Trump’s State of the Union Speech 2018

I wasn’t able to watch the 2018 State of the Union speech when it aired and instead I brought it up on Youtube the following morning while I was at work. Don’t worry; I was working while watching and listening to it and my boss, who sits next to me, had also missed it so he didn’t mind. Trump’s speech was longer than I expected—I had assumed he wouldn’t go longer than an hour due to his experience in showbiz and his love of Twitter—and it was also better than I thought it would be. Indeed, it was a strangely positive and encouraging speech overall. Back when Trump was inaugurated the phrase that I remembered most was “This American carnage stops right here and right now.” The speech seemed like a pretty dour assessment of America, even with Trump’s pledges to make things right. With the 2018 State of the Union Speech the quote that stands out to me came early on when Trump said “Let’s begin tonight by recognizing that the State of our Union is strong because our people are strong.” I’m not a fan of Trump but I can’t deny that his speech made me feel good about America and being an American. There was great storytelling in the speech and Trump fulfilled the president’s role of being America’s biggest cheerleader. Overall I’d give the speech something like 8.5 out of 10. True, the whole thing was political theater and I haven’t yet gotten around to looking at the fact-checking reports on Trump’s claims, but as a speech I’d say it was pretty good. I’m quite impressed that Trump didn’t go off-script into one of his tirades common on Twitter and my only major criticism of the speech in terms of its feel and presentation was that it was too long. The opening 30 or so minutes were strong, then things started faltering a little bit for the second 30 or so minutes, however Trump regaining momentum in the final 15 minutes. Having the North Korean refugee near the end was a powerful move and the image of the refugee holding up his crutches will likely be the most memorable sight of the entire night, at least for me. By the time this writing piece is published Trump will no doubt be back to his usual self, but for that hour and twenty minutes he actually came across as a great encourager and unifier.

They both should go

Author's Note: This post was written prior to the outcome of the Alabama election.

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There haven’t been as many politicians as entertainers who have been caught up in sexual misconduct scandals, but two big ones are currently prominent in the spotlight: (now former) Democratic Senator Al Franken and Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. Both have had credible sexual misconduct allegations made against them, and in the case of Al Franken we have photographic proof of one of his misdeeds. Recently the Democratic Party finally threw Al Franken under the bus in what appears to be a political maneuver to gain the moral high ground and make Republicans look bad for not doing the same to Roy Moore. Time will tell whether or not this strategy works.

Personally, I think both of these men should go. I realize that I’m probably in the minority for having this opinion, but I believe character is an integral part of a person’s qualifications for leadership. When a person has multiple credible sexual misconduct accusations made against them it speaks volumes to their character and in my view makes them unfit to hold high public office. The Democrats were right to pressure Al Franken into resigning, though their motives are very suspect given how long it took them to get around to doing it. Republicans ought to do the same to Roy Moore and demand he withdraw from the Senate race. These men cannot be our leaders. Had they confessed and repented of their deeds back when they first happened then we could be talking today about giving them a second chance, but right now they are unqualified.

As an addition at the end here, let me also say how disgusting it was in the early days of the controversies to read people trying to defend Al Franken and Roy Moore on purely political grounds. The line of reasoning seems to be that pushing them out will set a bad precedent and could potentially hurt either the Democratic or Republican Party in a really bad way in the future. Both Al Franken and Roy Moore come from states that are pretty safe bets for their respective parties, but what if a senator from a swing state gets forced out and the party loses a crucial vote for their legislation? Never mind the women who have been hurt or the blatant hypocrisy that will be committed—the party comes before principles.

Why can’t we have both conversations?

Whenever there’s an Islamic terrorist attack in America there’s a general unwillingness by much of the political Left to discuss the inherent role of Islamic ideology in the attacks. Likewise, whenever there’s a mass shooting by a non-Muslim there’s a general unwillingness by much of the political Right to discuss gun violence in America. My question is why can’t we have both conversations? These are both important topics and I don’t think we’re doing ourselves any favors by pretending that there’s nothing to say about them. Let’s have both the Right and the Left compromise, granting each other a serious conversation about one important issue in exchange for having a serious conversation about the other. In the process the truth will rise to the surface and we’ll all be better for it.

