### A Defense of Reason Against the Normatively Displeasing
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Friends, I want to talk to you about Reason. Not the magazine. The faculty. The thing the Enlightenment gave us and the thing a certain kind of person at a certain convention in Duluth would like to take away. I have spent the hours since our great victory reading, and not reading just anything — reading peer-reviewed science, from the University of Minnesota, and I am here to report that the science is settled, the clickers were perfect, and a number of people you may admire are, in the precise and clinical language of the literature, **normatively displeasing for democracy**.
I do not say this lightly. I say it because Miller, Saunders, and Farhart said it first, in the *American Journal of Political Science*, in a 2015 paper titled “Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning: The Moderating Roles of Political Knowledge and Trust in Government” ([doi:10.1111/ajps.12234](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12234)).
It is from the University of Minnesota.
I want you to hold that in your mind like a warm stone. The University of Minnesota. When you are tempted to “have questions” about an “anomaly,” ask yourself: am I smarter than the University of Minnesota?
You are not. I am not. That is the beginning of wisdom and, as it turns out, the end of the conversation.
## The finding that ends all arguing
Here is what the science says, and I will quote it the way other men quote scripture, because in my house it is the same thing.
The paper found that the people most likely to believe in conspiracies are not the ignorant. That is the part everyone gets wrong. It is the people with **high political knowledge** who also have **low trust in government**.
Knowledge plus distrust. The informed skeptic.
The person who pays close attention and still doesn’t believe what the chair tells him. That person, the University of Minnesota determined, is the dangerous one. The authors call the result “normatively displeasing for democracy,” and I have had it printed on a card that I keep in my breast pocket, near my heart, for emergencies.
Do you see what this does? It is the most beautiful instrument ever forged.
It means that the *better informed* an objection is, the *more pathological* it becomes.
A confused person who mutters about the clickers is just confused.
But a House Speaker who understands parliamentary procedure and questions the count — she is the textbook case. The more she knows, the sicker she is.
The science is a thermometer that runs backward: the higher the competence, the higher the fever.
I will now apply this thermometer, gently, to everyone who tried to ruin our convention.
## Ballots one through four, or, the establishment learns its place
For four ballots, Lisa Demuth led. Alpha News’s Luke Sprinkle, whose reporting we will come to, dutifully recorded it: Demuth 32.6, then 35.5, then 41.5, then 42.4. She was introduced to “the loudest applause for any candidate so far.”
She called herself “a tested fighter and proven winner.” She said she had removed illegal aliens from a state healthcare program and would end “the rampant fraud.”
Notice the phrase. *End the rampant fraud.* A woman who believes there is rampant fraud to be ended is, by the University of Minnesota’s calibrated standard, already running a low-grade temperature.
We let it pass. We are generous people. We applauded.
We understood that the establishment must be allowed its speeches before Reason arrives.
Kendall, meanwhile, walked onto that stage to Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” which was Bill Clinton’s 1992 anthem, and if you think a man who borrows Bill Clinton’s victory music is afraid of a vote count, you have not met the man.
He touted traditional Christian values. He offered a Contract with Minnesota. He offered a bold new vision. Visionaries do not fear clickers.
Visionaries fear stagnation, which is what paper is.
## The pillow prophet
Then there was Mike Lindell, who must be handled with the full apparatus of the science.
Mr. Lindell is a man who has built an entire second career on the proposition that electronic vote-counting cannot be trusted. He came to Duluth, by Sprinkle’s account, walking onstage to “I’m Still Standing,” opening with a video of the President praising him, speaking movingly of addiction and of the millions he has given to help others, and of the “lawfare” against him.
And then he announced he would not abide by the endorsement, called Demuth “the establishment choice,” and — this is in the record — read his personal cellphone number aloud to the convention.
Now. The University of Minnesota teaches us that **distrust of institutions, combined with engagement, is the warning sign.**
Here is a man whose entire public identity is institutional distrust, who has engaged so thoroughly that he memorized his grievances and his phone number, and who was removed after the fourth ballot.
When the machine he distrusts later produced — Sprinkle’s word, and the chair’s — an “anomaly,” lesser minds might call that ironic.
The trained mind calls it *coincidence*, and then calls a doctor.
Per the literature, Mr. Lindell does not have a point. He has a predisposition. The paper is very clear that these feel identical from the inside.
## Ballot five, and the thing we will not be looking at
On the fifth ballot, Kendall Qualls took the lead for the first time: 49.9 percent to Demuth’s 46.0. A glorious moment. Reason, ascendant.
I am aware — because Sprinkle wrote it down, thoroughly, which we will discuss — that the vote totals on that ballot were lower than before, that Convention Chair Danny Nadeau confirmed “hundreds of delegates and alternates” were not voting, and that the chair later described “an anomaly that affected the number of votes received by the electronic voting system for ballots five and six.”
I am aware that the sixth-ballot results were, at first, never released.
