There is no Debating with Evil

Putting last night in the proper context

I care very deeply about who wins the 2024 US election.

I grew up believing in the power of debate and the necessity of discussion. I was one of those nerds in school who actually enjoyed the bits where a teacher would ask you questions and engage different pupils at the same time with an issue. It’s one of the things I enjoyed most about school and university.

I don’t talk to the other side anymore.

There’s no longer really anything left to debate.

They believe in silencing and breaking me, and that it’s ok to imprison me for thinking or voting differently to them. Wherever they have power, they are using it to make the things I believe and care about illegal, and they have abandoned any idea, long ago, that people generally or people like me specifically have any inalienable rights.

Those aren’t the grounds on which debate is possible.

How can you debate some twat on social media who goes into the discussion beginning from the ‘understanding’ that free speech is something Nazis cherish, and that hating white people because of the colour of their skin is being against racism?

You can’t.

Some people say the antidote for bad ideas is better ideas. That the power of discussion is that it exposes idiocy, it reveals prejudice and bias, it puts everything in the light and exposed to scrutiny and that way we can make a proper judgement.

The advocacy of free speech has for most of the time that free speech has existed as a defined political concept always relied on this formulation. It goes back to John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1859) but as ever with such ideas Mill merely crystallised (beautifully) a concept which already existed. Here’s probably Mill’s best summation of the free speech position:

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

For anyone wondering whether progressive is progress, compare the clarity of that thought and language with modern formulations. It’s a stylistic as well as conceptual masterpiece, and Mill was not all that unusually eloquent for his age. You can find passages like this in almost every 19th century thinker, possessed of a sharpness and a beauty besides which even the best 21st century writers seem like fumbling retards spastically gripping a pen they do not control.

That’s even before we get onto the anti-language, thought-denuded, impenetrably obtuse speech peculiar to woke academia or to State and corporate policy documents.

There is though one thing to criticise in this classic defence of free speech, much as we might criticise the entire edifice of the thoughtful Enlightenment clarity that it represents and that built the classical liberal western political settlement.

That is its essential naivety.

It’s a formulation that came into being before respectable Belgians did horrifically vile things in the misnamed Congo Free State under Leopold II. It was a kind of thinking that emerged before the Holodomor and the Holocaust, before the Soviet gulag or the Nazi gas chamber, before the KGB, the Gestapo, the Maoist struggle session, the genocidal concentration camp, the Cultural Revolutions or the forced famines of Russia, China, Cambodia and all the rest.

Of course there was barbarism and the dark places of the Earth to learn uncomfortable truths from, but that’s rather remote when it’s filtered through the reading of Gibbon’s lovely prose in a sun dappled study. There was slavery, of course, but always remote if you happened to live within the little plot of land bounded by English coasts.

It’s hard to understand evil when it doesn’t live near you.

It’s hard to fear the words that drive men mad, when you are so sane and your life consists of so many reasonable things, a routine of delicate tea cups and polite exchanges, in a place that is safe, with people as moderate as yourself, in a land perfecting the good points of civilisation to a point it has never reached since.

The world that worries about dressing for dinner is not the world that worries about the kind of mind virus that builds death camps. Both worlds might have their pampered elites, but one knows what brutality is and the other has forgotten it.

So this idea that bad ideas should be aired and will then be exposed, or that we should die to defend the rights of even an enemy, or that we are ourselves improved by hearing another man’s error, depends upon a kind of social understanding that only exists when civilisation is at its peak. It no more applies to a declining civilisation than it applies to a sweltering jungle where cannibalism is rife.

The classical liberal view could only emerge as the flower of an old civilisation, and flowers may be beautiful but they are easily crushed.

It would be lovely, of course, if it still applied. If all we needed to do was drag things into the light, show them as they are, and all would be able to tell the difference between the truth and the lie, the authentic and the fake, the good and the wicked.

But that depends on an audience who still know what any of these words mean. And our audience doesn’t even know what the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’ mean anymore. The light of exposure does little to illuminate the vision of a fool.

It’s not as if the true nature of things has been competently concealed from us.

Look at our society today and you see obvious idiocies, injustices and absurdities enshrined on all sides, with worship of these things becoming ever more mandatory. We arrest people for silent Christian prayer. We say that the genital mutilation of children for profit is a good thing, along with the mass murder of babies for convenience.

We laugh at the candidate who mentions welcomed savages feasting on pets, rather than the candidate who welcomed the savages in the first place.

Today, if you are supporting Kamala Harris and the Democrats, you talk an awful lot about hope and change and joy, but you have already endorsed murders and riots and shitting on the streets. You speak of improving a nation you have ruined. You invoke freedom having imprisoned your political opponents, and you talk of Democracy having stolen an election, then deposed the puppet you installed, then offered up a candidate nobody voted for.

All of this, along with every media lie about the other candidate, along with the obvious sickening bias and rigging that now always goes on, is already exposed to the light.

