Ingredients, recipes, and what’s really at stake in this election.
As I’ve mentioned in past videos, I’ve previously voted down-ticket Democrat in every election since I was legally able to vote. I remember putting up Obama flyers around my college campus in 2008, and ignorantly ridiculing my good friends when I saw they had a McCain sign in their yard. In 2012, I sat with many of my professors as election night unfolded, relieved that the good guys had once again been victorious. In 2016 I ravenously consumed every video The Young Turks produced, sharing in their anger that my candidate of choice, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, was being cheated by “my team.” I couldn’t understand it, but despite this betrayal, I still gave very little thought when it came to casting my general election vote for Hillary Clinton. I didn’t like Clinton, but I still found her eminently preferable to the unknown entity that was Donald Trump.
Over the course of election night 2016, I drank nearly an entire bottle of rum, answering the age-old question “But why is the rum gone?” It’s gone because the world just ended, Jack. That’s why.
I’m not going to get into my personal journey over the last four years here. I’ve covered it extensively on my YouTube channel and in my writings. Those interested in the details will find them readily available. The simplest way to distill the past several years into something digestible is that I realized I’d been lied to by institutions I trusted, and developed the skill of discerning truth from narrative. Yes, I’ve studied everything from economics to history, theology to marketing, philosophy to biology. But all of those studies were in service of the realization that despite the overwhelming amount of information we have at our fingertips, unfiltered truth is frighteningly hard to find. Matt Taibbi articulates this reality with expert precision in his book Hate, Inc., where he provides us with the following lament while reflecting on our current media landscape:
“I work in this business, and don’t know who to trust. The situation recalls the landscape of third-world countries, where the truth has to be pieced together from disparate bits reported by news outlets loyal to different oligarchical factions. Companies are nurturing emotional dependency for cash. The key is to always report negatively about the other audience, but never about your own. “They’re bad equals you’re good,” and endlessly spinning in that cycle creates hardened, loyal, dependent followers… we’re not encouraging people to break these patterns. If anything, we’re addicting people to conflict, vitriol, and feelings of superiority. It works. Companies know: fear and mistrust are even harder habits to break than smoking.”
He’s right, (and it gets worse) but we’ll get to that in a minute. The point is, after the 2016 election shock, I’ve spent the last four years intentionally and rigorously developing the ability to sort fact from opinion, truth from narrative. This is a necessary skill under any circumstances, but especially so due to the abysmal situation we find ourselves in, as Taibbi so poignantly describes.
We’ll come back to this later. But for now, here’s the phrase I’ve been using to frame the topic of how I was going to vote: “Donald Trump probably doesn’t deserve to win, but the rest of us normal people don’t deserve what will happen if he loses.”
Let’s unpack that for a moment. When this phrase originally popped into my mind, I began to go down a list of things that I find to be fundamentally disqualifying about Donald Trump. This is not a short list, but I’ll give you the two that are most important to me. The first is the stuff with Stormy Daniels. As a married man with a wife I love and a 1 ½ year old daughter I adore, this story is just repulsive to me. He slept with a porn star while his wife was pregnant. I know we all seem to have moved past that, and delusional Christians have tried to make the case that Trump is somehow like King David, but it’s disqualifying in my opinion. I don’t think there’s much else to say on this one.
The other is the fact that this guy not only runs his mouth off with reckless abandon, he doubles down on whatever it is he says, often irrespective of the facts. This creates a doubly-whammy of confusion, and often necessitates explanations of things that can’t be explained without the asterisk that the President of the United States can’t control his mouth. It also ends up being the primary source of fuel his opponents use against him. The most recent example comes from his interviews with Bob Woodward, where Trump made accidentally correct statements about the transmissibility of the Coronavirus before we actually had that information on the books. Instead of admitting he was just shooting his mouth off and taking shots in the dark (considering no one had that information at the time), the President allowed a narrative to be spun that he intentionally misled the people for the sake of “optimism.” This is catastrophically stupid, and wouldn’t happen if he had any semblance of humility or self-awareness when it comes to running his mouth.
