The Election

One thing I enjoy about this Substack is I know a lot of its readers personally, and for that reason I also know many of them disagree with me. How dull it would be to write only for people who already were in lockstep with what you were saying! I say that because I also imagine some of you might be inclined to turn away from certain posts, but I would ask that the more you disagree, the more you stick this particular one out to the end. Imagine it were a reflection on the joys of owning a small, poorly-trained dog.

Donald Trump didn’t just win the election, he won the House, Senate and popular vote. He had unprecedented support among Latinos and black people, outperformed prior Republican candidates among Jews, reached out to Arabs in Michigan and even got the Amish to turn out en masse despite being outspent 2:1. The election was a total repudiation of the democratic party and its policies, the corporate press, the censorship industrial complex, uniparty republicans, left-wing academia, Hollywood, large tech companies thumbing the scale and entrenched government bureaucracy.

If you think this is a bad thing and were hoping for a different result, you probably have some explanation for what happened. I won’t pretend to know what anyone in particular is thinking, but I can tell you, as someone who is deeply relieved and heartened by this result how I see it. Maybe it will confirm some of your priors and disabuse you of others. Your mileage may vary.

My sense of relief is profound. I feel like a heavy weight has finally been lifted. I didn’t even realize how heavy it was until it was suddenly removed. The sense of creeping authoritarianism starting with Trump’s covid measures and increasing via the Biden vaccine mandates, online censorship, the creation of a disinformation bureau! was demoralizing in the extreme. I live in Europe where people have been arrested for Facebook posts in the UK, where a law was passed in France criminalizing criticism of the mRNA shots. The United States with its Bill of Rights was the one place where there was some obstacle in place against these abuses, but even there, prominent and powerful factions were explicitly calling for its dismantling.

But perhaps even more troubling was the behavior of ordinary people in response to these measures. I’ve written at length about what I take to be the causes, but more from a 30,000-foot view. I want to express how glad I am personally this behavior will ostensibly no longer be rewarded by those in power.

There is a large class of people who believe they are wiser and morally superior than those who disagree with them. They think that if you voted for candidate A you are a better person than if you voted for B. That who you voted for and how much you verbally signal your concern for various policies is important. One day it could be wearing your mask, another taking your booster, maybe it’s your views on Ukraine or Gaza, systemic racism, climate change or teenagers who believe they’ve been born in the wrong body.

If you don’t come out on the right side of these issues, you are not only mistaken, you are bad, and not just bad, but ignorant and in need of further education. It’s like an entire class of people became the HR department, your entire world was some dystopian corporation encouraging you to stay in line and accept a pay (energy) cut and lower standard of living for the greater good. And that’s assuming you were compliant enough to keep your job in the first place.

Now if this class of people simply excommunicated you from its church — and I know people personally whose families vowed to disown them for voting for Trump — that wouldn’t have been so bad. I mean I don’t need to associate with judgy, intolerant people who aim to stop me from thinking and saying what I earnestly believe. But it was worse than that: They didn’t even respect your right to be left alone.

If you refused to inject yourself with pharmaceutical poison, they wanted to isolate you from society. Never mind there was never any scientific basis for it, never mind the constitution does not suddenly cease to apply because people are scared of a respiratory virus. And even the people who were silent, who did not beat the drum for this biomedical authoritarianism just went along like that was normal. Like shutting down people’s businesses and telling them where they could travel was just unfortunately necessary and for the greater good of “public health.”

But while I harp on covid and the disgraceful scourge of vaccine mandates because it was such an extreme example, my larger point is about the ethos, the attitude that the lab coats, the experts, the climate scientists, the economists, the entire modern technocratic priesthood knew what was best for you. I posted on Twitter once my decision to decline a colonoscopy (deemed due at my age), gave the caveat that this was neither advice nor even an informed opinion of the cost-benefit of getting one, and people went insane. The notion that I wouldn’t go along with the prevailing medical edicts (what did they care what I did?) was enraging to them. They knew better, I was an idiot, “getting colon cancer to own the libs.”

The truth is, and of this one thing I am certain, you do not know better than I do. I am an adult human being, and there is no higher authority in the known universe than me. I can very well make my own errors without compounding them by taking on your flawed presumptions and biases.

Quite obviously there are technical matters where my expertise is lacking. I am happy to consult those who have it to better inform my judgment and decision-making, the way at trial experts often testify to better inform the jury of ordinary people. But just as it is the ordinary people who must render the verdict, it will always be my judgment and my judgment alone that governs my particular affairs, what medicines I will take, what policies I support, what language I use, with whom I choose to associate, how I feel it’s best to raise my kid, what she should and should not be exposed to at what age. I don’t care how many PhDs you attach to the end of your name — the more the worse if the last few years are any guide — you do not know how to manage my affairs better than I do, and I say that while cognizant that I make mistakes in their administration every single day of my life without exception.

So I have rambled a bit, but I wanted to convey as thoroughly as possible the enormity of the weight I feel lifted off my back as a result of this election. Yes, someone can still continue to be a condescending, insufferable, moralizing asshole, but what’s changed is he is no longer getting rewarded for such behavior by those in power. You can report me to HR for believing climate change (as it’s marketed to the masses) is a cynical and evil scam, but when you get to the HR office you’ll find Karen clearing out her desk.

…

I understand people have misgivings about some of Trump’s proposed policies, and as with any politician you should be circumspect. I would never guarantee he and his cohorts soon to be in power won’t overstep — he surely did during the covid lockdowns.

But I am certain virtually every claim instilling so much fear in susceptible people is a media fabrication, deliberate distortion or outright lie. One tell for me is when people cite Project 2025, insist he’s going to outlaw abortion or jail those for disagreeing with him politically. Not only did you live through four years of people posting all manner of falsehoods (He’s on Putin’s payroll!) under their own names all over social media without consequence, but as Glenn Greenwald pointed out, if that were true why aren’t people like AOC and Rachel Maddow fleeing the country yet?

The answer is obvious: they know all the rhetoric they spewed was fake and performative, even if the psychological damage they did to the credulous is in many cases quite real. Whether you want to venture outside the corporate media propaganda ecosystem to verify these points is up to you. (I have provided many links, and I encourage you to click them.) But my belief is no matter your political persuasion whether you realize it or not, like me (and Trump himself coincidentally) you just dodged a serious bullet.