Last week the Daily Wire premiered its first feature film, Kyle Rankin’s Run Hide Fight. The results were: impressive viewership numbers, glowing audience reviews, and a predictable outpouring of dyspeptic condemnation from critics who found fault with the movie once they realized it had been picked up for distribution by a conservative outlet.
All of this, it’s fair to say, represents a resounding success for the Wire’s new incursion into the fictional creative world. If the gatekeepers of that world took the time to savage the movie in print, they must be getting antsy about the potential for cultural success it represents. To paraphrase my colleague <a href="https://americanmind.org/author/poulos/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/author/poulos/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1611258056196000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF3k-mtVr6lLt11sWcPoIhcaRP9Ig">James Poulos</a>, when the eye of Sauron turns upon you, you know you’re getting close to infiltrating and destroying Mordor.
There were also, from some of the Daily Wire’s most devoted fans, concerns about Run Hide Fight’s nudity and strong language. Those concerns are representative of more widespread conservative misgivings about narrative art — and art more generally — which showcases the grittier, more violent aspects of life. So much of the explicit content featured in legacy and prestige venues — Netflix, Hollywood, the top 40 music charts — is either debauched (like Cardi B’s infamous “WAP”) or outright evil (like Netflix’s misbegotten child-exploitation flick, Cuties).
Whatever the artistic “merits” of such doggerel (on which, more below), anyone with a shred of moral dignity could be forgiven for wanting it nowhere near his children or indeed himself. We have a deeply felt intuition that art which shoves our faces in immorality doesn’t just disgust us but degrade us, in some way over which we don’t have total control. The chattering classes are intent on pouring filth into our eyes and ears, and despite our dedicated resistance, we worry that we can’t shield ourselves entirely from corruption.
I don’t want to dismiss or belittle those worries in any way — to the contrary, I share them all and want to take them very seriously. But I do want to suggest that in the case of Run Hide Fight, they’re misplaced. In the process I hope I’ll help us as conservatives to think about this question — the question of art’s morality — in a way that goes deeper than the churn of the daily news cycle. Because as it happens this is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, issues in Western artistic criticism: how do we affirm all the richness of art and its potential to edify, without leaving ourselves at the mercy of its dangerous power to seduce?
The Danger of Art
In the first-ever complete work of literary criticism, the Poetics, Aristotle made an observation that strikes at the heart of the problem. He was arguing that imitation (in Greek, mimēsis) is a fundamental human act and comes from deep in our souls: “imitation is engrained in man’s nature from childhood — in this, he is different from all the other animals. He is the most imitative of them all.”
Aristotle was developing an observation his teacher Plato had made in a number of places — particularly his last great unfinished work, the Laws. Both philosophers noticed that babies and young children learn all sorts of things long before they are able to understand rational arguments or even language. And the way they learn is through imitation, in the form of nursery rhymes, songs, and lessons that they can hear from their parents and parrot back. Preschool teachers still work this way: they teach with games, dances, and songs that can be seen and mimicked.
Art is a highly refined and sophisticated form of this basic human impulse to imitate. That’s where we get our idea that great art is supposed to represent reality — not the facts of something that actually happened, but the truth of inner experiences which can’t be conveyed except in narrative form. When we make movies or sing songs, we use sounds and images to recreate and imitate what a certain experience is like for the people having it. And because humans have a natural impulse to imitate, the audience who sees a good representation spontaneously feels some of the feelings represented.
There’s an inherent pleasure and delight that comes with doing something natural to us. That’s why Aristotle noted that imitation itself is pleasurable, even if what’s being imitated is something awful. “There is proof of this in real-life experience, for we enjoy looking at accurate images of things which are painful to see in themselves: monstrous beasts, for example, and corpses.” And here’s our whole problem. No matter what is shown in art, if it’s depicted skillfully and well, we can often enjoy seeing the depiction. That enjoyment is primal, deep, and pre-rational. It’s been with us since infancy, and that makes it powerful — more powerful, even, than reasoned arguments.
This is one of the reasons why Plato famously exiled poets from his perfect city in the Republic: it’s not that he didn’t like them, it’s just that they had too much power. Grab hold of people’s imaginations through skillful depictions and stories, and you can work your way into their hearts in a way that’s very hard to talk them out of — even if what you’re showing them is immoral and debased.
The Artist’s Responsibility
Hence the power of the modern American Left: they own the culture, so they can manipulate huge crowds despite the total failure of their ideas. But in reality you can’t, and shouldn’t, banish artists from a society the way Plato fantasized about doing. Art is too basic a human instinct for that, and it’s the only way to convey certain spiritual and emotional realities which go beyond mere material facts. So instead of giving up on art altogether, conservatives like the Daily Wire guys have started to respond to the Left in kind: you don’t fight false stories with factual arguments. You fight false stories with true stories.
This is the crucial thing that has to make us different: the fact that art represents something means it has to represent it truly. Otherwise it’s a lie — and a bitterly corrosive lie at that. The rhetoricians Cicero and Quintilian taught that good compositions need to “move, delight, and instruct.” Those are the three essential things that art can do in ways nothing else does: it stirs our emotions, it gives us rapturous pleasure, and it shows us the world.
But because that world is so broken, skillful artists can divorce the truth-telling function of art from its emotional properties — they can move us powerfully while instructing us falsely. This is the real reason why “WAP” is a vile song. It’s not because it’s sexually explicit: sex acts are a part of life. Much of Western visual art involves nudity and sexuality — look up Tintoretto’s “Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan” for one among innumerable examples.
Even things like the promiscuity and self-abasement Cardi B displays in “WAP,” though they’re grievously wrong to indulge in, are real things: they exist in this fallen world of ours, and art should have some mature way of acknowledging that. The fact that Cardi B does so isn’t her problem.
No, her real failure as an artist is that she doesn’t just depict promiscuity: she tells a lie about it. The song and the video make what she’s doing look easy, fun, empowering, and consequence-free. In real life — and especially for people who, unlike Cardi B, don’t have millions of dollars on hand to sweep up the mess — prostrating yourself for easy sex is a miserable, painful, damaging thing. Countless women, even as they nod their heads along to “WAP,” are finding themselves abandoned, lonely, depressed, and spiritually bereft because they’ve been sold a bill of goods about sex that just isn’t true. That’s the terrible power of art that lies.
But art that tells the truth doesn’t have to censor itself from showing ugly realities: it just has to be honest about them. This was a philosophy that was popular when Shakespeare — whose plays are saturated with gore and sex — displayed the full array of human life on stage. “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” says Shakespeare’s Hamlet: the purpose of art is not to sanitize the world but “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature.”
This means that when Shakespeare wrote about Macbeth’s regicide and murderous ascent to power, he also showed his and his wife’s descent into fatal nihilism and madness. He didn’t shy away from showing bloodshed, but he showed it taking place in a moral universe, where bloodshed has consequences and guilt brings misery upon the heads of the guilty. That’s the real world we live in, too.
As much as we might like to get away from this, we can’t. Shakespeare’s rough contemporary, Philip Sidney, pointed out in his Defense of Poesy that even Jesus Christ used stories to convey the profundity of what he had to say, rather than cut-and-dry moral lessons. The Lord knew that narrative and allegory “would more constantly, as it were, inhabit both the memory and judgment.” There is something foundational about stories at the core of who we are and what we’re meant to do. That’s what makes it so urgent that we not tell stories which distort the truth and pervert reality. But at the same time, it means we can’t escape showing the whole world as it is, evil and all.
What it Means for Us
So take, for example, a series like HBO’s Game of Thrones — another one about which Christians and conservatives often worry. There’s a reason why the sex is more corrupting in that show than the violence: it’s often completely disconnected from what the story is portraying. That’s what makes it feel unnecessary: it’s not that beautiful women don’t sometimes have sex in reality. It’s that to make art about that fact, you have to take it seriously and show the essence of what that particular sex is like. So when women are undulating in the background of an exposition scene that has nothing to do with them, it’s not art, it’s titillation: pleasure without instruction.
On the other hand, the violence in Game of Thrones is very often tightly bound to the characters and their relationships. Without spoiling anything, consider the character arc of Tyrion Lannister: almost everything he does, violent or not, is expressive of his inner self. That’s truth. That’s art.
Here’s the thing, then: school shootings happen. In them, violence occurs. People who are feeling panicked and vulnerable, as well as bad guys who are victimizing the innocent, say bad words. They also say them differently, for different reasons, and with different consequences, depending on their characters and circumstances. Nudity and sex are also real parts of life. All of these things are true, and all of them — in my estimation — are depicted with honesty in Run Hide Fight.
It’s a good reason not to show the movie to kids — children are a different ball game entirely, and everyone knows we want adults to be able to think about and do some things that aren’t suitable for impressionable young minds. But it’s not a good reason to condemn the movie. One reason why it’s broken out of the typical “conservative film” mold is because it’s not squeamish about acknowledging and portraying the full array of human affairs. That’s a good thing. It’s an essential thing. If we want to get serious about making our mark on the culture — and we have to — then one indispensable part of that will be giving artists latitude to be frank about what goes on in this world of sin.
You can, in other words, condemn “WAP” and Cuties without trying to scrub all the sex and violence out of the world. We can hold both lines in this fight at once: we can oppose the banality and decadence of modern pop culture, while striking out to make good, robust art of our own. In order to win both fights, we only have to do one thing: we have to tell the truth.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFegURPjAdNFJd0-_mKudXAgmAp5g">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwm82CEKe6gHOjTWwdZQOTR6iQow">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHQm8tQMK1XoUSXLWkCl3KkGZJgrQ">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHzq-src8474zs7-nMknyLYtgJwCA">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Run Hide Fight

Should Conservatives Watch Violent Movies?

entertainment

Film

Film Reviews

Hollywood

Last week the Daily Wire premiered its first feature film, Kyle Rankin’s Run Hide Fight. The results were: impressive viewership numbers, glowing audience