“But wait,” you say, “the other side is hateful and/or stupid. We can’t give a platform to something like that.” Ok, there might be persons in both camps who could be called either of those things, but if the other side truly is as bigoted and/or moronic as you believe, then you have nothing to fear from them talking. All you have to do is wait. Given enough time to talk, an idiot and/or a hater will expose themselves for what they truly are and will see their influence rapidly diminish. So let each side talk. If those railing about Islam are just idiotic Islamaphobic bigots then let them make their case and just watch as they hang themselves with their own words. In the same manner, if those persons screaming about gun violence are just stupid haters of liberty then allow them to take the podium and sit back while they embarrass themselves into irrelevance. After they’re done babbling their nonsense your side can walk up, easily refute their bad arguments, and sit back down knowing the other side came out of this exposed for fools they are while your side is vindicated. Again, you have nothing to fear from letting the other side talk, and you have nothing to lose but a little time. And hey, doing so might be your best chance to show them the truth and change their mind or maybe they’ll show you the truth and change your mind. Wouldn’t you want to know if you’re wrong?

Would I like to see Trump impeached?

If you’ve been reading this blog for about the past two years you know I’m no fan of Donald Trump, primarily due to his character, or to be more accurate, his lack of character. I didn’t like him when he was a contender for the Republican nomination, I didn’t like him as a candidate for the presidency, and I don’t like him now as the President of the United States. Even though I consider myself a little right of center on the political spectrum I wouldn’t mind seeing him impeached and replaced with Mike Pence. I realize that a lot of people have issues with Mike Pence, but I think everyone would agree that he’s a much more stable, predictable, and honorable man than Donald Trump. Actually, now that I think of it, I’d be willing to bet that a fair number of Republicans would be ok with this too, since Mike Pence, unlike Donald Trump, is an actual Republican.

Are the dominos starting to fall?

Much of the political Left and the mainstream media have been unrelenting over the past year in their quest to get Donald Trump removed from office. Despite their best efforts however, Trump is still safely the President of the United States. I don’t see Trump getting impeached anytime in the foreseeable future, but there have been a few smaller developments that maybe indicate that we’re seeing the first dominos starting to fall. Maybe.

Four of Trump’s former associates have now gone down. Two of them—former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former campaign aide Rick Gates—have been indicted. The other two—former national security advisor Michael Flynn and former foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos—have plead guilty to lying to the FBI about their communications with Russian officials. All of them had their ties to Trump severed prior to their indictments or plea bargains, so we can’t say any current member of the Trump Administration has been taken down, but perhaps whatever information they give to Robert Mueller’s investigation will lead to some significant charges in the future. Or maybe it won’t. It’s still too early to say. Special investigations like the one we have going on now take a long time to produce anything big, and it could be years before the investigation wraps up. There’s also a very real possibility that the investigation will take down members of Trump’s administration, but not Trump himself. To my knowledge there’s currently no evidence that Trump has done anything worthy of impeachment. Maybe that will change tomorrow or next month with a bombshell announcement that changes everything, but I wouldn’t count on it. In the meantime, those screaming for Trump to be removed from office better learn to be patient and not get their hopes up too much.

Trump and Twitter

If there’s anything we’ve learned from Trump’s time as president, it is that he desperately needs his Twitter access revoked, or at the bare minimum he needs a lawyer to review all his tweets prior to publishing and stop the most damaging ones from getting out. Trump has shown himself to be possibly the most thin-skinned president America has ever seen, and he shows no hesitation to lash out at anyone or anything drawing his ire.

The tweets coming out of Trump these days are nothing short of a national embarrassment. When it comes to Trump and tweeting, I think Republican Senator Ben Sasse put it best with his own tweet, which you can see below.

Donald Trump and Russia: Do we have the smoking gun yet?

Certain media outlets, such as CNN, seem to have dedicated themselves to making sure that not an hour goes by without them talking about allegations of nefarious connections between the Trump administration and Russia, and if I didn’t know any better I’d swear that we had conclusive evidence of Trump committing acts worthy of impeachment. The problem is, we apparently don’t. There are plenty of possible Russian connections and potential misdeeds by people surrounding Trump, but as far as I can tell we still don’t have anything on Trump himself. With no actual indictments, (at least, not at the moment) all this screaming about shady dealings tied to the Russians makes me wonder if the Russia conspiracy is being somewhat overhyped by the mainstream media. As someone who doesn’t like Trump, I’m biased against him and thus more inclined to believe stories like the ones being peddled to us by the mainstream media, but I can’t come down hard on Trump about this matter without solid proof. I need a smoking gun, and at the moment we just don’t have it. Should that smoking gun ever be found, however, I’ll be sure to publish a follow-up writing piece to this post.