There are many other things I could list that I find to be “disqualifying” about the President. For example, Trumpism has created a situation where Conservatism is being redefined by populism, rather than principle. This is remarkably dangerous, and the soul-searching that is necessary on the Right for how they will handle the post-Trump era is absolutely vital. There’s also the fact that the President has convinced many of his supporters that the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat. This is also recklessly perilous, and (in my opinion) will directly lead to otherwise avoidable hostilities on election day. Like I said, I do have a list. But here’s the problem I ran into when making this list: framing this as “Trump probably doesn’t deserve to win due to A, B, or C disqualifying characteristic” infers this statement isn’t true about his opponents. The reality is, Joe Biden also has numerous things that make him disqualifying. Refusing to answer whether he would pack the Supreme Court is disqualifying. Refusing to answer specific questions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings is disqualifying. Calling Antifa “an idea” is disqualifying. Telling black voters that they aren’t actually black if they don’t vote for him is disqualifying. The fact that he is clearly experiencing serious cognitive decline is disqualifying. The list goes on.
Then there’s his campaign itself. Joe Biden has framed the impetus for his very presidential run as being based on the “Fine People Hoax,” which is so thoroughly debunked, he must assume the American people are either too ignorant to know, or too cynical to care that he is lying to them. This lie was first articulated in his campaign launch video, and again during his speech accepting the Democratic Nomination at the DNC. This lie is insidious not only because of how obviously false it is, but because of the implications it created. The legacy media’s refusal to seriously correct the record on this lie is one of the things that has allowed every other lie to be believable. If you believe the President actually called neo-Nazis and white supremacists “fine people,” you’ll believe anything else they tell you about him, too. Moreover, it sets up every Trump supporter as being in favor of a man who finds neo-Nazis appealing. This has been caustic for our social fabric, but again, we’ll get to that in a minute. (See: Don Lemon’s recent tirade about breaking off friendships with Trump supporters to see how the treatment of the President has a direct relationship with how his supporters are treated, too.)
So what do we do? Both have aspects that are disqualifying. So did Clinton, Obama, Romney, etc. They all do. So how do we weigh it out? Here’s what I did, and how I got there.
I did vote Democrat in this election. There are local politicians that I know and support who I believe would be great public servants if elected, and I hope they are. However, I did not support the Democrat nominee for President. For the first time in my life, I voted Republican, and filled in the oval for the Trump/Pence ticket. Here’s why.
First, the more I ruminated on my “Trump probably doesn’t deserve to win” framing, the less I found myself feeling it to be true. It’s not that there aren’t things about him that would check that box- there are. But using the same metrics, who does deserve to win? What about the qualifying things he’s done? These are important questions, and worth considering. See, I understand why my friends and family who vote for Joe Biden are doing so. I disagree, even strongly disagree. But I understand their perspective. I do. However, I find the opposite to rarely be the case. I am yet to encounter a non-Trump voter who earnestly and empathetically says “Yeah, I understand why you did that. I don’t agree, but I get it.” This is partly why I didn’t really want to write this in the first place. I live in a Red state, so all of this is basically symbolic. Additionally, I have serious doubts about much good-faith understanding and curiosity I’ll receive from people I care about who disagree with my analysis, despite my offering of it. But fear tactics and inflamed social tensions are part of why we’re in this mess, and to succumb to them is to empower them.
Second, the last four years of this administration haven’t been that bad. Yeah, I said it. It’s ok if you disagree, that’s fine. But ask yourself: where do your opinions come from? Are they your opinions, or were they handed to you by someone else? Consider that a recent Gallup Poll found that a staggering 56% of Americans say they are better off now than they were four years ago. So it’s not just me saying that.
