107 Comments

I might have missed something but it seems like you haven’t really mentioned civil rights law much lately. The way I see it, Trump and Harris represent different types of authoritarianism: Trump is the loud caudillo, strongman type, while Harris is the cheery front for the bureaucratic, civil rights law variation.

Both are bad but because so much more of the current elite is sympathetic to the far left as opposed to the far right, Harris is actually the greater threat.

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Yes, and Richard fortunately touched on the left's vast advantage in elite structural power in this essay, I think he neglected to mention it in the previous one.

I also think we should bring up the case of the UK, which has apparently become even more aggressive in suppressing free speech in recent months, under a Labor government. Or maybe it's just being publicized more.

Seeing it in an English-speaking country, it's easy to imagine it as our future: a purely bureaucratized suppression of any and all unacceptable ideas, forcing offenders to do hard time in prison, within the context of a "liberal" democracy.

A powerful rightist authoritarian government in America, on the other hand, is pure fantasy, unless you're maybe looking 100 years in the future. The Democrats are backed by a majority of the population and a near unanimity of elites. Authoritarians don't rise to power against that kind of opposition.

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The majority of Russians did not support the Bolsheviks back in 1917 either, and yet the Bolsheviks still managed to seize absolute power in Russia, hold onto it for over 70 years, and do an untold amount of damage to Russia in the process.

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When the ACLU defended the Westboro Baptist Church in ~2010 free speech seemed like a core American value that was well accepted. Today we're somehow more concerned about misinformation while also allowing government disinformation to be taken as fact. Perhaps there would be more critical thought if Elon wasn't the subject, but values should be above such calculation.

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This hate for “antivaxers” really shows how ignorance in certain topics destroys the image.

You certainly have obsession with this topic based not on any serious research but on beliefs…

One of the main rule of medicine through human civilization is not to bring harm…

For that many types of vaccines were important, but some were very harmful.

Covid vaccines are still in research phase, brought a lot of risk and side effects.

But the main problem were people like you who “believe in science “ stop real science, close the possibility of other option for treatments , do not protect other innovative solutions, and refuse to treat people who had a difference in opinions.

Unfortunately beliefs like yours cost humanity a lot of lives through centuries!

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You don't know what you're talking about. Vaccines are much less harmful than other forms of medicine like chemotherapy or surgery. The "harms" from vaccines are negligible. Which is why vaccinated people have better health outcomes than comparable unvaccinated people.

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Its all fun and games until your unvaccinated kid infects my vaccinated kid with the measles (because vaccination does not offer perfect protection).

There is a collective element in vaccinations that when you have above a certain % vaccinated, the disease can go almost completely extinct. You will lose this effect when coverage gets too low.

Plus something that has saved hundreds of millions of lives over the past century should be debunked with a lot of solid evidence, something that is in short supply among anti vaxxers (and in your post).

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The argument that we can force people to do things against their will for the common good really, really needs a limiting principle. Otherwise I can make arguments such as arguing that transgender ideology must be made illegal, because my child might be exposed to it and end up mutilating and/or sterilizing themselves.

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That is not comparable. If your kid doesn't get vaccinated with a perfectly safe measles vaccine (this is basically settled science at this point, and people going against it are just idiots) you are increasing the risk for my kid in a very quantifiable and measurable way with no real benefit.

The problem is that none of these transgender ideas (especially for minors and with regard to surgery and hormone treatment) is settled science. There are very credible researchers who have done good research who are saying that doing this to minors is in fact a bad idea.

There are no credible researchers who say that vaccinating your kid with a Measles vaccine is a bad idea.

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>The problem is that none of these transgender ideas (especially for minors and with regard to surgery and hormone treatment) is settled science. There are very credible researchers who have done good research who are saying that doing this to minors is in fact a bad idea.<

I doubt that's going to be the case forever. Suppose that it were "settled science" that actually, allowing a minor to sterilize themselves and chop off healthy body parts in the name of "transgenderism" is bad. Would you now favor banning transgender ideology out of existence? Personally, I wouldn't be opposed to prison time for people who provide sterilization drugs to minors, if it were "settled science" that there is no such thing as changing your gender.

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>Moreover, it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to affect the outcome. Let’s say through my writing, I can change the votes of 20% of my Twitter followers, which seems to me a ridiculously high estimate. That means I’d switch 23,000 votes from Harris to Trump.

