Trump 2.0 - quick takes on domestic issues

After taking a look at how Trump senselessly ended Pax Americana, undermined the most successful military alliance in history, eliminated American soft power, and gave a lifeline to the enemies of the United States when they seemed to be on the brink of collapse, all that in just 2 weeks, let's see what's happening inside the US.

A lot of Americans think that although things are going bad, all the hysteria about American decline is overblown. The US is a country of strong democratic institutions and robust civic culture, it will weather this period out.

I'm sorry, they are mistaken. The health of the US is not a question we are waiting for the answer to. That ship has sailed. A sitting president tried to stay in power after losing an election, first by trying to pressure the DOJ to declare the results invalid, then attempting to steal it through his fake electors scheme, then finally, inciting an insurrection. And four years later, half of the American people voted for him. Trump being elected a second time proves two things. One, the people's tolerance (putting it very mildly) for a wannabe fascist was not a historical aberration, but a permanent fact of reality from now on. Two, the laws, courts, and other institutions are not enough on their own. Modern society depends on norms, which have proven to be much more fragile than anyone had thought before. The justice system had four years to act on Trump's 97 criminal indictments and failed. America is broken in a fundamental way. Even after Trump is gone, trying to steal elections, lying about it blatantly, and inciting political violence (and dozens of minor issues like dining with neonazis) are just part of the new norms, and one of America's two big parties will build on it.

Now all these above were a bit abstract so let's go down to concrete facts. Just a few, I don't have all day. Starting with Trump's appointments.

    The new Head of National Security Agencies, whose job is to collect the information provided by the different intelligence services, is Tulsi Gabbard. There is one question about Gabbard no one seems to know the answer to. Is she a paid Russian asset, or is she just an America-hating idiot who never met a bloody dictator she did not support against her own country? In the former case, one can argue that Gabbard has been put into the position because Vladimir Putin doesn't have time every week to fly to Washington himself.

    The Defense Secretary is Pete Hegseth, former FOX host, who has been mostly known for the fact that his colleagues regularly have to carry him away from office parties once he is too drunk to walk himself and has already harassed his female colleagues. Ah yes, he is a white nationalist and Christian fundamentalist, too.

    Kash Patel, the new head of FBI has been a strong Jan 6 supporter of Trump. His main claim for fame is writing a children's book in which Trump, the good King, is undermined by his evil advisors, but Patel, the court magician comes and saves the day. No, I'm not joking. He started with tenure demanding the names of FBI agents who worked on Jan 6 cases. The purge has begun. 

    Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the Health Secretary, is probably mentally ill, in a medical sense. He is a man who believes vaccines cause autism and would like to get rid of them if it's up to him. All vaccines. Against polio, measles, cholera, you name it. To be frank, I wish for him to succeed, just stop all transatlantic lines before he gets to work. Then let's catch up after the first cholera epidemic.  

    In normal times, one could hope that the robust civil service will dampen the damage the President and his idiots will inflict on the system. These are not normal times. Elon Musk has got bored faking being an engineer and now he is faking to be an accountant who can find fraud and waste in government. It's a permanent illusion among Silicon Valley types that leading a government is like leading a business company. Even if it were true, it's not clear why exactly Musk is the man for the job, whose last business venture was buying the world's most influential social media platform and reducing it to less than a third of its value. Notwithstanding, the world's richest imbecile is bulldozing through government offices, canceling programs, firing people, and exposing sensitive data without any legal authority. In the long term, he will probably save millions, with the chaos and destruction costing billions.

    Ah, by the way, X's CEO Linda Yaccarino is going around telling companies to advertise on X, or they will get no government contracts. Ah, and by the way, the administration is purging not only the FBI, but the CIA as well. The timing is perfect because Musks's schlepp must be teeming with Russian spies, for whom DOGE is just an espionage bonanza. 

    If the Russians had a free hand to destroy US interests globally and its system domestically, they couldn't do it better. Paid, blackmailed, or brainwashed, it's irrelevant. Trump and Musk are Russian assets, hellbent on destroying America, and liberal democracies overseas.

    And for those who think that the system only needs to hold on for four years, here is what has a real chance of happening in 2028. I said it already in front of an audience overlapping with the New Vac Times readership, so I'll be brief. In 2028, Trump's second term ends. If he is still alive and his brain has rotten enough, he will say, "I don't care, I'm not going anywhere". Republicans already started floating suggestions to eliminate the two-term limit. Everyone would fall then in line. If he is happy to step down, he will put Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr, or some other family member as the nominee, so the grift can be passed down to the next generation.

    Here is the next step. There is a 50% chance that Republicans lose the election, as is always. Luckily, certifying the results is the job of the incumbent VP, who happens to be J.D. Vance. Vance had one question from Trump, and one only, when he was selected as a running mate: "In the place of Mike Pence, would you have followed my orders to accept my elector slates instead of the real ones?". So that problem is solved. If protests erupt, Trump has Pete Hegseth and the new top brass of the military (he has just fired the current ones) who will be happy to shoot into the crowd if asked. Trump has already asked for this during BLM protests and was politely declined, as we know from the memoirs of his former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper.

    For those who think that Trump will be dead, or too old, or too lazy to care anymore and the next nominee will be J.D. Vance, who might be a creepy, spineless fucker, but he is not crazy, ponder what Vance said in 2021: “We are in a late republican period...If we’re going to push back against it, we have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” Considering how comfortable a lot of conservatives are right now, exactly what do you think he had in mind? What do you think?

If you think that all of this is an exaggeration, you will get over it. Denial is the first stage of grief.

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Trump 2.0 - quick takes

Time to take a quick stock of the Trump 2.0 so far. I have no stomach to sweat out some not-so-clunky prose on this dismal subject, so I will just iterate through a couple of points. Starting with the geopolitical ones.

Tariff war against Canada and Mexico. It's an easy one to be wise about because it happened already. Trump threatened with tariffs, Canada (I suppose Mexico as well) answered with their threats, then Trump blinked. Canada and Mexico reiterated promises they already made last year and Trump declared a great victory. Fyi for those who think that this 5-dimensional chess grandmaster just pretends to be the madman who uses outlandish threats in service of his cold hard calculations. He didn't achieve anything beyond uniting Canada as a nation against the US. Well played. 

I almost forgot, he also would like to annex Canada, I guess that's postponed now.

Greenland. Shitting on allies is one thing, but concretely threatening them with physical force unless they give up some of their territory? I just love how conservatives piss blood while trying to spin it. Nevertheless, I don't think anything will come out of it.

Gaza-a-Lago. As obvious from the previous posts, I'm on Israel's side in the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict (but not on the far-right opportunistic/batshit-crazy Israeli government's side). But simply shovel 2 million Palestinians away and build condos where they lived? Anyway, it would be a diplomatic and logistical nightmare, nothing will come out of it. 

Ukraine. Everyone knew that Trump would sell Ukraine out. Niall Fergusson, Douglas Murray, Konstantin Kisin, and all the other "principled conservatives" now act indignantly as if Trump just broke a personal promise to them. The poor snowflakes will get over it. However, America actually taking the side of the Russians? Demanding half of Ukraine's natural resources for "protection"? Blocking the UN resolution that states that Russia started the war? I hope all Republican congressmen start their days by taking a good look in the mirror and vomit. Coming to think of it, I hope his voters do the same, too.

What will happen? Ukraine will reject the "offer", and keep fighting. Will the Europeans actually put soldiers on the ground? Unfortunately, I don't think so. There are no Churchills here. Furthermore, and here comes my wild conjecture, if Europeans did that, Trump would threaten them with tariffs, or directly with military force.

No one (sane) ever raised the question: what if America decides to attack Europe? Not that people thought the idea impossible, it never even came up (outside of the mind of Noam Chomsky and other useful idiots). Now, it does come up, and it's no longer impossible. This is just mind-blowing.

Taiwan. A year ago, I would have bet money that China wouldn't try anything. The Ukrainian war probably made Xi Jinping ponder, "Is my military the same type of Potemkin army as Putin's, or is it even shittier?" Now I would bet that they will attack Taiwan. Trump not only won't lift a finger, he will gleefully comment on how his tough guy buddy crushes the Taiwanese. A caveat here is that I don't know how Taiwan's fall would affect the business of Trump's Silicon Valley ass-lickers. If it does, they will try to influence Trump.

I forgot the Panama Canal. No, that would require some organization, too.

Iran? This gives me a bit of a pause. I'm 50-50 on whether Trump will order American attacks on it. But, on second thought, nah, probably not.

To summarize, Trump won't do anything direct abroad, because he cannot. He is not capable of managing anything more complicated than...I can't even find a metaphor. He is not a chess master, he doesn't have a world-view, he is a witless ape throwing shit on the wall who enjoys hurting other people. His administration is made up of warring factions of lunatics, and lunacy is the only thing that we will see from the outside. He will introduce some tariffs, then call them off the first day when they start hurting Americans. He will threaten former US allies and back off at the first sign of resistance. 

And that was my geopolitical prediction batch for the next four years.

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Can I call them Nazis?

A conversation is effectively finished once a Nazi or Hitler comparison is made.
- Godwin's law

I always found Godwin's law pretentious bullshit on some visceral level, without ever consciously articulating exactly why. It's definitely not Godwin's fault, as the quote above is not from him. It is a twisted version of his original observation and thus mistakenly attributed to him. The real one, as I learned recently, states that

"if any online discussion continues long enough, then eventually someone in it will compare something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis"

which is hard to disagree with, on strictly statistical grounds. Nevertheless, the people invoking Godwin more often than not refer to the first version.