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We are flirting in this country with the darkest and most serious kind of civic disaster: the disaster of political violence. Not only the shameful and deadly fiasco in the Capitol building on January 6, but the merciless parade of arson, defacement, and slaughter that tore through our cities in the summer of 2020: these are like the first thunderclouds that pass over the air before a storm. If the storm comes, it will be the ruin of us all.
Our career politicians and their lackeys in the press grinned and cheered while Marxian revolutionaries ravaged our streets. They are now putting on a farcical display of mock principle, portraying the Capitol rioters as organized insurrectionists and issuing earnest calls to root them and their kind out of American society forever. The arrogant cynicism of aristocrats like this is a major root cause of the American people’s desperation and fury.
If people like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Elect Kamala Harris are pretending now to be shocked and appalled at the possibility of armed rebellion, remember that just last year Harris publicly <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bail-fund-backed-by-kamala-harris-and-biden-staffers-bailed-out-alleged-child-abuser" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bail-fund-backed-by-kamala-harris-and-biden-staffers-bailed-out-alleged-child-abuser&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1610731558671000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHjfxYDGvDtobqHdbgjngZgnfP-JA">invited</a> donations to a bail fund for rioters in Minnesota. Just as much now as then, whether they fret theatrically about insurrection or egg it brazenly on, what people like Harris are out for is power. They are part of the problem and should be regarded as nothing more.
But the hard truth is, whichever faction of rioters seems most sympathetic to partisan eyes, mobs in the street and in the Capitol represent profound failure all around: failure of leaders to lead, failure of the people to respond maturely and wisely, failure of government to serve the men and women who employ it—failure, in a word, of the American regime.
I’m far from believing that the failure is permanent or fatal for the country. But it’s worth understanding this moment for what it is so we can take it with the seriousness it deserves: this is not about grandstanding or hot takes. This is an urgent crisis that requires mature reflection. It is a make-or-break moment for our society that will determine how we and our children’s children live going forward.
What Did the Founders Think about Revolution?
Beyond the screaming and the pontificating, beyond the dimwitted children at CNN stoking the flames, the question at hand is: when and why do people take up arms against their fellow citizens and against their government? Strangely, framing it that way gives some small hope for a path forward, because we have confronted these questions before. Our Constitution was written by men who believed deeply in the rule of law, and yet they had just fought a war to overthrow their rulers. Less than a hundred years after the revolution, America would turn in on itself and fight another gruesome war between the federal government and a rival army of American citizens. That war, awful though it was, would end slavery and let the nation come into its own.
So it’s not as simple as saying “political violence is never justified” and leaving it at that—if only it were. But political violence founded our nation, and there are times—times of extreme catastrophe and oppression—when it is tragically the only solution. I want to be as clear as possible at the outset that I do not believe this is one of those times. But I also want to seek some clarity, for all our sakes, about what those times are and how we should think about them. For that we can refer to the founders themselves, who were well aware of these complexities and reflected on them deeply.
If you read only one document about revolution and insurrection from the founding era, it should probably be <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed28.asp" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed28.asp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1610731558671000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFZGUmgu12O78MUcJtHsE_MKJFHZw">Federalist #28</a>. It was written by Alexander Hamilton in 1787, as the states were voting on whether to ratify the new Constitution which would eventually become the law of our land. Hamilton was reflecting on the dangers and the necessity of a national army, and arguing that a stronger central authority wouldn’t stop the people from exercising their rights.
Perhaps the first weirdly encouraging thing Hamilton says about clashes between the government and the people is: they happen. “Seditions and insurrections are, unhappily, maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body,” he writes in the first paragraph; “the idea of governing at all times by the simple force of law (which we have been told is the only admissible principle of republican government), has no place but in the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.”
Hamilton was thinking first about the need for the government to put down conspiracies and insurrections with military force. As Senator Tom Cotton wrote in a now infamous <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1610731558671000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHx5-UnqdQOvaMML8RuFwaMcVVmEA">Op-Ed</a> for the New York Times when Antifa and BLM were terrorizing urban centers, “the federal government has a constitutional duty to the states to ‘protect each of them from domestic violence.’” That is the practical consequence of what Hamilton was arguing.
Shortly before the Constitution was drafted, Massachusetts had faced an armed uprising now known as “Shays rebellion,” in which a veteran of the revolution and his supporters fought against increased taxation. The founders were appalled at the prospect that the revolutionary spirit might not have been satisfied by 1776: “The flames of internal insurrection were ready to burst out in every quarter&#8230;and from one end to the other of the continent, we walked on ashes, concealing fire beneath our feet,” said James Wilson looking back on the tense days of Shays’ Rebellion. It sounds familiar.
So Hamilton was keen to vest the government with power to stamp out anti-Constitutional insurrections. He wanted to ensure the stability of the government and protect the people from the horrors of sedition. It helped that Washington, whose revolutionary credentials were impeccable, had reacted with passionate “indignation” when a group of his own soldiers conspired to attack Congress and demand pay in the “Newburgh conspiracy.” The founders had learned the hard way, and taught explicitly, that violent revolution is something to be avoided if it’s even remotely possible.
When is it Justified?
And yet, there was—and still is—the fact that our own Declaration of Independence takes the possibility of justified revolution as a given. “When in the course of human events”—not if, but when—“it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” But how to know “when”? If revolution is such a painful, bloody, miserable thing—and it is—how can we know when to make the terrible decision of taking that cost upon ourselves?
Hamilton addresses this, too, in Federalist #28. What has been called the “right of revolution” may fittingly be invoked “if the representatives of the people betray their constituents.” In such a case “there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government.” It would, Hamilton argued, actually be more feasible to rebel against the federal government than against state governments, because rebelling against the federal government would require a vast, coordinated, and carefully planned assault. “In a single state,” he explains, “if the persons intrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource.”
That is a pretty apt description of the Capitol hill assault, which was a federal-level riot with a state or local level of disorganization. The motley crew of protestors and rabble rousers that flooded into the building were unruly, disorganized, and without a plan. They had concerns about election integrity—some of which I share—but the court cases attempting to prove that November 2020 was a fraud had failed. One would be hard-pressed to say what they wanted, or—if what they wanted was Trump back in office—how they realistically thought they were going to achieve it.
What Hamilton argues about real, justified rebellions is, in part, that they have to be thought through and given the gravity they deserve. The fact that the United States is a big, diverse, and centrally governed country actually helps ensure that any successful revolution, in the event of true federal usurpation, would have to be carefully considered. Its costs would have to be weighed, and its rationale would have to be defended persuasively before a large number of citizens. Anything less than that is unserious and juvenile—not to mention counterproductive. The riot on January 6 was all those things.
Taking Riots Seriously
In a funny sort of way, Hamilton’s arguments here mirror those of James Madison in <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1610731558671000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHYOUFLe40Cp9g1Ni8zubyU_s3Weg">Federalist #10</a>. This is one of the most famous Federalist papers—it argues that liberty and representative government can thrive in a large republic because it means the different interests and factions have to find ways of working together if they want to accomplish anything major at the national level. This forced compromise and collaboration is a national safeguard against “the cabals of a few.”
For Hamilton, true revolution means collaboration, organization, and coordination among a variety of Americans, all of whom agree that their country has been stolen from them. He goes so far as to say that a successful revolution will have to ally with some parts of the government—either state governments against federal, or vice versa:
<blockquote>
Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government. The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress.
</blockquote>
It is not my opinion that either the protestors at the Capitol or the rioutous mobs from summer 2020 have thought through and coordinated their efforts seriously enough to justify revolution. If there is any group of people who really have tried to coordinate insurrection in recent memory, it’s oligarchs like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/politics/george-soros-racial-justice-organizations.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/politics/george-soros-racial-justice-organizations.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1610731558671000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFF1fsbn8pE5CoXunyuRsaMjIntlA">George Soros</a> and <a href="https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/jack-dorsey-bu-center-for-antiracist-research-gift/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/jack-dorsey-bu-center-for-antiracist-research-gift/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1610731558671000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGrls2bolS0D8mVyNikyjGIlMODww">Jack Dorsey</a>, who have calculatingly funded and encouraged racialist agitators while silencing opposition. That kind of puppetry and deceit really does amount to something like a coup—though not one, God willing, that has yet taken full control of this country.
I imagine some will object that the tech magnates and their Democrat stooges effectively have staged a silent revolution of their own, one for which violent rebellion is the only available mode of redress. To this I respond: grow up. We have not even begun yet to pursue all our legal and nonviolent options for fighting back against Big Tech and Davos. Conservatives talk a big game about local politics, but do you know the name of your local representative? Do you know whether he or she really stands for what you believe in? How about your neighbors—do you have any idea what their politics are? Any chance you can work together with them to get someone good on the ballot? Any chance you’ve tried?
The Left has played a long and in many cases quite sinister ground game for decades—infiltrating the schools, funding election efforts, building infrastructure and connections that have enabled them to insinuate themselves and their psychotic ideas into the culture. We laugh at the Democrats’ <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gretchen-whitmer-stacey-abrams-prayer-candle" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gretchen-whitmer-stacey-abrams-prayer-candle&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1610731558671000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwXr2iQYudXNd9McydS4LOHewumw">worship</a> of the failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, but they know that her relentless local campaigning was a big part of what clinched the Senate when it all came down to Georgia.
We can—must—play the same ground game in reverse, substituting our good ideas for their bad ones. We have to get serious about building new schools for our kids, about seeking new servers for our digital communications, about making the local connections that will be the foundation of our new coalition. The alternative is more frantic, unpremeditated political violence, which won’t do what we want and will eventually make everything much, much worse. Count me out.
If, on the other hand, you’re ready to get serious about winning the ground game on the New Right—if you’re ready to start working yesterday for a more robust populist coalition, one that can win locally and, in time revitalize conservatism nationally—then I’m right there with you. Let’s get to work.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFegURPjAdNFJd0-_mKudXAgmAp5g">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEwm82CEKe6gHOjTWwdZQOTR6iQow">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHQm8tQMK1XoUSXLWkCl3KkGZJgrQ">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1608237713152000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHzq-src8474zs7-nMknyLYtgJwCA">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Protests As Joint Session Of Congress Confirms Presidential Election Result

The Threat of Revolution

Capitol riots

Readers Pass

revolution

The Federalist

We are flirting in this country with the darkest and most serious kind of civic disaster: the disaster of political violence. Not only the shameful and

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Black Lives Matter Protest In Bristol

America Is Not a Democracy

American History

Democracy

Donald Trump

Republic

Take a moment and google the phrase “Trump is destroying democracy,” and you’ll see a trend so obvious that it hardly needs describing. “Republicans Are

