#272 On Disappointing My Audience

I make no apologies for this opinion, which I can well defend, that Trump is the most dangerous cult leader on Earth at this moment and has been for several years, and he should be viewed as such and responded to in that way. He utterly desecrated the office of the presidency, and I think there's no respect due to him, personally, for having occupied that office.

The general picture of the entire effort to establish massive election fraud that stole the election for Biden, all of it was obviously bullshit.

When Trump got banned from Twitter, I celebrated. In fact, I've been asking Jack publicly and privately for months, if not years, to kick him off the platform.

I consider it totally irresponsible to have gone down the rabbit hole of election fraud 'both sideism' around the 2020 election—the immediate aftermath of the election and in the ensuing months when you could have bet the lives of your children that Trump and his enablers were lying about everything in sight, trying to steal everything that wasn't nailed down.

We had a sitting president who claimed to have won the election when votes were still being counted and called for the vote counting to stop. If you can't recognize how abysmal that situation is and how worthy of contempt Trump was and is for behaving that way, there is nothing to talk about, really, from my point of view.

What has long been clear is that, in a forced choice between catching COVID having been vaccinated and catching COVID not haven't been vaccinated, your outcome is better, whatever your age cohort, if you've been vaccinated.

What about the risk of the vaccines? We don't have long-term data on these mRNA vaccines. We don't have long-term data on what it's like to get COVID not having been vaccinated ... Yes, the future is uncertain, but there is no good reason to be terrified of these vaccines.

At minimum, given the difference that we know vaccines make, there are tens of thousands of people who did not need to die who did die because they didn't get vaccinated.

...The events of January 6th really are the most shocking thing to have happened in over 200 years in the United States.

We know we have a problem on our hands here, and if we don't fix our electoral machinery in the meantime, 2024 could be far worse than 2020.

This pandemic was, as I've said before, a dress rehearsal for something far worse that is bound to come, whether it's engineered deliberately or coughed up out of a bat. We know that this pandemic was about as benign as it can get.

The basic problem, as I see it, is that we are living through what is, at least in my lifetime, an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy across our institutions. We're living in a society that has been poisoned by misinformation and disinformation.

There are certain moments in history that really will not benefit from airing 'both sides' on any given debate, especially when one of those sides is either obviously illegitimate or the probability of it being legitimate is so low that it becomes irresponsible to have certain conversations at certain moments in history.

Our distrust of mainstream institutions is totally warranted ... But that doesn't mean that the contrarian opinion on any specific point is generally right—because it isn't generally right.

I am the first to admit that the public health messaging and the posture of many of our institutions has earned all of the mistrust that they've received. It's just been awful.

Whatever terms of service Twitter has and had, it was absolutely clear that Trump had violated them long before he was kicked off the platform.