The point Godwin was making is obvious. He highlighted the fact that Nazi comparisons are made too frivolously in online discourse, to the detriment of it. This is a factually valid observation. My dislike stems from the smugness of people misusing it, indicating that bringing up Nazis in a conversation about current political events at any time is just a sign of unsophisticatedness.

This post is obviously prompted by the previous one, which in the eyes of many clearly violated Godwin's law, so before I try to figure out why exactly I detest the bastardized version, let's dispel some possible misunderstanding right at the start.

Last time, I made a very categoric statement that Trump voters would have elected Adolf Hitler as chancellor, had they lived in the 30s Germany. This perhaps deserves some afterthought. After great disappointments, one tends to be carried away with emotions, in written form as much as in person, and sometimes expresses opinions in a needlessly offensive, problematic manner, which he later regrets once emotions cool down and common sense prevails. I want to reassure the readers of the New Vac Times that this is absolutely not the case with the previous op-ed. I really do despise half of the electorate. Not as humans in everyday life, not their morality necessarily, but as citizens. I stand by this opinion, and everything that came out after the elections of Trump-supporting intellectuals, media personalities, and tech billionaires supports my belief. So do some friends and family, too, sadly. 

I agree with everything The Dispatch's Nick Cattogio wrote before and after the election. If the paywall stops you, you can listen to Tim Miller reading up a piece of it from 35:05. If you listen to it a bit longer, you will hear the succinct version of the argument, from Tom Nichols: 

"- You can't judge these people!"
"- The hell I can't!"

By the way, I didn't describe Trump voters as Nazis. I merely claimed that they would have voted for the Nazis, and everyone can draw their own conclusions from this. 

Here are mine.

90% of these people are ignorant not only about cold hard facts that are well within their effortless reach but are also unable to comprehend the importance of the rule of law, liberalism, institutions, and many other fundamental building blocks of modern society, more than an average kid does at the age of 12. This is arrested development on a global scale.

Arguably, most people are simply not interested enough in these topics as much as others are not interested in chemistry. There are only 24 hours in a day. But, if you listen to Donald Trump (and you could not listen to him for hours aggregated in the last 8 years) and think, this is the guy I'd rather see leading the world, you lack something more than just information.

If I despise these people, that feeling is nothing compared to what I feel towards right-wing intellectuals and self-described centrists. The staff at National Review, Wall Street Journal, Unherd, and likes of popular historian Niall Fergusson or "journalist" Piers Morgan, or the dozens of podcast hosts with millions of followers. Pretentious assholes playing high-brow intellectuals for the highest bidders. They would have fit in nicely with Albert Speers, Carl Schmitts, and Martin Heideggers, or just the run-of-the-mill functionaries of that era. Fergusson made some indignant noises when Tucker Carlsson interviewed Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper ("the most important historian of the United States today") who claimed that the real bad guy of the Second World War was Winston Churchill, a puppet of his Jewish financiers. In five years, when another slimy little "historian" will voice similar claims, it won't make such ripples, and Ferguson will just shut the fuck up and find something quickly on the Democrats' side to complain about.

As for the tech bros, like Peter Thiel, David Sacks, or Elon Musk? In case you'd think that there is a charitable interpretation of their sycophantic behavior, Thiel just spared you the trouble on Piers Morgan recently, when he gloated about how the time has come to demolish the "ancienne regime", by which he meant, liberalism. It's not clear which part of liberalism he detests. Rule of law? Judicial independence? Free press? Or just voting rights for the hoi polloi? The less said about another self-proclaimed big thinker, Elon Musk, the better. Actually, I can't resist quoteingDestiny: "... Elon Musk is a 97 IQ man who masquerades as a 137 IQ man and all of his followers are 85 IQ so they all believe that he's as smart as he says he is". Zuckerberg, Bezos, and the rest? These are just miserable cowards. They required no prison or threat of physical violence to cave, just the prospect of losing some profit. 

In short, everyone named above would have gone along with every right-wing regime in the 20th century. In the unlikely event that Trump really starts rounding up people by the millions to deport, they will explain why it's still better than a Democrat president. Rotten bunch. They deserve a post on their own.

Yes, this argument is not constructive, but again, a medical diagnosis can be valid even if there's nothing good coming out of it.

That was more long-winded than I expected. The intended main topic of the post will probably end up shorter. So here we go: is it ever justified or useful to call someone (or liken to) a Nazi? I can think of some obvious cons, and some pros as well.

The cons come easy to mind if you open a left-leaning newspaper. The "Israel is the Nazis of today" Soviet propaganda which originated in the seventies when Israel aligned itself with the US is still going strong and will do so as long as the public remembers the Second World War. After that, we might just revert to the old, time-proven habit of calling Jews God-killers. The fascist label is basically on everyone who criticizes BLM, or its next incarnation. Go to the Left enough (no need to travel far, just a step beyond the Guardian) and you will live in a world where everyone but you and your friends (and Facebook soulmates) are fascists.

These people are grinding away one of the best social taboos humanity has come up with, the taboo against racism, one chip at a time. Another metaphor might be even better. Words as vehicles of magic. The word "Nazi" puts a powerful stigma on its target, like the mark of Cain, banning him or her from society. But the magical potential is finite and the power ebbs away at every use, even faster by every misuse.

Having said that, all the above doesn't categorically imply that the comparison is never justified or helpful. To make a convincing argument in a good-faith debate, or to have any real debate at all, the participants need to establish a common ground, from which point they can reach some conclusion following the rules of logic. There is not much common ground left. When even basic facts are controversial, the agreement that Nazis are bad is one of the few remaining ones.

Therefore dogmatic reverence of avoiding Nazi comparisons is silly. If someone chants "Jews will not replace us" or uses the word "vermins" to immigrants who "poison the blood of the country", then obvious analogies come to mind. The burden of proof to justify their position is not on those who point out the glaring similarities but on the ones who have a knee-jerk reflex to dismiss drawing any Nazi parallels. As is the burden on the person who chants and blabbers racist crap to clarify "I only borrow phrases from the Mein Kampf, but I wouldn't follow them up with actions". 

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US election 2024 prediction

Okay, let's get it out of my system. What's going to happen on November 5 and shortly after?

I'm in a state of cognitive dissonance simultaneously holding three different mental models in my head.

The Rational Ignorant

When sliding into the first one, I'm sure anyone who claims to know who will win the 2024 presidential election is full of it. American politics is effectively a two-party system with calcified electorates, where the elections are almost always decided by very small margins. Any of the major parties could put forward a German Shepherd and have a non-negligible chance of winning (the Republicans are so sure of this that they test their luck and put forward a Putin-loving convicted rapist and insurrectionist). At the last election, each of the seven swing states was won or lost by mere tens of thousands of votes. Biden carried Arizona with 49.4% of the votes against Trump's 49.0%. There is no way of telling where fractions of a percentage will go.

The Scared

The second mental model draws its power from the mood inside my information bubble, which is dark. Most Never Trumpers and pundits foresee a Trump victory. But being worried is the default state of liberals, which allows me to...

The Confident

...find solace in the third one. God knows I need it. With this hat on, I predict Kamala a landslide victory. I base this on personal gut feeling and on the analysis of Peter Zeihan who agrees with my gut that Trump is a loser with a capital "L". After 2016 he managed to lose every single election where he chose to make himself the center of the vote. The 2018 midterms, the 2020 general election, the 2021 Georgia runoff elections, 2022 midterms. In 2020, he himself was ejected from office (making him the first one-term president of the last thirty years), and for the rest, the candidates he endorsed failed miserably.

He was never popular. He won 2016 with 45.9% of the popular vote (against Hillary's 48.0%) and his approval rating hovered consistently in the low 40s. The elections are decided by swing voters and a substantial proportion of them have developed a loathing of Trump as intense as his fans' devotion.

For the reasons above, until his disastrous debate performance, I was quite sure Biden would win, and even after that, I thought he had a nigh even chance. However, with Biden stepping down, the pent-up energies of democrat voters frustrated by their candidate's age blew up in an overwhelming surge of enthusiasm for Kamala. And in the last couple of months, she has done reasonably well. Her debate performance was spot-on (thanks to her preppers, who after 9 fucking years finally figured out how to talk to The Donald), and her interviews were good enough. Not good, mind you. But good enough. I believe that she is the dream candidate of few, but the preferred one of the tight majority in this binary race.

Trump on the other hand went to full idiot ("cat-eating Haitians") and full fascist (MSG-rally) mode, beyond anything we have seen before, and that's saying something. On the bright side, I don't think he has gained many new voters with that nor with his creepy shithead VP-elect Vance.

After November 5

Assuming that the last model proves to be the most accurate, what will happen after Trump loses?

I believe that bloodshed will happen. Trump and the imbecile half of the country won't accept the results. There will be instant lawsuits, as is normal, demands to stop the counting, as is moronic, and then a couple of other actions, which are criminal: Republican election officials sending in fake electors and/or refusing to certify the results, attacks on election officials, death threats to politicians, and mobs on the street. The constitutional crisis can last for weeks, giving constant opportunities for violence.

January 6 and the years since then normalized this behavior. Eighty-year-old taboos against political violence, Nazi slogans (and dinners guests and apologists) and even questioning democracy are broken. There is nothing hyperbolic or unhinged about the picture painted in the previous paragraph. Every single piece of it already happened four years ago. There are three crucial differences this time, however. 