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If you want insight into our culture, pay attention to memes. No kidding: talk of memes has become a thing in the digital era, but “mimetic” behavior isn’t a digital phenomenon: it’s a human one. When people say “and I oop” or repeat the same dance over and over on TikTok, they’re doing more than just messing around. They’re living out one of the most basic human impulses. If the Right is going to win on this front, we have to understand memes.
How Memes Work
The word “meme” itself comes from an ancient Greek concept: mimēsis. It means “imitation,” and a mimēma, or “something that is imitated,” is a meme. This is what the philosophers Plato and Aristotle thought lay behind all artistic production and culture-making. “The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood,” writes Aristotle in his Poetics, and he goes on to explain how basic kinds of imitation like games and lessons develop into elaborate forms of imitation like theatre.
This fundamental truth has been at the heart of how we understand art and society in the West. From the poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69375/the-defence-of-poesy" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69375/the-defence-of-poesy&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607630007258000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFUYNKeBqNPQqepU4aGGifuJJhH7Q">Philip Sidney</a> in the age of Shakespeare, to the philosopher <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/girard/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://iep.utm.edu/girard/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607630007258000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHlUJgG6ZydxPVmS77ISoK26vhEww">René Girard</a> in the modern day, mimetic theory has informed some of our civilizations’ most incisive cultural commentary. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind,” wrote Girard in “Generative Scapegoating. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”
If you’ve ever heard me or anyone else nattering on about how important it is for conservatives to understand and care about art and culture, this is why. When we make art, we’re not just painting pretty pictures or saying nice words. We’re trying to represent something spiritual by imitating it and so conveying it: those pictures and words are trying to get at an internal feeling or experience which others will grasp and experience themselves. Shakespeare himself described it as holding “the mirror up to nature,” which gets it about right. When good art hits you with a really accurate portrayal—an effective imitation of some reality—it compels you to feel something, to reproduce within yourself what the artist is expressing.
It’s a powerful tool, and it can be used for more than just self-expression: it can be used for influence and control. When something is repeated and reproduced enough, it prompts that deep human impulse of imitation and catches on—it goes viral. This is what happens when a song plays on the radio so much that it gets in your head even if you hate it: by the sheer power of mimēsis, it worms its way into your brain and forces you to imitate some small part of the culture, to reproduce it within your own self.
This brings us to memes, in the current digital sense. A meme is mimēsis distilled, like the “crack” form of cocaine: an endless repetition that finds its way into your own patterns of thought whether you like it or not. Ever find yourself saying “lol” out loud, or thinking “<a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sad-panda" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sad-panda&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607630007258000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGgnZsYjd0QIbPaH86vNvToVLYocQ">sad panda</a>!” in response to something genuinely tragic? If so, then your online experience has memed its way into your head, even if you don’t know exactly the origin of the meme or endorse all its assumptions.
Therapy and Manhood
When a meme gets popular, or has a resurgence, it says something about what’s on people’s minds. You can almost feel them rippling like waves across the surface of social media, or watch them pass from hand to hand overhead like a beach ball at a rock concert. That’s what happened this week with the “men need therapy” meme, which had a bit of a moment this past <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/do-all-men-need-therapy/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/do-all-men-need-therapy/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607630007258000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG4Y6FR-WLXUBXZoN4RDnJ4Q2XENQ">July</a> and has now appeared in the world’s bloodstream again.
This time the particular mutation is: “why do men do x instead of go to therapy?” “why do men start podcasts instead of going to therapy,” <a href="https://twitter.com/flossybabyjay/status/1335606543056769025?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/flossybabyjay/status/1335606543056769025?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607630007258000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGek8FXxEJ6GDq068nObirAMM3eBQ">asked</a> @flossybabyjay, virally. Or “why do men start going to the gym instead of therapy,”<a href="https://twitter.com/custardloaf/status/1336313181090709504?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/custardloaf/status/1336313181090709504?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607630007258000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHD-P1brjrvB8pGbhsjfjDsmJbU-g">wondered</a> @custardloaf. It seems silly to analyze something so apparently frivolous, but it’s not: these weird little verbal tics emerge out of deep, gut-level attitudes about the world. They’re worth examining in detail.
In this case, we can start with the answers to these questions: why do so many men prefer to go to the gym than to therapy? What’s with all those podcasts, anyway? Well for one thing, men are (gasp) different from women. Most good therapists will tell you that perpetual counseling with no defined endpoint is bad for anyone, but men in particular tend to be <a href="https://www.nyrealestatelawblog.com/manhattan-litigation-blog/2015/july/men-are-more-goal-oriented/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nyrealestatelawblog.com/manhattan-litigation-blog/2015/july/men-are-more-goal-oriented/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607630007258000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFvJW1-5Pvw69u5KbSyMCYna9zu9A">goal-oriented</a>. We like going out and doing stuff, and we like to have a target that tells us when the stuff is done.
So the state of simply “being in therapy”—as opposed to “doing therapy” to resolve a particular issue—is unlikely to fly with men as a sales pitch. But on a deeper level, for many men, taking on new projects is itself a form of therapy. In response to the question about working out, one lifter wrote: “I started lifting with a friend a few years ago and I had no idea he was depressed. A few months ago he told [me] that lifting every day with me saved his life.” Any man who has ever processed his feelings by going out and building something, or writing a novel, or basically making anything, will understand that experience: it’s kind of a guy thing to resolve your more intense feelings by getting active rather than talking at length.
None of which is particularly a knock on therapy itself, which can be totally helpful for men under some circumstances—soldiers suffering from PTSD, for example, or guys who had abusive parents. That in itself is part of what makes it so wrongheaded to cast therapy as some cure-all which can “fix” men, as opposed to all the other things like weightlifting and podcasting which are just “tactics” to “avoid dealing with things.” If you talk about therapy that way, you make it into something most guys are going to shun at all costs.
Why wouldn’t they? If you’re going to belittle all the good and manly stuff we do like it’s some kind of childish evasion ritual rather than, you know, the stuff civilizations are built on—and if you’re going to contrast therapy to building, using tools, working out, making art, and all the other stuff we love to contribute to the world—then I’m sorry, but we’re going to tell you to pound sand. I can think of nothing more likely to scare a dude away from therapy (perhaps at exactly the moment when it might be life-saving) than to present it as the thing that will deflate all his manly energies and just let him have a good cry.
This, I believe, is the heart of the matter and the core of the meme: it’s not actually about getting men to go to therapy when they need it or inviting them to become more emotionally aware. It’s not about helping or healing men at all. It’s about identifying manhood itself as something that needs fixing, and therapy as a cure you absolutely 100% need if you have the terrible disease of being a man. Dig down into the logic of the meme and you’ll find an ugly little hostility squirming like some kind of angry bug: “why don’t men go to therapy” quite simply means “men are bad.”
How and Why to Win at Memes
I present this little rant as an object lesson in how to read and understand what goes on in the culture, and an argument for paying attention where doing so might seem a little foolish at first. It’s not foolish, actually, to scroll Twitter once in a while and parse the video game references or movie quotes that are really generating traffic today. It’s a way of discerning how people feel and are making each other feel—and what we are inviting one another to want or aspire toward.
This, for what it’s worth, is exactly why places like the Daily Wire are so important. You don’t save the world just by writing laws: you save it by making memes. Good memes, and good art, and internet videos or podcasts of your own that can really catch on and speak to people, the way all art and indeed all culture does. We who write and speak at DW are not just trying to convince people here, though of course I think we present some pretty good arguments for our points of view. We are trying to get under people’s skin and implant there something more wholesome than the toxicity of the Left.
A final word in response to what I imagine will be a major objection: isn’t what I’m talking about just brainwashing or indoctrination? No, I answer: it’s half or more than half of our humanity. The fact that leftists use art and culture to so hideously sicken Americans—children especially—has left us with Orwellian concerns about what it means to persuade someone using more than just facts and logic.
But the truth of the matter is, though people do learn and grow intellectually, they also get won over emotionally, in their hearts. It has been very rightly said that “facts don’t care about your feelings.” That’s exactly true, and a crucial observation. But it’s also the case that people’s feelings are facts, and in order to operate effectively in the world you have to take facts about how people feel and how they operate emotionally into account. To really persuade them, you have to ingrain in them the intuitions that prepare them to receive logic in a good and noble frame of mind.
Plato made exactly that argument in his Laws: before children can use reason, they hear nursery rhymes. Before we ever walk into a lecture hall, we see movies and sing songs. And today, as Plato couldn’t have known but might have predicted, we make memes. We ought to take care how we do so, because—to paraphrase another Greek, Archimedes—give me a meme and a place to stand, and I will move the world.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF83sqnbRSoskQQ6sEAo_cYVTeiMg">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGTcuBM7QTUoG0IILQKEiWbSzKnoQ">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGMUl1NuGq0C5ObYzxcMCv-7q9PNA">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGHBgoLcqZAhuVqJiN9d0bQFEIbog">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Assorted Location And Technique Shoots

Men, Memes and Therapy

Masculinity

Memes

Mental health

Therapy

If you want insight into our culture, pay attention to memes. No kidding: talk of memes has become a thing in the digital era, but “mimetic” behavior

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/men-memes-and-therapy/

https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/12/GettyImages-154559408.jpg

