Trump

The Election, 2024

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Personally, I’m voting for Trump and for Republicans generally.  My issues include:

The overwhelming importance of free speech, which is under pervasive and increasing Democrat attack (the censorship pressures during Covid and the 2020 election were only the tip of the iceberg)…the strange Democrat affinity for the Iranian regime, the failure to stop Houthi depredations on shipping, and the undercutting of Israel’s self-defense (had Harris had her way about Rafah, Sinwar would still be alive)…the spread of anti-Semitism on ‘elite’ college campuses, including interference with Jewish students attending class, and the Administration’s failure to do anything substantive to address this…the chaos resulting from deliberate failure to enforce the border laws (done obviously for electoral reasons)…Democrat failure to take seriously the Chinese challenge and supply-chain dependency…Harris blaming inflation on ‘price-gouging’ and ‘greed’ while ignoring the effects of spending and money supply.

The dismal performance of much of the public education system, which is condemning millions to virtual innumeracy and illiteracy, while being protected from competition and challenge by the Democrat-affiliated teachers unions…A threat to innovation in the form of economic policies centered around subsidies toward favored industries and companies rather than addressing structural problems; also, the proposal to tax unrealized gains. Energy policies which are unrealistically and harmfully anti-fossil-fuel. Overall, the increasing Democrat orientation toward reengineering the entire society from the top down, which is entirely contrary to the spirit that has made America successful and free.

I think Trump is a problem-solver and a creative thinker, he has a lot of what Michael Gibson of 1517 fund refers to as Polytropos, a Greek word that was used to describe Odysseus and which means, basically ‘will get it done somehow.’ There are obviously plenty of things about the man that I wish were different, but as Bill Ackman pointed out, an election is not like a marriage or a business partnership where you have a whole universe of people to choose from–in this election, you choose from two. In my own view, Trump is the better choice by a wide margin.

Ackman’s Choice

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Bill Ackman, founder/CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, has written a long and thoughtful piece (at X)  on his reasons for supporting Donald Trump in the upcoming election. This piece, which may be the first of several, focuses on what Ackman sees as the actions and policies of the Biden/Harris administration and Democratic Party that were the catalysts for his losing total confidence in the administration and the Party.  Since there are many people who are not on X,  I am reproducing his entire post below the break.

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Betrayal

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Recent events make it quite clear, if it wasn’t already, that a high percentage of American media people–print, television, and Internet–have been involved in a multilevel betrayal:

–They have betrayed their supposed professional responsibilities to the truth, which they frequently assert to claim credibility and moral superiority.

–They have betrayed the American people through their frequently misleading and often outright false reporting. They saw Biden’s mental state on a regular basis, and either convinced themselves that they weren’t seeing what they were actually seeing, or flat-out lied.

–Given the importance of the United States in world affairs, they have betrayed not just Americans, but the people of the world. Issues of war and peace, prosperity or want, well-being or starvation for billions of people are affected by US policies and leadership.  The US possess the world’s most powerful military and its most devastating nuclear arsenal.  Thanks in large part to media irresponsibility, this is now under the control of a man who is in severe cognitive decline.  There are probably times in the typical Biden week when he could be convinced that the nuclear Gold Codes are things that he needs to provide to get a special discount deal on his favorite ice cream.

–This point is of lesser importance than the others, but given the most of these media people work for publicly-traded corporations, they have betrayed the shareholders who own the enterprises which employ them. These traditional media have not been doing exactly brilliantly in readership/viewership and financial terms. It seems likely that with a little more balance and a little less ideology, they could be doing significantly better. But the journalists chose to put their personal political beliefs ahead of this responsibility as well as their other responsibilities.

I have previously quoted something said to me once by a wise executive:

When you’re running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality.  It’s like you’re watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on.

If this is true about running large organizations–and it largely is–it is even more true for the citizen and voter in a large and complex country.  The individual can directly observe only a small amount of the relevant information, for the rest–from the events on the border to international and military affairs–he is generally dependent on others.  And that gives those others–those who choose the frames and the sequence in which they are presented in the movie analogy–a tremendous amount of power.

