Why JHK will vote for DJT

“Are you against the principle of free speech? The Democratic Party is.”

So opens James Howard Kunstler’s posting today. I think it’s substantially untrue that the “Democratic Party” is against free speech, though they do need their noses rubbed good and hard and repeatedly in the damnfoolery of the extremist members of their alliance (who they dare not suppress). Also, I cut Kunstler rhetorical slack as he vents against his (former?) party, just as I tend to rant against mine. There’s something like that in the Lord’s Prayer, as I recall.

Apart from the dubiously broad brush, his is

the choice some fairly influential figures who claim to be liberal are making. “Frankly going to unhappily vote Republican, including Trump, until the left walks this shit all the way back,” wrote James Lindsay, an Intellectual Dark Web fixture and ardent critic of critical theory, last week. The “this shit” in question? An article in The New Republic calling for the left to eventually seek to abolish the Constitution. In quote-retweeting Linday’s tweet, fellow IDW figure Eric Weinstein added, tagging two mayors who are very unpopular among the anti-woke, “InCons are a force this year. Involuntary conservatives are real. As I’ve told you: the failure to condemn @MayorJenny & @tedwheeler, acknowledge ANTIFA, admit to media bias or to level about cognitive issues etc. in a near octogenarian has created the Never-Trump Trump voter.”

Jesse Singal (likely paywall)

Excerpts from Kunstler’s pungent case for Trump (for whom I nevertheless will not vote):

Are you against reason itself? For all your talk about the primacy of science, your agenda militates furiously against it: Math is “racist,” there’s no biological basis for understanding sex, all science is a “white colonial way-of-knowing,” masculinity is “toxic,” women can have penises and men can menstruate. Do you really believe these absurd fantasies manufactured in the graduate schools in the service of academic careerism at all costs — or do you just go along with them for the sake of protecting your own careers and perquisites?

…

By the way, did you notice that Jeffrey Toobin has not been fired from his positions at The New Yorker magazine and CNN for jerking-off on-screen during a Zoom meeting of his professional colleagues last week? None of them have even publicly criticized him. Why do you suppose that is? I suppose it’s because he is a favored member of the Woke Journalists club and enjoys special protection from professional ruin — though the truth is he’s thrown away his credibility as a legal commentator, whether the Wokerati like it or not, especially on matters of public conduct. But that’s just one example of the hypocrisy that Wokesterism is full of, and reveals its chronic disingenuous insincerity.

…

I’m under no illusions that Donald Trump will Make America Great Again in the way that many of his supporters understand that slogan. The USA is headed into a terrible ordeal of economic disorder that I call the long emergency. Mr. Trump won’t stop it, and it may yet make a fool out of him. But the Democratic Party’s agenda would add an extra layer of tyrannical and sadistic insanity to the process that will only bring more suffering to more people, and I don’t want that to happen. I believe that Mr. Trump will probably win the election, but we’ll have to see what kind of nefarious dodges his opponents will employ to prevent any resolution of that outcome.

James Howard Kunstler, interrogating “former friends who have dumped me on account of my support for Mr. Trump’s re-election” in Last Round-up at the Wokester Corral