The man Hillary couldn’t beat

Back in January I made the decision to take some time off from writing about politics in order to see how the Trump presidency turned out. It’s been over six months since then, and I’m thinking now might be the right time to allow myself to write a few political posts. Currently I have no writing pieces in mind that are longer than one or two paragraphs, so don’t expect any longer political posts any time soon. Today, I commence my return to political writings with a simple reflection.

It seems that the Trump administration can’t go a single week without a new controversy arising. Trump appears to be bumbling his way through the presidency and no one knows which target this loose cannon is going to shoot next. As I watch events unfold at the Trump White House, a single thought keeps coming back to my mind: this is the man that Hillary Clinton couldn’t beat.

A Special Kind of Power

While driving to work I was listening to a radio show and the hosts mentioned a woman who had stated that she had to increase the dosage of her anxiety medication due to Donald Trump’s presidency. Upon first hearing her tale I dismissed it as another example of an unstable individual who couldn’t come to grips with reality. Later that day, however, I realized that there actually was something very interesting going on in that woman’s life. Donald Trump, not by actually doing anything to this woman but merely by the fact of his existence, is inflicting a debilitating level of anxiety on her and able to completely wreck her life without lifting a finger. That’s a very special kind of power—the type usually only wielded by the most notorious of human dictators (a status Donald Trump does not hold and never will) or by the most nefarious beings found in various forms of fiction. It is a power that drives people insane with fear, but at the same time is a power that cannot be directly controlled by its user. The only way this power works is if the target allows the fear to control them. If instead the target refuses to be captivated by that power, then it will have no hold over them or their mental or emotional state. In the case of the woman being discussed on the radio, she is ceding to Donald Trump the ability to incapacitate her even though it’s highly unlike Donald Trump knows of her existence or particularly cares about her anxiety issues. Unless that woman learns to stop giving Donald Trump that power she’s going to have a very rough time for the remainder of his presidency.

Why are South Korea’s elections so much cooler than ours?

No, seriously, I want to know why we can’t match them, at least in terms of political coverage. For a prime example of how far South Korea has left us behind, check out the video below in which the electoral results from their recent presidential election are done in the style of Game of Thrones.

Avoiding the Nuclear Option

In a move that surprised absolutely no one, Senate Republicans took the Nuclear Option earlier this month to get Neil Gorsuch confirmed to the US Supreme Court. A lot of ink has been spilled since then about the ramifications of this move, but today I wanted to briefly talk about a possible compromise deal that I heard about that could have avoided the Senate going nuclear. From what I understand, small bipartisan group of senators was trying to hash out a deal whereby Gorsuch would get confirmed, but at the same time one of the older liberal justices on the Supreme Court would resign, and Merrick Garland would take his/her place. You might Remember Merrick Garland as the Supreme Court nominee that Obama put forward after Antonin Scalia died but never got any hearings due to Republicans gambling that a Republican would win the next presidency and substitute a more conservative nominee in Merrick Garland’s place. This compromise deal to get both Gorsuch and Garland on the Supreme Court obviously didn’t pan out, but had it come to fruition it could have been a very special moment in our current political climate, with Republicans and Democrats coming together for a deal that would give both parties some of what they wanted and avoiding the Nuclear Option. Seeing Republican and Democratic leaders shaking hands on such a deal could have been a publicity coup and finally given Americans a reason to believe that their leaders were actually capable of working with each other. Instead, however, we got confirmation that things really are as bad as we thought.

Sargon of Akkad

Last month I mentioned that I had watched a number of videos by a Youtube personality who goes by the name Sargon of Akkad. One of his videos came up while I was searching for something on Youtube, and over the course of several weeks I found myself going back to his channel from time to time to watch more of his content. Around that time I decided that it would be a worthwhile thing to do a writing piece based on what I’ve seen of Sargon and his work, which brings us to today’s post. Much like my writing piece on Milo Yiannopoulos, this is not meant to be a comprehensive detailing of everything Sargon has said and done, but rather a short description of what I’ve seen so far. There could very well be important things about Sargon that I’m not aware of, so maybe you should imagine some fine print at the bottom of this post that says something like “All statements subject to change based on new information.”

