I Should be Happy About the Election

I mean, right? Democracy and All That?

My friends are happy about this election. Finally, they will say, our long national nightmare is over. They have slayed the evil beast that took non-stop attacks 24/7 on social media, endless angry op-eds in high minded outlets, hearings and indictments and impeachments all to shut up a man who said too much.

I should be happy about this election, right? Established order at last. Finally, a woman — and not just a woman but a woman of color - is Vice President, making history. So yay right?

(Twitter says: easy for you to say privileged white woman so-called ally racist racist racist!)

I like Joe Biden. I believed in Joe Biden. I am okay with a Biden presidency. I like Kamala Harris. I think she will be a fine leader. The only problem is that I have seen too much and now I can’t unsee it.

I should be happy about this election since I cheered on Hillary Clinton all through 2016 and was so depressed after the election I could not get up off the couch for almost a year. I championed Biden back before it was cool, before everyone forced their support for a guy they could barely stand. I was there, cheering Joe on.

I should be happy about this election because finally, the racists are bring driven out like a dirt stain on an otherwise clean batch of laundry. Because they are racists, right? I mean, CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR and PBS and TWITTER, my god, TWITTER all said Trump was a racist and his supporters were all racist and if you knew a Trump supporter you were a racist and so you can’t be my friend! They told us that so we have to believe them, right?

I should be happy about this election because the celebrities will be happy. VOTE! They all pleaded. VOTE you miserable peasants. We know better than you could possibly ever know because we live these lives of privilege and we can’t be bummed out that there are poor people who are being fooled by Trump. We use steel straws! We have solar panels and you are a terrible person if you do not vote the way we tell you to. You can’t be a Taylor Swift fan unless you vote for the Democrats and Chelsea Handler’s will keep showing her chest if you don’t vote.

I should be happy about this election because I’m a lifelong Democrat. Because I have fought for climate change and women’s rights and what else? I can’t even remember now. I need someone like Rachel Maddow to explain it to me. So, my friend told me, Biden will implement climate regulations immediately. And, I think back but do not say, a Republican is going to come along in four years to remove them. I think Democrats actually think they won this election. They did not win this election. It was completely and totally rigged in their favor and whatever it was Trump did can’t be undone.

Trump will still be here - just a tweet away - just a Fox News interview away. He will be here because whatever it was he has started (populism?) isn’t going away. In fact, Trump showed more strength in the election than anyone in the media ever predicted. There are many more candidates who will use the Trump model going forward, who will have the ear of the people and not all of them will be white. The Democrats are on a losing path - they just don’t realize it.

All this election did was prove to hundreds of millions of people just how corrupt the media empire is - the very thing Trump told them. We all saw it with our own eyes. We watched them lie and gaslight for months. Trump might be out of the White House but it’s hard to see how he didn’t win that war against the press. They took a credibility hit they will likely never get back.

They wanted Trump out and for four straight years they defied the people who continued to support him. They donned the hats of activists and forgot what journalism actually means. They cowed under pressure from Woke Twitter, going along with whatever Lord of the Flies demanded. Trump supporters weren’t the majority but they were just as American as anyone else. And they weren’t all racist whites huddled in the Ozarks clinging to rifles with KKK stickers on the wall.

Not for one second or one day did the press and the Democrats give Trump or his supporters - one minute of praise for anything he did. Not the economy, not his foreign policy, not how he could reach people they never could or ever would or ever will. You will think what we want you to think about Trump. That was the directive.

They took every joke he made literally. They never covered the rallies as they actually were. You can tell if you watch them for yourself. You will see a funny, much more humble Trump than the media portrays speaking directly to the people. Yes, they chanted. Yes, they prefer offensive things Trump says to slick and polished speech by politicians but there was real joy there, and hope. Trump tapped into something very rarely seen in American politics that media could never capture even if they wanted to.