Just to name a few of the positives: Betsy DeVos has done a good job restoring Title IX and due process to college campuses, illegal immigration (and subsequently, human trafficking and illegal drug importation) has dropped, peace is breaking out in the Middle East, the economy continues to surge back despite a global pandemic, prior to the pandemic the economy was the best it had been in decades, we saw tremendous prison reform with The First Step Act, no new foreign wars, the return of troops stateside, the defeat of ISIS, improved trade deals such as the USMCA, and the removal of the impossible-to-exaggerate-how-dangerous-this-is Critical Race Theory from government training and government contractors. The only thing I’ll say about the race issue is that if Donald Trump is personally a racist, he’s the most incompetent racist to ever gain power in the history of the United States, considering the countless programs and initiatives his administration has spearheaded for the explicit benefit of non-white Americans. Compare President Trump’s record with the countless overtly racist remarks Joe Biden has made, and you decide who is more likely to hold racist viewpoints.
As an aside, I’ll tell you the first time (and one of the only times) I ever had the thought “He has to win.” It was during his RNC speech. During this speech, the President gave the most concise and accurate description of “Cancel Culture” I’ve ever heard:
“We must reclaim our independence from the left’s repressive mandates. Americans are exhausted trying to keep up with the latest list of approved words and phrases, and the ever-more restrictive political decrees. Many things have a different name now, and the rules are constantly changing. The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated, and driven from society as we know it. The far-left wants to coerce you into saying what you know to be FALSE, and scare you out of saying what you know to be TRUE.” -Donald Trump
When I heard that, I said out loud “He has to win. We need a president who understands this, because it’s one of the biggest issues we’re facing right now as a country.” I said it to my wife then, and I still mean it. Cancel culture is a symptom of the rot in our social fabric, and it must be stopped. President Trump understands that. As Tom Klingenstein recently put it:
“Trump is the perfect man for these times. Not all times, or perhaps even most times. But these times.”
Klingenstein continues:
“I know President Trump has many faults. I myself sometimes cringe listening to him. Sometimes he is his own worst enemy. He is a braggart, often misinformed, petty, sometimes even vengeful, and more. And yet, we are very lucky to have him. I am almost prepared to say that having him is providential. How else to explain that we find ourselves with this most unusual, most unpresidential man, who has just the attributes most needed for this moment. At any other time, he might well have been a bad president. But in these times, these revolutionary times, he is the best president we could have had.”
I might not go as far as Klingenstein here with my adulation, but he makes a good point: under other circumstances, it is fair to say that Donald Trump would be a terrible president. Perhaps even under most other circumstances. It’s hard to say. But for this moment, right now, he is the right man for the job.
However, all this is actually a distant second to my primary motivation in voting for President Trump. If Trump loses, it will mean the legacy media and establishment Democrats (I repeat myself) will have succeeded in their relentless campaign to subvert democracy through a dizzying and exhausting years-long campaign of misinformation and disinformation. This is unacceptable.
Note that I didn’t say “Trump must win so the media doesn’t succeed in how mean they are to Conservatives.” That’s not the whole story. We’ve seen the media and the Democrat establishment take seemingly boundless measures to preserve the establishment power, which includes scurrilous attacks on fellow Democrats.
Consider how MSNBC and NBC continually flubbed coverage of Andrew Yang, including everything from getting his name wrong, to excluding him from lists of Democratic candidates entirely.
There’s Tulsi Gabbard, who was basically accused of being a Russian operative by Hillary Clinton. Additionally, Gabbard found herself temporarily in Google’s crosshairs, as her ads were inexplicably removed from Google search results after her debate performance that finally put her in the spotlight.
Let us not forget Bernie Sanders, whose campaign was continually thwarted by the establishment Democrats in 2016, followed by an encore performance of corruption again this time around. It’s also worth mentioning the staggeringly biased questioning by CNN’s Abby Phillip during one of the Democratic Primary debates:
“CNN reported yesterday — and Senator Sanders, Senator Warren confirmed in a statement — that, in 2018, you told her you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?”