I think if you have really good ideas, they'll spread beyond just your Twitter followers. Like how your Sydney Sweeney tweets took off beyond just your followers and went viral. I'm sure you've seen the Noah Smith tweets that were like "Where did the new good take Hanania come from!?" If you write something that convinces Noah Smith, he might write an article basically repeating and elaborating on what you said. And he only needs to convince ~7% of his Twitter followers to reach that election tipping point since he has 3x as many as you. Noah Smith and Matthew Yglesias for example often write articles in response to each other that build on the other's points.

Personally I think the quality of your articles vary. I don't particularly think your Trump one was that concincing, which makes sense if you're only even 55% convinced of it yourself. But if you want more influence, it might be worth trying to target being convincing to other journalists instead of just convincing to regular readers. I remember watching a YouTuber once who mentioned in terms of growing his subscriber base, by far the most successful videos were crossovers with other YouTubers. I expect it'd work similarly for political substack writers.

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Bad ideas are sometimes viral, while good ones aren't. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/

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Republicans have their own highlight reel of speech restrictions. Sure, we could debate the merits of their school-related policies all day - book banning, "don't say gay" laws, limiting discussions on critical race theory. These are tricky issues that reasonable people might disagree on.

But then there are some examples that are harder to defend. Check out this GOP greatest hits collection:

Anti-Prostitution Pledge: The Bush administration required NGOs receiving PEPFAR funds to explicitly oppose prostitution, compelling specific speech as a condition for federal funding.

Anti-BDS Laws (Various states): Republican state officials passed laws punishing support for boycotts of Israel. In Texas, a public school teacher was fired for refusing to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel, violating her right to hold personal political beliefs outside of work.

SESTA-FOSTA: The Trump administration signed laws holding websites liable for third-party content related to sex work. This led to broad online censorship, affecting not only advertisements but also discussions about sex work safety, advocacy for decriminalization, and forums used by sex workers to share information.

Can anyone point to examples of Democratic government officials enacting worse speech restrictions than these? I'm talking actual government actions here, not Twitter spats or campus controversies.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20181218-texas-teacher-fired-for-refusing-to-sign-anti-bds-oath/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-prostitution_pledge

https://decriminalizesex.work/advocacy/sesta-fosta/what-is-sesta-fosta/

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Sep 9·edited Sep 9

Things like SESTA-FOSTA and the anti-prostitution pledge are, like many erosions of our civil rights such as mass surveillance, pretty much bipartisan efforts. Leftists have aggressively opposed sex workers rights and led much of sex trafficking moral panic until it mutated into Qanon, and If I remember correctly the unconstitutional crusade against Backpage was led by Kamala Harris.

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Yes, Democrats have their moments of pearl-clutching over naughty words on the internet. And sure, Kamala Harris went after Backpage like it was the final boss of a video game. But here's the thing: there's a world of difference between cracking down on sketchy classifieds and straight-up telling people what opinions they're allowed to have.

Let's break it down:

The anti-prostitution pledge was basically the government saying, "Repeat after me: Sex work bad!" to any NGO that wanted funding. That's not regulating ads; that's policing thoughts.

SESTA-FOSTA? Sure, it was bipartisan, but it was signed under a Republican administration. And boy, did it overshoot. It didn't just zap ads; it nuked entire conversations about sex work policy. Harm reduction strategies? Decriminalization debates? All caught in the crossfire.

The Backpage saga? That's more in the realm of "is this ad actually for human trafficking?" Sketchy? Maybe. A direct gag on political speech? Not so much.

So yeah, Democrats aren't saints here. The sex trafficking moral panic has left plenty of fingerprints on both sides of the aisle. But when it comes to the government playing thought police on political speech, the GOP examples are still in a league of their own.

And firing teachers for supporting a boycott?

The challenge still stands: Are there examples of Democratic-led government actions that more directly restrict the expression of political opinions or advocacy in this way?

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If you think anti prostitution laws for NGOs is bad, wait until you see what allows NGOs to be defined as for profit or nonprofit

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The feminists have been split on sex work for a while, at least as far back as the 70s. So there's a possibility for left-right coalitions.

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Books are perfectly legal, you can buy them in your local bookstore (if you have one) or on Amazon. Whether books are included in public libraries is a matter of curation. https://themillions.com/2012/03/ban-this-book-an-uncensored-look-at-the-lorax-and-other-dangerous-books.html

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I agree the Right has been (and likely will be given the chance) censorious. Re: book bans: Yes, banned from schools, but not banned elsewhere. Furthermore, many right-wing books are de facto banned because they aren’t purchased. Hence, one more problem with public schools. Re: “Don’t say gay”: highly misleading. It’s more about don’t push gender ideology.

https://open.substack.com/pub/persuasion1/p/reflections-on-right-wing-cancel?r=b5zww&utm_medium=ios

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deletedSep 9
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Interesting that you contest the item (book banning) on which I said "These are tricky issues that reasonable people might disagree on.", rather than the items I said were indeed egregious.