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One of Sargon's current avatars

Sargon of Akkad is a British man whose real name is Carl Benjamin. Taking the name of an ancient Mesopotamian king as his online persona, Sargon began his Youtube career began back in 2013 and since then his main channel has been steadily growing, to the point that at the time of the publishing of this post he has nearly 600,000 subscribers (Sargon also has another channel dedicated to livestreams he hosts, and at one time he had a third channel related to gaming). His subscriber base may not be much compared to the biggest channels on Youtube which have millions of subscribers, but it’s still a large number and Sargon can’t be dismissed as some nobody with an insignificant online presence. I think the first time I heard about Sargon was back when the Gamergate controversy first started to explode, but it wasn’t until earlier this year that I actually took a look at the content he produces. In that sense, my experience with Sargon is similar to the one I had with Milo Yiannopoulos, in that they were both names I had seen before but for a long time I never bothered to figure out who they really were. Having watched or listened to a fair number of Sargon’s videos from his main channel, I think I now know enough to make some general comments on him while being reasonably confident that I’m not misrepresenting him.

Carl Benjamin

What I think makes Sargon the most interesting is that, like Milo, he’s someone who breaks the mold of what you would normally expect from someone of his political persuasion. Sargon identifies himself is a classical liberal and is no fan of conservative ideology, and in one of his videos he took the Political Compass test and fell in the lower left quadrant of the political map, so I think it would be fair to call him some sort of centrist liberal with libertarian leanings. That said, even though Sargon falls on the left side of the political spectrum, he has held some political positions that most people would not consider as being liberal, such as being in favor of Brexit and Donald Trump (though to be fair, his support of Trump in the US presidential election seemed to be more about his disgust with Hillary Clinton than his believing in Trump’s policies). These abnormalities might be part of the reason he sometimes gets lumped in with the alt-right, which I’m sure causes him no small amount of face-palming. Much of Sargon’s content is dedicated to criticizing what he thinks has gone wrong with the left, primarily what he sees as the insanity of the progressive wing of liberalism. This means what you have in Sargon is man whose videos are frequently critiquing his own side. The rationale behind this strategy seems to be that Sargon is trying to improve the left by exposing the cancers he believes are festering within it, and by drawing attention to these problems hopefully the left will be motivated to address them.

Each week Sargon normally produces at least two videos—one being part of his recurring This Week In Stupid series, and the others being videos focused on a particular topic or current event. As you can probably guess from the title, the This Week In Stupid videos are Sargon talking about and mocking things he saw in the previous week’s headlines that he thought were stupid. The topical videos oftentimes are also reflections on current events, though with a deeper dive than what he usually does in This Week In Stupid. Being British, many of the topical videos are related to things going on in Europe, but he also does plenty of videos on things that people in America and other parts of the West might be interested in, such as censorship, identity politics, criticism of the mainstream media, social justice, modern feminism, and immigration. It’s in these topical videos that I think Sargon is at his best, as these are the ones that he seems to put the most time and effort into. Even if you disagree with Sargon, and a quick Youtube search will show you that lots of people do, you can’t deny that he takes his work seriously and I appreciate that Sargon tries to be thorough and includes links to the sources of his research. Seeing as how his primary sources of income appear to be Youtube revenue and a Patreon fund, I’m guessing he has a good incentive to produce quality content.

For my part I have found Sargon to be a very interesting voice to listen to over the preceding months. Like Milo Yiannopolous, Sargon is a mixed bag of things I like and dislike, but I do commend him for his commitment to his craft and I think it’s well within the realm of reasonable possibility for his channel to one day pass the one million subscribers mark. If reading this post has gotten you interested in checking out Sargon for yourself, below are links to several recent videos of his that I think give a decent idea of the sort of videos he produces and would help you decide if he’s worth your time or not. I’ll also link to an interview he did with Dave Rubin a year ago in which he tells some of his personal story and goes into a few topics not covered in this post, such as his involvement with Gamergate. Be aware that Sargon is not afraid to use colorful language, so if that’s not your thing then his videos may not be for you.

