Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry Profile picture
Dec 26, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
With respect, fwiw: I’m a Trump guy but I seriously considered RDS… He made a conscious decision (he or ppl around him but the buck stops with him), instead of billing himself as Trump 2.0, same policies & ideas but more competent and disciplined, he billed himself as *anti-Trump*. First on the vaxx. (Typical consultant-think: ohh, we’ll outflank Trump on the RIGHT! 300 IQ!) Then targeting Evangelical boomers and talking about how he was more socially conservative and Jesus-y than Trump. Except that those people have been well aware of Trump’s heresies since 2016 and have made the determination, rightly or wrongly, that the plusses outweigh the minuses. Whatever. It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback. But it’s definitely the case that between the beginning of the campaign and now, conscious decisions were made that, at least in retrospect, look like they were designed to turn off people like me, and average Republican voters, who started out as fans of both RDS and Trump, and made the choice much easier for them.
Sorry if this ruffles feathers, and I have friends in both camps and both camps are respectable, but that’s just the way I see it.
The thing is, having been around this block, I just know there was a meeting. With consultants. And powerpoint. "Here’s the most gettable demographic. It’s White Evangelicals over 50, who go to church every Sunday, they’re the ones who are most uncomfortable with Trump’s style and history and his deviations from socially conservative orthodoxy, and they turn out more, particularly in Iowa. If you go after them, it will boost your polls, and give you momentum, and bla bla bla" Ok. I just smell consultant-think and consultant-speak. What the consultants failed to anticipate was that it would just make him come across as fake and inauthentic and more anti-Trump than (I believe) he really is.
Again, in some ways this is very "unfair" to RDS who is a highly competent and intelligent conservative. On the other hand decisions were made and signed off on that led to where he is now. Political arena is tough, man.
It’s sad. He 5000% deserves better. But no one has a right to be President of the United States. He decided to get in there.

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More from @pegobry_en

Jul 8
Regular reminder that all the Biblical passages about "welcoming the stranger" relate to extending *hospitality* to travelers (who by definition depart on their merry way) and has nothing to do with immigration policy.

Witness the many times in the Bible where Israel fights invaders with God’s blessing and at God’s express urging

Withess the many times in the Bible where God scolds Israel for allowing strangers to live in Israel, and that this corrupts the people because it brings foreign practices such as polytheism and idol worship

Not that anybody making this argument is intellectually honest or actually interested in understanding God’s will through the Bible.
Hospitality was a huge deal in the Ancient world because travel was long and arduous and dangerous and if you had to camp out in the middle of nature you were very likely to get robbed or murder. It’s a huge thing in every Ancient culture we know of.

It’s simply absurd to suggest that anyone in the Bible could have written or understood those passages to mean "You have to let large numbers of random strangers settle in your country indefinitely if they feel like it"

And in fact, the Bible on *numerous occasions* discusses this very possibility and *every single time* GOD HIMSELF says "This is very bad, don’t do it"
The Bible of course has a VERY FAMOUS story about "welcoming the stranger", and that is the story of Lot in Sodom. And that story has nothing to do with immigration—the angels only ever claim to be passing travelers—and everything to do with hospitality.

Modern readers are often shocked by one aspect of the story, which is that Lot offers the hostile mob his daughters instead of his guests. But in Ancient stories, the honorable person doing over-the-top absurd things to honor the Law of Hospitality is a trope.

King Bob welcomes Strange Traveler into his palace. It turns out that Strange Traveler is a sworn enemy of King Jim over the hill, with whom King Bob has always had friendly relations. King Jim says unless King Bob hands over Strange Traveler, there will be war. King Bob accepts war with his heretofore friendly neighbor rather than hand over a guest.

And, of course, it’s not just Bronze Age stories.

The most Bronze Age culture still extant is, of course, Pashto culture. Famously, the Taliban refused to hand over Bin Laden to the US, knowing full well it would mean the end of their regime and decades of war, even though they didn’t particularly like Bin Laden and were blindsided by 9/11 which they thought was an insane retarded thing to do, but felt bound by the Pashto Law of Hospitality.

Marcus Luttrell is alive today because Pashto herdsmen found him and took him in and nursed him back to health. These men probably hated America and American soldiers and may even have killed many Americans themselves. But they took him in, and when Taliban militants demanded they hand him over, they not only refused but threatened war over it.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 3
Most of the schools in England were run by the monasteries so the literacy rate in England went from almost 50% to ~10% in a generation.
Also the "papal religion" had already "taken hold" for a thousand years and it took astonishing amounts of violence and oppression to draw the English away from the true faith.
They burned down the Bodleian Library. They burned down countless thousands of Books of Hours (priceless works of art and culture) because they had pictures and prayers to saints. Stained glass windows smashed. Statues smashed. TOMBS smashed because headstones mentioned saints.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 3
One of the puzzles I have is that the French don't have a reputation for autism, even though we are one of the most autistic nations on Earth: we invented French gardens, the metric system, we administratively divided our nation into little squares that are not related to history or geography because it made us feel better, we're one of the world's top math nations, all French philosophy is basically about how the key to life the universe and everything is abstract spergy logic-chopping...Image
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Like, who looks at grass, trees, and flowers, and thinks, "Yes, the thing to do is to turn this into PERFECT GEOMETRICAL SHAPES." Not even the Germans could come up with this. Image
tfw you wake up one morning and decide to raze 90% of your incredibly historic and important capital city because you think it would be neater as lots of geometrical shapes Image
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Read 22 tweets
Jun 14
Apart from everything else, American liberals are deeply, deeply provincial people. Ignorant about the world, unsophisticated, uncultured. Truly. Image
The reaction when I meet Middle-Americans vs Coastal-Americans and tell them I’m French is very different. Middle-Americans have *genuine curiosity and interest*, ask me questions about the country, etc. Coastal-Americans, of course, already think they know everything they need to know about France (it’s a socialist utopia).
*Today* is the day of Trooping the Colour, in Britain. With this line American libs are basically insulting all of Europe, much more than (say) JD Vance ever did. But they don’t know and don’t care. Just provincial, ignorant, unsophisticated people. Image
Read 4 tweets
May 12
Holy shit Pope Leo XIII was based.

I mean, I knew, but I didn’t know.
In his encyclical on socialism:
- Sounds downright Tea Party-ish in his defense of private property
- Identifies the root of socialism as greed and love of money, any claims to empathy are just a pretext
- Identifies that the true goal of socialism is to destroy the family
- Says that men are only equal to the extent that they are all called to believe in Jesus, but otherwise were created UNequal and this is good
- Says God intended earthly society to be hierarchical, as Heaven is a perfect society and therefore hierarchical
Read 5 tweets
Apr 1
"I killed many of my children to slightly alter the odds of one of my children getting a disability. Praise me."

Look, there’s no ifs or buts. This is just pure evil. End of civilization
Agamemnon sacrificed just one child and his family and nation were cursed over several generations.

We deserve every punishment
"Imagine a world without disability (because we killed all the disabled people)."
Read 33 tweets

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