Eric S. Raymond is an open source legend, author of the essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
Attached is his opinion on the US elections which I consider very valuable.
by @esrtweet
I hear Kamala Harris has conceded. For just a moment, I'm going to abandon the high-decoupling rationalist stance I normally post from and talk about what I personally wanted from this election and now hope I might get.
For me, a good outcome in this election meant not Trump winning, but his enemies losing.
I'm not MAGA, and not a tribal conservative of either the old-school or new-school kind. I'm a libertarian, and have some serious differences with substance with Trump and his partisans.
Also I have never much liked Trump as a person. He's vulgar and under-controlled; he talks and postures too much and, I think the charge that he's a narcissist has some weight. But...he chooses his enemies well.
I will also admit that I think better of Trump now than I did three months ago. He has demonstrated literal courage under fire, which is an important quality in a man who may need to make life or death decisions about the fate of a nation. I went to see him speak, and I saw a man much calmer and more together than I was expecting.
But I'm not really posting about Trump today, and the only other thing I'm going to say about him is that his most valuable quality is that he enrages evil people into unmasking themselves.
I have believed for decades that the central problem of American politics is defeating the Gramscian long march through our institutions. Covert and not-so-covert Marxists have waged a remarkably successful memetic war. it has many manifestations - blatant bias in the mainstream media, welfare statism, DEI, climate alarmism, transgender ideology, open borders - but the goal is always the same. To cripple and destroy the Main Enemy, the United States of America and everyone in it who loves liberty.
Trump's victory is the worst defeat of the Gramscians in my lifetime. They went all-in with an unprecedented campaign of lies, vitriol, hate propaganda, lawfare, and election rigging. He beat them anyway, and for that he has my respect.
What I want from the immediate aftermath of the election is to rejoice in their agonized screaming. What I want from Trump and Republican control of both houses is follow-through:
1. Impose election security measures so we can't be frauded again.
2. Abolition of every federal firearms law and regulation, including the disbandment of the ATF. We must restore the proper Constitutional order in which the government is frightened of the people, not the reverse.
3. Massive cuts in the reach and power of the administrative state. No unelected bureaucrat should ever have the power to effectively make law.
4. A concerted and conscious attempt to drive the Communists and Communist tools out from everywhere that they have burrowed into our institutions, perhaps starting with the complete defunding of any educational institution that harbors academic Marxists.
Yes, I know, many of these people don't know they're Communist tools. I'm past caring. I've been ready to throw them out of helicopters with my own hands since about 2014, hoping against hope that something would happen to make that kind of violence unnecessary.
Now, maybe, we have a path to defeating them peacefully. I'm not sure Trump fully understands this necessity himself, but there are people close to him - notably Elon Musk and Ron Paul - who I'm pretty sure do.
The first thing we need to do is be able to name the enemy. Conservatives have been cowards about this ever since the Army-McCarthy hearings a few years before I was born. They became afraid to speak about or explicitly oppose Communist infiltration, and we have been paying an increasing price for that cowardice through my entire lifetime.
Conservatives? MAGA people? If you really want to make America great again, make defeat of the Gramscians your cause. Name the enemy. Expose them. Defeat them. They have crippled, divided, and corrupted us for far too long. It's time to take our country back.