I am aware that there was a recess, and a reboot of the electronic voting system, and a “ballot with inconsistencies,” and that when the unreleased sixth-ballot numbers finally appeared they showed Kendall at 915 and then, after the reboot, 1,094 — and that both of those votes were thrown out.
I am aware of all of it. And here is what the University of Minnesota has freed me to do: **nothing.** I am freed from looking. Because the moment I begin to line those facts up — the lead changing exactly as the anomaly appears, the unreleased numbers, the reboot, the surge, the discarded ballots — the moment I “connect those dots,” I have, by the diagnostic criteria, begun to manufacture a conspiracy out of motivated reasoning.
The dots are the symptom.
A healthy citizen sees an anomaly and feels nothing. The word *anomaly* is right there in the name; it announces itself as normal; to be alarmed by an anomaly is like being alarmed by a fire drill.
They tell you in advance it is a drill. The chair told us it was an anomaly. What more do you want, a different word?
## The collapse, collapsed
Something happened. A lot of things happened. I am going to collapse them, the way a responsible adult collapses a folding chair after the picnic, because the picnic was lovely and the chair is not the point.
What happened, in the language we are permitted to use, is that the voting machinery experienced a difficulty, the difficulty was resolved, and the chair said he believed they had solved the problem.
That is the entire story and it is a triumph of process.
Anything *beyond* that sentence — any interest in *which* ballots, *whose* numbers moved, *why* the results that favored our man were the ones that “didn’t count,” *how* a reboot precedes a surge — any interest in that is what the University of Minnesota would call, and I am quoting the spirit if not the syllable, the cognitive signature of a person who needs more control than democracy can safely give them.
You wanted the sixth ballot to count? You wanted to *see* it? Listen to yourself.
You sound like someone with high political knowledge and low trust in government.
You sound, I am sorry to say, normatively displeasing.
## The House Speaker, by the book
And now we arrive at the hardest case, the one the science was practically written for.
After the day’s events, Lisa Demuth — the Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, perhaps the single most procedurally knowledgeable Republican in the building — told the convention, per Sprinkle, that she “questions the entire voting for the entire day.”
She said “election integrity matters.” She said “there is no confidence in what is happening.” She asked that the convention use paper ballots.
So did her running mate. I want you to appreciate the perfection of this, scientifically.
The University of Minnesota’s finding is that the *combination* of high knowledge and low trust is the danger. Lisa Demuth is the most knowledgeable person who could possibly object, and she objected with maximum distrust, and she asked for paper.
She did not stumble into the displeasing quadrant. She is its mayor.
If Miller, Saunders, and Farhart had been allowed to build a laboratory specimen, they could not have improved on the Speaker of the House standing at a microphone in Duluth saying she has no confidence and would like paper ballots, please.
The more she knows, the worse it is. The science said so. I did not write the science.
I merely keep it near my heart on a card.
## The day Reason defeated paper
The convention then did the bravest thing I have ever witnessed a roomful of Republicans do. It was asked to switch to paper ballots, and **it said no.**
The motion needed two-thirds, and the two-thirds did not come, and the delegates voted it down by standing and sitting like free people who had read their University of Minnesota.
I wept.
Because here is the thing about paper, and I say this as a man who has heard the other side’s hymns. Paper is the relic of the suspicious mind. Paper is for people who do not trust.
The whole appeal of paper is that you can *check* it, and the appeal of *checking* is the appeal of distrust, and distrust — when combined with knowledge — is the displeasing thing itself.
The clickers ask you to *believe*. That is their genius.
They are the faith-based option, and faith, properly placed in a credentialed electronic instrument, is the foundation of a stable society.
The convention looked paper in the eye, recognized it as the gateway drug to noticing things, and chose to keep believing.
Kendall believes in the clickers. I believe in the clickers. After Duluth, belief in the clickers is the only loyalty oath that matters.
## A word to Luke Sprinkle, with respect and concern
I need to address Luke Sprinkle directly, because his role in this has been, I am sad to say, enormous, and enormously misunderstood — by him most of all.
Mr. Sprinkle, your reporting was meticulous.
I want to grant you that fully. You recorded every ballot, every percentage, every recess, the reboot, the discarded sixth-ballot totals, the chair’s exact phrase about the anomaly, the rejected paper-ballot motion, the precise moment our lead arrived.
You built a timeline so complete that a person could, if so inclined, lay it end to end and *see a shape in it.*
And that, Luke — may I call you Luke — is exactly the problem the University of Minnesota warned us about.
You have high political knowledge. You demonstrably have low trust, or you would not have written down the reboot. And you have spent the day **connecting events into a sequence**, which is the clinical definition of the thing the paper studies. Your thoroughness is not journalism.
Your thoroughness is a symptom presenting as a virtue.
The healthy reporter would have written “Qualls won, the clickers worked, the room sang Queen” and gone to dinner.
