duro on Nostr: The quote is from a podcast that someone sent me last night. It is a 3.5 hour ...

The quote is from a podcast that someone sent me last night. It is a 3.5 hour behemoth that I am slowly chewing through and trying to parse out. But important to understand, it is not a theoretical conversation about what could be or what should be, it is more of a practical attempt to understand what is actually going on vis-a-vis how batshit crazy everything seems right now. And it is relevant to Walker's initial note about how to make elections more auditable and more secure, because that assumes that such a thing is universally desirable, and I think that the argument here is that not everyone wants that. So one of the challenges for us is to grapple with understanding why that is.

Less than 45 seconds into the conversation, Eric drops this incendiary comment:

"I don't know whether Donald Trump will be allowed to become president."

But rather than devolve into a reflexive and uncritical diatribe against something like the deep state, or Trump Derangement Syndrome, etc, he attempts to proceed a bit more critically:

"I think there's a remarkable story and we're in a funny game which is: are we allowed to say what that story is because to say it and to analyze it and to name it is to bring it into view. I think we don't understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is, we don't understand why its in the shadows, we don't understand why the news is acting in a bizarre fashion... there is something that 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 implicitly, that says 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. So what you're trying to do from the point of view of, say, the State Department, the intelligence community, the defense department, and major corporations that have to do with international issues from arms trade to food (they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn't agree with them and the mood of the country was "why do we pay taxes into these structures, why are we hamstrung, why aren't we a free people")--so what the two parties would do is that they would run a primaries, you would have populist candidates, and you'd pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place, and you had two candidates who were both acceptable to the international order--that is, they aren't going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you--we called that democracy. So democracy was the illusion of choice--what's called magician's choice, where the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows--in that situation you have magician's choice in the primaries and then you'd have the duopoly field two candidates either of which was acceptable and you could actually afford to hold an election. And the populace would vote and that way the international order wasn't put at risk every four years because you can't have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites.

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 position in government in the history of the Republic, entered the Oval Office: Donald Trump broke through the primary structure. 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, he's under the control of the Russians, and he was going to be a 20 to 1 underdog... and then he wins. And there was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson. You cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances--this is an unsolved problem. So I don't have a particular dog in this fight. I, one, believe in democracy, but I also believe in international agreements, and it is the job of the state department and 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."