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Once their fraud is exposed, they must rely on force
Source: Wikimedia Commons
“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” – George Orwell
Elon Musk, Russell Brand, and Joe Rogan are lifelong Democrats who are social liberals and have always sympathized more with the political left than with Republicans. Heck, Orwell was a leftist as well. But all of them have been banished from the Democrat party because of one very serious problem: They support free speech.
They believe in allowing everyone to challenge authority as they see fit. And guess who can’t accept such behavior: The authority. The Left. The Democrat Party. At least, the modern Democrat Party. Just a few decades ago, Democrats encouraged their followers to “Question Authority.” But now that Democrats ARE the authority, they take a different view. Because Democrats gain power through fraud and force. And now that their fraud has been exposed, they have nothing left besides force. So they must censor and otherwise control what was once open debate.
Elon Musk is such a believer in the importance of free speech that he bought Twitter for much more than it was worth, simply so he could remove the censorship and allow people to discuss things without the oversight of the federal government.
Rather than simply complaining about things, he put his money where his mouth is. A great deal of money.
Democrats tried to criticize his surprising investment, saying, “Oh yeah? Well, what if someone goes on this uncensored platform and criticizes YOU, Elon? Huh? How will you like THAT?” And Elon said that would be perfectly fine. In fact, that was the whole point. He didn’t want only speech that he agreed with. He wanted free speech. He was willing to tolerate dissenting views, even if he strongly disagreed with them.
It is telling that Musk’s tolerance of dissenting views so clearly defined him as an enemy of the Democrat Party.
If I were a Democrat, that would concern me.
Joe Rogan is the most successful podcaster in the short history of the format. His interviews are generally 2-3 hours long, and are characterized by Mr. Rogan asking questions of his guests and allowing them to answer. Which, today, is a radical concept. The news media views him as subversive.
If I were a member of the news media, that would concern me.
I’ve seen a few of his episodes where he clearly disagreed with his guest, but still seemed interested in his guest’s opinions, and would not just allow him to explain his positions, but actually encouraged him to do so.
Try to imagine a left-wing talk show doing that. The View. CNN. The Jimmy Kimmel Show.
In fact, long-form discussion shows don’t exist on the left, because of this central problem. Rush Limbaugh made a career out of in-depth discussions of complex topics, and encouraging discussion. So has Joe Rogan. And Russell Brand. And Jordan Peterson. And lots of others.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Democrats cannot allow such behavior. Obviously. Because their fraud has been exposed. So all they are left with is force.
If there was a chance they might win an open debate, Democrats would be eager to debate. Their efforts to stifle debate tell us all we need to know. Their fraud has been exposed. So all they are left with is force.
This recent election bothered me a great deal. Largely because all Trump talked about was policy ideas. His interviewer could observe that the sky was blue, and Trump had a policy suggestion to improve that. His policies were good, and Harris’ policies were bad. Over and over again.
This annoyed me, until I noticed that Harris never mentioned policies. Her supporters were good, and Trump’s supporters were bad.
So Trump was vilifying policies, while Harris was vilifying half the American population. Not for their ideas, but for who they are.
Harris’ approach is poison. That is how you start a war. In fact, I can’t imagine any other reason for her approach.
Of course, the devastating impact of Biden’s policies are obvious by now, and she freely acknowledged that she would have done the same things. So she just couldn’t discuss policies. She was stuck.
But still. Instead of saying that some policies are bad, she said that some people are bad. Which makes our divisions much greater, and much, MUCH more difficult to resolve.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
And Kamala Harris was not the first to take this approach. Obama said that Republican voters were “bitter clingers,” clinging to their guns and their Bibles. Hillary Clinton called Republican voters “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” Biden never debated policy – he just described Republican voters as racists and fascists. Democrat leaders have been ignoring policies and attacking Republican voters for decades.
Why would a leader do this? I can think of only one reason. Their fraud has been exposed. And they know it. All they have left is force.
Can Donald Trump fix this? I’m not sure. He at least understands it, since Democrats have spent the last several years opposing Trump not by debating his policy ideas, but by using corrupt government agencies to try to imprison Mr. Trump for the rest of his life, for phony “crimes.” Democrats are very open and honest about their desire for their political adversaries to die in prison, rather than attempt to debate their policy differences.