The Natural Enemies of Youtube (mainstream media criticism)

Why Don’t I Criticize the Right (self explanatory)

This Week In Stupid (for April 9, 2017)

Year Zero: The First #Vault7 Leak (analyzing the Vault 7 documents released by Wikileaks)

Dave Rubin interview

She’s back

In other political news, Hillary Clinton has decided that it is time for her to start making public speeches again. While Hillary certainly is free to address a crowd if she so chooses, I’m somewhat surprised that anyone on the political left would want to be seen with her or be interested in what she has to say. To put it bluntly, Hillary has now suffered two major presidential election defeats—the first one being in the 2008 Democratic primaries where she lost to Barak Obama, and the second, and much more humiliating one, being the loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. As I said last year in the aftermath of the election, the Hillary Clinton brand is so toxic that she couldn’t beat a clueless populist demagogue who alienated potential voters and regularly embarrassed his own supporters. I don’t think Hillary is doing her party any favors by returning to the public spotlight, but then again the Clintons are still a powerful force within the Democratic Party, so I suppose there’s no way they could get rid of her even if they wanted to. Perhaps the path forward for the Democrats is to just allow Hillary to talk, but quietly distance themselves from her.

Mike Pence and Dining

Tempting as it may be, I’m still not ready to write anything about Donald Trump’s presidency, but I do feel compelled to say something about the all the brouhaha that erupted a week or so ago regarding Vice President Mike Pence’s dining habits. As we all now know, Mike Pence has a policy of not dining alone with women who are not his wife or a member of his family—a policy that’s he’s submitted himself to since about 2002. The Internet and the press promptly erupted with both ridicule and outrage upon learning this, showering him with a level of scorn usually reserved for men who beat their wives. While I can understand why people would disagree with any number of Mike Pence’s political positions, it’s been disgusting to watch the mudslinging that he has endured over this personal rule. Here is a man seeking to esteem his wife, protect his marriage, and maintain his personal integrity by not spending intimate time alone with women who are not his wife—an unusually honorable policy for a Washington DC politician. I do not for a minute believe that Mike Pence hates women or thinks of them as nothing more than temptresses that can’t be trusted. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Mary Vought, one of his former staff members who published an op-ed in the Washington Post in his defense, which can be read here. Seeing as how she worked directly under Mike Pence, I’m inclined to believe her when she says his personal dining habits never held back her professional career, and as a side note I would go so far as to say that if your career advancement is dependent on having private dinners with an opposite sex boss, then something is very wrong with your organization. I have known a number of men in my life with similar personal policies to the one Mike Pence lives by, and though I realize that the experience of one individual cannot be taken as authoritative for every circumstance, I will say that those men are likely the most upright and honorable men I’ve ever met. If you want to tear down Mike Pence go after his actual political positions. Attacking him for his commitment to his wife just makes you look completely out of touch with reality.

The Political Compass Test

If you’ve been on social media for any length of time you’ve no doubt at some point seen one of your friends post the results of a test that some website has generated. The vast majority of these tests are nothing more than humorous time wasters and I normally ignore them, but several times a year I’ll come across a test that catches and holds my attention. Such was the case recently when I took the Political Compass Test. Unlike all those tests to determine which character of a particular fictional universe I was, this one actually seemed worthwhile, given that I couldn’t remember when, if ever, I had taken a test to gauge where I stood on a political map. The test is formatted to six pages of political statements, and for each statement you are asked to indicate how much you agree or disagree with it. After completing the test you are taken to a page that explains the methodology of the political map the test employs, as well as how to interpret your standing on that map, though I suspect most people just scroll past all of that to get to their results at the bottom of the page. Below is a screenshot of what I got.

According to the test I’m slightly right of center with a touch of libertarianism, which seems about right. That said, I acknowledge there are always limitations and flaws to these sorts of tests, so I take the results with a grain a salt. For my part, I did take issue with two or three of the political statements that I had to rate my agreement/disagreement with, since in my mind they were highly situational. For example, one of the early statements you have to rate is “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” In my mind that really depends on who the enemy of my enemy is and what I know about him. If this enemy of my enemy is of noble character and I have good reason to believe he won’t turn on me once my enemy is defeated, then yes, he is my friend. However if this were not the case then maybe I wouldn’t consider allying myself with him. It’s all about the details. I also do wonder how certain responses are interpreted, such as with the statement “The most important thing for children to learn is to accept discipline.” While I do think it’s very important for children to learn to accept discipline, I don’t think it’s necessarily the most important thing for them to learn, so I’d be inclined to disagree with it, but I wouldn’t want the test to interpret my selection of disagreement with the statement as my being against the disciplining of children.

