For someone who has studied communism in such detail, who seemed to have an understanding of the dangers that the Marxist-left poses, and, who has suffered greatly at the hands of cancel culture, I question how someone could be so monumentally wrong about what is going on with the Left & Right at the moment, particularly, with regards to the 2020 election fraud.
(He also believes fascism is on the Right, and, that most Democrat politicians are "very moderate", but, that's a discussion for another time).
The only explanation I have is Jordan has become a bit out of touch with reality, given his life-threatening medical condition, which took him out of the political landscape for a significant amount of time. He has only recently recovered & returned to the scene in the past few months.
His views of election fraud first became apparent on his recent podcast, with interview guest British intellectual Douglas Murray, whom also shares Jordan's belief that election fraud is a "conspiracy theory". (This was apparently recorded before January 18th, 2021).
He summarizes his discussion with Douglas, during his more recent podcast, with Gad Saad, as follows (recorded January 18th, 2021, released February 15th, 2021):
"I've noticed recently among friends and family members, as well as, more broadly in the culture, that there is a pronounced increase in the degree to which conspiratorial theories in particular, and, paranoid theories are propagating on the Right.
Now I don't know much about Q-anon, I've been out of the loop, and, I should be more on top of that, but I'm not. I do know that it's popular and pervasive.
And I do know that Trump's claims to have won the election are supported by a network of conspiratorial thinking. I was speaking with Douglas Murray about that, and you tell me what you think about this, this is sort of the conclusion of our discussion was that Trump claims that he won the election, and actually that he won it by a substantial margin, that's the claims as far as I've been able to understand them.
To believe that, this is what you have to believe:
(1) you have to believe that the electoral system in the United States is broken to the degree that fraud is widespread and pervasive and of sufficient magnitude to move an election,
(2) you have to believe that people as close to Trump as Mike Pence have become part of a conspiratorial network or have been shut down by people who are able to put sufficient pressure on him,
(3) you have to believe that the judiciary in the United States which I believe has ruled something like 60 times against his claims and one time in favour, you have to believe that it's become uncontrollably corrupt, even on the Republican side, even when those Republicans were nominated by Trump or Trump's people, and,
(4) you have to believe that the only person standing on moral high ground, through all of this, has been Trump.
Each of those propositions seems to me to have a low probability of truth, and their combined probability is infinitesimally small.
But, there's widespread support for Trump's claims that he won the election and was robbed of it."
(I've added the numbers to the list for clarity, and removed some of his stuttering of words).
Gad Saad dodges Jordan's question of whether he believes in election fraud, and they never return to it later in the discussion.
We do have some extra benefit of hindsight, in seeing TIME magazine's admission of guilt of the "conspiracy", but even so, I'd wager that the vast majority of us, prior to having seen the TIME piece, believed (and still believe) that election fraud was widespread enough to overturn the election.
Trying to put myself in Jordan's shoes, or someone like him, if I had known nothing about the details of the election fraud, and, were at least partially asleep, his argument would actually sound convincing. He says it with such a level of confidence, despite seemingly not having looked at the evidence, and paints election fraud believers as conspiracy nuts, basically.
So, a question for the community.
How do we convince someone, as intelligent as Jordan, of the election fraud, if they don't seem particularly interested in looking at the evidence, and, have already passed judgment on it as a "(crazy) conspiracy theory"?
Source footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_RrYz85E1A (Douglas Murray interview; ~43 mins in, Douglas begins to bring up the topic of elections & election fraud, Jordan weighs in at: ~45min 45s, ~48mins 15s, ~49mins 45s, ~1hr 5mins, ~1hr 8mins, ~1hr 20mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBcKlBaaoc (Gad Saad interview; ~9mins 50s in, Jordan begins the above quote about his thoughts on the election fraud)
This dude is obviously bad news if he can't see something this blatantly obvious.
I doubt it has anything to do with him losing his mind or a misunderstanding.
I honestly believe it is ignorance, him being out of touch.
Even with topics not related to election fraud, during the interview he seemed a bit behind, having a hard time grasping what's going on with the Left with woke-ism.
James Lindsay has surpassed him as an academic thought leader on the Leftist ideology.
I agree, I believe he is misinformed on this topic and, like deadbeatnik, I hold an infinitesimal amount of knowledge, so I'll allow it too
Indeed. It is unfortunate that this will colour all of his future analysis of the Right though, if he doesn't get informed. If you watch the videos, you'll see clearly that he believes much of the Right to be crazy/paranoid conspiracy people at the moment.