One, the Trump voters have been fed with the Big Lie for four years now. They are angry, they are shameless, and they won't accept another defeat. 

Two, Trump has nothing to lose by attempting to grab power by violence and can't afford to lose anyway. If he fails to get back to the White House, he will spend his remaining days in courtrooms if he's lucky and behind bars if we are. 

Three, there is no one by his side who would even try to restrain him. His people are the ones who just held a 30s-style rally in Madison Square Garden.

This is gonna be very ugly.

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The post-Biden era starts

After eight years in the Trump era and only months before the next election, one had the feeling minor affairs (like wars, criminal indictments, rape allegations, gaffes) come and go but the grand events run their inevitable course undisturbed toward some November cataclysm.

What a change an hour or two can make.

Ten minutes into the Biden-Trump debate, the Democrats were united in horror, and ten minutes after it, they split into two camps. The staunch Biden supporters argued that Biden should do what every other presidential candidate has done after a bad interview or speech. Follow it up immediately with a string of rapid appearances to prove that the misstep was a fluke. Instead, Biden retreated into his family circle for the weekend and appeared in two, very friendly interviews with carefully curated questions the next week. He failed to come across as reassuring even in them ("...I'm proud to be the first black woman...serving with the first black president..."). Then he sent out an irritated letter to fellow Democrats in an act of defiance. The White House came out with some miserable explanations of a bad cold and a jet lag that we are to believe had lasted for 12 days. It's a shit show.

The other camp, and yours truly, said that even if Biden followed the advice and gave three live TV interviews a day for a full week with cartwheels and juggling, it wouldn't matter. He already demonstrated during the debate, that at the minimum, he has spells during which he is unable to make an argument or even to form coherent sentences. That was the test and he failed. World events don't follow the schedule of an 81-year-old man to occur only on his good days, and even on those only between 10AM and 4PM. What if there is a crisis in the middle of the night, and the president of the United States can't even formulate an order?

The debate proved that Biden doesn't have the mental capacity to do the job anymore. His actions since that he is delusional beyond the point of even recognizing how much he has declined in the past years.

Biden die-harders broadly come with two lines of arguments. One is the electoral advantage of the incumbent over any other candidates. Biden has a proven track record, he beat Trump already, he is the incumbent, he has the highest name recognition, and (amazingly) it was just a bad interview from a perfectly capable man. Don't believe your lying eyes. The other describes the administrative difficulties of changing horses mid-race.

None of these matter. Joe Biden has been a great president, but he is now in a serious mental decline. He cannot hold the most important job in the world, period. Even if his good days outnumber the bad days now, the ratio will only get worse. By the end of his second term, he would be 86. The famous video where he seems to wander off from a group of world leaders was doctored to hide the fact that he is approaching a group of parachuters instead of just having a senior moment. But even on the full video, you can see that it takes him around twenty seconds to get his sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. Can you imagine him in 4 years?

This is a crisis that cannot be wasted. Except for Joe Biden, anyone and his dog would have wiped the floor with the thin-skinned, incoherent, blatantly lying Donald Trump in the debate, whose abysmal performance was only saved by Biden's meltdown. The Democrats will find a candidate who can do it. 

The right-wing media outlets reacted to the sinking realization in proportion to their pretensions of being impartial, principled actors. WSJ by suddenly publishing an opinion on why choosing Kamala won't help Dems, and the National Review by issuing an indignant complaint over the Democratic elites who want to subvert the will of their base by replacing a democratically elected candidate. They got scared and with good reason.

Biden will eventually resign with the amount of dignity left to him. And then, a new show starts.

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The most useful idiot

Noam Chomsky is one of the most famous living linguists in the world and perhaps one of the most cited scholars in modern history. If the MIT professor emeritus had done nothing else in his life but stuck to linguistics, he would have a place in history books as a giant in his field. He would also be little known outside of it. What makes Chomsky a household name for people even marginally interested in world politics is his unrelenting seven-decade (and counting) crusade to uncover the US's misdoings. Chomsky has been active as a political activist since the fifties and even today he continues to write books which now number over one hundred.

His work ethic is legendary. Besides being an incredibly prolific author, and world-class scholar in a field completely unrelated to his political activism, he reputedly replies to every email he receives regardless of the sender's status or importance.

It's nigh impossible to list all the events Chomsky has written about, but one can be sure that whatever geopolitical affairs the US had been involved in since its foundation, Chomsky commented on them all. And his interpretations were damning to America, to a fault. Which is not necessarily a bad thing on its face. The US is now the sole superpower on Earth, and it deserves scrutiny proportional to its status. America, like every great power in history, has intervened in other nations' business countless times and has committed plenty of mistakes and intentional crimes along the way. Especially its general Cold War conduct in South America, which involved supporting murderous regimes by direct intervention or explicitly encouraging torture and bloody oppression of their opposition, is by and large a stain on the nation.

But other great powers have done the same things and much worse. Consider Nazi Germany, pre-WWII Japan, the Soviet Union, or by our modern standards, every single power in earlier history, and the US probably comes out reasonably well in comparison to either of them.

Or not, according to Chomsky who genuinely believes not only that America (and the West) is a net negative force in the world, but that it is the worst of all contenders. He called and US and UK the greatest terrorist states in the world. Comparing the US to the Soviet Union, Chomsky has claimed that the latter was morally superior, if only marginally. Considering that the Soviet Union was practically a slave empire that killed millions of its own citizens, imprisoned ten times as many, and installed similarly brutal regimes everywhere it had its way, that's quite a statement.

As logically follows, Chomsky regards NATO as the most aggressive and violent military alliance in the world. Why countries in the Soviet sphere of influence have been begging to join doesn't merit serious attention from him.

Despite his obvious ideological bias, Chomsky's encyclopedic knowledge of the facts (he copiously cites dates, names, UN resolutions, acts of Congress, ... to support his arguments) makes most of his criticism credible. But with occasionally capital misfires. Anyone opposing the US can count on some sympathy from Chomsky, even unspeakable regimes like the Khmer Rogue. Pol Pot's nightmarish rule had seen almost 1 in every 4 Cambodians killed, which puts Pot far beyond even Hitler, Mao, or Stalin, as mass-murderer dictators go, at least proportionally to population. Chomsky spent years claiming that the regime's genocidal crimes were wildly exaggerated by Western media. After the facts have become undeniable, Chomsky never apologized. On the contrary, he argued that considering the information available at the time, he was right.

Chomsky in general has a poor track record with genocides, as the US hasn't committed any in recent history, and its evil vindicates the crimes of its enemies. Virtually singularly among serious Western scholars, Chomsky denies that the Bosnian massacres during the Yugoslav wars in the nineties were ordered by Milosevic, or in some cases, that they actually took place. In his interpretation, the Serbs were provoked into mass murders by the US to provide a pretext for NATO bombing. The reason? The US could not allow a successful socialist state to exist in Europe. 

After almost thirty years, Chomsky is still the main perpetrator of the lie that the concentration camps, revealed to the world by the infamous photos of emaciated men standing behind barbed wire fences, were a fabrication of Western journalists to besmirch the Serbs. One would think that sentences handed down in The Hague that were based on witness testimonies from both victims and perpetrators would put an end to such speculations. Not for Chomsky. To this day, he is willing to appear on Serb television to be used as a tool of anti-Western propaganda. As a side note, it's worth mentioning that the current leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, served as a propaganda minister in Milosevic's bona fide fascist government. To be fair, it's not that Chomsky doesn't acknowledge the war crimes of the Serbs. He just doesn't care about them.

Considering his past stances, Chomsky's assessment of the current Ukraine-Russian war is predictable in its direction. But it's still surprising in its extent. There are many interviews with him on the war today and they generally follow the same pattern. After the mandatory and very short throat-clearing about the brutality and injustice of the Russian onslaught, Chomsky quickly moves on to clarify that it was fully provoked by the US. America refused to respect the Russian sphere of influence (like it refuses to respect the Chinese one, Chomsky adds, if already on the topic). It is a surprising dose of realpolitik from a self-proclaimed anarchist and humanitarian. And something that never appeared in Chomsky's writings vis-à-vis Western powers.

The haste in condemnation of the aggression is balanced by a lengthy and patient monologue about how the color revolutions that toppled corrupt politicians in the region were CIA-staged coups. No credit goes to the oppressed masses Chomsky claims to champion. Georgians, Belorussians, or Ukrainians do not openly challenge the brutal regimes they live under, they are just unwitting puppets in a Western ploy. Chomsky never extends this condescending attitude to people who rise up against American-friendly oppressive regimes. 

One expects similar Pavlovian sentiments from run-of-the-mill leftists, like the thousands of Jeremy Corbyns, who will never recover from the hangover from the Cold War, and will always think that reflexively defending any Russian action is a matter of principle. But Chomsky knows better and even his sympathetic audience anticipates some afterthought that would add a bit of nuance. Chomsky, as a true iconoclast, brushes aside such bourgeois expectations. He declares that the anti-Russian hysteria overtaking the West surpasses even the anti-German hysteria during the Second World War. That's some food for thought.