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deletedSep 9
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I'll take that as a concession that the three examples I gave (firing teachers for supporting Israel boycott, anti-prostitution pledge, and SESTA-FOSTA) are indeed far as or more censorious than anything the Democrats have done.

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deletedSep 11
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The act states: "No funds ... may be used to implement any program ... through any organization that has not stated in either a grant application, a grant agreement, or both, that it does not promote, support, or advocate the legalization of prostitution." Your statement has nothing to do with the policy in question. Of course organizations receiving federal funds should not promote or fund prostitution. The policy we are discussing compels an opinion on what the law should be.

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Elon had no issues with suppressing tweets in India and Turkey, where governments are more aligned with him (and where the "censorship" aligned with Elon's political views). This has nothing to do with free speech: He is us just using his best tool to excerpt soft power on a government that is not aligned with his agenda. Brazil has significant lithiums reserves, has just opened to a BYD factory, and has an blossoming EV market ripe for capture, but hey, that just conspiracy thinking, right?

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He has cooperated with lots of governments across the political spectrum. Brazil appears to be an exception where he has decided to end business there rather than concede. Perhaps he thinks it's just one idiosyncratic judge and that the rest of Brazil might blink first.

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It’s not even good conspiracy thinking. Backing a coup might be a good way for an industrialist to get trade concessions and cheaper commodities. Mildly pissing off a government is the opposite.

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Sep 9·edited Sep 9

The problem with trying to "stamp out" or even set sensible standards for what people like anti-vaxxers can post and claim on influential online platforms is that it immediately vindicates the worldview of conspiracy theorists or, more broadly, populists on the left and right who believe implausible things and that an elite is conspiring to silence them. There is no winning in a Martin Gurri world without standards or controls for the information the masses see and judge. The first option is to try futilely to fight large swathes of the public in an information war like federal health agencies during COVID or as European governments do with politically incorrect debates all the time. Alternatively, you let information flow freely, and let people form irrational information bubbles and allow the consequences, like people not getting vaccinated, to play out. Neither option is good, but the latter seems to trample less on vital individual rights while wasting fewer public resources on fighting an information battle with people who will not listen anyway.

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This is why prediction markets should be used. Let morons bet on their beliefs and lose their money to more sensible people.

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On tariffs, my understanding is that the President's authority to impose 10% tariffs by fiat requires there be a national security concern. Perhaps it's debatable what countries exactly qualify as a "national security concern" that might represent targets of a valid use of this power, but I think reasonable people should be able to agree that imposing tariffs on America's chief geopolitical rival, China, is on the "valid" side of that line, and imposing them on everyone in the world, as Trump is discussing, is on the "not valid" side of the line.

I have to think that a judge would immediately halt it from going into effect, and SCOTUS ultimately would strike it down. At the very least Roberts, Gorsuch, and the liberals would oppose it, but it really ought to be a 9-0 decision.

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I think you are too worried about the censorship machine. Go re-read Tocqueville. He wrote in 1840 that the way the democratic spirit works in America that social shunning silences any dissenting voice far more effectively than the open censorship practiced by kings of Europe. And? Things just went fine anyway. At any rate, I don't think any actually important idea was effectively suppressed.

Except Georgism. That was really sad, because that was something in theory the entire political spectrum could agree with. Which shows not so much the effectiveness of censorship machines, but of special interest groups..

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You make an interesting point - but the fact that Tocequville's comment was written in 1840 stands out.

In those days, communications were vastly slower, and the sparsely interconnected nature of communities meant that such social shunning was a confined local phenomenon.

Today we have the Internet, and Twitter - recording everything we ever said publicly and transmitting it to a global audience, where it is almost certain that someone will be offended by it.

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It is certainly so. The question is how much the offended person can do about it :) When I started using the Internet, 1999, anonymyty was obvious. Then much later on people were registering under their real name and face on Facebook and I thought they are all idiots.

But okay, some people actually make it a career, so they have to use name and face for credibility.

Still it seems cancellations are running out of steam.

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I don't know. They just took down Neil Gaiman over a bunch of questionable allegations and stuff that wasn't wrong a decade ago (like sleeping with much younger women).

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I genuinely hope you're correct. I'd like to see the world become more libertarian in its speech.

