Martin Gurri first came to public attention with his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, in which he posited that the new technologies and social media would completely disrupt the ability of elites to control communication. Much of what he wrote about proved prophetic.
In a recent issue of The Free Press, Gurri wrote an essay explaining that while he had abstained in the past two presidential elections, he would be voting for Donald Trump this time around. I agree with much of what Gurri has to say here but differ on my
conclusion. I've already voted and left the presidential line blank on
the ballot, the first time I've done so since casting my first ballot in
1972. I've discussed my reasons in post going back three years including And Then . . . and Unbarred. My reasons remain unchanged. If elected, Donald Trump will prove a disaster for the things I think most important. Meanwhile both parties continue to ignore our impending financial crisis which will impact basic services, healthcare, retirement, and our national security. I refuse to be associated with this nonsense. No matter who wins or loses, we all lose.
My only hesitation is this. While Trump would be a disaster, inspiring even more resistance, and be yet another missed opportunity for the opposition to Democratic insanity just like his first administration, if Harris wins and the Democrats take the Senate we may face an irreversible disaster and the end of a meaningful democracy. If Trump does win and the Dems don't control the House and/or Senate, don't worry, by 2026 voters will have two years to be reminded how terrible Trump is and the Dems will control Congress.
I'm going to use the format employed in Unbarred by reprinting Gurri's essay and inserting my own comments.
Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5.
For many years, I belonged to the “a plague on both your houses” party. In the last two presidential elections, I abstained: I found both candidates unequal to the task and refused to endorse either with my vote.
But I feel I can’t refrain this time around—and I want to explain why.
There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. The antagonists are roughly equal in number but vastly disproportionate in strength. True to its nature, one side controls virtually all the institutions that hedge the life of the voters. Also true to its nature, the other side spends most of the time fighting with itself.
The forces of control own the White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporations, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture. Homegrown control freaks can also rely on assistance from Control International, the cabal of like-minded elites that runs the United Nations, the European Union, and any number of nation-states from Britain to Brazil.
[THC: In November 2021, Margaret Hoover of PBS interviewed Chinese dissident and exile Ai Weiwei. Hoover asked if he saw Donald Trump as an authoritarian. Since Ai had written critically about Trump, Hoover was expecting an answer in the affirmative, so she was surprised at his response (the relevant part starts at about 15:45):
Ai: If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself.
He goes on to say that in today's conditions you could easily have an authoritarian and that, in many ways, the U.S. is already in that state, pointing to political correctness and its similarities to the Cultural Revolution of Mao. Hoover asked no follow up questions.
Gurri's point, with which I fully concur, is that the power structures in the United States currently are aligned in support of repression of opposition viewpoints; whether it be the Democratic Party, the federal bureaucracy, tech and social media, entertainment, the press, NGOs, foundation, and academia. The cultural sea in which we all swim is domination by progressive viewpoints and other perspectives locked out. The exceptions prove the case - progressives are hysterical that they lost control of one social media outlet (X, the former Twitter) to Elon Musk and he's become public enemy #1, as the Biden administration pursues a "whole of government" approach to making his life difficult with the goal of forcing the sale of X to someone more amenable. The left authoritarians cannot tolerate any dissent.
During this election campaign both Harris and Walz have been open about their disdain for the First Amendment as have old war horses Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. The New York Times regularly runs columns from academics debating whether the problem of free speech can be solved with the "right" Supreme Court justices interpreting the Constitution or whether we are better off with a new Constitution more clearly defining the limits of dissent.
In contrast, Trump has no supporting system or structure. His essence is chaos and improvisation. That's why it was so easy for the Biden Administration to reverse all of his domestic and foreign policy initiatives from his Presidential term.]
Why the itch to control? Nietzsche would explain it as pure will to power, and that’s a perfectly adequate account.
The Democratic Party is the party of control. Joe Biden has been a dotty old figurehead stage-managed by Democratic establishment fixers: The chief controller is himself controlled. Harris is a less withered version of the same thing. Intellectually, she’s Biden’s equal—that is to say, a slave to the teleprompter. She has never had a thought, held a real job, or succeeded at anything on her own. She was nominated for the presidency after receiving approximately zero votes in the primaries.