Although the worldwide anti-American sentiment is inexhaustible, it is also limited, and most people in Europe and the US consider America a flawed but relatively benevolent empire, at least compared to other powers. How does that square with Chomsky's own worldview? Chomsky explains this mass delusion as the result of the brainwashing of corporate media and institutions serving capitalist interests. In Chomsky's mind, liberal democracy is just a thin veneer over the ruthless, exploitative rule of the rich and powerful. Those who help maintain the facade, scholars, politicians, businessmen, and journalists, are either deceived themselves or active agents of the concerted effort to tell a false story of the world. 

To make it more concrete, if Chomsky is right, then every single politically centrist journalist in, let's say the New York Times, and every similarly inclined scholar of geopolitics in academia is either evil or a fool. US politicians of course are the worse of all. When talking about them (not Rumfelds or Dick Cheneys, but old-time Democrats like FDR, Kennedy, or Johnson), Chomsky's voice is dripping with cold contempt. In his interpretation, these people are never simply wrong on some matters or have honest but mistaken beliefs. They are evil.

Ironically, despite his hatred for his motherland, Chomsky is a quintessentially American figure. The US might be the only country in the world where someone so antagonistic to it can achieve status, fame, and respect without the fear of being silenced by administrative or more direct means. His most receptive audience is American, too. Western Marxists are usually not held in high esteem in countries that actually lived under the system they advocate. Chomsky has particularly fallen out of favor with Eastern-European anti-communist intellectuals when he went to Prague and explained to them how pampered their lives were under socialist regimes compared to the people's who rebelled against American-backed dictatorships in South America. Many of these people were imprisoned and persecuted during the socialist era and the audience understandably felt a bit disrespected on behalf of those described as cowards and opportunists by someone who only saw their countries from afar and never risked his life or livelihood.

As noted earlier, despite his advanced age, Chomsky is still very much active. He's been authored or co-authored six books since 2020, and he still makes appearances sometimes and gives interviews on a daily basis. He is astonishingly sharp for a 94-year old and time hasn't seemed to dampen his elephantine memory. Yet his interviews are often frustrating. He is wont to go off on a tangent to deliver long (but coherent) monologues of something he deems important. Chomsky has found one of the few advantages of being a thousand years old. It is the unspoken permission to simply ignore an awkward question. Just answer another one. It works all the time because it would seem very rude to call it out and seem to put verbal pressure on a frail old patriarch. In a recent interview, even Piers Morgan waited meekly every time until the grand old man finished his monologue on a question he wasn't asked. The same Piers Morgan who very rarely gives his guests the opportunity to utter even their opening sentence uninterrupted. 

There is also a pettiness in Chomsky unbecoming of a man with his fame and intellect. He is thin-skinned to the point that he takes disagreements as personal affronts. He rejected a to engage in a public debate with Sam Harris whom he simply labels "slanderer" even though Harris is anything but, and who made his challenge in as much good faith as possible. Nick Cohen, a left-wing British journalist, who called out Chomsky on his mistakes and pernicious influence on the Left, earned the qualifier "maniac".

Having made any misjudgments doesn't fit Chomsky's self-image either. A couple of weeks ago, Tyrell Cowen asked him in an interview if he has any regrets after 70 years of political activism. That's an understandable question, even a saint would make some mistakes in a lifetime. It's also a good one. The answer almost always gives nuance to the person's espoused worldview and lets fans see the human side of their hero. Not Chomsky's, though. His answer was as cringe-worthy as the proverbial job interviewee's who is asked to tell something about his negative qualities and responds with "Sometimes I just work too hard". Chomsky's rephrase was: "My only regret is that I didn't fight even harder". That's something to say after trying to whitewash the Khmer Rogue. Tyler, and others before him, also asked Chomsky to name anyone whose work he admires. Chomsky repeatedly refused to do so and instead said that he admires the young people on the street fighting for justice. No one to look up to from his vantage point, it seems. Noam Chomsky has to be peerless.

And in some respect, he truly is. Very few people in the world have his intellect and factual knowledge about world affairs. And this is what shields him from sounding like a caricature, even though his ultimate judgments often are not better than any reflexively anti-Western idiot's you read on an internet forum. With great intellectual effort - or dishonestly simply by ducking, evading, or explaining away inconvenient facts, like genocides -  he squeezes everything into his warped view of the world according to which Western countries are on the evil side of history, and there is little more to the matter.

But in some respect, he is not unique at all. The old observation about socialists - "they don't love the poor, they hate the rich" - applies to "anti-imperialists" like Chomsky perfectly. Just replace "poor" with "oppressed" and "rich"  by America, and America only. His reversed Christian credo of beams and motes in one's eyes is also common among self-hating Westerns, Chomsky's just stands out by the merit of his caliber.

For better or worse, Noam Chomsky lived in and contributed greatly to this world for 90+ years and will continue to live (and be used) in the world of his admirers and opportunistic propagandists for many decades to come.

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After the Midterms

Apparently, even Trump has a half-life. We are looking ahead to a slow, ugly decay.

The rollercoaster ride after Trump's improbable victory in 2016 mostly distracted the attention from an important sequence of events. Elections. He has made every single one of them about himself and he has lost every single one as well. The 2018 midterms elections, the 2020 presidential elections (making Trump the first president in the last 30 years to be kicked out after one term, plus the first president after 1932 to lose the presidency, the House, and the Senate), 2021 Georgia Senate run-off (again costing the Republicans the Senate), and finally (so far) the 2022 midterms. In the latter, almost all of his crackpot endorsees were wiped off, making the midterms a practical Democratic victory.

I - and most other people - were wrong on Trump's prospects at least twice already. I didn't think it possible he would win in 2016, and I thought we saw the last of him after January 6, 2021. Yet he always managed to come back on top, even without his Twitter pulpit. Will he do it again?

I think not. In 2016, he eked out a narrow victory on the back of the American's craving for entertainment and rode that wave until only recently. Even after leaving the White House he could keep up the show with the incompetent coup attempt and beating the drums on the stolen election. The Republicans were in gridlock. Trump doesn't seem to be a winner anymore, but he is still the darling of enough of their voter base. 

But the midterms came, and his candidates lost the race and the Republicans lost the belief that Trump has a more special and closer relation to their voters than themselves.

There is blood in the water. Mike Pence, the most sycophant of Trump trustees (although to his credit, he refused to break the law for the dear leader), openly said that he hopes in 2024 there will be better candidates, and he didn't close out the option to be one of them. Mike Pompeo, Trump's Secretary of State, considers running himself and made disparaging remarks about former leaders whining about the past. And when even Ted Cruz seems to be hedging his bets, Trump must see that things are not going his way.

So when Trump announced his candidacy again, he did it in a very different world than the one of 2016. He is no longer the shiny new thing, he is not even much of an entertainer. He can keep repeating the stolen election mantra, but he can soon find it to be a lonely tune and a boring one. When his fellow election-denier nutjobs lost their elections, apart from Kari Lake, they just shut up and left. J.D. Vance, who won, forgot to name Trump among the 37 people he thanked after the event. Very suddenly, it just doesn't seem chic anymore.

Yet, the Republicans are still in the same gridlock. If Trump gets the nomination, they are probably sailing for another defeat in 2024. If they deny it from him, he could wreck the party in vengeance. In an era, where the voter base is so calcified that elections are decided by a percentage point or even a fraction of it, Trump can destroy the GOP's chances for at least another term by creating a new party, or just by continuing to promote the crazies.

On the top, and perhaps not independently, of that are Trump's mounting legal problems. US Attorney General Merrick Garland just named a special counsel to weigh charges against Trump over the classified documents found in Mar-a-Lago. Garland is not a partisan hack. This step against a former president and present candidate is unprecedented. Also is the hope from Trump's own party for Garland to succeed and rid them of this problem.

Just to counterbalance the above observations, let it be said that Trump has survived legal problems and political challenges, and mind-bogglingly even a failed coup. We might get surprised again. The Republicans are both stupid and coward enough to stick to him and Biden could be foolish enough to try to run again, at 82.

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Is Putin a rational actor? - Part 2

The previous post left the topic off with the statement that Putin is a Russian imperialist with 19th-century values and priorities and a US-sized chip on the shoulder. He cares only about Russia's coercive power over other countries - which he equates with greatness -  and he thinks that everyone else does the same. He also believes that the West is out to destroy or at least subdue Russia. These are not mere speculations, Putin himself expressed them openly many times.

But more than that, his obsession with West's bad intentions is personal. Putin is convinced that the color revolutions in post-Soviet republics (2003, Georgia; 2004, Ukraine; 2005, Azerbaijan; 2006, Belarus) were all staged by the CIA, and he allegedly blames Hillary Clinton personally responsible for the Ukrainian one. He believes America wants a regime change in Russia itself (he just made that a self-fulfilling prophecy two weeks ago) and for him personally, Moammar Gadhafi's fate.

Gadhafi's grisly end is something that reportedly rattled Putin because he interpreted it as a cautionary tale. The Lybian dictator accepted the West's terms and gave up financing terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction in exchange for being left alone. And then, they killed him. The moral of the story is that the more concessions one makes to the US the closer he gets to being murdered. If he believes this, that would explain why he has chosen to depend on China instead of integrating with the West, even if he is aware of the strategic dangers of China's friendship.

Based on how things look now, with the Ukrainian invasion, Putin took a gamble and lost big time. He didn't expect the reactions from either the West or the Ukrainians. He destroyed Russia's economic prospects for decades. He ensured that the EU will now do everything to rid itself of its dependency on Russian gas. He managed to revive NATO - which will likely expand even closer to Russia now - and strengthen the EU - the exact opposites he wanted to achieve.

