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I’m sorry to hear that about your family and I will pray for your kids’ recovery to full health.

Voting is great, but we fetishize it too much in this country. Jonah Goldberg talks about voting being the last stop of citizenship not the first. I knew a guy who actually planned to flip a coin in the voting booth in 2020. I doubt he went through with that but he honestly didn’t care. Voting for no good reason is not an act of civic responsibility.

I’m entirely with you about the need to rekindle civic virtue in this country. It takes a lot more than voting and tweeting. And a majority of Americans seem not to know the true definition of civic virtue today.

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Thank you so much for the prayers. It's much appreciated.

Yes, this has been a bit of clarion call for me lately. I talk a lot about it in my classes and in my social groups at school as well. I am greatly concerned that in the "fetishizing" (as you aptly call it) of democracy and voting that we'll tear down the aspects of the system and the process that insulate it from demagoguery. This is a big reason why I came out so hard against HR1 and have had a falling out with non-Trump conservatives like Bill Kristol and Evan McMullin who supported its passage (though I was equally opposed to the ways I felt it assaulted the principles of federalism).

Yes, if there's anything I've observed in America's educational system it's that we've engendered an animated and angry spirit of activism that falls very short of what informed and measured civic virtue is supposed to look like. This ongoing conflict between the woke SJWs on the Left and the red-pill Culture Warriors on the Left is destructive, and it doesn't really matter who side wins anymore because they're conflict won't leave anything left worth having.

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I hadn’t realized that McMullin came out in favor of HR 1, but I’m not surprised. With Kristol, I think I understand the game he’s playing and I have a lot of respect for him but I disagree with what he’s doing.

Few people who know me would consider me a sunny optimist. But the level of cynicism about government and politics among my peers when I was in high school (~10 years ago) was stunning. I was the measured one. It was a cynicism borne more of ignorance than fact, though the Trump years may have given more credence to it.

I fear we’re educating another generation to be tuned out of what matters and plugged in to what doesn’t. And this leads to the kind of angry demagoguery you’re speaking of.

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Yup, here's the call to action from McMullin's Stand Up Republic: https://standuprepublic.com/tell-your-representative-and-your-senators-to-support-the-for-the-people-act/

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Interesting. Yeah HR 1 in my opinion is very problematic and doesn’t even solve the problem it supposedly is designed to solve. I’m solidly against it.

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It's a recycled progressive wishlist resurrected and pushed forward as a supposed solution to a problem that didn't exist when the legislation was written. It literally nationalizes the election process, which I cannot for the life of me understand as being a good idea after a sitting President tried to steal an election. The President is in charge of the national government, and the supposed solution to a sitting President trying to steal an election is to place more aspects of the election under the purview of the national government and, by extension, the President? My observation of the 2020 election was that federalism saved us from disaster. Without the states having separate control of the elections and without state courts being able to shoot down the absurd election challenges (all of which were entirely beyond Trump's power to control or manipulate) who knows how things would have played out. But even beyond this argument, it's just really bad legislation. I laid out my argument against it in no uncertain times once upon a time: https://medium.com/the-liberty-hawk/h-r-1-strikes-at-the-very-heart-of-federalism-421ce9e303d.

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I went and read your Medium article. I’m even more against HR 1 now than I was before. One of two of the things you mentioned in it I actually didn’t know about.

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I agree entirely.

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