“Policymaker, father, stand-in king”: that is how a much-discussed “Checks and Balances” podcast from the Economist described the office of the American presidency in anticipation of Joe Biden coming to occupy it. The statement was greeted on <a href="https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1333408612400705536?s=20">Twitter</a> with a staggering ratio of (currently) 645 replies to 149 likes—as sure a sign as any that the Economist had, in the current vernacular, posted cringe.
There are few words that inspire more visceral disgust among American conservatives than “king.” It is a title that has become synonymous for many with “tyrant”: an evil office occupied by an arrogant fool, possessing vast quantities of unmerited power and wielding it over oppressed subjects in a manner doomed to corruption.
This, in the scope of history, is a radical and relatively new outlook. “Kingship” has not always been an inherently bad word—neither, ironically, has “tyrant,” which comes to us from the Greek tyrannis, best translated simply as “king.”
But the ease with which tyrannis slid from meaning “king” to meaning “violent oppressor” shows that even in antiquity, rule by one man was inherently prone to abuse. That is something the great historians and political theorists of Ancient Greece and Rome knew well. Aristotle, Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero: each of them, in his own way, saw that the evil in human hearts made it impossible for one man and his heirs to hold lifelong rule without eventually becoming hypocritical, destructive, and cruel.
But it’s not as simple as just throwing off the shackles of kingship and being done. Someone has to be in charge, and attempts at direct democracy—giving power solely to a majority of the voting public—have ended poorly in the ancient world. Without great statesman like Pericles at the helm, direct democracies like Athens found it difficult to act decisively in times of war or even proceed coherently in times of peace. Just as monarchies decay into tyrannies, and aristocracies decay into cronyism, direct democracies decay very easily into mob rule. The brokenness of human nature always wins out in the end.
Therefore even the Roman historian Livy, who famously endorsed the virtue of republican liberty even as he wrote under the Emperor Augustus, still recognized that simply letting the people loose is a recipe for disaster. Though the Romans put an end to their own decadent monarchy around 509 BC, Livy <a href="http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Livy/Livy02.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Livy/Livy02.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF4SxaZxW7ghw0FMYx6xJhnu8Waiw">wrote</a>, they were lucky they didn’t do so earlier. Because:
<blockquote>What would have been the result&#8230;if they had been freed from the restraining power of kings and, agitated by populist storms, had begun to foment quarrels with the patricians&#8230;before sufficient time had elapsed for either family ties or a growing love for the very soil to effect a union of hearts? The infant State would have been torn to pieces by internal dissension.</blockquote>
In other words, even Romans needed time to mature before they tasted what Livy elsewhere calls “the sweetness of liberty”: if they were going to dispense with the strong leadership afforded by kings, they would need something better to put in its place. But what?
The Lawful Freedom of a True Republic
The answer is given by Polybius, a Greek historian who describes the masterful design of the Roman constitution in his own <a href="http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/6*.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/6*.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG_wQxLPNe9v2IaS1dqDbCJi-gIIw">history</a>. All simple forms of government, writes Polybius, undergo what has come to be called anacyclosis—a Greek word meaning the “cycle of regimes.” If a virtuous king takes over, nevertheless his son or his son’s son becomes corrupt and monarchy becomes tyranny. Then a few good men oust the king and install an aristocracy—but that devolves into oligarchy, or cronyism, in the end. Then the people seize control, their democracy becomes mob rule, and a king has to rise up to bring order back. The cycle begins again.
But the Roman republic was a system for balancing each kind of government against the other: the voting people, the aristocratic senators, and the “consuls,” a yearly two-man executive that performed some of the duties kings used to perform. So even in the republic, the office of consul looked enough like kingship that, in Polybius’ words, “if one looks at this part of the administration alone, one may reasonably pronounce the constitution to be a pure monarchy or kingship.”
And yet, Livy tells us, the Romans at this point were so disgusted by monarchy that they even chased from the city a perfectly decent man who had the same name as a former king, simply because “the very name was a danger to liberty.” The Romans took every precaution that the consuls should never be tempted to those excesses they had suffered under the rule of tyrants.
Every republic needs an executive power, and that power must fill certain functions which kings fill in monarchies: issuing final decisions in times of war, for example. But it would have appalled the Romans to imagine that a consul, or anyone in government, was coming even close to being a “stand-in king.” The whole point of replacing the kings with a republic was to eradicate the need of kingship entirely.
The Puzzle of the Presidency
All of this and more was on the minds of the American Founders when they drafted our Constitution in 1787. Americans, having thought of themselves as English subjects until very recently, were still stinging with resentment at the abuses of King George III. Those abuses are listed at great length in the Declaration of Independence, and the impulse to avoid them at all cost did much to shape our first national compact—the <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&amp;doc=3&amp;page=transcript" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash%3Dfalse%26doc%3D3%26page%3Dtranscript&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGpGet2MoZi26JxA9hoyG2_lfNWvg">Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union</a>.
Under the Articles, America discovered what Polybius and Livy both knew: a government whose central power is too loosely held will be vulnerable to chaos. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was, effectively, a response to the problems that arise from a weak federal government: no executive or judiciary branch means no power to do such important things as repay debts or regulate commerce between states.
And so the founders had an extremely difficult needle to thread. On the one hand, they had to vest power in a stronger federal government if America was to survive at all. On the other hand, both they and their people were—exactly like the Romans—still supremely wary from firsthand experience of anything that looked remotely like monarchy. To create an executive office in that climate which would pass muster with the people was a tall order indeed.
That is why Alexander Hamilton, in <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed69.asp" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed69.asp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG2xAJitQWkA46Dimr7_GJF6fK5Xw">Federalist #69</a>, took every pain to reassure his readers that this new office—the presidency of the United States—would not in any way be a stand-in king. True, “the executive authority, with few exceptions, is to be vested in a single magistrate.” But, “ if, in this particular, there be a resemblance to the king of Great Britain, there is not less a resemblance to the Grand Seignior, to the khan of Tartary, to the Man of the Seven Mountains, or to the governor of New York.”
Hamilton goes on to give reason after reason why the president will not be like the English king. Presidents will be elected every four years; kings rule for life. Presidents can be impeached; their vetoes can be overturned; their treaties and ministerial nominations are subject to the advice and consent of the senate. And, crucially, “The [president] has no particle of spiritual jurisdiction; the [king] is the supreme head and governor of the national church!”
Central to all these arguments is the essential point that a king is invited to consider himself inherently superior to his subjects—more fit by divine right to rule—whereas a president must prove himself on the basis of merit in the eyes of his fellow men. At issue is nothing less than the most fundamental question of our nation: are men created equal, or are some born with a greater right to govern themselves than others?
So, Hamilton concludes, “What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other? The same that ought to be given to those who tell us that a government, the whole power of which would be in the hands of the elective and periodical servants of the people, is an aristocracy, a monarchy, and a despotism.” Nothing could be further from the truth, in other words, than to call the president a “stand-in king.” By design, in spirit, and according to their own direct protestations, that was the last thing the founders intended.
What Are They After?
Anyone who wants to cast the presidency as a makeshift monarchy should thus be subject to the most careful scrutiny imaginable. Why, we are entitled to ask, do the staff at the Economist think it would be salutary for Joe Biden to occupy the role of “father figure” and de facto monarch? Why does Biden himself seem eager to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-history-and-meaning-of-court-packing" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-history-and-meaning-of-court-packing&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF9ZuCntufvZJsdyao5GEu3ZALEvw">pack</a> the Supreme Court with judges of his own choosing—and why does he seem to think he can do so without broad bipartisan consensus? Why, for that matter, do so many of his supporters want to turn our carefully calibrated republic into something approximating <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-the-electoral-college-was-created" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-the-electoral-college-was-created&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNElPdM2lv5Eiz_d6tzDikrFmA3uRQ">mob rule</a>—which, as sure as night follows day, will give way to kingship in the end?
The answer to all these questions is older than the Roman republic or the Athenian democracy. It is as old as government itself: power. That enticing ability to make others serve at your pleasure, against which the entire system of American government was designed to protect. “Power tends to corrupt,” <a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/214" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/214&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH3oVMmhd9updOhgNOPhJfs0SWJBw">wrote</a> Lord Acton to Bishop Creighton in 1887, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Already in states like California, where one-party rule and COVID hysteria have turned governors like Gavin Newsom into de facto monarchs, we are seeing the shameless ugliness that <a href="https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1333906492596994048?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1333906492596994048?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHC5kOZ74bdI0a3kSKO291Oe_qBFw">deforms</a> <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/small-business/ca-restaurant-owner-mocks-gov-newsom-french-laundry-banner-calls-restrictions-sheer-insanity" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.foxbusiness.com/small-business/ca-restaurant-owner-mocks-gov-newsom-french-laundry-banner-calls-restrictions-sheer-insanity&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHGoLfIHQtQ-qarz88WzqxyrBCplQ">men</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1333799010251939844?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan/status/1333799010251939844?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGLsgsoKYCyXLIWjRj7zX7ZYlHy8w">women</a> who can issue command after command without accountability. The face of kingship is the face of a man dining out on fine French cuisine while his people languish in locked rooms after 10pm and eke out a living on the dole. The face of kingship is as God said it would be in <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%208&amp;version=NIV" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search%3D1%2520Samuel%25208%26version%3DNIV&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGJHkZsVgBKL8Vn1AjdmGTJe4n4aw">1 Samuel 8</a>: given enough time, they will drive your sons before them like horses to pull their chariots, will steal the best of your land and leave you hungry, will laugh out of sheer arrogance while you starve.
That is why the president is not a stand-in king. And neither is Gavin Newsom, though he may act like one. The American spirit is battered but not broken, and though this year has been a nightmare in many respects, it is imperative that we not submit. The kings of this world <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%202&amp;version=NIV" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search%3DPsalm%25202%26version%3DNIV&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1607018323414000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFLWvlXu8yWmESMfA32-PuPO0JxRA">rise up</a> and band together against God and his anointed—will we stand against them and be free?
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221983000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGOa-5uhWZB1tdZYdyHUUZsncs64g">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHeqHRcOHKxbcUv9rlirlA80vgVhw">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGaeulj7VbgJQ5dk6HibW2hrbAtiA">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEEeT2VvJ36dSMfrqxX2KlMm0OSrg">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

U.S. President Trump’s State Visit To UK – Day One

The Kingship and the Presidency

2020 Election

Federalist Papers

Monarchy

“Policymaker, father, stand-in king”: that is how a much-discussed “Checks and Balances” podcast from the Economist described the office of the American

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/the-kingship-and-the-presidency/

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As everyone knows, Thanksgiving is cancelled. You are not to travel, see family, hug anyone, or play loud music. In fact, it’s probably best not to eat all day — to be safe. Just sit on a disinfected chair and stare hungrily at your wall alone, peasant. It’s for your health.
If you must partake in human interaction, do it over Zoom. Wearing a mask. And make sure you shut down your computer before 10pm. This will ensure that the virus particles, which love to party, do not hear you pumping tunes late at night and mistake your Thanksgiving celebration for a rave. Though they are allergic to 1995 Châteauneuf-du-Pape when drunk in large groups by public health officials and/or the Governor of California, COVID particles are known for their love of raves. If they think you are having one, even over Zoom, they will travel digitally through the computer to infect and instantly kill everyone you love. This is science. It is known.
If, however, you are a science denier who cares so little about the elderly that you don’t want to leave grandma alone in a nursing home on her favorite day of the year, then you are going to have to make sure you avoid saying the wrong things. Saying the wrong things is hate speech, and hate speech is violence, and violence can kill people, just like COVID. So while you cannot avoid spewing noxious germs out of your filthy plebeian mouth, the least you can do is refrain from allowing your disgusting wrongthink to infect the ears of your beloved friends and family whom, to reiterate, you should probably never see again for the rest of your life until they and you all die of natural causes — to be safe.
In light of all this, I, the Daily Wire’s designated authority on correct thought and speech, have generously set aside some time on the plane flight I am definitely not taking on the way to see family with whom I am definitely not gathering for a delicious meal we are definitely not eating, to provide you with this comprehensive list of all the things you are definitely not permitted to say at Thanksgiving dinner. No need to thank me: it’s a public service I freely provide out of the pure goodness of my heart, which is much better than yours. All I ask in return is that you please — for the love of God — not breathe on me.
“Happy Thanksgiving.”
This should be obvious. In addition to being cancelled because of COVID concerns, Thanksgiving is also canceled because it is a vile white supremacist holiday commemorating the tragic subjugation of Native Americans, who lived together in harmonious perfection right up until the moment that white men killed them all, every last one, in cold blood. That’s just history.
If, as a society, we had any decency at all and were not rotten with systemic racism from our putrid roots to our foul branches, we would declare the final Thursday in November a day of public mourning on which the only rituals would be listening to spoken-word poetry by BIPOC and screaming at the sky.
But since America has yet to cast off the shackles of her colonialist oppressors, the least you can do on this solemn day is refrain from dredging up painful memories of the time when devout Christians risked life and limb to give their children a better life and killed exactly zero Natives in the process, making a decades-long peace with their fellow Christian, Squanto, and the Wampanoag Indians. This miraculous story of heartwarming brotherhood is simply too dangerous to be recalled or recounted. Stay well clear.
Basically Any Pronouns
Unless you are prepared to sit through a PowerPoint presentation of minimum three hours in length on the subject of your nonbinary child’s voyage to self-actualization, you are almost certainly not sufficiently enlightened to grasp the subtleties of their/zis/xear postgender identity. And let’s be real: you probably wouldn’t understand anyway, which is why you should not refer to your child at all for the duration of the meal, or acknowledge zir/zoom/Steve’s presence in any way.
However, it is also vitally important that you acknowledge and respect your child’s validity, so do not fail to address zim/flim/floomf at least once every 30 minutes. If your child wishes to perform an interpretative dance at or on the dinner table during the meal, you should be grateful for the privilege of witnessing this sacred stage on the journey to authentic self-discovery. Applaud for no less than five minutes straight afterward, then immediately fall silent. Respect the process.
So, to review: do not mention your child, because that is ignorance, but do not ignore your child, because that is erasure. To be absolutely sure that you do not cause harm, you must never speak with or look at your child, but also never stop speaking at or looking at your child. This isn’t hard, bigot.
“Trump is the President.”
This is misinformation. It is especially dangerous misinformation because it is true. It’s bad enough that Donald Drumpf is out there undermining our democracy by performing such misleading actions as “honoring those who served” for Veterans day. Those sorts of autocratic power-grabs can at least be flagged with the appropriate warnings on social media. But if you go around saying such things as “the Constitution dictates that the new presidency does not become official until the state electors meet and the Inauguration takes place on January 20,” there will be no heroic social media authorities around to keep your irresponsible claims in check. Your friends and relatives might actually believe that Trump is still the president which, again, is no less harmful for being technically accurate.
Indeed, the fact that Trump really is the president actually makes saying so worse, because bad facts are only bad if people are allowed to acknowledge them and speak them out loud. If we all make sure that no one ever says the bad things, they will go away. This applies not only to Trump’s presidency but also to such facts as the immutability of chromosomal sex and Aunt Stacy’s unfortunate tendency to drastically overcook the sweet potatoes. Don’t mention these realities. If you do, people might get the idea that they can just say any old thing just because it’s true. This would be a deadly blow to social justice.
“Would you like some pumpkin pie?”
This implies that you have stayed so long at your forbidden gathering that it is time for dessert, which in turn is probably past the government-mandated curfew. Might as well ask Uncle Schmendrick to pass the COVID, you super-spreader, because at this point night has fallen and the virus has come out of the cave under the earth where it sleeps during the day. And once that grim beast emerges to stalk the earth, God help us all.
“May I use your restroom?”
Restrooms are extremely unsanitary, which is why you should urinate and defecate in your pants at the table during the meal. Also, there probably isn’t any toilet paper.
“I am thankful (for anything)”
By definition, anything you are thankful for is a privilege. You should not be thankful for your privilege. You should atone for it at every second with bitter self-recrimination and weeping. If you allow yourself a moment’s peace from the constant self-doubt and rancorous envy which measures every person’s gains and blessings against your own, then you might find that you are set free into a peace which passes all understanding and a joy which grows even in the telling of it. This would eliminate your need for people like me to tell you what to say and think, which would be an utter disaster — not least of all for my paycheck.
“All Lives Matter.”
You should never say this. Ever. Not just at Thanksgiving. It is the hate speechiest kind of hate speech. Saying “All Lives Matter” means you do not believe black lives matter most of all, and that is racist. It is racist to believe that every human life is shaped by hand in the image of God, our common Creator whose love for us explodes every human category and shatters every human boundary, penetrating down into the very depths of creation to carry us bodily out of the hellish torment to which we would otherwise be consigned by the totality of our sin. There could hardly be anything more hateful than to say that the Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing is made, wields a power of salvation for all mankind in the face of which race, class, disability, and every other one of the puny obstacles that we raise up against his love are of no account.
So again, whatever you do, do NOT spend any time at Thanksgiving meditating, as the Pilgrims did, on the power beyond all speech or thought in light of which all the demons which plague our fallen world will flee like so many shadows and by whose power Death will be swallowed up forever on the Last Day. The Pilgrims were genocidal maniacs, as we have already discussed, and their retrograde beliefs are extremely dangerous because they imply that the lives of black people (you know, the real kind — the kind that voted for Joe Biden) do not matter inherently more than the lives of other people.
Thus if you even for one second say or so much as think that the power of the Black Lives Matter movement, much like the power of every nasty tribalist hate group that has ever oppressed mankind since the fall, will be shattered in a moment’s work by that mighty justice which shall one day roll down from heaven, then you my friend, like Thanksgiving, are cancelled. In fact, do not allow your mind to pass even once beyond COVID lockdowns, race riots, or any of the empty madness which plagues the present moment, or you might contemplate eternity and recall that though we shall have trouble in this life, yet we are pilgrims upon the earth and destined for a heavenly country. That in itself would be reason enough to gather with your family and thank God together, forgetting not all his benefits. And we wouldn’t want that.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF83sqnbRSoskQQ6sEAo_cYVTeiMg">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGTcuBM7QTUoG0IILQKEiWbSzKnoQ">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGMUl1NuGq0C5ObYzxcMCv-7q9PNA">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606431224802000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGHBgoLcqZAhuVqJiN9d0bQFEIbog">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Thanksgiving