His imperialistic drive might have made him attack Ukraine but his paranoia will dictate his actions from here. 

What makes Putin extremely dangerous is that he is very different from past Soviet leaders. He is not just the first servant of a universal ideology. Khrushchev or Brezhnev were simple figureheads of the Communist Party. Chernenko's and Andropov's names barely ring a bell to anyone anymore. Even Stalin presented himself as the face of the Party and, ensuing some political murders, was duly replaced after his death. But Putin is the regime. 

The war was his decision and his alone, and he will bear the sole responsibility for the economic collapse that at the moment looks like the most probable future for Russia. An additional military defeat would mean losing face and shattering the image that he has built up for domestic use in two decades, as the infallible hypermasculine leader. And losing the war could very well mean losing his life, too. Even before the attack on Ukraine, Putin had been long past the point when peaceful retirement was an option for him. If the opposition ever overthrows the government, he will spend the rest of his years in prison. If one of his enemies gets to the helms, he will be probably killed.

Besides this all, this is the guy who has flooded the internet with his half-naked muscleman photos. There are videos of him taking a scuba-dive and, lo and behold, emerging with two ancient Greek urns. Or of him shooting a snow leopard. Or scoring eight goals against professional hockey players. When he started showing age, he underwent cosmetic surgery (which he denies), which made his face almost unrecognizable. He sits at the end of a ridiculously long table when he meets foreign leaders, reportedly lived in isolation in the last two years, and publicly humiliated his own chief of intelligence on national television just before launching the war. What does this all tell about his mental state? 

In short, Putin is a man who ordered the killings of journalists, political opponents, schoolchildren (Beslan school siege), and tens of thousands of civilians (during the Chechen wars), perhaps even Russian civilians to create a pretext for the Chechen war. He is incredibly vain and he has cornered himself into a position, from where for him personally, victory is likely a question of life and death. Being rational from there is not reassuring for the rest of the world.

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The US withdrawal from Afghanistan

I thought about writing a post about Afghanistan right when the news broke, but it took about 20 seconds to dismiss the idea. Just thinking about the amount of information I'd need to consume to even have a vague idea of the big picture was almost as depressing as the news themselves. Nevertheless, my guttural reaction was that Biden should consider resigning. Throwing half a country to a fascist regime of 8th-century ideas just because the Americans are bored of a "war" that hasn't even made the news in years? Is there anything to talk about at all? 

Since then I've read and listened to a fair amount of articles and podcasts. I haven't gotten much better informed, but at least I've learned to appreciate the complexity of the situation. And to marvel at how opinions of well-informed people can be so starkly different. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that the execution of the withdrawal has been an unmitigated disaster surpassing the worst expectations (Biden said there won't be pictures like that of the helicopters rescuing Americans from the top of the US Embassy in Saigon - he was absolutely right, seeing Afghans trying to hold on to the wheels of American airplanes taking off, then falling to their death is even worse). Beyond that, half of the people I usually listen to say that regardless of the blunder, Biden made the right decision, and the other half claims that it was both stupid and immoral. I could rarely notice even the trace of doubt from either side. It's worth emphasizing that I'm referring to very intelligent and well-intentioned people, who do journalism for a living, not right-wing assholes or woke idiots. Everyone seems lost in the whirlwind of information, instinctively groping for their favorite tropes to find a vantage point.

As for my current vantage point, I can accept a wide range of opinions barring "the Americans should not have forced their culture on the Afghans" or "it is their (the Afghans) decision how to live, who are we to say that our ideology is better than the Taliban's" - which is exactly what I was told just a couple of days ago. Sure. So there are gay people in the world who prefer to be killed on sight. Our gays are just brainwashed by our Western liberal culture to think that staying alive is better. The same goes for atheists (or just secular-leaning people), or women who want education, or Muslims who have a different interpretation of the holy scripts. Stoning, burning, chopping off limbs for petty crimes are wrong only by our measures. Seriously, how braindead people can be? (the answer is: quite, see anti-vaxxers).

Ranting is over, back to the big picture. I decided that instead of giving an opinion, I try to collect the questions I think one should ask before forming one. I came up with the following list:

• If we accept both that the Americans had reason to go to Afghanistan and that they should have left already, then when would it have been a better time to leave?
• If the war was a failure, what objectives have the Americans failed to achieve?
• How much responsibility do the Afghans bear for the failure?
• What have the Afghans gained and lost in the past twenty years?
• What is changing actually? How much of the country was under American control and how much of it will the Taliban take over?
• How much did it cost for the US in money, energy, political capital, military resources to uphold the Afghan state?
• How much will the withdrawal cost in intelligence, global prestige, counter-terrorism efforts for the US?
• What will be the effects on America's enemies and allies?
• What will be the effects on the people of Afghanistan?
• How will the answers to these questions change in 5, 10, 20 years' time?
• Could have the withdrawal been done sensibly?

Along these lines, here is what I think now.

Objectives and results

The Afghanistan war started as America's retaliation against Al-Queda for 9/11. The US aim was to kill Bin Laden and destroy his terror organization and prevent further attacks on American soil. Al-Qaeda resided at that time in Afghanistan in the terrorist haven of the Taliban (the relationship between them and their hosts wasn't frictionless, but the Talibs hated America much more than they would have been willing to hand over Bin Laden). Contrary to the public image of a war-mongering, imperialistic US trampling over international laws, the invasion enjoyed unanimous international and domestic support across the whole political spectrum. For the first time in its history, NATO invoked its fifth article, declaring that the attack on America was an attack on the whole alliance.

Toppling a regime of a Third World country was not a challenge for the world's sole superpower, and the US had the resources and resolve to hunt down its targets. But had the Americans left right after achieving that, the terrorist groups would have simply re-organized, and the Taliban would have returned. So they had to stay and try to prevent it from happening. Thus, in the following years, the US half-heartedly committed itself to a second objective, namely building up a democratic Afghan state as a bulwark against extremism. After twenty years, both objectives can be deemed as failures. Al-Qaeda is not rooted out, the Taliban controls more territories than before the invasion, and the withdrawal immediately pulled the plug on the incredibly corrupt and incompetent Afghan state. It looks all but certain that the Taliban will take over completely, and whatever advances the Afghans have made in human rights and freedom will be reversed.

However. Even if the Afghan democracy lasted only twenty years, and it was miserable by Western standards (and often disappointing for their own citizens), it still meant that a generation grew up where girls could go to school, women could take a role in public life, boys could play football or watch TV, theaters opened, people could live their lives free of religious fanatics. 

Just to quantify a few achievements:

• Consumption of electricity rose tenfold.
• The infant mortality rate fell from 145 per 1,000 to 104 per 1,000
• Life expectancy for women rose from 45.5 years in 2001 to 54.4 years in 2019
• The literacy rate for women rose by 300 percent

This is just the tip of the iceberg. This is not nothing, this is actually amazing. This is something everyone should cherish who gives a damn about other people.

At what costs was this all possible? Calling Afghanistan a "forever war" was a catchy and misleading political slogan. From the US point of view, it has hardly qualified as a war at all. The number of US troops on Afghan soil had been decreasing for years. In September 2017, the number was 14,000. At the start of the Biden administration, 2,500. The American casualties in the last two and the half years were 24 soldiers. 24. Just for comparison, 58,000 US soldiers fell in Vietnam. In Germany today, 34,000 US soldiers are stationed. In Japan, 55,0000.

The brunt of the sacrifices fell on Afghan soldiers, among them around 60-75,000 died in the last twenty years, fighting against the Taliban. The number of civilian casualties is comparable.

Can we say that the achievements above compensate for the 120,000 deaths? I really don't know, no one does, it's just not computable.

Was it worth it for the US? The war cost around 2 trillion dollars. This is a far greater amount than one could comprehend, so let's not try to calculate how many ICUs could have been built from it. Money on this scale doesn't work like this, anyway. It also cost around 6-7000 American lives. Was it worth it? I don't know.

The costs of leaving

I remember that shortly after 9/11, the most often heard wisdom from the experts was that the next attack is not an "if", but a "when". And yet, 20 years passed and no serious terrorist attack took place on US soil. Would it have been different if not for invasion? I don't know, but I find it likely.

Now the US completely loses the intelligence network it has built up in the past twenty years and also its ability to act on the ground. How much will it cost in money and lives to prevent another 9/11, continuously, with no end?

Dismantling everything they built there and not leaving even a single base where they could operate from seems just a bad decision regardless of the time horizon.

The effects on allies and enemies

It's good to remember, that the Afghanistan invasion and war weren't a US operation. It was a NATO operation. The American unilaterally pulling the plug on it won't foster trust and goodwill in the future among their allies. And what do the Taiwanese think now? Or Japan or South Korea or Ukraine or the Baltic states?

As for the enemies, China, Russia, or Iran just can't stop gloating over the American humiliation. But under the surface, things are less clear. Are they really happy to see the US beaten, or would have rather seen it staying mired in the Middle East with no end? Does China feel emboldened now (vis-à-vis Taiwan), or rather worried that America will turn its focus fully on her? Afghanistan's Muslim neighbors sound jubilant now, but I've just listened to a Pakistani journalist, who said that under that unified facade they are less than joyous, because contrary to how ignorant Westerners think, it's not all tolerance and camaraderie in Muslim-land.

Could the withdrawal have been done better?