Watching Trump’s rallies was, for me, a wake up call that unmasked the media’s lies about him and his supporters. They see them as KKK rallies - no joke, they really do. But they aren’t. I dove into Trump world and for weeks I tried to see what the media had been telling me, what the Lincoln Project republicans had been telling me about Trump. But I never saw it. I saw a guy his supporters loved because of his failures and his frailties because those frailties matched their own. They saw a guy who was not perfect and didn’t pretend to be. Trump was unpretentious - in the end, that’s really what it comes down to. No, watching Trump World only gave me a clearer understanding of why his supporters love him so much.

None of this means I would have voted for Trump - but I still like to think I live in a free country and not one under the thumb of big corporate mind control. Boy, was I wrong.

(Twitter says: lying white woman of privilege you do support Trump just admit it! Admit it! Racist racist racist!)

The press gaslighted the people over the protests. Over the rise of extremism on the left. Over the riots at the protests. They lied about COVID - yes even that - to bring down Trump. CNN took the lead by obsessing on COVID every single day until the protests hit and then they just miraculously pretended there was no more COVID. Until the protests died down and then it was COVID COVID COVID and it was all Trump’s fault. All of it.

The Lincoln Project republicans had their strategies all laid out but they weren’t working. Until COVID. And then they redirected and they hit Trump with being a murderer of 200,000+ Americans.

That was the lie we all just lived through and even then Biden BARELY won. Barely. That should tell the media and the Democrats just how little people trust them anymore and after this election you can bet people will trust them even less.

I see my friends making sweeping judgments about Trump supporters that are just flat out wrong. Wrong on every possible level. Does he have white supremacist supporters? Who knows. That’s what the media says. I guess we have to believe them. But he has a lot of different kinds of supporters - in fact, the only group he lost ground with this time around was white men. Go figure.

OUT DAMN FACTS! We are living in a post-truth era. You have no choice but to go along with it or you will be shunned. Facts are your enemy.

But I should be happy about this election. Right? I mean the good guys won, right? I should be happy about an election that I predicted way back in 2019! Before anyone else did! I should be happy that Democrats will be dancing in the streets and putting critical race theory back in schools and the Woketopia will reign supreme. Yay!

(Twitter says: that’s right! We FINALLY canceled Trump and thus, we can cancel anyone. You’re next.)

I should be happy about this election. I know I should be. I’m trying. I really am. But it doesn’t matter what I think. I am just some irrelevant middle aged woman raging against a machine - a machine that has no idea who I am and doesn’t care. It just needs my data to make me buy things and stay active on social to help Jack drive up his IPO. At least I escaped Facebook.

I guess the truth is I naively went into this thinking Biden could beat Trump in a fair fight. I didn’t think I would see so many big moneyed forces - including Wall Street, which should tell you a lot - rise up to bring down Trump. It wasn’t Biden that beat Trump. He was the candidate in name only. His legacy was all that was required. Kamala Harris gave pro-Hillary Democrats something meaningful to fight for - history made at last, kind of, sort of.

But it doesn’t matter.

I should be happy about this election and I would be if I didn’t feel so disgusted about what we just lived through. I know that the media made Trump and then they brought him down. They made him, profited off of him, and then used that power to rig an election in a country that has absolutely no power against such a massive machine.

This was the series finale of the Trump show that they created. They made Trump into the villain of that reality show - a show that its viewers were duped into thinking described this whole country. But there was a whole other part of it that didn’t watch that show. And they loved having a guy in the White House who SAW them, let alone fought for them.

I SHOULD BE HAPPY. I know I should. Maybe someday I will be. Maybe Biden will surprise me and be a good leader who helps bring the country together. I guess that is the tiny crumb to cling to by the end.

I guess you should always ask yourself whether or not you really do want to pull back the curtain. You might not like what you see. Maybe Oz serves you better as an Emerald City full of luster and hope and made up mythic figures who have all of the answers to life’s problems . It is true that ignorance is bliss.

Yes I know. I am not allowed to say all of this. But I’m saying it anyway. Damn the torpedoes.