Things You Definitely Shouldn’t Say at Thanksgiving

COVID-19

Satire

As everyone knows, Thanksgiving is cancelled. You are not to travel, see family, hug anyone, or play loud music. In fact, it’s probably best not to eat

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/things-you-definitely-shouldnt-say-at-thanksgiving/

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Everyone sucks, and that is why you should make extra sure to have a very happy Thanksgiving this year.
No, seriously. The most needful reminder of all this year is that everyone is — categorically, scripturally, and historically — the worst. The tale of humanity is a tale of murder, war, rape, disease, and other assorted catastrophes. I do not mean to be flippant about such things. They are agony, but they are the norm.
And so in order to grasp the true character of any event in any human society, one must understand that a large amount of human history is quite painful and terrible. There is no pure and unblemished culture against which we can measure the atrocities of those big bad Europeans who came to settle the New World centuries ago. Maya, Aztecs, Incas, Toltecs, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Egyptians alike: at one point or another they have <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-native-american-slaveholders-complicate-trail-tears-narrative-180968339/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-native-american-slaveholders-complicate-trail-tears-narrative-180968339/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1EIM7kT0xqotO3XCFSQ3jn">all</a> gotten <a href="https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.history.com/news/aztec-human-sacrifice-religion&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0zgOke15ELdz0eZ9GHMIzN">eagerly</a> about the <a href="https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3ppRZ1BeSRMRTTztXVE-qH">business</a> of <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/discovering-columbus/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/discovering-columbus/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1XXY7fpcbkdSNixczUObAj">enslaving</a> each other, sacrificing one another to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/10/skeletal-remains-confirm-ancient-greeks-engaged-in-human-sacrifice" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/10/skeletal-remains-confirm-ancient-greeks-engaged-in-human-sacrifice&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1qw8GHop2RwY23SIjVFdc1">false gods</a>, or otherwise <a href="https://www.livescience.com/65283-crucifixion-history.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.livescience.com/65283-crucifixion-history.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1WxeGCC2dyAYX-HJGxrPJB">mistreating one another</a> quite dreadfully. You don’t need religion to tell you this: you just need a few history books and a pair of eyes.
Against this rather grim backdrop there occasionally emerge, by the grace of God, a few spots of light. The story of Thanksgiving is one such spot. The Puritan Pilgrims were what is called “Separatists” from the Church of England because of their refusal to participate in rituals they deemed unbiblical. They had been “harried” (to use the language King James employed at the time) out of their native land. Though they found sanctuary for a while in the Dutch town of Leiden, they so yearned to raise their children apart from the seductions of the world that they felt called to set out for distant shores.
On the way, they were given the runaround by some thoroughly opportunistic businessmen called “The Adventurers,” kept from departure until the worst possible time, and shunted into a 75-foot-long cavern in the belly of a ship, the Mayflower, which would suffer hair-raising damage on the 65-day journey to the New World.
They arrived to find the native Wampanoags either thoroughly wiped out by disease, or else humiliated by forced capitulation to sworn enemies such as the Narragansett. Of those who had occupied the area of Patuxet, now called Plymouth, only one, Squanto, remained alive — and that was because he had been enslaved, carried to Europe, and forced to find his way home after regaining freedom.
Half the Pilgrims died during their first brutal winter in Plymouth. Their meeting with Squanto and the regional chief, Massasoit, likely saved them from ruin. And so it was that, 399 years ago, in 1621, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag made a pact that would last for decades of peace.
It can only be understood as a miracle: these two battered, beleaguered people, rendered desperate and needy by the cruel violence of this fallen world, came together in the midst of it all — all the disease, all the heartache, all the fear — and they broke bread. Like all miracles, it was a moment in which the warmth of fellowship glowed defiantly in spite of all else — a moment puncturing through the darkness, providing some hint that we are more than this world makes us out to be.
And indeed we are, though disease and fear threaten us still. We are told this year that we must not gather, because it is not safe to do so. But just like the accusation that the European settlers of America were uniquely evil, this warning against the plague of coronavirus is based on a deep misunderstanding about what kind of world it is we live in.
It is never simple, never clean, never easy, to do the things we humans are called by God himself to do. Eating together, building families, building nations: these things are not safe. Never have been, never will be. We do them anyway, not because we can be assured of their success or their security, but because our gift and our duty is to rejoice together in the midst of all this mess. Now we are told to wait until the mess is cleaned up. That is nonsense. We will die before that happens, and we will never have lived.
The Pilgrims’ eventual governor, William Bradford, <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24950/24950-h/24950-h.htm" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24950/24950-h/24950-h.htm&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw39QeoD8zTcdsAwX8CKJjU7">wrote</a> in his record of the journey that when the group left Holland, they were deathly afraid and bitterly sad. But “they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lift[ed] up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits.” So are we pilgrims, all of us, on this earth — here to find what joy in it we can. May your own Thanksgiving, and every Thanksgiving, be one moment of such joy. Do not wait until it is safe to make it so.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0GMUxg7VdCwuD3R6L_d0Ck">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2pFKJrpynA6Tw5SEUoWO-Q">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0qDA523zYhtONSXhHcG_1m">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1606332440226000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0Ut9TSIMBUWEolj8C35yBk">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

First Thanksgiving

Why You Should Celebrate Thanksgiving

Coronavirus

Everyone sucks, and that is why you should make extra sure to have a very happy Thanksgiving this year. No, seriously. The most needful reminder of all

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/why-you-should-celebrate-thanksgiving/

