There would be certain tactical advantages to this. The Left always performs much, much better when a Republican is in office. The anti-establishment populist-right would continue to be rallied. The division between the Republican “base” and Republican establishment would continue to expand as would the divide between the “deep state” and Republican voters. Fragment, fragment, fragment…
Susan Rice for VP and Samantha Power for Secretary of State? It figures.
Only 10%? At the end of the Cold War, no less than Robert McNamara wanted to reduce the military budget by 50%. “Progressives” are so lame. Kudos to Kyle for calling them out.
There is not nearly enough Antifa to carry out an insurrection like the recent one.
Who cares about this fraud’s opinion? Remember his smoke and mirrors show at the UN before the invasion of Iraq? He was a neocon stooge then and he’s a neocon stooge now.
Kyle comes close to getting it in this. He’s not nearly where I am but he’s moving along.
This statue is located about a block from my residence. There is a row of Confederate monuments that line the avenue where the Lee statue is located, and which have predictably been vandalized and tagged with graffiti in recent days.
Kyle generally strikes me as a reasonable leftist. But he misses quite a few points in this that are rarely pointed out, but should be.
I would argue that virtually all US Presidents, with rare exceptions, have engaged in actions just as pernicious as the leaders of the Confederacy. Virtually all US leaders during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century were involved in the oppression of blacks and Native Americans on the North American continent or invading and/or annexing parts of Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands. Where does anyone think that the Western continental states, Alaska, or Hawaii came from? How did the US acquire Puerto Rico and Guam?
Even many US leaders that are considered icons by many mainstream “progressives,” and others further to the left, were tyrants in their own right. Wilson suppressed the labor movement, embroiled the US in WW1, and wasn’t the most liberal guy on race either. Franklin Roosevelt placed Japanese-Americans in prison camps. Harry Truman incinerated hundreds of thousands of people with atomic weapons. Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the Vietnam War, and Nixon and Henry the K were partially responsible for bringing Pol Pot to power in Cambodia. Ronald Reagan funded the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Central America.
Kyle Kulinski has an interesting rebuttal to Carlson’s Hobbesian-Burkean perspective.
In his more serious and intelligent moments, Carlson is simply making the Hobbesian argument that order must be maintained at all costs in order for civilization to exist with considerations of “justice,” whatever their merit, being a secondary or tertiary concern. A similar argument could have been made to defend the rule of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi, particularly given what happened to Iraq and Libya post-US/NATO invasion. Carlson is also making a Burkean argument that whatever the problems with existing institutions, merely burning them down typically makes things even worse. I can respect such arguments even if they’re a bit one-dimensional.
Kulinksi is making the perfectly reasonable observation that the insurrectionists were hardly the ones that started the fight, and that the lumpen violence of the insurrectionists pales in comparison to the institutionalized violence of the power elite. Looting Target is kindergarten compared to killing a million people in the Middle East. But Kyle, unfortunately, falls back on the liberal idealization of the “rule of law.” The law, as anarchists have always pointed out, is primarily an instrument of political, economic, and economic subjugation with the positive benefits of law (like “order”) largely being incidental or geared to serve ruling class interests. OF COURSE, the state is inconsistent in the enforcement of its own laws. Consistency is not the objective. Maintaining power is the objective.
So Kyle now favors Hubert Humphrey Biden over Richard Nixon Trump? A Biden victory will result in the neoliberal class and Deep State collectively trying to consolidate their position while a Trump victory will likely result in more fragmentation.
Krystal and Saagar respond to Kyle Kulinkski’s pivot on voting for Biden in light of Trump’s military deployment on U.S. citizens.
This could set a dangerous precedent.
Kyle takes his stand with the 46%.
Between the 46% who either don’t vote or vote third-party, the 67% of voters who constitute the “exhausted majority,” the minority of Blue Tribers and Red Tribers who are tired of the bullshit, and former establishmentarians who see through it all (the Carne Ross-types), we anti-Systemists or System-skeptical folks are a super-majority, even if we don’t agree on anything else.