The answer is undoubtedly an emphatic yes. The evacuation has been a horrific blunder. Thousands of Afghans who worked with the Americans are desperately trying to get out of the country under the threat of imminent execution. Seemingly everything that could have gone wrong, did.
On the other hand, the Biden administration had a very bad hand to play with. The speed of the collapse took them as a surprise, for which the blame is squarely on them. They should also have prepared for the worst scenario much better. Yet, what would have been the effect of them saying a month ago: "Guys, we are off in 4 weeks, and your corrupt, incompetent government will be the first to throw in the towel, so get out of the country right now while you can, because you won't believe the shitstorm that's coming" ? What would that have led to?

So it could have been done much better. But not very well.

Summary

To finish with a banality, this is complicated - even if too many seem to think it's dead simple. For me, the only honest attitude seems something like "This is hard. I am for/against the withdrawal, but I accept that the other side can pose legitimate questions I just don't have the answers for". Biden's decision - which I still think was a bad one - will have long-lasting consequences on counter-terrorism, geopolitics, regional politics, American domestic politics, human rights, and a bunch of other things. It will change some for the better, some for the worse, and some better in 2 years and worse in 10. As the Zen master Gust Avrakotos said, "we'll see".

 

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Trump again?

This is not a post I really wanted to write. I'm really sick of American politics. But my last statement on the topic, that is, Trump had finally committed a successful political suicide attempt, has been proven wrong dramatically quickly. So honesty demands a follow-up which at least gives the opportunity to look at the bigger picture. Let's do it and get over it.

The election immediately refuted some of my theories. I thought Trump is already in his "fat Elvis-stage", where he has become more of an embarrassment for the Republican voters. He lost his novelty, he didn't reach out for new supporters, he had proven to be a complete failure in every respect. Every ethnic minority will come out against him. He will lose big time. He didn't. Actually, it was a very close election (thanks to the electoral system). 10 million more people voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. But, at least, at the end of the day, he lost.

After the election, to no one's surprise, Trump kept shouting lies and conspiracy theories about his "stolen victory". "Great, keep doing it", I thought. The louder he is, the smaller he grows, and the bigger the embarrassment he causes to the GOP. All is well-deserved. What I didn't - and neither many others - expect was that the GOP would enthusiastically go along with his lies. That was bad because the longer they stick with Trump, the longer it will take to finally get over him.

And then came January 6. It was a cathartic moment. I think if the Senate had voted on the impeachment trial that day, Trump would have been finished. Even the Trump-fans of the party shat themselves enough to immediately blame Trump and distance themselves from him. 

And then, the impossible happened. The GOP "civil war" between Trumpists and normals lasted about two weeks and ended with a whimper. The Republicans not only refused to convict Trump, but ran back to him as fast as they could. The ten Republicans who voted with the Democrats face censure, death threats, and ouster from office. State-level Republican Parties literally censure them for being "insufficiently loyal" to the former president. They make the Soviet Politburo of the 80s look like a group of free thinkers.

There is a reason why I said it was something impossible. In America, the world's oldest democracy, one of the main parties supports someone who openly tried to overthrow a democratic election, and having failed in that, he incited a mob to attack the nation's Capitol, which left 5 people dead. Ah, yes, and they also wanted to hang his vice-president. They not only support him, they practically worship him. The GOP is a party of traitors, and it's not hyperbole. It's a fact.

This is something about which if you weren't wrong, you just didn't pay attention. This might seem like a lame attempt to explain away how badly I read the situation, but I stand by it. 

So, will Trump be the Republican candidate in 2024? Let's sketch up the usual quick pro and con lists.

The GOP is in a very hard place now. I still think most of them would love to put Trump behind them. But there are two main reasons why they keep toadying to him. One is that none of them wants to face what Cheney, Kitzinger, Sasse, Cassidy, or the other dissenters are going through now. The other is that Trump holds them as hostages. If he created his own party, half of the voters might flock to him. (Yes, impeachment conviction would have solved your problems, coward idiots). Even if only 10% does, the GOP will never win an election again. Yet, January 6 left the stain of unacceptibility (for some, at least) on Trump. Even before that, he managed to be the first president in 30 years kicked out after one term, and the first in 100 years under whom the governing party lost the trifecta of the presidency, the Senate, and the House. He really doesn't look like anyone's idea of a winner. Yet, supporting him gives at least a chance for the GOP to win back the Senate in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.

And this is where the pro list ends. The con list has two items, one is Trump's looming legal battles, and the other is the other contenders.

Trump's legal challenges are numerous but fall into two broad categories. First of all, if McConnells dreams come true, the criminal system catches him for inciting the insurrection, or for trying to put pressure on officials to change the election result, or something like that. McConnell would love it, because then the system would do the dirty work of getting rid of Trump for him. Second, New York prosecutors finally got their hands on Trump's tax records. That could lead to some juicy stories, but unless he appears on the front pages lead away in handcuffs, none of them will shake his base.

About the other Republican presidential hopefuls, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley stand out. They would love to inherit Trump's voters, but until Trump is legally banned from running for the presidency, they have no chance. They are cowards, they are spineless, they are young, they might just wait for their turn in 2028.

So, the con list is not very strong either.

Well, that's it for now, I guess.

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Bye, Trump 2024

Will Donald Trump be the Republican presidential candidate in 2024? I wanted to write this post right after the Georgia runoffs (January 5) but procrastinated long enough, that is, 24 hours, for letting Trump render the question moot. Nevertheless, I think he already lost that chance on January 5, and what he did the next day will push the Republican Party further away from him - which is an undeserved present for them and a good thing for everyone.

The reasons are his complete failure in delivering victories, the stain of January 6, being the only president ever impeached twice, and being kicked out of Twitter.

Not that the GOP gave a damn about any of the last three items. It is beyond caring about principles, or just the illusion of the minimal standards of decency, or the president being an incompetent, corrupt, race-baiting moron. They don't even care that much about policies anymore. The single purpose of the Republican Party is to win elections. And the Great Negotiator has turned out to be pretty shitty at that. 

In 2016, with the stars aligned, Trump finally won the presidency he has been attempting to run for since the beginning of the 2000s. And then it went all downhill. In 2018 he declared that the midterm elections are a referendum over him. The Republicans then duly lost the House. In 2020, the voters kicked out Trump himself, making him the first one-term president in 30 years. The fact that the GOP actually gained seats in the House made it clear that the GOP can still win elections, but Trump is a liability. Then he just couldn't bring himself to shut up and on January 5 he cost the Republicans the Senate as well. And that's when I think the romance ended for good.

Hawley and Cruz didn't lead the movement to challenge the election result because they love Trump so much, but because both of them wanted to be the 2024 nominee. Like the other Republicans who planned to vote with them and refused to vote for impeachment, they don't want Trump, they want his base.

And then, as the cherry on top, came the unique historical feats of being the only president ever impeached twice and having incited the mob to attack the Capitol of his own country. Social media platforms have taken away his megaphone, Amazon pulled the plug on Parlor. In the near future, without the impunity of his office, ugly things will just keep coming up around him. 

I think even without these, 4 years of him not being the president would break the spell. Without his bully pulpit, he will stop being scary for Republicans, and instead, for all the reasons above, he will become more and more an embarassment. Even if Republicans refuse to convict him, and thereby banning him from holding public office again, Trump is done.

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Farewell letter to the National Review

After four years, I decided to cancel my National Review subscription. I thought it's a good idea to share them why, and I sent the paper the letter below. I tried to be short, charitable, and to avoid being snarky or pompous. I don't think I succeeded in any of those apart from the charitable part, but I did my best. Here it is:

Dear National Review,

After four years of reading and a couple of months of thinking, I decided to cancel my subscription. In the following, I'd like to explain my decision in the hope that it might do some good. 

In 2016, when Donald Trump became the presidential candidate of the Republican party, I, like half of the world, was dumbfounded. I didn't understand how any moderately well-informed person, political affiliation notwithstanding, could vote for a conman, who is a despicable character and a national security threat. It prompted me, a centrist, to dive into conservative journalism. After some trial and error, I ended up with the flagship magazine of the American conservative movement, National Review. 

I was happy with my choice. NR provided a diversity of opinion, great writing, new ideas (new for me at least), and thoughtful challenges to my more liberal worldview. I didn't agree with all the articles of course, but at least half of them in every issue gave me something to think about.

However, in the following years, as it became obvious that Donald Trump is exactly the man he had shown himself to be during the primaries, my satisfaction slowly started to erode, step by step.

Donald Trump has trampled on every principle this magazine is purported to care for: character, fiscal responsibility, free trade, Christian values, standing up against dictators, standing up for allies. He has ballooned the deficit. He sucked up to foreign dictators and took the side of Vladimir Putin against his own intelligence services. He abandoned war allies. He dragged the level of political discourse to the gutters. He blackmailed a foreign ally to force it to come up with dirt on his political opponent. He paid off a porn star he had sex with while his wife was in labor. He pardoned his corrupt business partners. He embraced the support of white-supremacists and genuine lunatics who think that the Democrats are literally a pedophile, Satan-worshipping cult led by George Soros. And, in the time when every day almost as many Americans (and on some days more) die in COVID as in 9/11, he held rallies just to be celebrated by thousands of maskless people - who cares who might die because of this. "I take no responsibility at all".