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The election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 convinced many of his opponents that something was fundamentally wrong with any system that could have produced such an outcome. For years, Democrats and Never Trumpers have been seeking to pinpoint the exact location of what they consider a national dysfunction. At a structural level, nothing has come under more scrutiny of this kind than the Electoral College.
A refresher: the College is the device whereby American presidents are chosen. It’s not a direct vote—i.e., the candidate with 51% of all individual votes doesn’t automatically win. The technical term for such a procedure is a “plebiscite.” The framers of the American Constitution considered, but rejected, plebiscitary government.
Instead, the voters in each individual state vote for “electors”: these are individuals holding no other federal public office, each of whom casts one vote for president. Every state gets the same number of electors as congressmen—so two for the two senators that every state gets, plus a variable number depending on a number of factors (population foremost among them) for the number of representatives.
In the original design and defense of the Constitution, these electors were considered genuine representatives whom the people would choose to deliberate on their behalf. Today, except in extreme cases, almost no one expects electors to vote against the candidate who got the most votes in their state. This phenomenon—the “faithless elector”—is at this point largely the last-ditch fever dream of people dissatisfied with the results of the national vote. (Sorry to disappoint anybody who’s banking on that option today.)
To put it another way: people don’t vote for electors anymore so much as they vote for the presidential candidate who will receive their states’ electoral votes. But that still means—as we have been reminded often these past four years—that the person who loses the popular vote can win the presidency. Trump did that in 2016.
And this is the outcome that many Democrats can no longer accept. Even in 2020, Trump’s sternest critics are appalled at how close you can come to winning the Electoral College after losing the popular vote. From <a href="https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1325552771467251712?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1325552771467251712?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGOXGElrSUt26jDJcVGxALOelRk0g">Bernie Sanders</a>, to <a href="https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/1328306585244938240?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/1328306585244938240?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHRFNaUN0juPOj9HczUvxHGmFrZMg">Marianne Williamson</a>, to <a href="https://t.co/dG0qdItC5x?amp=1">The Washington Post</a>, to any number of <a href="https://www.highlandernews.org/75519/it-is-time-to-abolish-the-electoral-college-and-adopt-the-national-popular-vote/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.highlandernews.org/75519/it-is-time-to-abolish-the-electoral-college-and-adopt-the-national-popular-vote/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFBS0Tzb82vyr2iAN7QJb-M3EjCqQ">amateur</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ziwe/status/1325119848117129217?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/ziwe/status/1325119848117129217?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEgEwoLHIaQ0FTlLIoMjaOZtsDOdA">commentators</a>, calls to abolish the Electoral College abound.
Chiefly, the argument against the system is that it gives undue weight to the concerns of rural states with small populations but a large number of electors. This leads to claims that it threatens or undermines “democracy”—by which people usually mean, as The Washington Post said, that “it’s time to let the majority rule.”
At the more progressive extremes of the Left, you’ll also hear concerns that the College is “<a href="https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1327797970931105792?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1327797970931105792?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEE2_VV6dwl5hTh6pJpSk7OK_mGDg">racist</a>”—either because it mutes the importance of urban centers, where many black people live, or because slaves, when they were held, only counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of representation.
What people might not know is, we’ve been over all this before. The most serious challenge to the Electoral College came not in 2020 but in 1970, when a constitutional amendment passed the House and looked poised to pass the Senate. Recall, by the way, that an amendment is what it would take to change the College: it’s written into <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/article-ii/clauses/350" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/article-ii/clauses/350&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH6ybQRq1OvRjnFM5NDpaZeqON_yA">Article II, Section 1</a> of the Constitution, so abolishing it isn’t a matter of a mere executive order or even the most well-worded of op-eds. Still, 50 years ago, it looked like an amendment was in the cards.
The man who gets the most credit for turning that around is Michael Uhlmann, who was then a congressional staffer for the Republicans and would go on to a long career in law and teaching. Uhlmann prepared a <a href="https://americanmind.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/M.-Uhlmann_The-Electoral-College.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/M.-Uhlmann_The-Electoral-College.pdf&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGhNydo0GCQ5Du9pANCZwsZy7Oxow">lengthy brief</a> for the Senate Judiciary Committee explaining in precise terms why abolishing the College would be a disaster. It’s remarkable that we’re revisiting the question now, since every one of Uhlmann’s arguments is still perfectly sound. In truth, hardly anything of consequence has changed since we hashed this all out at length in ’70.
Keeping the Mobs at Bay
The first thing to acknowledge is that choosing an appropriate number of representatives is one of the most delicate and difficult tasks in republican statecraft. There’s no magic formula: it takes prudence and discernment. The authors of the Federalist Papers, in which all American procedures of this nature are explained and defended, <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed55.asp" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed55.asp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGVVpD8r5lKSre49jeHkCrhJxWA0g">observed</a> that “no political problem is less susceptible of a precise solution” than the problem of who gets how many votes.
It’s not just a question of population: it’s a question of political corruption, social dynamics, and their effects on reason. Get too few people involved, and you leave them open to bribery or influence from vested interests. Get too many involved, and you end up with an unruly mob.
And if populism and demagoguery are what we’re worried about these days, then unruly mobs ought to be a major concern: big crowds tend to elevate the kinds of leaders who are good at rousing and motivating big crowds. Think Mussolini, or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-history-and-meaning-of-court-packing" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-history-and-meaning-of-court-packing&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGmnIp3KwZR4BIaj3N9buUuJvJesg">Gaius Gracchus</a>, or Maximilien Robespierre: not exactly the sort of person we want at the helm in this tense moment.
No argument for the Electoral College is more germane than this one. But none is more unpalatable either. For many people, it now smacks of elitism to argue that public sentiment is fickle and needs to be channeled by virtuous representatives.
This colossally misses the point: the concern about direct democracy isn’t about the character of the voters. It’s about the sheer effect of numbers. The Founding Fathers <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed55.asp" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed55.asp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGVVpD8r5lKSre49jeHkCrhJxWA0g">argued</a> not that the unwashed masses were fundamentally stupid, but that even “had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
In other words, the tendencies of crowds in and of themselves lead naturally to chaos and instability: mobs bring out the worst in people, no matter how enlightened and decent the people in the mob. Crowds can be intimidated into conformity, swayed to impulsive action, and goaded or tempted into acting against the better judgment of the individuals involved. It’s simply part of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_mentality&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE6r-ByeXxXRjsIah7dLeZYTOcbog">how people work</a> when they get into large groups and pressurized situations. We’ve seen it play out on our city streets over the past few months.
Given that this is so, another argument for doing away with the College—that it would break the two-party system and encourage viable third parties—is actually a point against abolishment rather than for it. In the chaos of a multi-party election, the candidate whose head will rise above the waters will be the loudest, the angriest, the most uncompromising and therefore eye-catching one. If you think it was a shame that we elected a Reality TV mogul for president, you may want to think twice before creating the conditions under which only a made-for-TV pundit can win attention and votes.
By and large, arguments for abolishing the College are framed in high-flown terms of the people’s right to be heard. And no American would deny that the people have such a right. The question is, are the people to be granted exactly their whims at all times, or are those whims to be filtered and interpreted by the representatives and structures of the government that the founders put in place?
The Washington Post editorial board writes, “we believe that Mr. Trump’s election was a sad event for the nation; his reelection would have been a calamity.” For the sake of argument, let us grant the worst that can be said of Trump voters: they are racist, homophobic Nazis who want to beat and scare minorities into submission. Let us concede all that, obviously false though it is. Still: there are 73 million of these despicable bigots in this country. Are the Bernie Sanderses and Elizabeth Warrens of the world really ready to turn the American people into one massive voting bloc and set them loose on the government in the aggregate?
In point of fact it is the Democrats who view “the people” as ethically deplorable and yet somehow, incongruently, want them granted direct access to the presidency. Republicans, by contrast, view America as a fundamentally decent place with generally quite commendable people—who nevertheless, like all people, need to be guarded against the worst impulses of their nature through carefully calibrated constitutional systems.
The Dam Against the Flood
The Electoral College is the best such system that exists. It is imprecise, as its crafters knew it would be—as every such system is. It has some amusing results, like the fact that voters in Wyoming have four times the influence of voters in California. But the consequence of all this is not suppression or racism: it is compromise and diversity.
This was one of Uhlmann’s strongest arguments back in 1970. “So successful has the electoral college been,” he wrote, “that most Americans are inclined to forget that they are, in one or more senses, members of a minority—geographic, ethnic, religious, social, or economic.” And since “a minority which fails to align itself with other minorities” will be in great political trouble, the Electoral College “not only encourages such alliances, but virtually requires them. It builds moderate majorities while protecting the interest of all minorities that are willing to compromise.”
This observation was actually borne out by the results of our most recent election, in which centrists of every race and sexuality <a href="https://forward.com/opinion/457887/the-real-lesson-of-the-election-people-of-color-are-not-a-monolith-and/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://forward.com/opinion/457887/the-real-lesson-of-the-election-people-of-color-are-not-a-monolith-and/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH4eBXvOrvSZP6u2lW0MvvzDhjkAQ">banded together</a> against woke extremism in a new Republican coalition. Far from representing the failures of the Electoral College as a racist institution, Donald Trump actually represents the triumph of it as a uniter of Americans from all regions and walks of life. That union—that complex, messy, strange assembly of weirdos we call America—is being reinvigorated in real time by the realities of our political system, even while all our elites protest to the contrary.
Uhlmann goes on to argue that a national plebiscite would invite electoral fraud on a massive scale. Suffice it to say that if mobs are something we should be worried about in 2020, election integrity is something we should be absolutely losing sleep over. These days, no matter how many fake ballots you shovel into the polling stations, you can only win one state’s worth of electoral votes. Imagine the temptation to corruption when every new pallet brings you closer, not just to winning Georgia or Arizona, but to going home with all the marbles.
In the end, as Uhlmann <a href="https://americanmind.org/memo/as-the-electoral-college-goes-so-goes-the-constitution/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/memo/as-the-electoral-college-goes-so-goes-the-constitution/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFB3CieBC3VVlsOhxWf0CUmV1Jmtg">noted</a> in 2000 after a photo-finish competition between Bush and Gore, the logic of the Electoral College is the logic of the country itself. Electors are given to states in exactly the same numbers, and for exactly the same reasons, as congressional delegates. In the simplest possible terms, those reasons are the ones <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed57.asp" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed57.asp&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEYm_WYcRsUIAl0zNGUWk6OKpGIMg">described</a> in the Federalist: that “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
The Electoral College is a carefully crafted instrument for doing just that: finding virtuous leaders who will lead in the best interests of the people, and keeping both people and leaders as free from corruption as possible. It’s a tremendously subtle and multi-layered task, one for which only a method as ingenious as the Electoral College is suited. The idea of abolishing that method because it has some observable idiosyncrasies is the most ham-fisted and extreme solution possible to a set of problems which require, if anything, only minor tinkering.
Maybe we should take stock of how many electors each state has. Maybe we should add or subtract a few here or there. But tossing the whole process out would be like taking a sledgehammer to a dam because it’s showing signs of the usual wear and tear. Cracks there may have been in the dam, but you’re not going to like it when the water it was holding back comes gushing through. It’s a good thing the same founders who put the dam there in the first place, also made it nigh-on impossible for thoughtless political celebrities to get their hands on the sledgehammer.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://youngheretics.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221983000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGOa-5uhWZB1tdZYdyHUUZsncs64g">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHeqHRcOHKxbcUv9rlirlA80vgVhw">Claremont Review of</a> Books and <a href="https://americanmind.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://americanmind.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGaeulj7VbgJQ5dk6HibW2hrbAtiA">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/spencerklavan&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605727221984000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEEeT2VvJ36dSMfrqxX2KlMm0OSrg">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

US-POLITICS-VOTE-TRUMP-PROTEST

Why The Electoral College Was Created

Democrats

Electoral College

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 convinced many of his opponents that something was fundamentally wrong with any system that could

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/why-the-electoral-college-was-created/

