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Notes -
Politico says that Biden’s staffers are allegedly pushing for preemptive unilateral pardons for controversial figures in order to “inoculate” them in preparation for Trump’s DOJ & FBI. There are some real eyebrow-raisers in this article, so forgive me for this block-quote:
Emphasis mine. It’s not really surprising that Biden wouldn’t be brought into these discussions given how isolated he has been said to be in these last weeks, but the fact that his staffers see an opportunity to extend his personal clemency for his son to a general pardoning of anyone Trump dislikes (including those that might have committed legitimate crimes, like Fauci) seems to me to be another attempt to just have one final ‘fuck you’ against Trump as lashed out from Biden’s lame duck period. As mentioned in the article, one of the major weighing concerns in actually doing this would be the fact that the very instance of such pardons would seem to be indicative of actual foul play, and to add on it would seem to be reminiscent of the pardons Trump gave out in his last weeks as President even as in those cases the pardons weren’t sweepingly preemptive as these would be.
The very fact that Fauci of all people might get a pardon, despite the fact that entire governmental agencies as seen in the House & Senate reports believe that some fuckery might have been going on with gain-of-function research, seems to me to be a huge mistake to make; his pardon if done would have to specifically make clear the timeframe in which that research was going on to clear him for it (if any foul play occurred during that timeframe) if that’s what the Biden administration believes Trump will prosecute him for. This is just one example of a possible pardon and its disastrous implications, too, notwithstanding the other rumors of Biden pardoning SBF or whomever else (which would also be another thing that could be explosive given conflict-of-interest).
Crimes are real, and people in high places commit them. But prosecuting them is reactive, and prosecutorial discretion lends itself to petty political witch hunts. Trump supporters, of all people, should realize this.
What would be gutsy and genuinely salutatory would be for Biden to offer broad, blanket pardons of controversial figures on both sides. And it would be helpful for Democrats: they wouldn't spend the next four years chasing down crimes, real or imagined, that don't really matter (compared to other issues) and that don't help them win elections.
No, we shouldn't. What we should realize is that the system has been used against us, legitimately or illegitimately, and so now it needs to be used against them as well. If the ways that federal, state, social and corporate power have been used against Red Tribe were acceptable, then they remain acceptable when we use them against Blue Tribe. If that cannot and will not be allowed to happen, then that is valuable information that we would do well to confirm before considering where we go from here.
If in fact the situation is one where Blue Tribe is fundamentally unwilling to accept application of their own rules against their interests, then this fact needs to be made common knowledge.
Sulla was so bad that Marius must take every measure and seize every power to save the Republic, otherwise the Optimates will keep winning forever. This can't have dire consequences down the line.
A fair point. Now offer your plan for how the powers we've seen turned against Red Tribe can be reliably leashed in the future. Tell me how we get back to a trustworthy media ecosystem. Tell me how we end systemic discrimination in education and employment against non-Blues. Tell me how we get the FBI to stop breaking the law to persecute Republicans, and then breaking it the other way to protect democrats. Tell me how we lock up cancel culture for good. Tell me how we solve the thing where the general Blue population believes that they have an inalienable right to lawless violence against perceived Reds without consequence or retaliation.
The system whereby we share power with Blues cannot survive the abuses we have seen. It has to go. One of the best ways to convince Blues of that fact is to use it against them, forcing them to fight back against it themselves out of self-preservation. This does not even require breaking laws in the way that they repeatedly have done, and continue to endorse doing. Merely enforcing the letter of the law will, I think, be more than sufficient.
Octavian. The Red vs Blue distinction must become meaningless. Frankly Trump is already some way there with the amount of Democrats he has made switch sides.
But really, the only way to end the war is to win a victory that is incomprehensible to its own paradigm. Using the system to prosecute the other side in retaliation isn't enough. The system must be destroyed and remade to such a degree it is unrecognizable.
Abolish the CIA and turn its role over to the DoD. Turn the FBI into a statistics department. Obliterate the DoE with extreme prejudice. Collapse the entire education Ponzi by making student loans forgivable in bankruptcy. End the Fed.
Afuera. Afuera. Afuera.
And don't stop there, create two new institutions for every one you destroy.
But I wouldn't even attempt to prosecute the people staffing the old decrepit system. Just let them go. Ignore them. Make their protests a meaningless antiquated impotent gesticulation that has no effect or meaning.
It's a high bar, but I genuinely think that short of this, you are locked in an endless struggle that ends with the death of the Republic. There can't be any reds and blues anymore.
But that’s saying that to destroy the enemy, we have to destroy ourselves.
It’s a bit like the school I mentioned once in the UK where, to avoid religious conflicts between children, everyone is forbidden from praying and all meals are vegetarian. I grew up Church of England. I resent having to give up my religious practices because newcomers are causing trouble. I don’t want to stop the Culture War, I want to win it, at least in my local area.
I agree with this otoh.
Yes. The Populares must cease to exist. Because they only exist in their opposition to the Optimates, and vice versa.
You must transition from the 2 story state to the 1 story state.
You deserve a better, longer reply but to be brief, I don’t think this is true. There are real, concrete issues at stake: who is allowed into the country, who is allowed to control cultural bottlenecks like Twitter or academia, the relative privileges and duties of men and women, whether we need to destroy our economy with unilateral green policies, and so on.
Tony Blair actually tried what you suggest: he began mass migration to, in the words of his advisor, “rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”. But I consider myself a British nativist populist. If you attempt to render the Culture War irrelevant by flattening the differences between natives and newcomers, I lose by default. So I can’t back that. This is what I mean when I say I want victory not peace.
Another example would be transgenders vs TERFs. There are currently irreconcilable differences between the TERF wish for single sex spaces without men, and the trans wish to be invited into single sex spaces for women. You can render this conflict irrelevant by ceasing to consider women as meaningfully different from men, or considering trans ‘women’ as equivalent to women, but either is a loss for the TERF faction.
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But as Corvos raises, to go from a two-tier society to a one-tier society does not necessarily mean that Populares becomes Optimates. Rather, Optimates must become Populares. This is why people have railed against communism and similar ideologies in the past, because all they really accomplished was leveling everyone in certain societies down to a level that was objectively sub-par.
I think class is something that might be impossible to eradicate. Even the Soviet Union stratified into proletarians and intellectuals. Classes must always exist in any human civilization. The best you can do is to keep resentment from building up in the first place.
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