No matter. The fixers are on the case, and they can work wonders. Harris has been kept in a bubble of adoration, to the deafening applause of the media and the rest of the institutional horde that controls the national narrative.
Threats to the controllers will be smashed without mercy. Trump represents the greatest danger—that makes him a criminal, to be raided by the FBI and prosecuted in Democratic-influenced courthouses.
[THC: The Democrats current hysteria about Trump prosecuting his enemies, is merely a matter of projection. It's what the Dems did from 2016-19 during the Russian collusion hoax. It's what they did with their multi-pronged federal and state assault on Trump. If you want to know why Trump's supporters complain about double standards, let's take the crazy NY DA case against him. DA Bragg got 34 felony convictions because of a $250K payoff to Stormy Daniels, which was supposedly misclassified on federal reporting forms because Trump was trying to influence the election. Under the federal statute that is one misdemeanor but Bragg somehow created a state case on the same facts. I believe the conviction will be overturned by the state appellate court. In contrast, in 2016 the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid FusionGPS over $1 million to create the phony Steele Dossier in order to influence the presidential election and misreported the expense in its campaign filing. The FEC settled the matter for a $135,000 civil penalty.
After winning in 2016, Donald Trump had the opportunity to go after Hillary Clinton for her criminal violation of federal document security standards. Instead he asked DOJ to stand down. In retrospect, a mistake, as his enemies would never have done the same.]
Tulsi Gabbard demolished Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary debates. That makes her a terrorist, to be placed on the travel watch list usually reserved for hardcore jihadis. Others who run for national office against the wish of the controllers are guilty of lèse-majesté and should be arbitrarily removed from the ballot—not just a Republican like Trump but disobedient liberals like Robert Kennedy Jr. and Jill Stein. It’s about domination, not ideology.
The internet allows too many heretical opinions to reach the public. That means a censorship apparatus must be erected on the Chinese model, to smother those pesky anti-control voices. “Disinformation” has become any message the controllers find offensive. “Malinformation” is acknowledged truths the controllers wish to bury. All are protected speech under the First Amendment but Our Democracy demands the silence of the lambs. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s pseudo-confession of guilt for his own participation, government censorship of the digital sphere continues to this day, including on Facebook.
Mistakes by the regime must be shielded from view—blunders such as Anthony Fauci’s involvement in gain-of-function research at Wuhan and Hunter Biden’s lost laptop from hell. That means the scientific establishment and intelligence service executives must be dragooned to lie to the public on behalf of their institutional masters, followed by a torrent of ridicule in the media for those who irrationally insist on the truth.
[THC: In early 2020, I thought that Covid originated from a Wuhan wet market, based on my reading at the time, as well as my experience in China from 2000 to 2011 when I had the opportunity to meet with national and regional health and safety officials. The evidence that's become available since then has changed my mind. The burden of proof is now on those who don't think it originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And, as we've now learned from the release of internal NIH and NIAID documents, Fauci and others deliberately suppressed information that conflicted with their preferred narrative of a wet market origin.
The Hunter laptop story is even worse. We now know that the FBI had the laptop for a year prior to the 2020 election and had verified the authenticity of it as well as its contents. Yet it carefully laid the groundwork with social media companies for months prior to the New York Post article, priming them to censor the revelations in the weeks leading up to the election. Moreover, a cadre of former intelligence community officials issued their letter, falsely implying the story was Russia disinformation, in order to further support suppression of the story, an effort in which they were mostly successful.
The Hunter laptop story also supports the systems and structure argument made above. This all took place when the Trump administration was in power, yet the White House had no control over its own administration. That simply does not happen with a Democratic administration.]
Every principle espoused by the controlling caste leads inexorably to a tightening of the noose. Climate change? To save the earth they must control away our vehicles, our travel, our gas stoves, our diets, even our plastic straws. Anti-racism? To ensure perfect numerical “equity” they must control every outcome of every transaction, from the test scores of our children to the people we hire for our companies. Gender identity? To allow for the proper fluidity they must control the relationship between parents and children, access to women’s bathrooms and women’s sports, and finally the English language, down to the last pronoun.