Despite a few personal qualms about the Political Compass test, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from taking it, as any flaws with it are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things and I think it does a decent job of gauging where people fall on the political map. If you’re curious to take the test yourself and see how where you fall, you can follow the link below.

https://www.politicalcompass.org/test

Vault 7 (and Sargon)

As if we didn’t need another reason to distrust the American government in general and the CIA in particular, last week we had the release of another large batch of leaked CIA documents via Wikileaks. Referred to as “Year Zero,” this initial batch of over 8,000 documents comes to us from “Vault 7,” whose origin is purported to have come from an isolated high security network within the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. These documents shed more light on the CIA’s power to spy on both America and world, and once again raise serious questions about what our government and the CIA are doing with that power. Of course, 8,000 documents is a lot of material, but thankfully we live in the Internet Age and many people have been posting helpful summaries online. Personally, I would suggest a video made by a Youtuber called Sargon of Akkad, which can be found here. It’s just under 20 minutes long and provides a good synopsis of what’s going on without overloading the viewer with too much data, though if you want to know more he has a link in the description of the video to the sources he is drawing from.

Unrelated to Vault 7, at some point in the future I’d like to do a writing piece on Sargon, as he’s another online personality whose videos I’ve found myself watching lately. He’s not as controversial (or famous) as Milo, and comes from the other side of the political spectrum, but like Milo he’s an interesting figure who bucks some of the trends we would normally associate with people from his political persuasion. Sometime in the next month or two I’ll hopefully have a writing piece on him ready for publishing.

Higher Education

I don’t have any children, but if I did I would be very concerned for their future college educations. Not so much because of concerns that used to be at the front of peoples’ minds when sending their kids off to college—such as substance abuse and bad behavior—but because of the climate that has been spreading across college campuses like a cancer over the preceding years. This climate has been marked by repressive intolerance of any position that doesn’t align with established orthodoxy, and recently reared its ugly head again at Middleburg College in Vermont, when students at the college shut down a planned speech from a conservative social scientist named Charles Murray. After disrupting his speech with constant shouting and foot stomping, Mr. Murray’s was moved to a private room to have his speech delivered remotely, but that too was thwarted when the protestors repeatedly pulled the building’s fire alarm. When it became clear that Mr. Murray was in real danger, he was evacuated from the campus, but in the process was mobbed by a group of students who seriously injured one of Middleburg’s professors who was trying to escort Mr. Murray from the premises. The crazy thing is, from what I’ve read about the incident online, almost none of the student protestors actually knew who Charles Murray was or had read anything he had written. Maybe Charles Murray is a bad person, but they didn’t even try to understand him before rejecting him. All they knew is that he held views contrary to their own, so he had to be destroyed. I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident, but if you’ve been following the news on college campuses lately you know that this sort of anti-intellectualism is becoming increasingly common. Any dissent against the ideologies prominent on campuses is met not with civil discourse and a free exchange of ideas, but instead with screams, protests, and sometimes violence. I would never want to send a child of mind to a place that treated opposing views with such abject hostility, and if my child held conservative political views I would probably be scared for their very safety, seeing as how conservatives seem to be the primary target for the thought police now roaming campuses nationwide. Perhaps it’s best then that I don’t have children, so that I don’t have to live to see them subjected to this sort of oppression.