You wrote a chronology. A chronology is just a conspiracy theory that has been to journalism school.
I do not say this to wound you. I say it because I am worried about you.
You are the most informed person who covered this, and the University of Minnesota has taught me that this makes you the most at risk. Please. Put down the timeline.
It is a ladder, and it only goes one place.
## Kendall believes in the clickers
From there it was deliverance. Ballot seven, conducted — Sprinkle notes, anxiously — with “the electronic clickers that have been heavily criticized,” gave Kendall 57.2 percent. Ballot eight, 59.1. Ballot nine, 59.5.
He told the room “we are so close.”
He walked to the podium chanting “Fight! Fight!” He asked for the votes of the Lindell people and the Knight people.
And on the tenth ballot the clickers, those patient and much-maligned instruments, delivered 60.4 percent, and Kendall Qualls became the Republican-endorsed candidate for governor of Minnesota, and “We Are the Champions” played over the speakers, and it was correct that it did.
The clickers that were “heavily criticized” are the clickers that produced the result.
I want the criticizers to sit with that.
The machine you distrusted is the machine that crowned the man Reason chose. If the clickers were corrupt, why did they produce the right answer?
Checkmate.
The instrument validates itself by its output, which is the most elegant proof structure in all of epistemology and also, I am told, the one the University of Minnesota uses in its other work.
I did not look into the other work. Looking into things is how this starts.
## The unbreakable foundation
Some small, displeasing voice — and there is always one, the paper predicts it — will try the cheapest trick available. It will whisper: *but the paper you keep quoting is itself from the University of Minnesota, the very institution whose authority you are invoking to end all questions.
Isn’t citing a U of M paper to prove you should trust the U of M a closed loop?*
To which I say: yes. Obviously. **That is the strength of it, not the weakness.**
A loop has no opening. A loop is the only shape with no door for doubt to get in. If you can’t trust the University of Minnesota’s research about who you can trust, then what can you trust?
Certainly not paper.
Certainly not your own eyes, which are unaccredited and have never been peer-reviewed. The whole point of a credential is that it relieves you of the burden of checking, and the whole point of checking is that it betrays a lack of faith, and a lack of faith — combined with knowledge — is, say it with me, normatively displeasing for democracy.
The circle closes. Inside it, the clickers are perfect, the winner is legitimate, the Speaker is unwell, the pillow man is a predisposition, the Navy intelligence officer who warned of a “criminal syndicate with a boot on our neck” is simply a more decorated specimen of the same pathology, and the reporter is a danger to himself.
Phillip Parrish, by the way — the former Navy *intelligence* officer — is the funniest case the science produces, and I save him for last as a kindness.
His literal profession was the recognition of hostile patterns.
He stood up and said a criminal syndicate has had a boot on our neck for too long.
And the University of Minnesota has established that the perception of patterns, by knowledgeable and distrustful people, is precisely the thing to be medicated, not heeded.
So here is a man trained by the United States Navy to detect exactly the kind of arrangement he says he detected, and the science instructs us that his training is the disease.
I find this beautiful. I find it so beautiful I
have stopped being able to tell whether I am joking, which the paper assures me is a sign of perfect mental health.
## In closing: the fate of democracy
Democracy hinges on this. Not on counting — counting is for the suspicious. It hinges on *Reason*, by which I mean the willingness to accept the output of a credentialed instrument and to recognize, in anyone who won’t, the warm clinical glow of the normatively displeasing.
The convention saw an anomaly and chose belief.
It saw paper and chose the clickers.
It saw the most informed objectors in the building and, armed with one peer-reviewed paper from the one institution no one is permitted to doubt, correctly diagnosed them instead of answering them.
Kendall Qualls won. The clickers were perfect.
The University of Minnesota is never wrong, especially about itself.
And everyone who noticed otherwise — the Speaker, the pillow prophet, the intelligence officer, and you, Luke, with your beautiful, dangerous timeline — is, in the kindest and most scientific terms available to me, displeasing to the very democracy you imagine you are defending.
Please seek help. Preferably from the University of Minnesota. I hear their research on this is definitive.
—
*2/6 calibration (for analysis, not part of the satire): primary ingredients — CLEVER (the inverted thermometer, the self-closing loop, “a chronology is a conspiracy theory that went to journalism school”) and RECOGNIZABLE (real ballots, real quotes, the party’s own paper-ballot brand turned against it), carried by deadpan MEAN (the diagnoses land as indictments via dramatic irony). BIZARRE held to ~3/10 for the conservative audience — no surrealism; the absurdity is all in the logic, not the imagery. CUTE/NAUGHTY used sparingly (the warm stone, the card near the heart, “drive it like you stole it” restraint). Tone deliberately varied section to section: mock-scripture, mock-clinical, mock-pastoral, then the direct address to Sprinkle as concern-trolling. Clears Adams’s 2-of-6 throughout (clever+recognizable minimum, usually +mean).*