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When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died this year, Democrats — foremost among them progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — advocated expanding the size of the Supreme Court. The point was to counterbalance what became a 6-3 conservative majority after President Trump’s appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, was confirmed.
This is an idea called “court-packing.” It’s been floated before, but never really put into practice in its most extreme form. The size of the Supreme Court hasn’t been altered at all since 1869, and before then it was changed only by one or two judges at a time.
Americans are wary of court packing <a href="https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/10/07/supreme-cort-packing-poll">when polled</a>, in part because of its huge and in some cases uncertain potential consequences. It’s a bit like tinkering under the hood of America’s republic: if you’re going to start moving essential parts of our constitutional machinery around, people want assurance that you know what you’re doing. When elected representatives start proposing a full-engine retool, their constituents often start asking just how carefully they’ve thought this thing through.
Now, the Supreme Court’s size is not set in stone by any law. The <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/full-text">Constitution</a> gives the president the right to nominate judges, but it tasks Congress with determining the size and shape of our Supreme Court. They did this for the first time in 1789 with the <a href="https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&amp;doc=12&amp;page=transcript">Federal Judiciary Act</a>, which created the Court and set the number of Justices at six. That number was reduced and raised several times throughout the 1800s until finally, not long after the Civil War, it was set at nine by the <a href="https://www.fjc.gov/history/timeline/circuit-judges-act">Judiciary Act of 1869</a>.
For a long time afterward, no one touched that number — and for good reason. Playing tug-of-war with the Court had by that point become a way for presidents to expand their power and influence. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Judiciary-Act-of-1801">In 1801</a>, President John Adams and the Federalists in congress had taken a parting shot at their successors, Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans, by hastily stuffing the courts full of appointees and then reducing the number of Supreme Court judges from six to five. It was a last-ditch effort to keep Jefferson from leaving his mark on the country, and of course it was futile: under the Jefferson Administration, Congress saw Adams and raised him, first <a href="https://www.fjc.gov/history/legislation/landmark-legislation-judiciary-act-1802">returning</a> the number of judges to six and then <a href="https://www.fjc.gov/history/legislation/landmark-legislation-seventh-circuit">raising it to seven</a> in 1807.
Once that game got going, the potential for abuse and escalation became apparent — especially as sectarian tension tightened and finally snapped into outright Civil War. <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2013/07/the-first-court-packing-plan/">Two new Justices</a> were added in 1837 under Andrew Jackson, and a 10th during the War itself, until finally congress fixed the thing at nine once peace settled in. It’s not hard to imagine that this would have been a relief: the War, after all, had driven home how miserably violent and bitter contests over the structure and character of the country can become.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans lay dead at one another’s hands after an unresolvable conflict over, among other things, the power of the president relative to the states. Fixing the rules of the Court in place gave a measure of stability to that question going forward: at least now, everyone knew what the rules were. As in sports, so in politics: if everyone believes the game is fair, the losing side is more ready to take its licks and fight another day. Keeping presidents from helping themselves to more judges was one way to calm everybody down about the stakes of presidential elections.
No one disturbed that new peace until President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. Frustrated with his inability to get progressive New Deal legislation past the Court, Roosevelt proposed the <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-fdr-lost-his-brief-war-on-the-supreme-court-2">Judicial Procedures Reform Bill</a>, which would have let him add as many as six new Justices — one for every sitting member of the Court over the age of 70 years and 6 months. This was court-packing in its most essential form. It failed, although Roosevelt eventually got his progressive Court through the usual means of appointing new judges when old ones died.
Joe Biden has resisted saying whether he wants the Court packed — his actual words were that the people “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html">don’t deserve</a>” to know his views on the issue until he reveals them in office. He then said that he’d establish a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/us/politics/what-is-court-packing.html?auth=login-email&amp;login=email">commission </a>to make “recommendations on how to reform the court system, because it’s out of whack.” It’s an idea that’s found favor with far-Left senators such as Elizabeth Warren, but <a href="https://americanmind.org/features/what-comes-next/judicial-carnage/">conservative</a> <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/biden-harris-radical-scheme-pack-supreme-court-opinion-1537920">scholars</a> have expressed extreme concern that what this amounts to is a radical court-packing scheme beyond Roosevelt’s wildest dreams.
The Warnings of History
What the history of court-packing shows is that efforts to change the shape of the Court feed and express the very worst impulses of American leadership: they represent the extremes of arrogance and partisanship. In the case of Roosevelt, court-packing reflected the perceived excesses of Progressivism: here was a president unwilling to let a little thing like the fabric of the Constitution or the will of the benighted people get in the way of his righteous vision for a perfect future.
In our own day court-packing looks, if anything, like an even more disastrous prospect than it was in 1937. The instability entailed in leaving an enormous center of power up for grabs to any president who chooses threatens to intensify our now-raging civil feud.
In the past, at least, those congressmen who did change the number of Justices on the Court set a fixed number. Everyone knew what that number was, and even if it changed it would change to another definite, reliable amount. But even that was too volatile: the minute presidents realized they could get Congress to open those doors, they started squabbling over the Court like dogs over a bone.
What was so galling about Roosevelt’s plan compared with all that went before it was the open-endedness of it: who knew just how far he was eventually hoping to go in bending the Court to his whims? “Up to six” new judges for now — but what would stop him from adding more if he didn’t get his way the first time around? Now we have a man who proposes not even to tell us what, exactly, his plans for the Court are — just that he thinks it’s “out of whack” and needs fixing under his administration.
If the danger of such proposals increases during times of great civic strain, then there could hardly be a worse time to pack the courts. We are as close to one another’s throats now as we have ever been, with the exception of those terrible bloody years in the 1860s. Back then, we learned the hard way to keep the ground on which our regime is built as stable as possible. Now, when even Supreme Court confirmation hearings have become extravagant show trials, when rioters and looters take to the street at a moment’s provocation, can there be little doubt that making open-ended proposals to transform the Court is about as safe as playing basketball with a hunk of napalm?
The Founding Fathers themselves were supremely wary of this kind of practice. Alexander Hamilton, in his <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed78.asp">defense</a> of the Constitution’s judicial system, wrote that:
<blockquote>The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution. By a limited Constitution, I understand one which contains certain specified exceptions to the legislative authority; such, for instance, as that it shall pass no bills of attainder, no ex-post-facto laws, and the like. Limitations of this kind can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing.</blockquote>
In other words, if the Court is going to be restrained within the bounds of the Constitution, it has to be kept as impartial, as free from political attachments, and as true to its commission as can be. The consequence of court-packing is likely to be just the opposite of this: it will invite each new president to wield limitless power over an army of Judges uniquely loyal to him. It will turn the courts — the one place in America where every citizen is meant to stand on a shared bedrock of truth and justice — into one more puppet of the Oval Office.
What’s at Stake
History tells us that once the courts fall under the sway of radicals, there is hardly a limit to how bad it can get. In Ancient Rome, historians like Appian and Plutarch looked back on their own era of politicized court reform as the beginning of the end for a dying republic. When Gaius Gracchus, a fiery young reformer, led a popular uprising to power in Rome after the death of his brother, one of his major policy initiatives was to take the power of judging court cases away from the senators, who were the highest political class, and give it to the equites (the “knights”) who were intermediate between the senate and the people.
This looked like a populist reform — the senate had admittedly become corrupt, and Gracchus’ proposal had the appearance of something that would increase transparency and accountability. In point of fact, though, Appian <a href="https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Appian/Civil_Wars/1*.html">writes </a>that the knights “became addicted to bribe-taking, and when they too had tasted these enormous gains, they indulged in them even more basely and immoderately than the senators had done.”
The reason for this is obvious: at moments of deep-seated mistrust and political instability, making drastic changes to the structure of power turns fellow citizens into competitors for political favor. Gracchus, like Biden, claimed he could put the courts into the hands of the people. But, like Biden, he was really proposing to take control of the law himself.
A century of bloodshed and civil war followed Gracchus’s irresponsible measures. We are fooling ourselves if we think we are better suited to pack the courts now than Rome was then. Plenty of bipartisan analysts think a saner proposal would be just the opposite of court-packing: a <a href="https://keepnine.org/">constitutional amendment</a> to keep the Court at nine members. That is the kind of thing that amendments are intended for: reflecting the lessons learned from abuses of the American system over time.
We are lucky that the wisdom of our founders made it impossible for a president to meddle in the structure of the courts without the consent of Congress. We are even luckier that the providence of God seems to have kept Congress out of complete Democrat control this election cycle. If Biden does go through with a court-packing plan, it will be up to the people’s representatives to stave off disaster and defend the Constitution against malformation. There is nothing partisan about this — the same principles would hold good if a Republican were proposing the same thing, and responsible Democrat congresspeople should be pressed to recognize that. It is a fight worth having and — by the grace of God — it can still be won.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="https://claremontinstituteorg-my.sharepoint.com/personal/sklavan_claremont_org/Documents/YoungHeretics.com">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of Books</a> and <a href="https://claremontinstituteorg-my.sharepoint.com/personal/sklavan_claremont_org/Documents/americanmind.org">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/SpencerKlavan?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Guardian statue

The History and Meaning of Court-Packing

Cancel culture

Court Packing

SCOTUS

When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died this year, Democrats — foremost among them progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez —

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/the-history-and-meaning-of-court-packing/

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They&#8217;ve called the race for Biden, as we knew they would. Vox was among the first at 8:53 a.m. on Friday. Then on Saturday and thereafter the supposedly &#8220;less partisan&#8221; outlets — NBC, ABC, Fox — followed. If we accept this from them, we are fools.
I’m not saying this because I think Trump will win if all legal votes and only legal votes are counted — although I do think that. I’m saying it because whether a Biden win is crooked as sin or pure as the driven snow, it has absolutely nothing — and I mean nada, zero — to do with how the press has treated this thing and will continue to. The legacy media has proven itself as corrupt as any Democrat city machine this election cycle, and we are going to have to dedicate ourselves to not believing them going forward. This is our first test.
For four years now, Democrats have not so much as begun to concede Trump’s 2016 victory. Hillary Clinton called Trump “illegitimate” as recently as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605054070565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEGtFghgYU0VWYZbLZGCWRUwtybHA">2019</a>. Former President Jimmy Carter said <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/6/28/19127475/jimmy-carter-trump-illegitimate-president" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.vox.com/2019/6/28/19127475/jimmy-carter-trump-illegitimate-president&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605054070565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFyK1JHq3DKhw9TfTqOAYb9QkF30A">the same</a>. “Not my president” wasn’t just a hashtag: it was practically the official position of the Democratic Party. All this because of Russian <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/13/will-all-the-name-brand-people-who-pushed-the-russian-collusion-conspiracy-get-off-scot-free/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/13/will-all-the-name-brand-people-who-pushed-the-russian-collusion-conspiracy-get-off-scot-free/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605054070565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFU_B7E9VFz-X1CRn0qQGkPL7Ap6Q">collusion charges</a> that went nowhere, an impeachment that <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-empire-strikes-back/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/the-empire-strikes-back/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605054070565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHL7-dB81FENfP2pIvvpDt4RjZgGg">failed utterly</a>, and a trail of <a href="https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/stop-saying-donald-trump-colluded-russia" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/stop-saying-donald-trump-colluded-russia&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605054070565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEtbnOg6D8YgCY3OzqANXa77fN-2A">oppo research</a> so thin it could have competed on America’s Next Top Model.
If that smorgasbord of nothingburgers was enough to justify an entire first term’s worth of #resistance, then these chuckleheads can wait for a month while we get to the bottom of some very shady election shenanigans.
In Michigan, at least 6,000 votes (and possibly many more) <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/gop-demands-michigan-vote-count-checks-after-machine-glitch-flips-county-to-trump" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/gop-demands-michigan-vote-count-checks-after-machine-glitch-flips-county-to-trump&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605054070565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGpdfioQ5uMjUgL2-USi-nqscBVxQ">went to Biden</a> when they should have gone to Trump because of a mysterious “glitch.” Arizona was <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-stands-early-arizona-call-after-furious-pushback-trump-campaign-1544662" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-stands-early-arizona-call-after-furious-pushback-trump-campaign-1544662&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605054070565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGFhE29uDCQCCRaQLiKiNSK7JlmfQ">called</a> for Biden early on election day by Fox News despite the fact that (it later emerged) there was still plenty of room for Trump to take the lead at the time. And what in the blazes is up with just full-on stopping the count mid-flow like they did in the major battleground states where Trump was winning?
That ain’t normal, bub. It’s not that the thousands of suddenly emergent Biden votes are impossible, or that every accusation of fraud is credible. It’s that taken together, they represent vastly more than enough to look into and take to the courts.
To say so is not to “<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/11/06/trump-biden-election-results-misinformation-false-fraud-claims/6187396002/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/11/06/trump-biden-election-results-misinformation-false-fraud-claims/6187396002/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605054070565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHueK9nZNyxZ9RtVOl8ZuSKgkpAAw">threaten democracy</a>.” It is not to “<a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/world/2020-11-06-listen-voting-fraud-allegations-threaten-us-democracy/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/world/2020-11-06-listen-voting-fraud-allegations-threaten-us-democracy/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1605054070565000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGAeDN1Yx_y9FliH6n1dmgd3Ut2BA">spread disinformation</a>.”  It is not “dangerous” or “divisive” or “unpatriotic.” Anyone, Republican or Democrat, who shames a Trump supporter for wanting a thorough investigation of the truth, is simply a shill for this country’s thoroughly discredited ruling class. After years of dedicated and dishonest resistance to a duly elected president, they don’t get to tell us when this election is legitimate. We get to decide that: we the people. We should not back down.
This will be harder than it sounds. The reason our slatternly media outlets have survived as long as they have is because the charm of authority is hypnotic and hard to break. The credibility accumulated by New York Times and Washington Post reporters from days long gone by still lingers, completely unearned, with the disingenuous hacks who are trying to call this election before the legal battle is done. When they tell you the race is won and scold you for suggesting otherwise, it will be hard to stare them down and hold the line with confidence. But we have every reason to do so, and we must insist that our elected representatives do the same—no early concessions from RINOs, thank you very much.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/never-forget-how-wrong-the-polls-were">Never Forget How Wrong The Polls Were</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Trump Supporters Hold “Stop The Steal” Protest At Pennsylvania State Capitol