In other words, “Mr. Sanders, when did you stop beating your wife?”
The point is, this isn’t just a Left vs. Right thing. It’s an Establishment Left vs. Everyone Else thing. And it can’t be allowed to succeed.
Today I listened to a conversation between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, two men who are so consumed with delusion over the crisis personified they imagine Donald Trump to be, that even their comparisons between Trump and Hitler find Hitler to be the more virtuous of the two. And yet, even they struggled to contain their concern over what the legacy media has become.
“We have a media that is more interested in controlling the news, rather than airing the news,”
Sullivan said when discussing the unprecedented black hole of media malfeasance we’ve seen surrounding the Hunter Biden Laptop story. He continued:
“It’s especially troubling, because if we do get a change of regime, and if we do get Joe Biden in, all these people are gonna be responsible not just for suppressing information, but suppressing information on behalf of those in power.”
This is not the first time Harris, who again, finds Trump to be less principled than Osama Bin Laden, has gone after the legacy media for their Trump-era perversion. I remember a video he made last year, where he stated that in response to Trump, “we have a Left that is filled with liars, and dupes. And that is also sickening.” He goes on to describe his feelings on the “Fine People Hoax” about Charlottesville, lamenting that “The fact that the Left will lie about what he [Trump] said, again, in places like The New York Times, is a disaster.”
That’s putting it lightly. We cannot ignore what we’ve seen in our media complex’s unified front in simultaneously refusing to cover anything positive about the Trump Administration (going all the way back to the beginning), while shamelessly providing wall-to-wall coverage of even the most outrageous and discredited allegations.
It’s not just the President. The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings gave us a barrage of preposterous allegations being uncritically presented on major news outlets, all because Kavanaugh happened to be a Trump nominee. They ignored the stories of Blasey-Ford’s friend being bullied and harassed into corroborating things she didn’t believe. They ignored Tara Reade, and lashed out at those who didn’t. They’ve largely ignored the unprecedented Middle East Peace deals, and the little coverage they did receive amounted to either downplaying them, or bizarre assertions that they will actually increase conflict. They’ve inflamed racial tensions to a fever pitch, often by uncritically presenting highly contentious ideas as if they’re well-accepted axioms, or just misrepresent the contentious ideas altogether. We also can’t ignore the asymmetry of their treatment of protests in the streets as good, and any other violations of social distancing as bad. They’ve bent over backwards, sometimes to hilarious effect, to downplay any violence taking place in our cities. They negligently used photos from the Obama presidency to criticize Trump’s border policy. They have also frivolously equated anyone on the Right as a “white supremacist.” Just a few days ago, Nancy Pelosi made the irresponsible claim that she “doesn’t trust the Supreme Court” and that all Trump appointees should recuse themselves in the event of election issues making their way to SCOTUS. Lastly, and while we’re on the topic of media malfeasance, it’s worth noting that despite coverage to the contrary, Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
Then there’s the impeachment, and the uncritical presentation of allegations that weren’t even in the articles of impeachment themselves. We often forget such an embarrassment took place, because it transitioned directly to the Covid-19 Pandemic. During this time (and especially at the beginning) we witnessed some of the more egregious and dishonest reporting we’ve ever seen in this country’s history.
Neither impeachment nor Covid-related, one of my personal favorite examples of the total collapse in journalistic integrity comes courtesy of NPR’s list of the top stories from 2019. Their #4 was “The Mueller Report: With Redactions.” Here’s how they described it:
The Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election was arguably the most anticipated document of 2019. That 400-page report noted that while the Justice Department’s guidance is not to indict a sitting president, the findings did not “exonerate” Trump. “The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred,” the report noted. “Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
For those of you unsure of the issue here, NPR just conflated two radically different things: The thrust of the first part of the Mueller Report (which found no collusion), with the conclusions of the second part, which was about obstruction of justice, and concluded as NPR described. This would be like someone standing trial for murder and jaywalking, being found innocent of murder, no verdict on jaywalking, and the news reporting it as there being no verdict on the murder charge. See the issue? This is about as brazenly deceptive as it gets, folks.