And the Republican Party went along with it. Not reluctantly, not with protests, but with a Lindsey Grahamesque eagerness to please. And, unenthusiastically and grudgingly, National Review went along, too. Yes, it still offered diverse voices. Yes, it called out the most egregious offenses. It never hid its opinion of the president's character. But the objections to Donald Trump never went beyond what is expected from Her Majesty's Opposition. It was always about finding the easiest path not to go against the grain while finding convenient reasons to support it - masquerading as responsible, principled journalism. Toothless and restrained admonitions to Trump, war cries against the most moderate, institutionalist, establishment-type Democratic challenger one could imagine, Joe Biden. The diversity of opinion now includes Conrad Black and Victor David Hanson on one end but stops with Kevin D. Williamson on the other. And even Williamson's GOP-critical pieces are mandatorily embedded between two Democrats-bashing articles from him.

In short, the National Review chose to tolerate the president and support the GOP based on the conviction that the Democrats are even worse than Trump. That opinion could have been held with fairness and integrity. But every time Trump and his enablers did or said something indefensible, Biden grew a bit more menacing. He spoke up against defunding the police and similar radical left idiocies. He refused to jump on packing the court. He believes in compromises and has reached out to the other side. None of these matters a bit - he is still worse than a narcissistic, callous, petty, corrupt ignoramus whose indifference and stupidity has probably killed tens of thousands of Americans, and who is actively spreading Russian propaganda (an American president spreading Russian propaganda!). No critical inquiry into our side except for the most glaring errors. No trace of subtlety in the analysis of the other side. No difference between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. Conveniently, no hard decisions for a right-wing magazine.

The partisanship is as dismaying as obvious. The GOP and even Trump have always been given the benefit of doubt, a generosity that has never been extended to the other side, which is of course a single, monolithic block hellbent on destroying America. Whatever his sons' faults, everyone knows that Biden has never used his office to enrich himself and his family, just as everyone knows that Trump and his family are doing exactly that. Still, the National Review chose to find problems only with Hunter Biden and never with Jared Kushner. When Donald Trump was publicly demanding that his attorney general indict his opponents, National Review worried that Biden wouldn't be a reliable custodian of the constitution. When the NYT revealed Trump's decades-long tax evasion, David Harsanyi of the NR declared this behavior "patriotic". When Donald Trump with half of the GOP is literally trying to steal the election (please forget the anodyne descriptions, like "undermining democracy" - this is plain treason), and his former National Security advisor calls for suspending the constitution and declaring martial law to re-run election,  National Review poses the on-line question: "What do you think is the greatest threat to America? Cancel Culture or Socialism?"

I was relieved to see that at least in this madness, National Review refused to follow the rest of the right-wing media (even though it still deems the doctoral title of Jill Biden as scandalous as the call of Trump-loyalists for the execution of a public official). But when the line to make a stand is simply between being a democracy or a Banana-republic, that's a very low bar. No decent citizen needs journalists and political thinkers to tell him or her how to make a judgment on that. Republican congressmen and prominent right-wing media personalities are working with the gleeful support from Russia and China on destroying the most fundamental democratic norm - the bipartisan transfer of power. You have to be an intellectual to see nuance into it.

Arguably the most valuable and generally unappreciated gift from Trump presidency is that it provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to test your character. Standing up for decency and principles has never been less risky. In darker ages and places, one could pay for it with her life. In today's America, the penalty was angry tweets from the Crybaby-in-Chief. For the overwhelming majority of the GOP-members, that was too much. But there were conservatives and even Republicans who stood by what they believed in the face of ostracism and sometimes financial difficulties. They are the Never Trumpers, the erstwhile allies National Review never ceased to disparage while itself stayed in the warm and secure nest.

If I want to read good writing and excellent opinion pieces informed by conservative ideas, I could still find both in the National Review. But the amount of confirmation bias, self-delusion, and hypocrisy I would need to wade through is just too much. NR is still the flagship of intellectual conservatism. But that aspect is of secondary importance. First and foremost, the magazine exists to serve the GOP, which, having thrown away every principle it ever claimed to believe in, only exists to oppose Democrats.

Goodbye for now, with the hope that one day we can meet again.

Sincerely,
The Editors of New Vac Times

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Pranks, bubbles, disappointments

 

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a professor of mathematics and physics, submitted an article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to an academic journal of postmodernist cultural studies. It passed through peer reviews with flying colors and garnered praise across the targeted segment of academia. Shortly after, Sokal announced that it was a prank. Prompted by his annoyance with pseudo-intellectuals, he had packaged lengthy nonsense in obscure language and tested how well it would sell. It did sell well, not to the amusement of the duped parties, at least not after he exposed the trick. Astonishingly, some of them even doubled down. Instead of owning their embarrassment, they claimed that Sokal might have been insincere, but his article accidentally happens to be full of gems.

Twenty years later the philosopher Peter Boghosian, the mathematician James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, an English literature scholar, pulled off the same trick. To expose poor scholarship of certain academic fields, they submitted a series of bogus papers to various journals. Their target this time was yet another subfield of postmodernism, the gender- and race-studies - "grievance-studies" as the trio puts it. They rewrote some parts of Mein Kampf, wrote an essay about how dog-parks facilitate rape-culture in society, another one about the benefits of anal sex toys for men in the fight against transphobia, and a series of others in a similar vein. Boghosian's "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" probably crowns their efforts, but it's a tough race. Like Sokal, Boghosian and his partners in crime wanted to cast a spotlight on what they perceived as pseudo-intellectual bullshit masquerading as science.

The hoax was eventually exposed and it predictably ruffled the feathers of a great many people. It generated both furor and discussion about many topics around ethics, groupthink, cultural influence over academia, orthodoxies, etc.  Lindsay and Pluckrose recently wrote a book about the broader topic of their interest with the lengthy title of "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody".

I listened to many interviews with the guys, and I like them a lot. This all happened in the past. Then a couple of days ago Lindsay' tweeted: "Frankly going to unhappily vote Republican, including Trump, until the left walks this shit all the way back." 

Well, that was a bombshell. I don't think Lindsay is a racist or misogynist or even the kind of guy who suffers Trump. But it is a colossal error in judgment, for two reasons. 

For one, Donald Trump dragged the presidency and public discourse in the gutters like no one ever has before, and by paralyzing America, it made the world a more volatile, dangerous, and cynical place. Yes, America never fully lived up to its ideals, but: 1. no country ever had 2. the world's hegemon at least had noble ideals. Good luck with the world that is governed by Chinese, Islamist, or Russian ones instead. The damage being caused by irritating poseurs, virtue-signaling craze, and victimhood culture on the Left is very bad and it does real harm to real people, but it still doesn't even come close. Your sense of proportion has to be so imbalanced to see that exactly the opposite way, that it's a miracle if you can even utter a straight sentence. Clumsy metaphor, never mind.

Nevertheless, Lindsay's opinion on the dangers of the two extremes is at least defendable. Maybe he is right and my sense of proportion is useless. But what is not defendable, in fact, almost inexplicable for a man of Lindsay's intellect, is that he thinks reelecting Trump would somehow help his cause. A ruling white-grievance party is not a bulwark against left-wing idiotism. It's the fuel of it. Lindsay seriously thinks that another four years of Trump wouldn't make Wokes even crazier?! It would make me crazier.

Luckily, his college, Helen Pluckrose, has not fallen in the same pit. She, without judging her acquaintances' decisions, encourages everyone to vote for Democrats. I wonder whether it has to do something with gender (that would be ironic for the trio). Women certainly seem to be less enamored by this faux-strongman-shtick.

Anyway, read what Jerry Coyne has to say about the matter.

The affair made me sad but also prompted me to contemplate bubbles. Lindsay lives in a bubble where he faces the absurdity of and harm caused by Wokeness every day. He probably also suffers attacks from them every day. And this apparently distorts his picture of the world to a dangerous extent. It is sad and disconcerting.

It's sad to realize that someone, whose opinion you have valued high so far, proved to be very fallible. It is also frightening, because if a smart guy like him can't see the forest from the trees, how do I know that it's not I who lives in a bubble? How do I know that Lindsay is not right, and a Trump presidency is, all things considered, still better than a Biden one? Or how do I know that Lindsay was right about Wokeness, to start with? It's both true and meaningless to say that everyone lives in a bubble. Obviously, everyone has preferred sources of information and a specific group of fellow humans he or she regularly interacts with.

I suppose the only remedy for close-mindedness is to follow the well-known and rarely practiced advice of staying out of your comfort zone. I suppose one can try to stay informed simultaneously inside multiple bubbles with little overlap or push the walls of her preferred bubble as far as she can. 

When Trump won in 2016, I started actively seeking out right-wing information sources. The farthest I had to stomach to go was National Review, and even that one I'm planning to ditch now (although, had they not gone all-in for the GOP by 2020, if not for Trump, I would stay). I never had it in me to watch Fox, let alone to read Breitbart. Gad Saad, Jordan Peterson, Niall Fergusson, Andrew Neil, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, and few other people whose names I can't recall now, are whom I strongly disagree with at times, but I enjoy listening to. I can't listen to anyone who I can't enjoy. Probably that's the reason why I never sought left-wing sources of information. They are humorless. Hm...I just realized I have to correct myself here. I accidentally stumbled upon Slavoj Zizek, and he is quite funny, but I have no idea where he is on the political spectrum - even though he calls himself a communist. Anyway, this post has descended into a rumbling, it's time to stop.

