DECLINE AND DEMOCRATIZATION: Jim Clyburn's neighbor makes a strange claim!

FRIDAY, MAY 22, 2026

No country for democratized men: Is it possible that the South Carolina legislature is redistricting the wrong man?

As we noted in Wednesday's afternoon post, the South Carolina House has created a new map aimed at eliminating Rep. Jim Clyburn's "majority minority" 6th congressional district. If the state's Senate goes along with the plan, Rep. Clyburn could be out after 34 years in the Congress.  

(Or possibly not, of course.)  

We ask an important question today—could the South Carolina GOP be trying to dump the wrong man? We base our question upon this report about Rep. Ralph Norman, Rep. Clyburn's next-door neighbor from the 5th congressional district:

GOP Rep. Says January 6 Was ‘Made Up’: ‘That Was A Staged Thing’   

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said on Thursday that the January 6 insurrection was “made up,” claiming that the event was “staged” by those who opposed President Donald Trump. 

Norman was asked by press about the Department of Justice’s new $1.776 billion fund set up as part of a settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the 2019 leak of his tax returns. The Department claimed the fund was meant “for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress,” leading many to question whether Jan. 6 rioters could receive money through the fund.

When pressed on this possibility, Norman claimed that the insurrection had not taken place in the way it's remembered, seen on video, and spoken about by those who saw or actively took part in the riot. 

You can read the full report yourselves. You can also watch the videotape, which includes this exchange:

REPORTER (5/21/26): Your colleagues, though, your Republican colleagues, ran for their life and barricaded themselves in their chamber. You think they were acting?

NORMAN: No, there was a riot there, but it was a self-made riot by members who hate Trump. It was made up. In my opinion. 

So said Clyburn's neighbor. We'll guess that he may have watched too many Tucker Carlson tapes—the carefully curated video clips which Carlson aired, night after night, on the Fox News Channel.  

Who the heck is Rep. Norman? For all we know, he may be the world's nicest person. The leading authority on his life offers this basket of insights:   

Ralph Norman

Ralph Warren Norman Jr. (born June 20, 1953) is an American politician and real estate developer who has served as the U.S. representative for South Carolina's 5th congressional district since 2017. His district includes most of the South Carolina side of the Charlotte metropolitan area, along with outer portions of the Upstate and Midlands. A member of the Republican Party, Norman served as the South Carolina state representative for the 48th district from 2005 to 2007 and from 2009 to 2017.

Norman won a special election after Mick Mulvaney vacated his seat in Congress upon being appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget by President Donald Trump. As of 2019, with a net worth of $18.3 million, Norman is the 28th wealthiest member of Congress. Govtrack.us ranked Norman as the most conservative member of the 117th Congress as of February 2023.   

He advocated for the implementation of martial law to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden in January 2021.   

And so on from there. For the record, those carefully curated neighboring districts have been engineered to present disparate profiles like these:  

South Carolina 5th congressional district (Norman):
White: 64.1%
Black: 23.8%
R+11

South Carolina 6th congressional district (Clyburn):
White: 41.6%
Black: 46.8%
D+13   

We'll take a wild guess with respect to one topic. The 6th district's representative probably has the clearer idea of what happened on January 6.

This is no country for democratized humans, our youthful analysts can sometimes be heard to exclaim. They're referring to the so-called "democratization of media"—the rise of the new media platforms which generated this new sociological state of affairs:   

Every nitwit a king!  

Talk radio arrived on the national scene in 1988, courtesy of Rush Limbaugh. As of March 1994, Limbaugh was telling a massive national audience that "Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and the body was then taken to Fort Marcy Park."

(By happenstance, we heard that fateful broadcast live as we motored through West Virginia.)

"Cable news" was already present. But soon there were three major "cable news" channels, and two of them eventually went largely or wholly partisan.

The Internet had arrived on the scene; it too went largely partisan. And then, at some point, the podcasters came into our lives. 

We humans weren't built for deluges like this:

Every podcaster a king!

At Fox, they let Tucker run his con about January 6, night after night after night. They disappeared the reams of videotape in which police officers were being beaten. 

Millions of Ralph Normans were produced in this way. Given the way we humans are wired, they frequently believed every word.  

(Also, people believed that President Obama had been born in Kenya. They believed that "death panels" lay at the heart of the fiendish Obamacare plan. People believed that the 2020 White House election had been stolen. Our human wiring makes us highly susceptible to bogus tribal belief, pretty much all the way down.)

We humans! We humans weren't built to evaluate the welter of claims this "democratization" dropped on our heads. According to all the experts, we human were wired for different ends:

We were wired to split into warring tribes and to craft and believe our own tribe's narratives!

The Reds believed that January 6 was staged by House members who hated President Trump. We Blues believed that the southern border was shut up tight, and we also believed that President Biden was actually fit as a fiddle.

Everyone else could see that these claims were wrong, but we Blues frequently fell in line behind a million other tribal assertions—tribal assertions which sent President Trump back to the White House for the current second term.  

Before he died this week, former congressman Barney Frank discussed the various ways we Blues went astray. Next week, we'll be looking at what he said, and we'll also be looking at Michelle Obama's recent comments about the (understandable) feelings of many Trump voters.  

While we're at it, we'll be looking at Helen Lewis' recent cover report in The Atlantic—her essay about "masculinism." (She failed to mention the ugly nightly fury of the Fox News Channel's Greg Gutfeld, whose undisguised loathing of the people he thinks of as women won't seem to let him go.) 

We'll also consider the state of Florida's new high school history curriculum, a curriculum the state will offer in place of the pre-existing Advanced Placement U.S. History course.  

We humans weren't built for democratization, or so our young analysts tell us. And, to a certain extent, they can sometimes almost seem to be at least partially right!

As a general matter, we Blues can see the shape of the problem when we look at the Reds. But we struggle to see the shape of the problem when we take a quick look at ourselves. 

Along with the sudden democratization, we were hit with a president who is almost surely mentally ill and/or in some sort of cognitive decline. We remind you that people who are (severely) mentally ill didn't choose to be mentally ill. But this last factor, layered atop the rampant democratization, gives our ardent analysts sick nightly dreams of demise.

Eventually, we'll return to what Rep. Clyburn recently said—to his surprising claim that Democrats might win three (3!) House seats in South Carolina if his district gets broken up. 

(A major South Carolina Republican warned his colleagues in the GOP that the number could be two!)

Rep. Clyburn may not have believed what he said, but he plainly said it. More broadly, his statement points in an intriguing direction as we fight through the profoundly unhelpful Blue agitprop which has followed the Callais decision.

(It's the stolen valor which gets our goat. That is plainly not a comment about Rep. Clyburn.)

The United States is no country for democratized men! So President Putin has sometimes said, in slightly different words. 

Beyond that, President Xi may think that we're a nation in decline. If he does believe such a thing, does any sane person, looking around, really think that the amazingly tall Asian strongman might not have a hint of a point?