All of this is just barely scratching the surface. The irony of this reality collapse is rooted in one of Sam Harris’s most popular criticisms of President Trump. Harris asserts that Trump lies with such frequency, it’s impossible to keep up with the avalanche of nonsense we’re constantly bombarded with. In all fairness, there’s some truth to this. Trump says a lot of dumb things, which causes even more dumb problems, some of which I touched on earlier. But what we see in the things our media chooses to cover, how they cover it, and what they choose to ignore, is staggering. This is the real avalanche of nonsense. Every legacy media institution from the New York Times (See: Bari Weiss’s scathing resignation letter) to NPR (See: Their recent justification for not covering the Hunter Biden story) has slowly been revealing their true agenda: the recapture and preservation of power for the Democratic establishment. As James Lindsay said in his video about why he is also voting for Trump: “We cannot empower this.”
No, no we can’t. For those of you still unaware of the situation we’re facing here, let me lay it out for you as simply as I can:
The past four years has been a synthesis of collaboration by legacy media, establishment Democrats, and increasingly by big tech in a nonstop experimentation with ingredients. Throttle this account, downplay that, lean into this narrative, etc. All of these are ingredients in search of a recipe, and that recipe is how to so thoroughly misinform and disinform the public through emotional manipulation and factual distortions so as to successfully defeat the sitting president or any other opposition to their quest for power. Some who are experimenting with these ingredients are doing so for purely financial reasons, others for political reasons, and many a little of both. (Again, see Matt Taibbi’s Hate, Inc. for a more robust look at the various dynamics of how we got into this mess with our media.)
Regardless of the reasons, it’s just been ingredients thus far. They’re throwing stuff against the wall, and seeing what sticks. But when this election is over, they’ll have two possible recipes. The first recipe, the one that can’t be allowed to exist, is the one where they succeed. They’ll pull the deceptions out of the oven, savor the smell of their repulsive concoction, and dine on their morally bankrupt success. Then, they’ll go about tweaking and perfecting the recipe so as to ensure that their power never goes unchallenged again. Of course it will eventually be challenged, and that’s a whole different problem. I’m not sure how many people are actually interested in some modern version of a civil war, but I’m not one of them.
The other recipe isn’t much better (though it is better). With this recipe, they lose- but they will have come remarkably close to succeeding. Too close. They’ll dip their finger in the sauce, taste it, and say “Not quite, but it’s close. Maybe a little more of this dishonesty and algorithm manipulation, or a little less of this restraint, and then we’ll have our recipe.” Failure this time around will give us four more years of experimenting, and bring them that much closer to finding the secret sauce to upending democracy as we know it. This, too is unacceptable. “We cannot empower this.”
The second scenario at least gives us a fighting chance. What I mean is, many people have already woken up to how they are being manipulated and lied to. While the establishment would inevitably respond to a Trump victory by spending the next four years working even harder to subvert democracy and journalistic integrity, we would also be working to expose their rot and abandonment of anything even remotely resembling a moral compass. It would remain an uphill battle (and likely get much steeper) but it also might just be enough to turn the tide in the war for reality and principles.
This is why Trump has to win, because the legacy media and their corrupt alliance with the Democrat establishment absolutely needs to lose. As I mentioned, there are many other reasons why I think Donald Trump has been a better president that he’s given credit for. But those reasons don’t even come close to the importance of defeating those whose very business model is currently based on intentionally getting us to hate each other. These people are the reason we’re all looking to Tuesday like it’s The Purge, rather than an election in the freest country on planet earth. If they win, we lose. And if Trump wins, we honestly still might lose. But at least we’ll have a chance, and that’s enough for me.
-T