Steps Involved in Developing a Robust & Accurate Political Phenomenology
You Need to Hear Things You Might Not Want to Hear
I just finished watching Tucker on Twitter — it took me two days, total, pausing for breaks and other things — interview Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
[Photo: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tucker, available here : https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1704665052031172641 ]
Topics discussed were :
1. How voter fraud came to be prosecuted in Texas successfully and has led to insights into how it works on a massive scale across the country in a way difficult, if not impossible, to prove in court (analogous to organized crime’s strategy to appear legal on the surface and to prevent convictions, with one key disanalogy with organized crime).
2 . Surpising, shocking due process violations that have the appearance of legality for the accused during impeachment proceedings. These have not been fixed by Republicans—they don’t even appear to have been widely understood or pre-known about before Paxton was accused of the things he was accused of.
Due process violations like, for example,
2.1 There was a gag order on both parties, accused and accuser, that was violated by his accusers, which gave them an advantage over Paxton in the public eye, because Paxton obeyed the gag order. The accusers got away with violating the gag order. He most likely would have been punished for violating it.
2.2 There was a funding disparity during his process because apart from any conviction, his pay was stopped and he couldn’t afford legal counsel. Keep in mind, he was elected by the voters and his pay was stopped, though he had tenure up to and until conviction and removal from office. Of course, if he was innocent, which he was, he would be fighting false charges against tax-funded accusers without the benefit of even being able to pay his own living expenses, much less counsel. This happened in a Republican state. Even if such a system is a holdover from when Democrats ran Texas, it should have been fixed immediately by Republicans just like Republicans fixed Democrats lynching blacks. Republicans are behind in Texas, and it’s a little unnerving. Democrats will use things like this to take over the state.
2.3 There was evidence that the Biden DOJ was behind most of false charges, though the immediate accusers involved some other Republicans. Paxton is the most aggressive and effective contra-Biden litigator in the country, keeping the White House accountable on all sorts of violations of law that would otherwise go unnoticed and unopposed— big stuff, not small stuff. That is, until he was merely accused without evidence, of things he was innocent of. Something is off here. Republicans need to find out how to fix it immediately. This is like a 3 foot wall that is supposed to keep Hamas out. Republicans, you need to fix these problems in Texas. Like, really fix them, like the Founding Fathers fixed the Articles of Confederation in drafting and adopting the US Constitution. Study it, and fix it.
Also discussed:
3 . Karl Rove was somehow involved in all of this.
[Photo 2: Me and Karl Rove at Loyola Marymount University, Lost Angeles, Spring 2009. He was First Amendment speaker that year. I met with him for some time prior to the event as the faculty advisor to the LMU College Republicans. I was impressed with him—he had a very hostile crowd which he was able to pacify and turn very quickly by argument and persuasion. I’d never seen anything like it.]
[Photo 3: I posted the photo on Facebook in 2012 with my recollection of the event].
Now, this one sticks in my craw, because when you have personal experience with someone, and the description from someone you haven’t met of someone you have not only met, but interacted with substantially in person, and their description goes against what you seem to know or to believe from personal experience, it’s a bit jarring.
But that’s why I’m calling this entry in The Republican Professor Newsletter what I’m calling it. Political phenomonology is how the arena of politics appears to you. In phenomenology, however, careful description of the appearances takes a lot of skill, discipline, and hard work. That’s because we aren’t very good at it without training. Oftentimes, we misdescribe what appears to us. It’s just a feature of human nature that we do this all the time without discipline and training.
It appeared to me that Karl Rove was one way. Now it appears he’s another way . Which appearance is the real deal ? How to resolve the apparent contradiction in appearances ?
One way is that Karl Rove may have in fact been different when I met him in 2009. Maybe he’s changed, and he’s no longer concerned about voter fraud (which is why the Democrats are extremely frightened of Ken Paxton—he was effectively studying the vote fraud game plan and figuring out how to counter it).
Another possible resolution of the apparent contradiction in the two Roves I’m presented with is that Karl Rove never did change. He stayed the same. But that my powers of observation, interpersonal intuition, and discernment back in 2009 were not sophisticated enough to detect how Karl Rove really was. That’s a possibility. I think it’s less likely than the alternative, but we all tend to over-estimate our own prowess from time to time.
A third possibility is that Rove has reasons for what he is doing that are beyond my ability, or Ken Paxton’s, to understand, but that they are good reasons and he’s just really far ahead of us. That Karl Rove is a super-Republican bad-ass, and we’re way behind. Or, maybe he thinks he is, falsely, and he’s slipping, and has poorer judgment, and maybe some pride, and that his reasons may be good in thought, but bad in consequence. In other words, maybe there is some middle ground between the first two possibilities mixed with unknown factors. In politics, there are always unknown factors, unknown for any number of reasons, including unintentional, or human limitation factors like limited attention spans or poor documentation.
This process can be difficult, but it’s essential to develop a robust attention to political phenomenology. Equally difficult is remembering these things in the future when it really counts.
Where I’m at right now as it pertains to Texas and Republicans and Karl Rove: As a result of Tucker’s persistence, courage, and willingness to keep doing what he’s doing where he can, I’ve been exposed to political appearances that I think give me a fuller picture of the vulnerabilities to freedom and liberty in Texas. And if Texas goes, there goes any accountability whatsoever to the one party state in D.C. It’s important for us all to keep a closer eye on Texas and to listen to Paxton’s theories on vote fraud on a massive scale with mail in ballots.
Otherwise, how things appear to us in the future will probably be how things appeared to the victims of totalitarianism in the classics of the historical literature on the subject: a tyranny that we are powerless to oppose because it passed the point of no return for us.
[Photo 4: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tucker, 20 Sept 2023, available here : https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1704665052031172641 ].
Professor Lucas J. Mather was the faculty advisor to the LMU College Republicans for many of the years he served as a lecturer there in the Philosophy Department, where he witnessed first hand Democrat bullying and intimidation tactics on students and adjunct faculty, hostile work-place tactics used to pressure grade-inflation, and a various assortment of biases and harms under the Orwellian description of “inclusivity, diversity, and equity.” There are many fond memories that Professor Mather has of LMU, however, where he was once a student himself in the Bioethics Institute.
Dr. Mather is the producer and host of The Republican Professor Podcast and teaches in the government department of Azusa Pacific University in Lost Angeles County, California.