone, this is another example of ReadingRainbow just recycling meme talking points they can't substantiate. For instance, they'll never be able to point to any actual specific example of a single protestor "in federal detainment for years without charges". It's a talking point they've hallucinated but continue to repeat credulously.
> Combined with his very visible cognitive downward spiral
Why do you believe this? My impression has been that he always speaks in a rambling and somewhat incoherent way, but I haven't noticed any significant change recently compared to 2016.
It's true that he's always spoken in a weird way but I see a marked change from 2016. The highlights are: heavier slurring, lots of mispronunciations, and frequent name confusion. The weirdest one has been referred to as "glitching" where he sort of gets stuck on a word and you see him grimace, one of his shoulders goes up, and he tries to massage over it by saying "I tell you what" or a similar filler phrase. I don't have time to compile a full collection of examples but David Pakman regularly posts examples on his YouTube channel under very clickbaity titles.
Difficult to exaggerate how disingenuous it is for liberal elites to question Trump’s mental fitness after the last 4 years of gaslighting the country about how everything with Biden was fine and anybody who suggested otherwise was a right wing conspiracy theorist. Shameful, really.
Even if that's true, only one side managed to kick out their old senile guy at the top. That's a damning indictment for the other side refusing to face the music.
It all goes back to climate science denial. Back in the 1990s, the best and brightest on the right (Cato, AEI, Heritage) didn't want to accept the political implications of climate change, so they preferred to listen to a bunch of hacks, mostly the leftovers of the tobacco industry campaign against smoking restrictions. That inevitably led them to conspiracy theories in which scientists were making up their findings either in the service of world government or (more prosaically) to get more grant funding.