When Style Reveals Substance

"they will never find that hill if this isn't it."

Calm, steady, thoughtful strength.

I mostly can’t be bothered to watch two hours of YouTube video, these days, because life is too short, but here’s two hours of YouTube video that I watched with great pleasure — a discussion between biologist Bret Weinstein and two unvaxxed servicemembers, former Air Force officer Jordan Karr and current Army officer Grant Smith (who writes on Substack) about moral and legal challenges to Covid injection mandates in the military. It takes exceptional courage for an active duty officer to speak this plainly.

If you don’t have the time to watch the whole thing, note that it’s divided into sections. The section titled “Spirituality in military,” which starts around 49:30, contains the kernel of the discussion, or at least what seems to me to be the kernel of the discussion. Bret Weinstein has a tremendous skill for boiling complicated discussions about principle down to their clearest, plainest expression, and you can watch that happen here. I’m not going to write about this discussion, because it speaks for itself. This is what moral strength looks like.

This discussion reminds me of the calmness and moral clarity of the trucker convoy that gathered in Ottawa, leading a weak and morally empty government to declare a national emergency and start freezing the bank accounts of dissidents.

What the Truckers Want

One of the most common objections to Substack posts about Covid policy is that writing is just words, and that talking about it isn’t doing anything. But what becomes extremely clear over time is that words are foundational, the first way we shape our lives. Hegemony is the cultural structure of power. The “long march through the institutions” is a generations-long effort to control the instruments of our discourse: news, literature, movies, academia. Language-centered institutions.

If words don’t matter, why did they bother?

Or consider the madness of the infamous NSBA letter, which asked the federal government to investigate parents who criticized school boards as domestic terrorists, calling harsh criticism “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” (“Additionally, NSBA requests that such review examine appropriate enforceable actions against these crimes and acts of violence under the Gun-Free School Zones Act, the PATRIOT Act in regards to domestic terrorism, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the Violent Interference with Federally Protected Rights statute, the Conspiracy Against Rights statute….”) The NSBA was asking for terrorism prosecutions for people who said things about their policy choices, because what you say matters. (And here’s Merrick Garland’s response, in case you missed it.)

Now, watch the NSBA’s request in action, because it’s incredibly telling how the big policy discussion worked in local practice.

During the hysteria-driven end of in-person schooling in 2020 and 2021, a parent in Michigan named Sandra Hernden complained vociferously to the Chippewa Valley School Board that her autistic son was floundering in virtual school. She argued that school closures were a bad policy choice, and harmful to children. Thus criticized, school board members explained that shut up.

Because Hernden is a police officer in Harper Woods, school board member Elizabeth Pyden filed a personnel complaint against her, emailing the town’s public safety director to claim that complaining about school policy made Hernden a bad cop. (“I am writing with a concern regarding how one of your officers conducts herself in her own community.”) But then this also happened, and the blue stamp across the top tells you that this document was recently filed as evidence in a First Amendment lawsuit:

Dear federal law enforcement, please investigate this woman for crimes, because she comes to our meetings and speaks during the designated period for public comment. Sounds like a classic case of actual overdrama, right there, but I’m not a lawyer. When you criticize policy in a public forum designed for the criticism of policy — the public comment section of a meeting of a local legislative body — you’re being threatening. And that’s kind of correct: You’re threatening the status and mediocrity of smug idiots who enjoy minor authority and can’t stand to be challenged. This is the substance of our public policy debate over the last decade, and really the substance over the last two years:

Public: The policy choices you’re making are poor choices, and are causing harm, so you should make different policy choices.

Authority: OH GOD A TERRORIST HELP HELP¹

Just words are important. Truth is the first tool of social organization. Speaking clearly has substance and meaning, as Bret Weinstein, Jordan Karr, and Grant Smith have just reminded us.

1. Please God no you’re one of them, aren’t you?