Conservatives Must Hold The Line On Election

Biden

They&#039;ve called the race for Biden, as we knew they would. Vox was among the first at 8:53 a.m. on Friday. Then on Saturday and thereafter the

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/conservatives-must-hold-the-line-on-election/

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No matter what happens, the polls were wrong. Catastrophically, irrevocably, irredeemably wrong. They’ll try to make us forget that. We absolutely cannot let them.
Going into the election last week, NBC News/Wall Street Journal gave Biden a <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/523822-biden-up-by-10-points-in-new-national-poll" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/523822-biden-up-by-10-points-in-new-national-poll&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1604697136516000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH3KaxM3pyVtx-5lUwrdqhz8kj6iA">10-point lead</a>—no matter what the final tally, there is no way this won’t turn out to have been wildly off. <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/house/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/house/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1604697136516000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHkjgQ1xBNzRLNL_reFnZkrAbX-PQ">Likewise</a> in the <a href="https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1324324887348060161?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/RyanGirdusky/status/1324324887348060161?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1604697136516000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFQ7NOuyt6QS9jesIX6LR2n19raXw">now-upended</a> House of Representatives. The New York Times/Siena <a href="https://twitter.com/TomBevanRCP/status/1324009761621319680?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/TomBevanRCP/status/1324009761621319680?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1604697136516000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFOFLox4Y18icvoPwROeTCj8M1HZQ">overestimated</a> Biden’s support in Florida by 6 points, in North Carolina by 4 points, in Michigan by about 6 points, in Wisconsin by about 10 points, in Iowa by more than 10 points, and in Ohio by more than 9 points.
All this per Tom Bevan at RealClear Politics, who notes that NYT/Siena is rated “A+” by the polling website 538. Nate Silver, the famed wizard of 538 whose expertise has long been represented as infallible, responded to criticism of his approach with the following measured remarks: “<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/nate-silver-tells-fivethirtyeight-critics-fuck-you-we-did-a-good-job" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.thedailybeast.com/nate-silver-tells-fivethirtyeight-critics-fuck-you-we-did-a-good-job&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1604697136516000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGNGBi4dsBSJEg8aMmRh3IyrWLBXQ">f— you</a>, we did a good job.” This attitude is typical among pollsters and will continue to be.
Over and above the inaccuracy of the polls themselves, there’s the way they were reported: relentlessly, unyieldingly, devotedly, in such a way as to demoralize and shame Trump voters. We were to believe the national averages despite their spectacular failure in 2016, because now the models, the precious models, had been adjusted. If we so much as questioned the certainty of all this we were denying the great god Science, that mighty idol of coronavirus lockdowns, apocalyptic climate change, and any number of other bloody human sacrifices.
The fury with which the pollsters and the legacy media are now insisting that they were right—in the teeth of abject failures that go well beyond their own stated margins of error—will not let up. They will keep revising the narrative backwards, keep demanding indignantly that we acquiesce, keep screaming at us to live in the world they imagine. They will do this because they hate us, and that’s all they have.
After all, in point of fact, they did not correct their models. They doubled down on them. Statistical models, as a philosophical matter, are based on assumptions about who is doing the voting and why—that is part of how statisticians choose whom to poll and how. The assumptions our ruling classes made about Trump voters were dead wrong in 2016, and they have gotten worse, not better, since then.
In the wake of the 2016 election, the professed soul-searching that was supposed to occur among the commentariat quickly revealed itself as merely a recommitment to passionate, disdainful hatred for all who dared vote Trump. We were in fact uneducated, racist, and bigoted in every other way imaginable. Now that Trump is gaining more nonwhite voters than any Republican since 1960, the true believers are doing their best to magic that reality away: only “<a href="https://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow/status/1323982596980826113?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow/status/1323982596980826113?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1604697136516000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHEZNqYPu_8fTSeYbwXkjlbVvVrWA">white gays</a>” (sayeth New York Times opinion writer Charles Blow) and “<a href="https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1323807759276498945?s=20" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1323807759276498945?s%3D20&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1604697136516000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHHxzXTaRC0RCbnKipz1511QO9o5g">white Cubans</a>” (declareth Times propagandist Nikole Hannah-Jones) and “Uncle Clarences” (sneereth MSNBC’s <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbcs-joy-reid-blasted-for-referring-to-justice-thomas-as-uncle-clarence" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbcs-joy-reid-blasted-for-referring-to-justice-thomas-as-uncle-clarence&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1604697136516000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFXk3yOxTerlovRuY3DHc1Y7_Pm2g">Joy Reid</a>) are part of this movement.
The fact that these claims are patent cope, seething with venomous desperation, will not stop them from being repeated everywhere, day after day, from now on and forever more. If this is not a watershed moment for conservatives to discredit these clowns, then we are simply not worth our salt. As of this writing, the presidential election is still hotly contested.  I expect it will be for some time. But though we must fight that fight all the way to the courts, we cannot—I repeat, cannot—lose sight of how shamefully these sneering pundits and arrogant pollsters have failed. Their jig is up, and we must insist that no one who ever listens to them again is taken seriously. If we fall for their gaslighting next time, we are simply too gullible for our own good.
In the 44th chapter of the Prophecy of Isaiah, God says that it is he “who frustrates the omens of liars, and makes fools of diviners; who turns back the wise, and makes their knowledge foolish.” As it was then in the courts of Assyria and Babylon, so it is now: the readers of signs and the tellers of fortunes, whom we made to be as gods, are now shown to be men in the pure nakedness of ignorance. This truth—which may turn out to be the most important one of the year—has been made known. It’s on us not to forget it.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and assistant editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of</a> Booksand <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
More from Spencer Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/video-games-the-last-refuge-of-manhood">Video Games: The Last Refuge of Manhood</a>
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Final U.S. Presidential Debate Between President Trump And Democratic Candidate Joe Biden

Never Forget How Wrong the Polls Were

Polls

No matter what happens, the polls were wrong. Catastrophically, irrevocably, irredeemably wrong. They’ll try to make us forget that. We absolutely cannot

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/never-forget-how-wrong-the-polls-were/

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The revolution is at our doorstep. In this election, the Democrat Party is proposing to unmake America.
That’s not an exaggeration or a metaphor. It’s the platform they’re running on. One of the singular gifts of the American Left is to pretend they’re advocating moderate change while saying things which, on the face of them, entail overturning the American regime.
In no instance is this more true than in the accusation that America is systemically racist. It’s an accusation that Joe Biden has <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-systemic-racism-exists-law-enforcement/">repeatedly</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEnwjnsnpHc">adopted</a> as his <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-07-28/joe-biden-offers-plan-to-take-on-systemic-racism">own</a>. He’s even got a <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/10/biden-root-out-systemic-racism-not-just-divisive-trump-talk-column/5327631002/">plan</a> to root it out.
By definition, to say that America is systemically racist is to say that it is not racist accidentally, but in and of itself. Racism is an evil thing; to accuse an entire country of it is to call that country evil, and to propose cleansing that country of its sins is to propose unmaking the country. This isn’t hard.
And yet Biden gets by with the affable moderate act: “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/biden-do-i-look-like-a-radical-socialist-with-a-soft-spot-for-rioters/2020/08/31/eab136ef-88c7-4b84-a990-3c21dd0afb8d_video.html">asked</a> glibly in August.
Yet what is the consequence of telling people that their country is viciously flawed in its essence and its origins? What is the logical conclusion? Nothing other than riots, and worse. So it is that Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the New York Times’s 1619 Project and one of the country’s foremost proponents of the “systemic racism” theory, has <a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/06/22/new-york-times-mum-on-1619-project-creator-calling-1619-riots-moniker-an-honor/">said</a> that “it would be an honor” to have this past summer’s riots named after her work.
If you believe, as Hannah-Jones has written, that “racism runs in the <a href="https://dwswanson.com/2019/11/28/just-how-much-racism-is-in-our-dna/">very DNA</a> of this country,” then naturally you will encourage people to scrap the country and start over. That is what the Black Lives Matter movement and its supporters want to do. “If this country doesn’t give us what we want, we will burn down this system and replace it,” <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/blm-leader-well-burn-system-down-if-us-wont-give-us-what-we-want-1513422">said</a> BLM New York chairman Hawk Newsome. Of course they will. Why waste time reforming a system which is evil per se?
The statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus that lie toppled in our streets aren’t an accident, an excess, or a misunderstanding. They are the natural outcome of the philosophy in which Joe Biden has said he believes, and on which he proposes to act. And so when his running mate, Kamala Harris, <a href="https://americanmind.org/post/theyre-not-gonna-stop/">says</a> that BLM protests are “not going to let up — and they should not,” there is no reason to be surprised. They’re quite clear about what we want — it’s perfectly reasonable to take them at their word.
But this is not a people’s movement: it is an elite revolution. Its claims to represent the oppressed are as absurd on their face as its claims to moderation. Eighty-one percent of black Americans <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/81-black-americans-dont-want-less-police-presence-despite-protestssome-want-more-cops-poll-1523093">oppose</a> BLM’s major policy proposal, which is to defund the police and leave America’s cities defenseless. The leaders of this anti-American revolt are people like Hannah-Jones, and Boston University Professor Ibram X. Kendi — recently funded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to the tune of 10 million dollars — and the PhD-holding “trained Marxist” BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors.
We are voting on whether to empower a snide coalition of spiteful oligarchs who detest us and want us destroyed. In that deepest sense, we are voting whether to unmake our country. For this nation was founded on bullheaded resistance to a super-powerful bureaucracy whose wealthy, disdainful upper crust thought the idea of republican government was despicable and absurd.
When the colonials were rebelling, one letter from London to America called the newly independent Americans “dumb-founded, infatuated, back-bestridden, nose-led-about, priest-ridden, demagogue-beshackeld and Congress-becrafted independents.” That is what the Democrats think of Americans now: dirty, stupid, low-class “independents.”
Well, I say: alright. That’s what we are. I say the real America is full of dirty, low-life independents, and we ought to be proud to stand up once again to say: “No matter what happens, no matter how you mock us, no matter what you threaten to do, I will be free.” That’s the real revolution. That’s the American revolution. Everything else is just fatuous clowns making a mess of things with power that isn’t theirs by any right of God or man.
I don’t know what’s going to happen this week. But I know which side I want to be on, which revolution I want to support. This is America, and no matter who mocks us, no matter what they threaten to do, no matter how powerful they seem — we will be free.
Spencer Klavan is host of the <a href="http://youngheretics.com/">Young Heretics</a> podcast and associate editor of the <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/">Claremont Review of Books</a> and <a href="https://americanmind.org/">The American Mind</a>. He can be reached on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/spencerklavan">@SpencerKlavan</a>.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Joe Biden

The Democrat Party’s Revolution

Democratic Party

The revolution is at our doorstep. In this election, the Democrat Party is proposing to unmake America. That’s not an exaggeration or a metaphor. It’s the

https://editorial.dailywire.com/news/the-democrat-partys-revolution/

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Spencer Klavan