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"With the rise of Trumpism, there is now no comfortable home for classical liberals. They have to choose their poison." -- this is the fault of the 2-party system, which is caused by FPTP. If the USA used a system of proportional representation, such as STV, there would be 5-7 viable parties and more voters would be able to vote for someone they actually liked as opposed to someone they disliked less.

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Sep 9·edited Sep 9

Not having an FPTP system can lead to what is happening in France and other Western countries, where voters don't want to support dying center-right and center-left parties, so they sheepishly jump ship to the far right and far left. With big-tent right-wing parties like the GOP in the US or the LDP in Japan, different factions owe different favors to one another and need to cooperate to pass legislation or make important political appointments, so there ends up being a compromise where classical liberals at least have some say. That is not to say ranked-choice voting does not have advantages. I think either system is inconsequential in changing electoral outcomes when the electorate firmly leans toward one direction.

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France's system still has the spoiler problem.

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I continue to find the anti-vaxx obsession a bit strange. Do you think people should be forced to take vaccines against their will? I assume not. Do you think anti-vaxxers should be actively censored, and would this effectively amount to duping people into taking vaccines (because they are not allowed to see counter-arguments for why they shouldn't)? You seem to be concerned about censorship, so I assume not. What is actually to be done about the dreaded anti-vaxxers, besides to continually complain about them?

This is particularly relevant given that we are talking about making a decision of which party to vote for. Whatever one thinks of anti-vaxxers, they haven't had any effect on actual policy besides to make it more acceptable to refuse vaccines. Yet the vaccines remain freely available to all who wish to take them. Is the fear that if we elect Trump, then at some point the Gribblers will gain enough power to start banning vaccines?

I do agree that the cult surrounding Trump is tiresome and I wish he would go away already. But I find it frustrating when people justify their views by reference to outgroups which they disdain. If we are going to put on our democracy hats and actually play ball, then we are supposed to justify ourselves with things like reason, logic, evidence, etc. Not by "well those people over there really piss me off." That's the sort of lazy thinking displayed by the Trump cultists who hate foreigners.

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Sep 9·edited Sep 9Author

There’s no way we would have had Operation Warp Speed if the Republicans were anti-vax like they are today. Now they refuse to fund future vaccines and call for investigations into the Covid vaccines. I want to shun anti-vaxxers from public life so serious people can deal with problems.

And it’s a good litmus test too. I’ve never seen a prominent anti-vaxxer who wasn’t awful in many other ways. Tucker, Alex Jones, and RFK would be poisonous to public discourse even if they didn’t talk about vaccines. So having a strong norm against anti-vax gets rid of a lot of other bad stuff too.

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If you’re trying to make pro vaccines sound respectable, why bring up operation warp speed at all? Covid vaccines were rushed out the door with poor testing, and ended up being only as effective as flu shots. It was common for democrats to point out that the “trump vaccine” posed such risks until vaccine worship became its own cult amongst the democratic-liberal crowd, presumably because it was yet another way of enforcing compliance to regulations.

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It's not that Operation Warp Speed was too fast. It's that the FDA is normally WAAAAAYYYY too slow, and economists like Alex Tabarrok have been saying so for a long time.

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But the Covid vaccines themselves are not a great product to hawk the concept of vaccines generally

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There are vaccines for more lethal illnesses, but mRNA vaccines are a big enough breakthrough to make vaccines generally an even better deal. It should be much easier to create new vaccines in the future. There really isn't any way in which COVID vaccines were worse than the average vaccine.

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We will all eagerly await for the mRNA vaccine that actually changes the game, in that case.

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How is this to be accomplished? As you've probably observed, complaining about them and calling them names isn't likely to be effective. With their freedom of speech safely ensconced in spaces like this site and Twitter, they don't have to care that Richard Hanania hates them.

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Well the same way you reduce the influence of anyone. Talking about how they’re bad. I think I’ve probably made elite conservatives have a more negative take on anti-vaxxers. They still have their YouTube channels but I hope to make sure fewer smart people take them seriously. Many things are popular but still worth arguing against.

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I suppose that's one way to think about it. Personally I don't like the idea of spamming out emotionally driven shaming attempts, but maybe that's what I should be doing if I really have the courage of my convictions, putting out different variations on "leftists are badmeanevilwrongstupid and you should hate them." Why do you choose to focus so intensely on anti-vaxxers and not on DEI bureaucrats in this way? Are DEI bureaucrats not also guilty of getting in the way of "serious people dealing with problems?"

