Pun Salad

Anyway, I admire politicians who are willing to lead. Everyone likes to “speak truth to power.” How often have you heard people brag about that? Almost no one likes to speak truth to the people — where, in a democracy, power really lies.

The scorecard empowers Granite Staters to hold their legislators accountable for their votes concerning economic freedom and creating a society of mutual benefit, where people succeed based off helping others.

NHJOURNAL: So why did you join the Lincoln Project?

HORN: There are multiple reasons. Of course, I believe very strongly it’s the right thing to do. I’m doing this for the same reason I ran for Congress and served as the chairman of the New Hampshire Party. I’ve spent years as a spokesperson for Republican values, like small government and defending the Constitution.  And Donald Trump doesn’t have a clue about what Republican values are.

I believe that what we’re doing here is being a voice for Lincoln, for Reagan, for all of those sound, conservative Republicans who’ve come before us.

And I firmly believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our Republic. I believe that Mitch McConnell is leading the Senate Republicans into a constitutional crisis when he says that he’s going to manage the impeachment trial in complete coordination with the White House. They are supposed to be a separate and equal branch of government, and instead they are completely under Trump’s thumb.

I do not think that you would need to be an admirer of President Trump or a partisan Republican (I am neither) to understand, as all mentally normal people do, that the impeachment itself is the trophy example of a weaponized investigation being used for political purposes. You can even believe that the president should be impeached and removed from office and understand that. Because that is the obvious truth. There isn’t anybody who does not know that, even though there are many people who cannot, for professional or psychological reasons, admit it.

In the now-forgotten days of October 2016, the great rhetorical demand among Democrats was that Donald Trump and Republicans promise that they would “accept the results of the election.” This was always a little mystifying, inasmuch as it raised the question of what they might do instead — raise an army? But that rhetoric was premised on the assumption that the Republican candidate was going to lose in 2016. Since then, it has been Democrats who have steadfastly refused to accept the results of the 2016 election. The hyperbole about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election (settle down, you mouth-breathers — it is possible for something to be both real and exaggerated at the same time) is part of that. The impeachment is part of that. The years-long campaign to establish a pretext for impeachment was part of that. (Emoluments, indeed.) Michelle Goldberg’s bizarre politics-as-group-therapy (“Democracy Grief Is Real,” etc.) is part of that. So is “Resistance!” and the risible insistence that Donald Trump is the worst thing since Adolf Hitler.

What I'm proposing is not a firewalled splinternet; it has more to do with where I see us evolving as a society—into enclaves. In one form or another, this sort of purposeful bundling already informs our day-to-day life. Netflix groups its users into “taste clusters.” The global population has become more siloed with the mass introduction of premium subscription and paywalled services—those who have and those who don't. On Reddit, users bond and bicker in shelled communities. We're already walling off.

So why not be more intentional about it? What many black, brown, and even queer users are losing in this digital jambalaya is a sense of ownership—all of us remain beholden to the reach and grip of Big Tech. You could assume the worst, of course—that in an internet of micro-utopias there would be, say, a NaziGram. But communities of hate already and will always exist, in the name of “free speech.”