[THC: The Biden-Harris administration adopted as its primary domestic initiative, pushing through all government institutions, policies based on the conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have deliberately manipulated the structures and very language of our society in order to maintain white supremacy, also known as diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). The administration issued two major Executive Orders to make sure DEI is injected into every federal action. DEI is a repudiation of the principles of the Civil Rights Movement and is actively hostile to free expression, freedom of conscience, equality and due process under the law. It is why progressives define hate speech as speech that disagrees with progressive, and anti-democracy as disagreeing with progressives. For more read The Danger Within: Equality or Equity, Which Side Are You On?]
An overarching political theory can be deduced from all this. The American public is axiomatically violent and bigoted. From the best of motives, therefore, the guardians of Our Democracy must radically limit the number of democratic choices available to the public.
So here is the most compelling reason I will be voting against Harris and the Democrats in November. I was born in Cuba. I recognize the stench of hypocrisy emanating from those who conceal lust for power behind a buzz of salvationist jargon.
If the control accumulated by the administration had been used for good—if the world were calm and at peace, say, or the American public brought to unity as was promised—we might have been convinced it has some merit. But there’s a reason Biden is no longer on the ballot. There’s a reason Harris is running away from her administration’s policies. At home and abroad, the last four years have been a rolling disaster—and the voters know it. This crowd understands institutional control and nothing else. Out in the world, failure has been habitual, horrendous, epic in its dimensions.
Where to begin? For motives I am hard put to explain, the Biden-Harris people encouraged millions of illegal aliens to swarm into our urban centers. They mismanaged the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, relying (naturally) on harmful school closures, lockdowns, and mandates, all based on contrived falsehoods, and they utterly botched the persuasion campaign for the vaccines. They inflated, indebted, and overregulated the economy. They spent trillions but were unable to build or achieve much beyond a handful of charging stations: We can guess where the money went. They promoted grotesque stereotypes based on race and sexual preference, a policy that sowed division and reaped distrust.
Internationally, the nightmare began in Afghanistan, where the administration gratuitously turned the country over to the terrorist-friendly Taliban. Thirteen American servicemen died in the rout and many more were abandoned—and shamefully forgotten by the media.
[THC: If Gurri's point is we should not have left Afghanistan I disagree. I've thought since about 2004 our mission was finished. Making that country into a functioning tolerant democracy was not something achievable in my view. Whether we stayed a year or a century, Afghanistan would revert to its historical tribal politics when we left. I hoped Obama or Trump would withdraw, so I give credit to Biden for finally doing it. What I do not understand is why we chose the worst possible way to conduct the withdrawal. We left massive amounts of equipment behind, we closed Bagram Airbase, which we could defend, leaving us only Kabul for evacuation, and instead of withdrawing later in the fall when the Taliban mobility was restricted because of winter, but we had superior ability to operate and could have managed a more orderly evacuation, we did it in summer when the Taliban had full operational mobility. For that, Biden and the military chiefs need to take the blame.}
Every despot in the world took note: The U.S. was in retreat mode. Putin sent his Russian legions into Ukraine. Hamas invaded Israel, which was also attacked from the north by Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen, a third-rate outfit, managed to shut down commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Iran is about to build a nuclear bomb, the logical conclusion of the frustrated Obama-Biden-Harris love affair with the ayatollahs. China is aggressively expanding its military, particularly its navy, even as our own military has atrophied because of antique equipment and low enlistment rates. We can’t even deploy all our warships because we lack the personnel to do so.
