“Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
In 2016, Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States. Like all presidents, he was elected to do the best job he could in service of the American people. Our elections are meant to tell our government what we want. But somewhere along the way, we’ve lost touch with what this country was designed to be - a Constitutional Republic.
We don’t go through the trouble of elections to have them systematically undermined because the administrative state, and an elite ruling class, don’t like dealing with someone they can’t control. We don’t spend four years throwing everything at our elected leaders to see what sticks. We don’t send our Department of Justice to raid the home of a former president to “find something.” We don’t punish our elected leaders just for the crime of winning.
We don’t indict them on ticky-tack procedural matters because the person now in the White House is too weak and too unpopular to win a second term. In this country, it’s supposed to be a fair contest between those who win the primary elections. Putting that heavy of a thumb on the scale is corruption on a level we’ve never seen, at least not in my lifetime.
What’s next? Is every outsider politician going to get the same treatment? Will they continue to pervert the justice system, weaponize the DOJ and play partisan politics on the people’s dime? We all deserved much better than that. It is long past time to rise and vote them out.
From Tablet Magazine’s must-read opus:
Two criteria define membership in the ruling class. First, as Michael Lind has written, it is made up of people who belong to a “homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta.” America has always had regional elites; what is unique about the present is the consolidation of a single, national ruling class.
Second, to be a member of the ruling class is to believe that only other members of your class can be allowed to lead the country. That is to say, members of the ruling class refuse to submit to the authority of anyone outside the group, whom they disqualify from eligibility by casting them as in some way illegitimate.
So much of what Jacob Siegel covered in that brilliant piece was coming to me fast and hard in the darkest days of 2020. In the middle of all of it, as I watched a unified mob of bottomless rage and dehumanization coming from my side all aimed at one man and those who supported him, the words that tumbled out of my mouth were these, “we’re not the good guys anymore.”
We were the side that convicted Trump as a racist and a rapist and had certainty in that. It drove the media narrative for months, spreading like a virus through the minds of the young. They were already afflicted with a kind of mass hysteria that hit the Left around the time of the rise of the Tea Party.
People rising up to challenge Barack Obama? What could it possibly be if not racism?
But this delusion that racism was coming for Obama began to trickle down into the public consciousness. The early stages of a full-blown mass hysteria event began to percolate.
Evergreen College was a warning sign of what was to come. Many of us didn’t realize, though, how bad it would get. How bad it is now.
Before the election, the hysteria over Trump and racism boiled over into actual violence. When people talk about the Proud Boys showing up with guns, much of that was because of the ongoing attacks on Trump supporters. And they believed they had to offer them protection, but now they were racists too. Racists, racists everywhere.
When Trump won and the violent protests erupted, there was this sense by people in our government that all of it was okay, allowable, and understandable. Now think about Evergreen and put the two together. Even if you think it was allowable when Trump won, it became allowable whenever they didn’t get their way. And I’m not talking about our Constitutional right to protest. I’m talking about violence and intimidation.
And, of course, since they’ve now used January 6th to flip the script, they’ve successfully managed to silence dissent by scaring Trump voters away from their own constitutional rights to protest. They know they’re going on a list, and the FBI won’t be far behind. Does that sound like America to you?
The violent riots from the Left will continue and even escalate because they have been told over and over that it’s allowable as long as they see themselves as the “good guys” and the other side as the “bad guys.”
The crowds showing up to protest the laws in many of the red states banning gender-affirming care or demanding gun control illustrate perfectly how this new brand of a protester from the Left thinks that all they have to do is what they did at Evergreen and in the Summer of 2020 and the government will meet their demands because they always have. But what happens if the government doesn’t?
Captain Ahab
“Wait to read the charges,” is what the American people are being advised ahead of Tuesday’s indictment of the first American president. A Black man will finally bring down Trump in their ongoing fantasy melodrama. But really, he’s more like Captain Ahab on a doomed mission to, at long last, capture the elusive Moby-Dick.
Most white people in power now hide behind Black people, and they’re surely doing that now with Bragg, who has become both their hero and their fall guy.
All of those Great Men and unmarried successful career women are now reduced to the color of their skin. Their legacies now depend on being good allies, stepping out of the spotlight, and hiding behind a person of color for absolution.
Sure, there’s still a white guy as President of the United States, but he’s just one election win away from stepping down and putting in power the first Black/Asian “who identifies as” female President of the United States.
And there you have it. A grand plan. A legacy, at long last. Joe Biden will not be forgotten. He’ll always be remembered as one of the “good guys.” And no one will disabuse him of that notion as the scene fades to black.
No matter what else happens, this indictment has exposed them for who they really are, and that means they might win the battle, but they won’t win the war.
The only people who should decide whether Donald Trump should represent them are the American people. But if Democrats can’t find exciting candidates who can beat Trump that is on them.
Enough is Enough.
In each episode of mass hysteria throughout history, there comes a time when it’s obvious the witch hunters have gone too far. This was accusing the Governor’s wife of witchcraft in Salem in 1692. How ludicrous, thought the governor, after 200 people had been accused and 20 of them died using something called “spectral evidence.” That is what you can’t see but can only imagine. Once the Governor eliminated it, the witch trials collapsed.
