The whole point of Jacksonianism is “You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone. You play fair with me and I’ll play fair with you. But if you fuck with me, I’ll kill you.”
Steven Den Bestie
I have a friend my age, a devout Catholic who was voting Republican long before I ever considered it who I occasionally get together with for breakfast where we talk sports, religion and politics.
He is appalled at what the left has been doing and has been most applauded and shocked by the blatant lying that we’re seeing being presented without challenge by media etc.
Yet despite all of this there is one thing that he’s said blatantly which surprised me, if Trump is the GOP nominee he will not vote for him. He’ll leave the presidential column blank.
I’ve argued that this is foolish and objectively pro-Biden and his answer is this: He believes that if Trump is re-elected the term will be all about vengeance against the left rather than getting things does and he doesn’t want any part of that.
I think he’s likely right about Trump seeking vengeance bit but I think it’s a feature rather than a bug, not because I want political vengeance to be the rule but because I don’t and the best way to explain why such vengeance is the best way to stop the use of government as a tool against the party not is power is to make sure that both parties suffer the consequences of such a thing.
I plan on bringing this up next time we meet for breakfast…or I can just send him this link to Kurt Schlichter who explains that this vengeance is vital better than I do:
First he notes that this is exactly the situation he didn’t want:
I am not for any of this. I think this is a bad idea. I warned people against creating these New Rules where you use the law, or, instead, you twist the law like some sort of Tibetan yogi into unrecognizable forms and shapes in order to trap your political enemies. I am on record saying it’s a bad idea. I still think it’s a bad idea. But what I think doesn’t matter. The New Rules are now The Rules, and it’s time to use them like Eric Swalwell used Fang Fang.
Quickly and unpleasantly for the recipient.
He points to this site which makes the case against this idea and I will quote it at the end of this piece but let’s make the point he is making and that point is all about consequences:
What about all the people who conspired to prevent Missouri citizens or citizens of Oklahoma or Idaho or Alabama or Florida or any other state not dominated by freaking communists from speaking freely on social media? It’s been a while since I’ve been at law school, but I think that the First Amendment still makes free speech a right, and if you’re interfering with the right to speak freely, well, that’s a conspiracy to RICO a felony rights fraud or something. Blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t really matter. You just take the present indictments against the people challenging an election that they thought was rigged, and you add a few facts. You change some theories from trying to challenge a disputed election to trying to keep people from saying what they think about the election shenanigans, and you file that.
They will scream and yell, and I think it will be funny. And I think it will be beautiful too. I am a big fan of symmetry. What they do to us, we do to them twice as hard. Suddenly, a whole bunch of them will be looking to the fed courts to 86 these nonsense cases, and, luckily for them, I think the federal courts will eventually throw out these nonsense Trump cases and create a precedent for throwing out theirs. Or not. So, they may beat the rap, but they will take the ride, just like thousands of good conservatives had to when leftists manipulated the legal system to screw over their political enemies.
emphasis mine
That is the entire point. Until there are actual consequences to actions they will keep happening, and as an example of this I cite the minor miracle that happened in a city that suddenly decided to enforce laws concerning homeless camps that they had previously ignored:
Murals along Commercial Street in downtown San Diego have long been blocked by encampments. Yet at the start of the week, no tents could be seen on either side of the road. The same went for the people who’d been living in them.
“There were hundreds,” Bob McElroy, president and CEO of the Alpha Project shelter, said in an interview. “Where did they go?”
In short once there were consequences behavior changed. Now if consequences make a difference to a homeless drug addict with very little to lose, how much more would consequences matter to a rich pol or a civil servant with money and position and pension to be put at risk?
Schlichter speaks a very uncomfortable truth in closing:
We should never have gotten this far. But we did. And if we ever want to go back, we better roll up our sleeves and be prepared to get our hands dirty because you can never be submissive enough that they won’t try and destroy you.
I’ll be voting DeSantis in the primary as I suspect my friend will too. DeSantis has actually made the best case against the path of vengeance without trying and it’s illustrated by the piece quoted by Kurt noting the other side of the argument:
All across the country, Governors have been quietly using that exact same “broken” system to achieve exactly the kind of victories we all say we want. They have fired George Soros backed prosecutors. They have removed CRT and gender ideology from grade schools. They have banned transgender athletes from taking opportunities away from women. They have banned vaccine mandates and protected businesses from forced closures. They have delivered on wildly popular School Choice programs. They have forced “Sanctuary States” to endure the consequences of their virtue signalling on illegal immigration. And they have fought the worst excesses of woke corporations who would use DEI and ESG to punish those who refuse to vote the way they want them to.
The careers of these Governors and other elected officials across the country are a testament, a stark refutation of the Conservative black pill position on the coming elections in 2024.
Indeed, Ron DeSantis in particular has been so successful at using our allegedly “broken” system to re-Conservatize Florida that he’s accidentally created an entire genre of social media engagement… the “I’m a Progressive and here’s why I had to flee Florida” post.
That’s a pretty good point and those successes are one of the reason I’m voting DeSantis in the primary but that ignores one fact. If we push on the state level but abandon the federal level to the left’s actions then eventually they will have enough federal judges whose primary commitment is to ideology rather than law to upend all of these state level reforms. Already we have a members of the Supreme Court citing falsehoods in opinions, once there are five who are committed to ideology rather than law then the next civil war is simply a matter of time.
I much prefer the DeSantis route and will continue to argue for his nomination but if I’m unsuccessful and Trump is the nominee I’ll try my best to make the case to my friend to join me in voting for him. I’ll cite Kurt and I’m make my points but in the end people are going to have to decide if they want to give whoever is ruling us four more years to use federal agencies to destroy us.
May we choose wisely
