In this episode of Old-Fashioned Democrat, Jose Vasco pivots to the election and what's happening on the Kennedy campaign. He interviews Jeff Dornik, fellow Kennedy supporter, about several important issues facing Americans in 2024.

First, they discuss the Kennedy campaign itself and why this campaign has captured the affections and imagination of such a cross-section of independent-minded Americans. Kennedy's camp brings together former supporters of Obama, Clinton, Sanders, Trump, Paul, and even Gaetz and DeSantis, in gatherings where they can set aside stupid partisan bickering and focus on commonsense solutions to grave problems facing the country. Jeff shares his migration from his Republican upbringing to Kennedy, while Jose talks about drifting from a Marxist youth steeped in liberation theology to Kennedy's world.

They also address the giant elephant in the room, which is free speech and the abandonment of First Amendment principles by both left and right. The left long ago decided that suppressing speech and canceling undesirable speakers would serve as a useful political strategy, and they threw out any qualms about censorship. Now, many on the left are reaping the whirlwind as anti-Zionist critics like Briahna Joy Green and Katie Halper are being slammed on the left by the left, as well as being pushed out of their jobs.

But Jose and Jeff, who have spent years pointing out the left's tendency to suppress free speech, ask the audience to let go of any delusion that the right was authentically pro-free-speech. The recent firing of Candace Owens and the expulsion of the groypers from a Turning Point USA serve as good points of departure to examine the complex dynamics leading to right-wingers canceling and suppressing other right-wingers.

Jose and Jeff differ somewhat on their diagnosis even if they agree on free speech principles. Jose believes that grift is the major source of right-wing cancel culture. Conservative suppressers like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro did not learn their censorship from the left, but rather home-grew their own censorship styles because of petty rivalries with other conservatives. In order to maintain dominant control over conservative expression, such censorious power brokers did two things: (1) weaponized their knowledge of the left's propensity to attack conservatives, so that they could let the left wing cancel their competitors while they strategically withdraw opportunities and support from the victims' conservative allies, and (2) eventually created censorship and extortion mechanisms of their own independent of the left, strangling their right-wing competitors with devious contracts, blacklists, ostracism, and smears.

A chain of ironic censorship cases illustrates all these currents simultaneously, as Jeff and Jose discuss in this podcast. The groypers have hounded and harassed Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA for years, accusing Kirk of not being conservative enough and of pandering to the Jewish lobby. Fuentes and other groypers were expelled from all the polite platforms of conservative society, branded as antisemites, racists, and freaks. The result has not been an elimination of harmful ideologies from the right at all--instead, Fuentes and other groypers were pushed into dark corners where they could only engage in conversations with other people holding extreme opinions. Then when the Gaza war broke out, they looked like truthtellers because Kirk and his gang had denied that AIPAC was poisoning American government for so long. Kicking Fuentes and the groypers out of the TPUSA conference in Detroit backfired, since Fuentes gave a barnstorming speech outside the conference venue, and now looks like a heroic truthteller as many forget that he does hold abominable views on race and nationalism.

A similar cluster of ironies is discussed by Jose and Jeff as they look at the cases of Steve Crowder, Candace Owens, and Briahna Joy Gray. In early 2023, Gray was comfortably employed by the Hill and used her host position to mock Owens. Owens was comfortably employed by Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire and used her host position to mock Steve Crowder, who had been screwed over and blacklisted by Ben Shapiro after Crowder revealed how much Shapiro was actually censoring conservative voices to hold his dominant position.

Fast forward to the summer of 2024, and see what has happened. Crowder's family life was dragged out as a deflection from what Shapiro was doing. Shapiro went on to fire Owens over her resistance to Zionism. Not long after that, Gray was fired over her resistance to Zionism. So all three -- Crowder, Owens, and Gray-- were all killed by cancel culture, but only now are people seeing common cause with their ideological rivals and enemies. At last Owens and Gray collaborated on a podcast about Zionism, which was a good sign.

This is a great podcast full of rich insights. You don't want to miss it. Follow Jose Vasco at x.com/josevargasvasco and keep an eye out for Jose's book, Demoagogue 2037, coming out soon.

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