Believing without question

In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, social media feeds and traditional news outlets were awash with reports of hate crimes being committed across the country. A mass outbreak of racism, xenophobia, Nazism, and every other conceivable malignant social and political force was overrunning America, and obviously Trump and his supporters were to blame, or so we were told. As it turned out, however, nearly every one of these hate crimes that were reported around the time of Election Day were found to be hoaxes. The Muslim girl who claimed Trump supporters assaulted her, ripped off her hijab, and shouted insults at her? She made it up in order to have an excuse for breaking curfew. The Bowling Green student who claimed rocks were thrown at her, and the other Bowling Green student who claimed he was mugged by men shouting slurs? Also fake. The Chicago student who received hateful notes and emails from Trump supporters? He made the notes himself. The Muslim college student who said she was harassed on a subway while onlookers did nothing? All lies. The guy in Boston who said he was confronted by two white men when he got off a bus and was told that the US was now “Trump country” and then they threatened to lynch him? Total fabrication. The black church in Mississippi that was vandalized with “Vote Trump” graffiti and later set on fire? It was done by one of the church’s own members. The Texas family whose garage was spray-painted with a racial slur and whose truck and motorcycle were set on fire? The father of the family confessed to doing it himself. The various hate speech writings found on walls, stairs, and other public places? I haven’t seen one yet that wasn’t proven to be a hoax, or at the least remains uncertain.

Why did these people create these falsehoods, and perhaps more importantly, why were so many of us so willing to accept their stories without question? To answer the first question we’d have to get the individual answers from each of the perpetrators, whereas the second question we can ask ourselves. The state of social and political discourse has gotten so bad in our society that we are willing to immediately believe the worst about those whom we disagree with, even when the available data, as well as common sense, would tell us otherwise. Those of us who were anti-Trump should have been very skeptical of all the claims of hate crimes that were coming out in droves around Election Day, but instead, to our embarrassment, we bought in without a second thought. Even I, a person who is friends with Trump voters and knows better than to believe the lies that are perpetuated about them, was inclined to think that the Election Day hate crimes were real. Our minds are shutting down, our hearts are hardening, and I honestly don’t think the trend is going to stop any time soon.

Milo Yiannopoulos

UPDATE: This post was originally written and published just prior to the pedophilia controversy that Milo found himself in. I’ve made a few small adjustments and added a new section (in the bottom half, titled “Is Milo a pedophile?”) to this writing piece to reflect these recent events. Hopefully Milo doesn’t get himself into any more trouble, since I don’t want to have to update this post a second time.
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In my writing piece on Inauguration Day, I said I wasn’t going to do any more political posts for a few months, but in the time since then I’ve decided I’m going to make an amendment to that pledge. I’m not going to do any writing pieces related the Trump presidency until later this year, but there are other political topics that I think are worthy of being written about, so I’m giving myself leeway to write on them. That brings us to today’s post.

Like many people in this country, I watched in dismay as the University of California at Berkley campus devolved into rioting that centered around a planned speech by conservative writer and speaker Milo Yiannopoulos. The former home of the Free Speech movement of the 1960s was now home to a movement intent on censoring views that it did not agree with, and in one regard they succeeded, seeing as how Milo’s talk was cancelled due to security concerns. The protestors did not want Milo speaking at their campus and sought to prevent anyone from hearing him, but as I read and watched news reports it occurred to me that their efforts were likely going to backfire. The reason for this being that the rioting had gotten me curious to know more about Milo, and I probably wasn’t alone in my curiosity. I had heard of Milo about a year or two ago and noticed his name had appeared a few times in my online readings, but I honestly knew next to nothing about him. Most of the time his name had come up in the past it was accompanied by charges of racism, sexism, nazism, bigotry, fascism, and whatever other derogatory description you can come up with for a hated person these days. Apparently Milo was one of the worst human beings alive today, but having never looked into this I didn’t know if the accusations were true. So, I decided to do something really crazy—I decided to listen to some of Milo’s previous lectures and decide for myself if he really was the scum of the earth. Milo had been on tour at college campuses across the United States for the past several months and the audio from them was available on iTunes, so I downloaded six or seven lectures to listen to while at work, and at home I watched another two lectures on Youtube. After several days of watching, listening, and taking notes, I’ve come to few conclusions about Milo. Since I was trying to find answers to particular questions in my mind about him, I’ve laid out the first part of my thoughts in the form of questions and answers. After that are miscellaneous things I found interesting. Granted, Milo could be a completely different person in private, and I didn’t listen to all his lectures, so there are topics that I can’t cover here.

Inauguration Day

Today is Inauguration Day. Originally I had intended to publish a longer political writing piece today, but as I was exploring the various avenues I kept hitting dead ends. What I came to realize is that this time I don’t have any sort of long-form writing on a single subject to share on this day. Instead, I just have a collection of thoughts that have been on my mind.