When Joseph McCarthy went after the military, Eisenhower saw he’d gone too far and set about undoing the hysteria infecting American life, making us accuse one another and fracturing our country. People somehow found the courage to confront McCarthy, and eventually, the hysteria evaporated.
Now, with the indictment of a former US President, there is the sense, at long last, that they’ve gone too far. Even some who hate Trump are starting to speak out, though not many are on the Left. One thing we know for sure is that history will not be kind because it never is.
And as the Nicole Wallaces and Rachel Maddows and Joe Scarboroughs and Lawrence O’Donnells, and journalist blue-checks on Twitter wait out Tuesday’s mug shot, they are starting to look like themselves finally. Masks off, eyes glistening, mouths watering. It’s like that scene in Carrie when Nancy Allen can’t wait to pull the rope and dump the pig’s blood on the prom queen.
But Carrie was a cautionary tale, an “eff around and find out” kind of story that warns bullies that you can sometimes take things too far. And everyone ends up rooting for Carrie.
I learned almost everything from movies. They shaped who I would become as a young woman. I learned most of all that I wanted to be on the side of the good guys, like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, Sally Field in Norma Rae, and Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome, and of course, Michael Douglas as Andy Shepard in An American President.
Aaron Sorkin’s template for the Great Man defined what the Democrats would be going forward.
We were the good guys, and they, the Republicans, were the bad guys. It should shock no one that this film was directed by none other than Rob Reiner, who can now be seen living in obscurity, marinating in the insular fame of blue-check Twitter, as he bleats his pronouncements into the void and waits for the cavalcade of hearts and RTs.
They used to be the party of the working class, now they’ve lost them. They used to pride themselves on being outsiders. Now they’re the very definition of insiders. Their obsession with Trump has hollowed them out, transforming them into nothing more than a superficial shell that still takes the shape of what it used to be, but when you reach for it, it shatters into a million tiny pieces.
Trump, who never postured moral superiority, never sold himself as a “good guy.” But instead, sold himself as a fighter who could take it and take it and take it and take it some more and remain standing. Imagine any of them, from Rob Reiner to Joe Biden, having to deal with just one day as Trump.
And this indictment is the chef’s kiss. It proves everything Trump said about them was right. It proves how punitive, petty, and corrupt the Democrats have become and how delusional. For Trump, it’s a long low softball down center plate that he’s about to turn into a grand slam.
Heading into 2023, our government looks a lot less like Sorkin’s An American President and much more like a little-seen movie directed by Clint Eastwood called Absolute Power. There are no heroes to be had here, just a corrupt government of criminals protected and insulated from justice.
Back then, Saturday Night Live was willing to challenge the most powerful people in the world, including Bill and Hillary.
But minds like that, and like Clint Eastwood’s, aren’t grown in America anymore. Instead, we get them mushy, coddled, and afraid. Helicopter parents and Big Pharma micromanage them. They are told “words are harm” so don’t read Dr. Seuss. Don’t read Raold Dahl, or Agatha Christie - not until we wipe clean any evidence that people were ever worthy of mistakes.
Don’t read Mark Twain or Flannery O’Connor or Harper Lee. Steer clear of movies directed by problematic men. Never watch Chinatown or Annie Hall. Clean your mind, make it pure, so that all you can see is what we put in front of you, cleansed and compliant, sensitivity reader-approved.
Who could forget Saturday Night Live after Hillary lost? They took a side even then that said we’re the "#resistance, and those on the outside, left behind by our culture, our government, and Hollywood, will now spend four years being mocked by us. They will be made to pay for daring to participate in Democracy.
I was listening to Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone and thinking about the real resistance. Us. Those on the outside who are now onto the game:
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
You’re invisible now. You’ve got no secrets to conceal.
I was thinking about a mind like Dylan’s, and how we no longer live in a country that would find him, celebrate him, and sell his songs. He would have to fit into some kind of dogmatic aspirational definition of the America the utopians want, defined only by his skin color, his gender expression, his sexuality, and if he somehow managed to break free from it and wrote songs about them, he would be exiled.
This is the house the Democrats built. This is the suffocating hole in the ground they want all of us to jump into. They want us to like all of that fake euphoria because all of them have been saved. The price we will be made to pay is to renounce our freedom to vote for the person we believe best represents us. The price we’ll have to pay is everything.
This indictment, like so many accusations and charges against Trump, is based on “spectral evidence,” imagined intent by people who genuinely believe they can see witches.
They think this indictment makes them look like the “good guys” they have pretended to be for so many decades. And maybe they were once. But now, everyone sees just how weak they are, how sad it all has become, how much they’ve distorted and perverted American Democracy just to push out the guy the working-class voters wanted instead of them.
All that tells me is that they don’t know this country anymore. They don’t know who most of us are out here in the outer regions, who are looking at their shrinking bubble of totalitarianism and are much happier building a gulag this side of paradise, and we’re ready to use our vote to tell them exactly what we think of them.
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