Magician's Choice

In rejection of managed reality

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

John F. Kennedy, February 26, 1962

Years ago I was traveling to New York Tuesdays and Thursdays to see a doctor a friend had recommended to me. She and I had similar health issues, and we kept in touch to let each other know about anything promising we came across in our search to get better.

The doctor’s practice was interesting because you’d sit there in this NYC apartment-turned-office and talk for hours with a half-dozen people twice a week for months, getting vitamin IVs and chelators, taking saunas or hooking up to oxygen, checking in with the doctor, etc. It was people from different walks of life - businessmen, teachers, moms, university students, etc - and I liked pretty much everyone I met. One day when the doctor was out around the holidays, we played UNO with the nurses (who were, for that day, very loud).

It was actually in the lead-up to 2016 at the time I was there - I only went for about 7 months. Sometimes politics would come up, though usually only to groan and shake our heads at the latest development before moving on to something else. But it was assumed everyone was against Trump - it was self-evidently the reasonable position among those who knew anything. I’m not sure I had at that point even encountered anyone in my day-to-day life who really supported him - the most was maybe a few of my uncles who watched Tucker and would sometimes share memes at Hillary’s expense.

So it was something of a shock when this woman who I’d spent a lot of time talking with and liked started to say that you know, she actually wasn’t sure who she was going to vote for and began to say what she liked about Trump.

My eyes widened and my jaw half dropped in a questioning surprise. I cut in - don’t you know what a loose cannon this guy is? I started rattling off the insane things I’d seen reported in the media about him. One of the nurses gave me a knowing smile but gently waved me off and I relented to give her space to explain her view, but the rest of the group moved on before she could. I’m embarrassed to think about it now, but I was proud in the moment to have been knowledgeable enough to push back against what everyone knew was insanity.

The night of the election, I stayed up into the early morning hoping for a Clinton win, and felt totally defeated as it became clear she’d lost. I am not even sure why - I had never really followed politics much at all. It was more this vague sense that the bottom of the world I was a part of had fallen out, and that it was changing in ways I did not understand.

It was. And I now believe it was deeply necessary.

I want to share my view of things as someone who started on one side and crossed over.

I think the first thing that started to change my view were the lies. Take Very Fine People - most of you have probably never seen this footage:

But even though the transcript and video has been out there since 2017, nearly every mainstream publication ran with this story, repeating it ad nauseam for years. Obama just repeated it to a group of voters in Milwaukee a few days ago:

Why would you place your faith in somebody .. who sat down for pleasantries with Holocaust deniers, who said that there were very fine people on both sides of a white supremacist rally?

And that’s not an exception. From Russiagate, to drinking bleach, bloodbath, suckers and losers, threatening Liz Cheney - every one of the controversies they’ve been pushing about Trump seems to completely fold under the tiniest bit of scrutiny. And as you watch all of this, it starts to become clear: the media that once loved him is now hellbent on destroying him, and they’ll use anything do it, no matter how dishonest. The question becomes why.

I think Eric Weinstein laid it out very well here -

There is something that I think Mike Benz has referred to as the rules based international order. It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, clandestine understandings, about how the most important structures keep the world free of war, and keep markets open. And there has been a system in place whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly that says that the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a face-off are both acceptable to that world order. …

And so Democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called Magician’s Choice: pick a card, any card, but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows. …

So under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, and then the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor poisition in govt in the history of the republic to the enter the oval office, Donald J Trump, broke through the primary structure. And so then there was a full court press, okay we only have one candidate who’s acceptable to the international order, Donald Trump will be under constant pressure that he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under the control of the Russians. …

This is an unsolved problem … And it is the job of the State Department, the Intelligence Community, and the Defense Department to bring this problem in front of the American people and say we have a problem, you don’t know everything that’s going on, and if you start voting in populist candidates, you’re going to end up knocking out load-bearing walls that you don’t understand.

I think this is the most generous explanation for everything that’s happened. In a world with nuclear bombs and where smallpox can be synthesized in a lab, giving the people the freedom to actually choose can perhaps seem to well-intentioned leaders like an impossible risk. And so instead we have democracy theatre - an illusion convincing enough to manufacture our consent and enclose us in a managed reality.

But even this best case is a repulsive inversion of everything this country represents and a total betrayal of its ideals. I would not make such a trade for a promise of safety, and I don’t think the rest of the country would either if they understood the choice.

Our leaders simply do not always know what is best for us - that is indisputable after Covid. And worse, our leaders do not always even have our interests in mind. We cannot have a system where they are not accountable to the public.

If it’s felt to you like things have gotten absolutely insane over the last decade, I think this is why. They cannot allow this debate to be had in the real terms, and so instead they need ways to shut it down - to tightly regulate the bounds of acceptable discourse, and punish those who stray outside those lines:

Apoorva is a reporter at the New York Times

And it seems to me that as this regime loses its grip on power, its death throes have become more desperate and more visible to those watching. The people are catching on. I believe it’s what is at the heart of all the social turmoil we’ve seen over the last decade.

MAGA was just early to all of it. They were people who had seen how the system treated other outsider candidates like Ron Paul. Or who experienced the ways you’d be branded a racist for expressing what were common positions five years prior. And they correctly intuited that Donald Trump, whatever his flaws, was the one - perhaps the only one - who could break through and stand up to it.

For that, I want to extend MAGA an apology, at least on my own behalf though I think the entire country owes it to you. I think you’re patriots who have suffered a great deal to stand up for common sense and American ideals against a socially-engineered, dehumanizing hellstorm. And I am not sure what path our country would be on if you hadn’t.

We are living through a time of great change. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it is the second American Revolution. The risks the establishment is worried about are real. And I understand the concerns people have about Donald Trump, though I think it is very hard to get an accurate picture of the man through such profound and systematic distortion.¹

But I think through him and those who have joined with his cause, we have a chance to put America back on its course towards something greater, something we last moved toward with JFK and which was taken from us by people obsessed with control in the name of safety. The America that Almost Was and Yet May Be.

I believe we’re up to the challenge.

1. I would refer you to what Amaryllis Fox, campaign manager for the similarly distorted RFK Jr., said of Trump on a recent volunteer call:

I realized pretty immediately that I had fallen into that same logic gulf that so many of us do, where you know something to be true about your guy, in this case, the fact that every news story that had run about Bobby in the last two years was not only wildly wrong and mischaracterized him, but was actually in many ways the polar opposite, the up-is-down, war-is-peace approach to media that we know today. And yet somehow I hadn’t realized that the same thing was true of President Trump. And that became apparent to me pretty immediately in those meetings.