How is it possible, now, not to know these things? The great media conformity did not work. Any adult should be able to see through it all, to let them speak knowing that all you will hear are lies. Any adult should know that the economy has got worse, the border is a joke, that millions of dangerous people have been invited in, that corruption is rife, that judges are unjust, that stores are looted, that streets are on fire, that the people in charge sit laughing above the chaos they shaped.

Watch a five minute clip of a camera driving through LA or Chicago and you know what has been delivered. See a single ghetto or a street lined with tents and homeless crackheads and you know what the likes of Kamala deliver.

But do we have an audience that is sane anymore? Or are there really more pussy hat wearing, soy drinking, that man is a woman believing, Refugees Welcome, mainstream media kool-aid drinkers than normal people now?

John Stuart Mill would not have seen much benefit from the exposure of their ideas, that’s for sure. Does the light help the blind? Does debate persuade the ideologically crazed? Is it any better talking to these people than it would be talking to a jihadi or patting the back of a rabid dog?

In our own interactions surely we have all encountered, again and again, both strangers and once dear friends who are now beyond reach? Who are now basically already celebrating that WE don’t have the freedom to speak and that THEY took it away from us.

So then we think debate will change that attitude?

“Hey, stop kicking me in the balls, I’m interested in your opinion!”

When you think of what’s already been done to us, and what’s already been done to Trump, the fact that he is even prepared to talk to them still becomes something almost as remarkable as their evil. It becomes a kind of imperishable belief in his nation and himself that he still expects to get something out of it.

As always with Trump, it’s not really about what he says, it’s always about what he does, and the difference between that and what the likes of Kamala do. He gained Robert F. Kennedy Jnr’s respect via this astonishing commitment to keep talking, not just to Bobby, but to everyone, including the people quite literally trying to bury him.

Would you debate the people who encourage others to murder you? I don’t think I’d bother.

The strategic part of me is so often exasperated with Trump. Why speak to these people at all? Why accept the debate? Why accept biased moderators who are going to fact check you when you say something true, and not fact check your opponent as she repeats outrageous lies? Why give them this level of respect and credit and opportunity to rig the game yet another way against you.

But the moral part of me is, as always, in awe. The man was clipped by a bullet. He’s had more lies dumped on him and more trash talk and more contempt and more hate than any innocent man in history. That’s not hyperbole. It’s been at least 8 years of the entire resources of the entire global media and the entire verbal and written output of the millions of people they have brainwashed and conditioned to hate this man.

He still walks towards it. For the benefit of his nation.

It’s tactically stupid. He’s not a good debater. He’s a terrible speaker. Let’s be honest. Trump is the worst person in the world to make the case for Trump. If he’d hired himself, he’d have to fire himself. He’s vague, he wanders, he repeats himself endlessly. He’s painful to watch and listen to sometimes, and I regard him as the greatest man in US or world politics since Churchill. Whatever is the opposite of a Churchill or a Cicero in terms of speaking performance, that is Trump.

Even without biased moderators, he could make a debate with the senile and stupid Biden or the cackling halfwit Kamala look too close at times. It’s even a long time since we’ve heard any of the really snappy comments that would sometimes flare up in the middle of his commentary and jolt you awake. Because those were invariably excellent sarcasms and his advisors have told him they look too mean.

But none of this is what really matters. What really matters is the difference between freedom and this loathsome bubbling cauldron of Marxism and Narcissism, Corrupt Greed and Ideological Fanaticism, Elite Interests and Street Level Thuggery, Corporate Fascism and Black Supremacism, Degenerate Child Abusers and Islam Loving Hamas Apologists that is the Democrat Party.

There’s really nothing vile that doesn’t go into their recipe for success. Name any kind of deluded or authoritarian evil and it’s now got a place in the stew of nonsense Globalists force feed us.

What really matters is that Trump won’t swallow it and doesn’t want his country to swallow it. What really matters is that for all his faults and his clumsy speaking and his sometimes poor grasp of tactics this guy keeps taking the blows and shouldering the burden in ways that, frankly, none of the rest of us would.

We sit and watch saying ‘why won’t he nail them on J6’ when most of us are too bloody scared to correct lies on J6 from our own family members, or at the water cooler in the office, or at the school when we hear some parent or teacher talking brainwashed crap about it. How many of us have walked away from tiny confrontations, or said that talk about 2020 being stolen is boring us now? And we have done that while the J6ers sit in jail, and we have done that while Trump walks into every rigged bear pit to get clawed and scratched and lied about, again and again and again.

Maybe the thing that makes him dumb enough to accept a rigged debate is the same thing that keeps him fighting a rigged system and a rigged election. He wouldn’t still be standing without it. It’s the same thing as the kid who gets knocked on his arse but won’t stay down even though the bully has back up and he has none.

There’s no debating with evil. It’s a fools game. But bloody hell, the fool is the best of us.