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I wrote an entire book on DEI and affirmative action and countless articles on this. You just want me to leave the people you consider part of your tribe alone and coddle them.

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You accidentally platformed a harsh critic of mRNA vaccines when you interviewed Jobst Landgrebe on AI. He is clearly EHC. Would love to see a debate.

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No, I'm genuinely curious why you moved on from DEI and now complain about anti-vax. If we take the philosophy that we should continually demean people who think bad things, or who get in the way of solving problems, or however one wants to phrase it, well, that's an extremely target-rich environment. Far from having to choose between only anti-vaxxers or DEI bureaucrats, there is an innumerable variety of different stupid, harmful beliefs to choose from. Pro-Palestine protesters, transgender stuff, religious fundamentalists, you name it.

What causes you to zero in on anti-vaxx?

I agree that people like Alex Jones, RFK Jr., and even Donald Trump are stupid and obnoxious, and I wish they would go away, in large part because they do say stupid things and they do make the right wing look stupid. But I don't find it plausible to make "these people are stupid" a major plank of my worldview, because again, stupidity is a human constant, I can find it anywhere that I am determined to look for it.

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Ultimately and possibly very soon, Trump is a much greater threat to the USA and the world than Harris. At his worst he is a dangerous child with power aided by psychophants and angry white males like Bannon and Smith. His argument that tariffs will benefit the economy are simply wrong. He claims that sanctions harm the dollar. It is the opposite. It is always necessary to ask of any candidate" Who is likely to cause more harm? The answer is Trump. Harris is no prize. Her medicroty is preferrsble to Trump's rage fueled policies.

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Trump was already president and the “rage fueled” politics of that era were generally pretty solid.

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Unless your reader lives in 1 of 6 or 7 states that are in play, I would think even if your views on the top of the ticket changed your reader’s mind, it will not matter one iota. The overall effect will be much less than 23k votes.

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There's this really bizarre dynamic I've been noticing more and more lately, wherein what the Democrat-aligned progressive elite seem to want is a liberal version of the paranoid, radicalized GOP base, and what the center-right, anti-Trump ex-establishment GOP elite seem to want is a conservative version of the moderate, sober-minded Democratic base.

The reason the contemporary GOP is so dangerous and abnormal is simply that the GOP base largely succeeded in remaking the leadership in their image, whereas the progressive elite has thus far failed to do the same w/r/t the Democratic grassroots, not for lack of trying. This is not discussed for obvious reasons, but I personally find it to be a solid win for democracy in a time of diminishing faith in the whole Enlightenment project - the masses wrecked the GOP, true, but they stopped (and continue to stop) the liberal elite from wrecking the Democratic Party.

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You call the Democratic base "moderate and sober-minded"?

I live in one of the bluest counties in the country. These people are utterly unhinged, foaming-at-the mouth True Believers.

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I agree, there’s no home for classical liberals. That’s why I will be voting for “none of the above” for president and mostly Republicans down ballot.

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Have you heard of Chase Oliver?

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I have had to recognize my own cult like thinking in supporting Trump, but the Brazil situation has lately given me some clarity that I can support him and the GOP on the grounds of free speech alone without having to defend bad tariff policy. « Trump belongs in prison, but I’ll vote for him anyway » is a major cognitive dissonance. If more people accepted that as a valid position then I bet there would be less talk of weaponized government.

My thoughts on this election are that my vote is the best way to punish the Democratic Party for its insane lockdown policy and poor record on free speech and I’m willing to tear the country apart to make that happen.

Best case scenario is that Trump wins and uses some soft power to force Brazil, Australia, UK, and EU to back off on censorship. Given how much those countries rely on the US for economic and military security, what they get away with is in many ways a reflection on our commitment to free speech, and it’s not looking good especially with Harris on the record saying she wants to join those countries in placing onerous regulations on X.

Worst fear is that Harris wins, and free speech as we know it is as good as dead. They’ll find a way to regulate X in a way that doesn’t violate 1A but still effectively quashes dissent. If that doesn’t work they’ll stack SCOTUS which is only prevented by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema right now. Elon Musk will wind up in exile Durov style unless he cooperates.

Of course, I doubt the GOP especially with Trump will be the free speech party forever. Parties seem to have a habit of supporting free speech while in power only to censor once they’re in control. On one hand this means I likely have too much faith in the GOP on that issue, but on the other, it’s how you can tell the left is full of it when they claim to be the oppressed ones pushing back on the powerful. If they weren’t the powerful already, they’d support free speech.

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