Now THAT is force.
Musk and Brand and Rogan, with their quaint devotion to free speech, are not merely eccentric crackpots. They are a mortal threat to authority. A mortal threat to the modern Democrat party.
So they must be destroyed. Obviously. By whatever means necessary.
And at this point, they probably won’t be destroyed by fraud. It will be by force.
As Trump understands by now. So does Brand, after his painful legal issues, which started when he began to question The Left.
This is going to get ugly. Well, more ugly. If you can imagine. Trump knows what he’s up against, but he has his hands full. Perhaps he can change this.
But the left has gained power. And their fraud has been exposed. So all they have left is force.
And perhaps, at this point, that’s all they need.
Hard to say. I guess we’re about to find out. But I think this is about to get really, really ugly.
As usual, I hope I’m wrong about all this.
Published in General
Good post, Doc. This has become our routine.
An example I have found interesting to watch is on the issue of boys and men play-acting as girls and women to get into female spaces. And specifically the current example of Democratic representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts.
For daring to question the propriety of having boys competing on girls’ sports teams he has become quite the target of retribution and name-calling.
https://www.foxnews.com/sports/democrats-planning-replace-seth-moulton-after-speaking-out-against-trans-athletes
Rep. Moulton says many other Democratic politicians agree with his questioning on this issue, but are apparently afraid to say so.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/rep-moulton-says-fellow-dems-privately-agree-his-criticism-party
I thought the headline framing of the controversy in the New York Times was interesting (I don’t subscribe, so all I can see is the headline: “The Democrat Picking a Fight With His Party Over Transgender Rights.” As in, “How dare a Democrat challenge or even question the dictated orthodoxy of the good tribe. We will publicly (but metaphorically) flay you for doing so.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/16/us/politics/democrats-transgender-rights-moulton.html
Illuminatingly insightful. Terrifyingly so. This should be read aloud by pundits across the nation.
Bring it on. Let the left scream and cry. Their “force” is severely diminished right now. The right has all three branches for at lest two years. It’s like a property owner between bad renters. It’s time to spruce it up with a fresh coat of paint and hope the next renter is tolerable.
Margaret Thatcher’s “Ratchet Effect” illustrates the difficulty of improving things between periods of leftist control. We can occasionally slow the decline, a bit. But the pendulum seems to swing only one way. Historically, at least.
Of course, this could be different. Now that The Left’s fraud has been exposed, and they no longer hold any pretense of benevolence, perhaps Republicans will move away from the Bushes & Cheneys and toward the Vances & Hegseths.
Perhaps.
But the Left still has the Collins’ and Murkowski’s. (Sorry to be so negative this early on a Sunday morn.)
You could certainly say this is a brief period between leftist control. We will never have one of these brief periods again in my lifetime. She could only slow the decline because of their resolve, like us always worried about the next election. I will be furious if Trump isn’t aggressive this term. It better be the Hold-My-Beer administration.
This. I think because so many of what the left considered their base has finally started to see the light we may actually have a longer period in which to fix things. It still won’t happen overnight. It also will take a few more Vances and Hegseths, but if Trump can be somewhat productive in the first year and a half (before midterms) we just might get that and make the Collins’ and Murkowski’s irrelevant. Just listened to the Daily Wire Sunday show. The guy on there talked about the shift of Hispanics (I really hate that catchall) towards Trump. The shift of black men should also be noted. Now that these people get their info from places other than legacy media, we might get past the old boy, blue blood network of the GOP.
FAFO as they say. I don’t think it will get ugly as long as the Left is rudderless. The American voter has told them they are fighting the wrong battles and it is hard to whip up violence, when most everyone is against you. Nobody is going to tolerate riots to put men into women’s sports or to expel the Jews from Israel or to kill fully formed babies. They really want another George Floyd for both the permission to be violent and for the grift.
Stalin’s master propagandist, Willi Munzenberg, had some advice for the writer Arthur Koestler back when the latter was still a Communist:
“Don’t argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them. Make them shudder with horror. That, Arturo, is propaganda!”
That approach has come to dominate political communication from the Democrat side.
See The Munzenberg Method, Then and Now.
Truly fantastic post, thank you!
