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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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I will say this: if someone goes and makes those claims, they shouldn't run again.

That's great as a normative statement, but as a descriptive one, Raskin hasn't gotten an all-expenses one-way ticket on Amtrak out of DC. There was no purge of political spaces that claimed Russians hacked the 2016 vote totals -- between a third and two thirds of Dem voters still believe it! -- and no one who complains about the 2000 election or 2004 Diebold conspiracies got booted.

Raskin

This is from 2017. Amazing how much more fluid and coherent Biden's speech is. He rattles of some legal-procedural stuff there with ease that, today, he wouldn't be able to get through at all.

Also, while I find all of those things grating, a meta principle that questioning an election means you don't get to run in future elections is a terrible set of incentives. Cheating to win becomes that much more appealing if no one in the political sphere is even allowed to say, "my opponents seem to have done a lot of cheating". A strong norm of never questioning election is only a good thing if elections are actually of unquestionable integrity.

If it was just questioning the election alone, it could be okay. But that is not the case. It's questioning the election, plus questioning it really hard, plus frequent misspeaks and off the cuff remarks, plus unverified claims about Haitians in Springfield, plus getting really easily baited about rally sizes, plus making inflammatory nothing statements about an hour of violence, plus running a social media site where he rants against anyone and everything and declares he hates Taylor Swift in all caps...

All of the above and more make him look really out of touch and pathetic. I will say once again that he disappointed me greatly in the last debate by failing to even mention any of the Biden policies that made immigration go completely out of control, instead just shouting about immigrants over and over again. He's unarticulate. And he's old. And his policies are either nothings that he won't be able to follow up on or they're bad. If it wasn't Kamala Harris he was running against, he would be unelectable. He deserves to lose. He is terrible. He does not represent my views except in the vaguest sense. And yet, I will still vote for him, because I despise progressive politics.