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Anti-anti-Trumpers

Yesterday I listened to Coleman Hughes's interview with Niall Fergusson. Among other things, the discussion touched on America's handling of the pandemic. I had expected Fergusson to come up with his usual trope that how biased the mainstream opinion is for putting the blame fully on Trump, and he didn't fail to disappoint. He is probably right pointing to the mistakes and ineptitude of the CDC and the relevant institutions. Whatever the president of the United States' attitude is, a competent bureaucracy would have handled the crisis much better. However, he also made a passing remark of how the situation under Hillary Clinton would have probably not much different, apart from disinfectants and other antics of Trump. Had he not done that, his opinion could have been regarded as factually correct, even if one-sided. But Fergusson, in comparing Clinton to Trump, didn't see it important to mention that the current president has publicly and consistently belittled the crisis, disparaged scientific opinion, and personally attacked medical experts since the beginning of the pandemic. Almost everything can be explained away. But not this: Trump, after having admitted on tape that it's a deadly disease, has been, and still is, holding rallies where he encourages people the shout his name into each others' faces, and express their loyalty to him by not wearing masks. For the classical liberal Fergusson claims to be, it's a strange lack of reference to personal responsibility and individual agenda.

In concert, Hughes mentioned that the reason he hadn't voted for Trump in 2016 was that he had feared Trump would turn out to be a fascist. Seriously? The stretch of acceptability stops only at fascism? It's a shame because otherwise the wunderkind Hughes is a kind and brilliant person I like to listen to. And Fergusson is one of the most prominent historians of our time. I always (well, almost always) find his insights worthwhile, even if nowadays his deep and seducing voice and Scottish accent reminds me of an educated mob-boss who is telling you he is in a generous mood. 

So this whole affair leads me to a topic I've been planning to write about for a while. The people I despise most in the Trump-camp, the so-called anti-anti-Trumpers. As opposed to anti-Trumpers, it's a moniker some of its holders (Brett Easton Ellis, for example) explicitly like to attach to themselves. They are people who ostensibly dislike the president, but find that the "hysteria" around Trump deserves more criticism than Trump himself. Republican politicians have proved to be spineless cowards or worse, but at least they have the excuse of financial and professional risks that standing up to Trump would entail. But right-wing intellectuals, who are openly displeased with Trump and still make a living covering for the GOP and attacking Democrats, have no such excuse. Apart from friends not worth keeping, they had nothing to lose by choosing principle and not much to gain giving them up. There are plenty of other publications that would have employed them. David French and Jonah Goldberg bid farewell politely to the National Review, while Max Boots practically kicked over the table on his way out. They are the rare exceptions.

Let's see some examples for the rest.

When the NYT came out with the story of Trump's tax evasion, David Harsanyi of the National Review wrote an article titled "Avoiding taxes is patriotic". I shit you not. Harsanyi conveniently found his inside libertarian to argue that taxing by an incompetent government is practically stealing, so a real patriot should evade it out of principle. What about the police, the military, the judicial system, and similar trifles? I'm sure Harsanyi would have written the same in Biden's defense (out of principle, again), should Biden have turned out to be a lying cheating scum. I remember reading another article from Harsanyi, in which he thanked his parents for emigrating from communist Hungary and giving him an American life. There was really no need. Dictatorships have great use of people like him. He would have had a shining career in any one party-system in Hungary before 1989 or after 2010.

When America is in the twin grip of the biggest recession and deadliest pandemic since the Great Depression and the president both admits on tape the danger and publicly sabotages any solution, the National Review just finds out that 10 years ago Biden advised Obama against killing bin Laden. Surely, the story of the day.

Most recently, the NR expressed deep concerns that the Biden-presidency wouldn't be a trustworthy custodian of the Constitution. In the same week when Trump berated his Attorney General, Bill Barr, for not indicting Biden and Obama. Satire dies here.

I'll be charitable and assume that there are people here who are not merely shills for Trump, but kinda believe what they say they believe. And I see only two, probably overlapping, reasons to be in that position. One is running your confirmation biases on steroids in the past four years, then increase the dose in the last four months. The other is an addiction to the cheap sense of superiority coming from feeling intellectually sophisticated. Discovering subtlety in affairs dead obvious to anyone else with common sense. Playing the dispassionate, factual observer. These people, almost without an exception, found the realpolitiker in themselves. They measure the achievements of the Trump-administration (and obviously there are some) against the not-yet-manifested dangers of the coming Biden-presidency (there are some of that, too), and say "well, life is messy, politics is ugly, let's be serious here. This idiot is the price we have to pay for the sake of the country." So let's scratch the surface of the pile of shit they think the damage caused by a Democrat-presidency would dwarf.

• the president withholding military aid from a country unless they help to get dirt on his political opponent
• the president denying catastrophe-relief from California, because they don't support him
• the president publicly telling a white supremacist group to stand by
• the president personal lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, working with Russian agents and spreading Russian propaganda and misinformation
• the president personal lawyer, campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, long-time business associate, and national security adviser arrested
• the president publicly preferring Vladimir Putin's word over the report of his own intelligence services
• the president publicly refusing to accept the result of the coming election unless he wins
• the president calling California and New York, the biggest state and city he presides over, hellholes
• the president publicly demanding that his Attorney General indict his political opponents
• the president justifying abandoning the Kurds with "where were the Kurds when we needed them in Normany?"
• the president retweeting accusations that Obama and Biden have had Seal team 6 killed and faked bin Laden's death
• the president failing to reject the support of a group of lunatics who claim that Trump leads a secret war against Satan-worshipping, pedophile cabal of Democrats

Take only the last 3-4 points, and if we didn't live in the Trump-era, everyone would be sure that the president is sick. Not in the "despicable crazy bastard"-way. The "he is mentally ill, we need the vice-president to step-in now"-way. The mere need to belabor the point is mind-boggling.

And yet, the socialist danger to the American life is more worrying (not for 50 of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials, who wrote an open letter to support Biden). As Tom Nichols, former Republican international affairs specialist, put it: it's like one is offered A and B menu on an airplane. A is a bowl of shit, B is chicken. And the man wants to know how the chicken is made.

To go back to Fergusson, and the type of people he represents: "I look at the masses beneath me, left and right, and I am disappointed." I am, too. I kinda liked the guy.

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Trump contracted COVID-19

The virus cannot be conned.

Are we too jaded to be shocked by the news anymore? These last 2 weeks have been testing the idea. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's died and the ugly fight to fill her vacancy has just started. Then came the not-so-surprising revelations of Trump's tax record - it still would have sunk any other president. Then the horrific debate. Then the $4m sexual-harassment settlement of the barking-mad Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump's campaign finance chair and Donald Jr.'s girlfriend - this one is barely even worth mentioning, but it's too funny to leave out. Then Melania's f-word laden callous remarks about family separation - although Melania is too dull to even care about. And then, Trump contracted COVID-19.

To dispense with false pieties first, no one has had it coming more than Donald Trump. After ushering thousands into their deaths by willful negligence and total disregard for other humans' well-being (after Hope Hicks, with whom Trump was in close personal contact, was diagnosed with COVID, Trump held an indoor fundraiser), should he succumb to the virus, good riddance. It would be not merely Darwin Award-worthy, but a proof of cosmic justice.

Having said that, I hope he and the other morons recover quickly. He deserves to be defeated and humiliated in the election, then I wish all the best for the American justice system to determine his future afterwards. If he dies, it will be both a bang and a whimper at the end of these four years. Not only would Americans be robbed of the chance to pass judgment on his presidency, but I wouldn't be surprised if a sick martyr-cult emerged from this, with Donald Jr riding on its waves into 2024 (which in some other way could still happen at some point).

The only unambiguous blessing of this is that there will be no more debates.

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R.I.P. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The game is turned upside again. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal Justice and a heroine of female empowerment died on Friday. Which is, for Republicans, who preach the sanctity of life above of all, is just a side note next to the event of real importance: a Supreme Court seat has just freed up. Mitch McConnell didn't miss a beat and vowed to fill the vacancy with a conservative judge. In 2016 McConnel denied Obama the nomination of a new Justice, nine months before the election on the grounds that it's improper to fill up a Supreme Court seat in an election year. Lindsay Graham said it on tape that it's a matter of principle, and the Democrats can use his own words against him if they shoe ever gets on the other foot. Today it did,  and the flagship of the moderate Right, the National Review, argues that those words don't count, because the 2016 explanation was only the second most important argument against the nomination. Or maybe because it was the second Tuesday of the month.

No one is surprised, but it's hard to suppress the gag-reflex.

How does it affect the coming elections and what does it say about the GOP? First of all, I think there are two, seemingly competing, agendas in the GOP. One is Trump's, who obviously wants reelection. The other is of the Republican leadership, most notably Mitch McConnell - whose job description has always been delivering judges and being a sanctimonious prick. If they kept the nomination open until after the election, that could be used to force the reluctant Republicans to vote again for Trump. This is what Trump would want, I think. On the other hand, the fact the McConnell and Graham acted so quickly and firmly suggests that they don't trust in their chances to be around after 2021 January. They want to cement their legacy while they still can.

What particularly irks me is that if the GOP gets their third Justice, they will use it in decades to come as a justification for the 4-year whoring for Trump. Yeah, it was ugly, but we did it for the higher good. Gag-reflex again.

As for how it affects the election, I think no one knows. It can energize Republican voters who can feel redeemed. It can also give them the excuse to sit out this election - we got 3 Justices, that was worth it, but it's enough. It can fill Democrat voters with noble rage and drive them to the voting booths. Or, maybe most probably, it won't have an effect at all. Maybe the Supreme Court is only relevant for the top 5% of informed voters.

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