I am grateful that the Left, despite its hatred and anger, is generally much more poorly armed.
Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk don’t share some ideological blueprint like leftists. They do share the idea that discourse matters, that people deserve the courtesy of at attempt to persuade rather than be threatened with bad names and cancellation.
Leftism is not just an alternative approach to governance in a democracy. It demands to be made a replacement for religion, for personal identity and to undo faith in reason. Debate is at best unnecessary and at worst a sin. Submission to the collective is all that matters. Wear useless masks for years, take a vaccine that does not prevent transmission, believe only the extreme versions of climate change and endorse “green”policies that are all cost and no benefit, believe men in dresses are women, believe free speech is a threat to democracy, believe there was once an Arab nation called Palestine, believe Hunter’s laptop was a Russian fake… Any deviance must be punished. So coercion is a feature not a bug.
In a similar vein, C.A. Skeet writes about Leftism being a Death Cult.
Do read the whole thing.
Dang. Best article I’ve read in a while. Should be required reading.
Thanks for the heads up.
Powerful W.C. ” . . .the American left may never coalesce around a single leader. This is due to the unique nature of the American left, and the depths of depravity and selfishness to which it plumbs. I refer to this phenomena as the Cult of the Self.”
“There is one threat that, if not dispensed with immediately, will bring the fortified edifices of the Self crashing down. And what is this one threat?
An unborn baby.”
Reminds me of a quote from Bertrand Russell, which I can’t find online now, regarding a religious group who were against any kind of sexual activity including that resulting in children, which meant they relied upon mankind’s innate sinfulness to provide them with a continuing supply of fresh members/disciples.
Skeet is my new favorite conservative writer. And his sign-off bio is a hoot!
The current Left is similar to Maoism, which was cult-like, and that had a single leader. For all we know, Obama is leading but from the shadows.
The New York Times subscription model has destroyed honest reporting. Everything is changed to keep their subscribers up and happy.
Get rid of the Federal Reserve.
Ironically, they’ve already used fraud, or fraudulent claims, to employ force. To Doc’s point, it’ll be more of the same, much more, since they’re not now interested in policy discussions.
In the way that the far-left has skyjacked the Democrat party, the very telling and obvious way it has done so, should really be the path for center-left Democrats to move forward. Meaning discard the lunacy and you’ll get back to your slower ratchet, without getting completely pantsed in an election where they’re still picking their jaws up off the floor.
The further left or right on the spectrum you go, the more you lose the voters in the middle, and that’s where the headcount is, if you want to win an election. So I expect some snapback from the mainstream Democrats, the ones that are still standing, wobbly and aging, because they still so desperately want to cling to whatever power is remaining.
“Noncompliance“, that in a nutshell is what I think explains the anger on the Left. The Free Speech issue itself is not the main problem, but rather it leads to the possibility of noncompliance. The Left has Authoritarian tendencies. Describing Authoritarians was Orwell’s forte.
BTW George Orwell was the favorite author of the late Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens was a liberal man no doubt. If he were alive today I think he would not be accepted in legacy media. He’d be too dangerous and make mince meat rhetorically of Democrat panelists. I think he’d be thrown in the Elon/ Rogan bin.
See his book: Why Orwell Matters.
Those were the Shakers, I believe. Although Russell I believe mischaracterized them.
I can’t think of Russell without thinking of the irony that, because of his paradox (Is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves a member of itself?), he began trying to prove the infallibility of logic, which induced Godel to produce his Incompleteness theorems, which proved the inherent self contradiction of second degree logic (self referential logic, the only interesting kind, outside of Euclid’s geometry and ordinary arithmetic, according to the gurus).
Did the Shakers have an earlier name? Because I don’t think that was the name he used. And I think he was referring to a group with more contemporary origins. But it’s been a long time since I read those books.
Yes, yes, by all means yes. Usher in another era of Free Banking, and the nation will prosper like never before. Remove the monopoly on currency issue. It is as harmful as a monopoly in any product or commodity. See George Selgin on Free Banking at the Online Library of Liberty. Or Hayek’s Choice in Currency.
Notice that Trump never insulted the voters on the other side. Never once thought they were deplorable. In fact he was able to get alot of black and Hispanic voters because he mentioned that they weren’t be treated fairly by the other side.