Of course, what Kyle wants is not to disengage from or overthrow the System. What he wants is to merely vote for a Bernie Sanders-type. But for refusing to vote for either Trump or Biden, he’s at least moving in the right direction, much to the consternation of Blue Tribe fundamentalists like Cenk Uygur (who strikes me as a major douchebag).
This is an interesting video where Kyle explains why he is a reformist-social democrat rather than an anarcho-syndicalist or libertarian socialist like Noam Chomsky (who engages in way too may reformist deviations of his own). Basically, he says he “just doesn’t get it.” Fair enough. That’s what many libertarians and anarchists have said about my positions, lol. Interestingly, in many European countries, and some Latin American and Asian countries, Kyle’s positions would be considered “center-right.” The way he describes his views, he basically sounds like a Christian Democrat or an Ordliberal.
Apparently, “democratic centralism” is the one aspect of his time on the “far-left” that Bernie has retained. Along the way, he has apparently sold out to electoralism, and then to liberal-imperialism, and now to neoliberalism itself.
Kyle calls out the media sector of the new clerisy. This is good.
Imagine that. The student loan industry is a nationalized, state-run industry functioning in collusion with the banksters and the educationist wing of the new clerisy. Not being dischargeable through bankruptcy, student loans are modern-day indentured servitude. No way they’re going to give up that win-win scenario for the ruling class.
I don’t really think Justin Amash is all that bad for a Republican (which is an extraordinarily low standard). But he’s still just a Tea Party-type, Koch-flunkie. I’m also not a Libertarian Party member, so I don’t get a say, but I would prefer than the LP not run these Republican throwaways. But Kyle’s take on how Amash was essentially bullied out of the electoral system is interesting. I don’t see any value in electoral campaigns unless they are done for purely propagandistic purposes (like Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012), or for mock purposes (like Vermin Supreme). The only kind of electoral action I might ever consider voting for personally would be the idea I once suggested of a “pan-secessionist meta-party” but even that would be a mere afterthought to an on-the-ground revolutionary movement, i.e. the political arm of a popular insurgency.
The primary disagreement that I have with orthodox, American-style libertarians is their deification of characters like Bezos, Musk, Gates, Sam Walton, etc as idealized Nietzschean supermen. This is a recurring theme I have seen among Randians (the worst), Catoite neoliberals, and Rockwellian paleos alike. These characters are simply the Henry Fords, John D. Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegies, etc of the present time (and, yes, I know a lot of libertarians idealize the robber barons of the Gilded Age as well). But, in reality, these guys are simply the royalty and aristocracy of modernity, the neo-Medicis. Fortunately, there are an-caps like James Corbett who will call this stuff out.
It’s funny how milquetoast social democrats like Bernie and AOC and outright hucksters like Lizzie the Scamster are still considered too much by the bankster-friendly MSM.
The neocons, led by Bill Kristol, are using the Biden campaign to colonize the Democrats, while Trump has an 80% approval rating among the Republicans. If the neocons are successful at this, it means the US will have a neocon party and a faux-populist right-wing plutocratic party. Imagine if the two major parties in the US were Israel’s Likud Party and El Salvador’s ARENA, which the former lurching leftward on social questions and the latter appropriating LenPenist rhetoric, and you get an idea of what US politics would look like.
Kulinski talks about a video from 2013 where Obama admitted he and the Republicans agreed 70% of the time, and that the differences between the two parties were more about procedure than substance. Obama also pointed out something I have also pointed out many times, which is that in most countries there are much greater ideological divisions than in the US. Despite the “divisiveness” of US politics, it’s more about aesthetics, personalities, and team affiliations (like sports or music subcultures) than existential differences.
My respect for Kyle Kulinski has gone way up since he adopted a “boycott the major parties” stance on this election. “Vote blue, no matter” (or “vote red, no matter who”) is the stupidest position possible. It means you are telling your supposed leaders and rulers that you will hold them to no standards whatsoever and you will support them no matter how badly they screw up or how much of scumbag they are.
It would be hilarious if third party and/or independent candidates actually did well in this election.
