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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Donald Trump could literally shoot someone on 5th Avenue and I wouldn't vote for Kamala: OR: the Republic is dead, God save the Republic

I am not the average American voter. I went to 'college prep' - one of the best - instead of high school. And while I was there, I took more than two full years of college courses. On the "AP" tests for credit I got a perfect score in every course but one, which in the immortal words of Jordan Belfort, really pissed me off. I went to a top 20 undergrad on a merit scholarship as a straight white guy with married parents. Yadda, yadda, this post is not about my bona fides because yours are all much better

Nothing could get me to vote for Kamala or any democrat ever again. Nothing could convince me the 2020 election did not have just way too many ballots cast for both candidates. Nothing. A voice could descend from the clouds insisting that if I love Christ I must vote democrat and I'd think it was a trick of the devil.

This is deeply concerning to me as someone who got over the "what if there's an invisible space teapot" question when I took a philosophy class at Stanford one summer as a teenager because I asked my parents nicely and they were thrilled to pay for it. I just looked up to check the program was called EPGY and apparently shut down in '18.

If I can't think of anything that would change my mind, that tautologically means to me that my position must be indefensible. But I gesticulate wildly toward the national debt, the open border, the limitless unfunded mandates and all the rest and enjoy this 1% chance that something might change with Trump vs my visceral certainty that nothing will change without him.

Please forgive me if any of this seems like prideful ignorance - it's meant to be quite the opposite. This post is hoping to invite open discussion on what I consider to be the tension here. When you have the guy who took a summer school philosophy class at Stanford for fun disregarding his best instincts for want of action, what's going on with the guys who are just getting increasingly mad with no framework through which to process their lived experience?