THC: This point I agree with. It's not just the disaster in Afghanistan. People forget that prior to Putin's invasion of the Ukraine in February 2020, Biden public message was that if Russia limited itself to taking an additional slice of the Donbas, the U.S. would be just fine with that. Even before that, Biden reversed Trump policy, dropping U.S. objections to Germany's approval of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, making that country's energy supply more susceptible to Russian diktat. Senate Democrats even used the Jim Crow filibuster to prevent a resolution being brought to a vote disapproving of the Biden policy. Biden had also reversed the Trump policy of refusing to renew the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty until the Russians stopped cheating. And, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion. the administration advised Zelensky to flee the Ukraine, promising him sanctuary in the West. Of course, Trump's reckless rhetoric on Russia allowed the opposite impression to be created with the public. Trump was tougher on Russia than either Obama or Biden, but both of them sounded tougher than Trump (read Ukraine Blues for more).
We've let the Houthis (and their Iranian and Chinese backers) throttle Red Sea traffic though we have the capabilities to destroy them remotely. We continue to funnel money to Iran for unfathomable reasons. And, yes, our fleet is in bad shape. For all the talk about defending Taiwan, we no longer have the capability to sustain a prolonged conflict in the Western Pacific.]
There are too many leaks in the dike and not enough fingers—not to mention an absolute dearth of strategic thinking to identify where our priorities lie in a dangerous world.
This, then, is my secondary reason for voting against Harris. I’m not sure we can survive four more years of such toxic levels of incompetence.
Against this Everest of power madness and recurrent failure, a single argument is put forward in support of Harris’s candidacy: Donald Trump. Trump, we are told, isn’t just mistaken or bad. He’s a moral abomination—beyond the pale. All decent Americans thus have no choice but to vote the other way.
But the same thing would be said of anyone who opposed Harris. That’s how the forces of control function: “It’s either us or the death of Our Democracy.” Trump isn’t a moral abomination—or at least, no more so than Harris or Biden. He’s an ex-president, a politician with a known track record. If you strip away the moralizing narrative—the endlessly repeated inanities about dictatorship and insurgency—we are left with a flawed but semi-capable person. The world was at peace during his tenure. The economy boomed. I would happily accept the U.S. and the world of 2018 over that of 2024.
A more realistic charge lodged against Trump is that he’s an inveterate liar. This is certainly the case: The man spouts industrial amounts of nonsense. But in politics, everything is relative. The entire public character of the Biden administration rested on a colossal lie, in which Harris was complicit: that the president was a wise, energetic senior, fully engaged in the nation’s business. That massive deception, promulgated for years by an irresponsible media in defiance of the evidence of our own eyes, amounted to state propaganda, many orders of magnitude more destructive of trust than the worst of Trump’s outrages.
Trump is an agent of chaos, much as the Republicans are the party of chaos. At worst, he can do limited damage, since he lacks any purchase on the institutions. At best, he will slash to the ground the malignant harvest of the Biden-Harris years: the digital surveillance and censorship, the human flood at the border, the racial and sexual obsessions, the growing prostration of our military. If, from sheer animal intimidation, he can restore seriousness and discipline to the federal agencies in Washington, that would be a magnificent bonus.
I will vote for him because he’s taken a stand against the forces of control, and has been persecuted and vilified by them—and also because, at the moment, there’s no such thing as an agent or a party of freedom. That, I pray, will come in time.
Whatever happens, our system will endure. The American public, believe it or not, is still fundamentally sound and sensible. I freely acknowledge that we are in the grip of a psychotic episode, a sort of national midlife crisis, but I have faith that we will outgrow and transcend the moment. The hysterical refrain that Our Democracy is dying, recited ad nauseam by the forces of control, is a disgusting and self-serving trope—a gross demonization of fellow Americans who happen to disagree with their views. Those of us who take the side of freedom and the open society should disdain the use of such repulsive rhetoric.
[THC: I am less optimistic than Gurri. The damage we have already sustained over the past decade is immense. The damage that will be incurred, deliberately in the case of Harris, and through ineptitude by Trump, will make it substantially harder to "outgrow and transcend the moment".]
If my candidate wins in November, I will be content but not overjoyed. If our current masters retain control, I will be depressed but not suicidal. I am old enough to have acquired a sense of proportion. The United States and its amazingly sturdy Constitution, and the way of life that has flourished therein, will remain long after I have passed from the scene.
[THC: I hope I'm wrong and he is right.]
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