To initiate a productive political discussion, we need to establish a groundwork. What are the foundational questions that need to be answered? What’s the one point of agreement upon which mutual collaboration starts?
My suggestion: Let’s agree that there is a range between the guardrails of left and right, that together those guardrails allow for a road-space down which a united people can travel. Being aware that ruin will befall us when we lean too far toward ideas/policies that produce the likes of the Russian Revolution and contrarily, the likes of the Spanish Inquisition.
Present these questions.
Have the answers to these questions ready.
1. What is a nation?
2. What is a free nation?
3. What holds a free nation together?
4. What is the kryptonite of a free nation?
5. What was the purpose of the American Revolution? Why didn’t the founders establish a monarchy?
6. Why did your ancestors leave their shit-hole nation? What’s your role in preventing our nation from becoming the place your ancestors left? What happens if or when a free people shirk their familial, community, and national responsibilities?
7. Why do public servants make an oath to defend the US Constitution, and not an oath to the president, the federal reserve, congress, the DOJ, the FBI, the dollar, big tech, or to the news media and multinational corporations?
8. What is it about our humanness that ––at all costs–– must be protected? Does our humanness (and its meaning therein) exist within the individual? If not, then it must exist or be expressed within the interdependent relationships between those who survive together in collaboration. Who oversees protecting the bonds that hold human meaning/relationship together? What value can freedom possible have if people forget where the bonds of human meaning are held?
9. Why are religious people typically immune to totalitarian subversion tactics? Why do totalitarians aim to destroy religion? Why are non-religious people so easily enslaved and indoctrinated? What is indoctrination?
10. What distinguishes the inside of Plato’s Cave from the outside?
11. Only those who have prepared themselves for debate are worth ever engaging with. What does debate preparedness mean?
12. How does one determine whether propaganda or brainwashing have successfully taken root?
13. How are propaganda and brainwashing enacted? What are the methods? Why do these methods work effectively?
14. What is journalism? What are the highest of journalistic standards? How does journalism differ from propaganda, and propaganda from activism? What happens to a mind that gives its trust to a media that forgoes journalistic standards?
15. What was Socrates warning about the risks of democracy? What of democracy’s vulnerabilities must we be alert to?
16. A free nation is a road on a high mountain pass. The road has guardrails on the left and right. What are these guardrails fashioned of and what happens when a nation loses sight of them? Should people of a free nation have the right to ignore these guardrails? In a free nation, the power is with the people, which means the guardrails are the people’s responsibility, not the government’s responsibility. What happens if the people hand off guardrail-protection-duty to the government? What guardrails must everyone in a free nation agree upon without exception? How might tyrants aim to violate or exploit this: which version of tyrant/media/bank collusion?
17. What best describes the cornerstone of the worldview that values and aims to protect freedom, versus the worldview cornerstone that forgoes freedom? If a person does not understand why freedom needs protection ––as tyrants wish to dupe us into forfeiting it–– then they probably don’t understand what freedom is, how it is created, or what the consequences are of forgoing its protection.
18. We can all agree that corporate greed, lies, and manipulation are unacceptable. No one is arguing that. What’s the best way of combating this, short of allowing ourselves to destroy freedom and freedom’s virtues?
19. What is globalism and how does it threaten populism? What are the pros and cons of each? How does globalism destroy the nations who support it?
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