Substack Notes, Vol 10.5
Bizarro World
Oct. 14th, 2024 - Nov. 1st, 2024
It’s not working and Harris is 100% the meme. I’m beginning to believe that Kamala Harris was assembled out of platitudes and classism and pure political ambition, like a Golem of the managerial class, brought to life in some dark ritual. Whichever necromancers executed the spell forgot to throw ‘policy knowledge’ and ‘authenticity’ into the pot though. Good for memes! Bad for elections.
What a month! If you watch the mainstream media to form your picture of reality you’ve probably forgotten about the two assassination attempts and the embarrassing policy declarations everyone was making in 2020 and the ‘trust the science’ crowd and their misplaced, contemptuous confidence. You must have forgotten about that whole ‘Biden is better than ever!’ thing… otherwise why would you be watching the mainstream media and believing a word they say?
In any case, if you are one of this dwindling crowd of viewers you’re probably under the impression that Trump has been making racist statements and threatening oppressive dictatorship on a near weekly basis-in which case, why does he seem to be so popular? Ah, the unknowable mysteries of reality! Keep reading the NYT! I’m sure they’ll come up with something. Eventually it’s just going to be you and small group of schizophrenics and a few Ivy League sociology faculty members and two older ladies in comas, getting billed automatically, on their subscriber list. Maybe you want to get off the train before you find yourself in that position. Come back to reality. It’s nice out here!
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“[The Kamala plagiarism controversy] only serves to reinforce the galling impression that the highest positions in the land are occupied by empty, undeserving people.”
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People need to learn to say sorry more. If you mischaracterize or attack someone, and they explain why you're wrong about your mischaracterization or attack, you should say sorry. We should all have more human decency. There is another human being on the other end.
The idea that Kamala Harris could succeed to the presidency on her own merit with a straightforward campaign is obviously a ridiculous one, as proven by her feeble attempt to win the Democratic nomination in 2020 and by her abysmal ratings as Vice President. So, the Democrats formulated a pragmatic campaign strategy: give the public no policy information or soundbites from Harris until after the election itself, run a rehearsed and milquetoast campaign bereft of live interviews, avoid all challenging questions, and ignore the glaring hypocrisies. The problem with this strategy should be that it requires full media compliance to achieve success. For the Democrats, this is no problem at all—not a single mainstream media outlet has remotely questioned the Democrats’ unprecedented circumvention of the democratic nomination process, let alone pressured Kamala to agree to an additional debate or to sit down for a substantive, challenging interview…
From ’ Substack:
Nicholas:
I think if Trump wins, especially if he wins the popular vote, we are going to get a thousand think pieces and takes about America's latent blood thirst for authoritarianism, when I think it really is as simple as American's being directionally closer to his positions and vibes on the Economy, on Immigration, and on Foreign Policy. People will spill so many words on what this means when I really think it can be summed up in the mind of a low information swing voter as "eggs cost more" and nothing deeper than that. That is both promising, in the sense that voters are more elastic than we assume, but also frustrating in that it requires democrats to be consistently better than they have proven capable of lately.
From Egalitarianism Destroyed Rhodesia. It Will Destroy America Too, If We Let it:
…the Cold War was not a fight for “freedom,” nor was it a fight against communism. Rather, the Cold War was a successful attempt to tear down the Old World, a land of hierarchy and tradition, and replace it with either globalist communism or globalist crony capitalism; the two were generally similar in effect, as they meant a replacement of the local aristocracy with rootless cosmopolitans that were varying degrees of tyrants, a focus on the material world rather than tradition, and a total eradication of the influence of the old colonial powers.
…
Rhodesia, being a land of chivalric gentlemen rather than craven plutocrats, chose the honorable path. It chose to fight. What followed was a grinding 15-year conflict in which bloodthirsty rebels did their best to place landmines in civilian-traveled roads,16 murder farmers and farm laborers, and otherwise terrorize the civilian population, black and white alike.17 The whole time, those rebels were armed, funded, and trained by the communists…
…
The result was that all the freedoms the black and white Rhodesians alike had were stripped away. Freedom of speech vanished. Property rights vanished. Firearms were confiscated. Whites were driven from their homeland. Black tribes, namely the Ndebele, were genocided by Mugabe’s North Korean-trained thugs. Thus perished Rhodesia, thanks to the decades-long efforts of the “free world” and “liberal democracy.”
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Latinos have been abandoning Kamala Harris. And now we may have some clues as to why: They never wanted to be called Latinxs. See, for a few years it was necessary that American Democrats call Latino people Latinxs, despite clear and persistent protests. Why? Because Latino and Latina are gendered words, and binary ones to boot, and the Dems needed a nonbinary way to speak about this population in case any Latinxs use they/them pronouns. Literally the whole group was supposed to accept being renamed for the sake of they/them inclusivity. Needless to say, it didn’t work. And now there is a big, serious study out of Harvard University about how being called Latinx made Latinos turn to Trump.
From the study: “Using several datasets, we find: Latinos are less likely to support politicians who use ‘Latinx’; Latinos who oppose ‘Latinx’ are less likely to support politicians who used or are associated with ‘Latinx’; Latinos in areas where ‘Latinx’ is more salient are more likely to switch their vote toward Trump between 2016–2020.” Exposure to it was enough. You can imagine scenarios that might do it. One white guy with a man bun says something about “hola, my Latinx brothers,” and all who hear it suddenly decide they must absolutely vote for Trump that very day. You’d think whoever came up with Latinx must feel like whoever forgot to lock the door at Wuhan Institute of Virology upon learning this.
Our 50-50 divide also helps in a way: it makes the red-blue gulf nerve-wracking — but it also effectively bars a huge victory for either side any time soon. We are more likely to continue gridlocked than descend into a civil war. Compared with any other developed nation, we’re also booming economically, despite our mutual loathing, innovating away, and still a cultural global hub. We’re not Weimar Germany — a new democracy wracked by hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, and wounded national pride. We are the oldest democracy in the world.
The First Amendment has also saved us from the illiberalism of the woke left. Just think of what has happened to free speech in Canada and Britain without it. Yes, the woke captured every institution, but they failed to censor online media (thanks, Elon!), and could not prevent the rise of an alternative media universe to push back against orthodoxy. For every NPR bore, there arrived a Rogan; for every WaPo narrative, a singular Substack voice; for every red guard “fact-checker” in legacy media, there’s a “community notes”.
There are, of course, many more emotionally satisfying forms of government than liberalism. Ibram X Kendi would love to live in a country where an unaccountable “anti-racist” department could intervene anywhere at any time to right an injustice, however trivial, in the great racial revanchism of the 21st Century. But he won’t get to. Half the country would resist; heck, even NYT liberals have begun to see crude DEI as counter-productive racist poison. And critical race theory hasn’t destroyed the Constitution yet.
Time passes on this rich green island, this soft distant island, this verdant tropical island afloat in expectation and history, this big blue island, this nosy mangabe. Days slide past, identical in their schedule, subtly varying in detail, and there is no future to imagine but more like these. I wake in my tent, faintest hint of pink in the air through the gossamer walls, and lie still, listening. Night frog song ceding to day frog song, nocturnal mouse lemurs nesting, brown lemurs rising. They do not worry if today is like yesterday, nor even if somehow today were indeed yesterday.
Now, go outside!