The rise of the Internet has provided an alternative to the information dominance of the traditional media, but social media has tended to reestablish centralized control points.  It is extremely fortunate–may indeed be lifesaving–that Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) and has established a relatively uncensored policy on that platform. Substack, too, appears so far to be a truly open platform.  AM/FM broadcast radio has also played a relatively independent role, but this appears to be under threat by acquisition of large numbers of stations by Soros interests…and, potentially, given that radio has long been government-regulated, by legislation and FCC regulation under any free-speech-unfriendly administration and Congress.

A big part of the problem is the ‘professionalization’ of media. Journalists once tended to be blue-collar people making their way up in the world; now, they tend more toward being Ivy League graduates, fully inculcated into all the correct ‘progressive’ attitudes.  And, ever since Watergate, people entering the media field tend to see themselves not so much as observers and analysts, but as participants in government–even as kingmakers.

The 1954 novel Year of Consent, which I reviewed here, posits a future United States which–while still nominally a democracy–is really controlled by those who control the communications and specialize in influence of public attitudes. It seems disturbingly prescient.

 

 

 

Nihilism — Really?

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A piece at Quillette notes that it has been 22 years since David Brooks published Bobos in Paradise, the book that put him on the map.   The article reviews the predictions that Brooks made in the book and how they have actually played out in practice.

My focus in this post, though, is on something Brooks wrote very recently:

Performative populism has begun to ebb. Twitter doesn’t have the hold on the media class it had two years ago. Peak wokeness has passed. There seem to be fewer cancellations recently, and less intellectual intimidation. I was a skeptic of the Jan. 6 committee at first, but I now recognize it’s played an important cultural role. That committee forced America to look into the abyss, to see the nihilistic violence that lay at the heart of Trumpian populism.

(excerpted by Tyler Cowen from the NYT column)

If I were looking for Nihilism, I’d look for it among those people who view human beings as nothing more than a plague on the planet…for example, those who circulate this meme:

…I doubt seriously if many of them have MAGA bumper stickers on their cars.   I might also search for nihilists among those ‘activists’ who enter museums for the purpose of damaging our civilization’s greatest works of art.   I might search for them among those who desire to reduce all aspects of human experience…knowledge, art, music, love, sex, families…to nothing more than tokens in an endless power struggle of group against group.

Trump supporters are motivated by many different things, some admirable, some not so admirable…but I don’t think ‘nihilism’ is a significant factor.

Brooks also refers to ‘populist authoritarianism’….there is apparently a style guide somewhere telling media people that the two words need to always be coupled.   But seems to me that authoritarianism might be found about those who demand that social media work with government to suppress disfavored views, and those who use their former offices in the Intelligence field to imply a malevolent foreign origin for a story which has now been clearly shown to be true…and, especially, among those like Charles Schumer who warned that “if you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you”…but apparently felt no need at all to do something about reeling in this authoritarian abuse of authority.   I’d also look for authoritarianism among those who are upset about Twitter Blue Checks being made so widely available that people can’t tell who is a real journalist who deserves to be believed unquestioningly.

Brooks also says that “Democrats restrained their more extreme tendencies while Republicans didn’t.”   His definition of “extreme” must be quite different from my own.

I was surprised to see that Tyler Cowen, who is a pretty smart and thoughtful guy, titled his link “the wisdom of David Brooks.”   While Brooks does occasionally write insightful things, I don’t think this column falls in that category.   It reads to me like a recital of a catechism by someone seeking to provide reassurance of his orthodoxy.

On Public Display of MAGA

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San Antonio, the town that I am pleased to say is my place of residence, made the national and international news this week and not in a good way. My particular quadrant of suburban San Antonio was the scene of the now-notorious MAGA-hat-stealing-and-drink-throwing-incident. (A good selection of the resulting headlines are here )
The Whattaburger outlet where this took place is about two and a half miles from my house, adjacent to a brand-new Walmart, and the bank branch I used to do business with, and around the corner from the bank branch that I now do business with. The arrested-and-released-on-bail Kino Jimenez lives in another outlaying suburb apparently with his mother. He also seems to have committed a series of prior offenses; not exactly an upright citizen, it appears, and one with extraordinarily poor impulse control. Looking at the video of this incident and keeping in mind that nothing good happens at 2 AM I see a rather thuggish Hispanic guy getting his jollies picking on a couple of weedy Anglo teenagers in an all-but-empty-restaurant in the wee hours. I’d venture a guess that if it hadn’t been the MAGA hat, it would likely have been something else. Bullies always find an easy target, and a ready justification for their thuggish impulses.

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