Damn that was a good read. I can’t stand Trump the man, but the lefts insistence on Orwellian type policies and culture is why I voted for him in 2020. They’ve doubled down and I hope people continue to wake up/be red pilled.
Most Americans want to stay fat, dumb, & happy (oops, did I just offend fat, dumb & happy people?)
They get upset when gas prices go through the roof, but don’t pay much attention to egregious violations of the constitution and rule of law. Unless it hits them in the pocketbook.
"A red-pilled America is probably starting to think the reaction to Trump, rather than Trump himself, might be the even bigger threat." Yes, I've often wondered why front row America lost their mind over a man they could vote out 4 years later. Your observation, "once people are dehumanized, as Trump and his supporters have been, there are no limits to what can be done to them," is what disturbs me most.
Jefferson Smith's plea to "love thy neighbor," reminds me of the only rule I had posted in my classroom: Treat your classmates how you want to be treated. A take on "love thy neighbor," it's Golden for a historical reason -- it works.
I am thrilled RCP linked to this piece -- it bears reading and rereading. Thank you, Sasha.
That ridiculous reaction to Trump and the entire state trying to bring him down for made up shit is why I, and I'm sure millions of others voted for him in 2020. Prior to 2016, I could see no circumstance where I would ever vote for him, but Hillary, Obama, and their minions in the media, justice department, and FBI managed to change my mind.
Your response proves the author’s point. More HYSTERIA about Putin, Russia, etc. Go peddle that bull caca somewhere else. People are wise to the lies and we’ve damn well had enough. Come November 8th people in Congress who behave like you are going to get their tickets punched to return to private life again. Grow up.
Ummm... It makes all the difference in the world. Guy who gives shit to the disabled for being disabled is an asshole. The guy who gives shit to everybody regardless of who they are is just how he is. He is not mocking the disabled specifically which was the accusation.
Yes. It does. If Don Rickles only insulted Italians, that would indicate he may be a bigot. He mocked everyone. We knowingly elected Don Rickles as President and that is okay.
(you seem to consistently not grasp why folks who 20 years ago would be your political bedfellows are concerned about the woke movement - which the right is finally starting to copycat, I'm surprised it took them this long .. once you decide censorship or social pressure or the use of one's identity to win an argument is okay to do, when feelings trump the Bill of Rights .. then majority eventually rules. The left started banning Mark Twain and ethnic jokes and "offensive" Halloween costumes two decades ago .. and the majority ethnicities did not return the fire (eg hillbillies didn't complain about Redneck jokes). But now they are and now they do and the establishment is shocked .. just shocked. - so here is reminder of how it used to be and could be again if we get over ourselves.)
There is a common belief that the Left went crazy when Trump became president. But, the reality is they started on that path to lunacy when Obama arrived on the scene.
Look at the crazy in the women's eyes and the submissive supplication from the men. Look at the communist-style graphics in the opening scene. Listen to the pledges of loyalty to dear leader. The Fourth Turning started in 2009.
I hadn't seen that before, but wow - as one of the commenters said - it goes full 1984 at the end.
What's amazing is how many of the "pledges" in the video would be seen as unacceptable by the Left today. Particularly striking is Michael Strahan saying, "I pledge to consider myself an American, not an African-American." Amazing. Such a great time capsule piece - thanks for sharing.
This train got rolling during the first Obama term. If you recall, Bill Daley was Obama's Chief of Staff. He left after a very short tenure because, and I don't recall the exact quote but it is close to this: everything was about politics. (remember - Bill Daley was from the Chicago machine - for someone like him to rue overt politicization is pretty remarkable)
It used to be that good policy made good politics, and that was the route to power. Overall, it worked and power, via the consent of the governed, was earned. When Obama ushered in the era of politics above policy, only successful politics was good politics. And with control of the media, all Dem politics are now pre-ordained as successful. Power was no longer earned, it was either taken or fabricated. Power is now mostly fabricated. And thus the loss of consent of the governed.
There are people I love who are caught up in this hysteria. They are genuinely terrified of Trump and people who voted for him. It is very hard for me to find anything I can say that will promote calm, objective thinking. I voted for Trump in 2016, and they can see that I'm not a monster, but that doesn't help. This essay might help.
I don't want people to like or vote for Trump, or think anything at all about him except to see the terrible danger that accompanies hate, the rot that sets in when we nurture the contempt in our hearts towards any human being, when we boast about and take pride in it.
Thank you for this essay. I will send it to some of the people I care about the most in the hope that they can both remember their core solidarity with other human beings and put aside the fear, anger and hatred that now obscures it.
For as dangerous as we've been told Trump is, where is the damage he has caused. He's an unlikeable character, a weasel, a liar, a cheater, and I'm sure plenty of other bad things. I'm still waiting to see all of the negative consequences we've been told that he would cause to kick in.
I have many friends like yours who view him as some major threat. It's amazing that on one hand, they see him as a bumbling moron, an imbecile, and unqualified for office. On the other, they truly believe that he almost became a life-long dictator on 1/6. Many of the same people believe he's holding nuclear secrets to sell, like he could actually pull that off while being with the Secret Service 24/7 and having an extremely public profile.
You don't become or stay successful by lying and cheating in a business environment - only in politics. Our ruling class just loved Trump... until he challenged their hold on power and money which he surely did. From day one they never treated him like a legitimate person much less a duly elected President. Well, he 'returned the fire' and punched back at everyone because they deserved it.
This is one of the most succinct pieces about the history and feelings of the non-partisan-minded, thoughtful-but-not-Trump-deranged person in the Trump era.
It's near-perfect, but I do have some (important) semantic issues I wanted to chime in on. The pill registered, but disgusted democrats/old liberals/"original formula" lefties, et al., are taking is maybe better described as what Matt Taibbi called the "neither pill." I'd maybe go one step further and say it's the "something better has to emerge, and I'll support any efforts towards that something better and stop voting for either of these horrible parties" pill.
I really think calling the modern democratic party, or their newly-minted young, faux-progressive foot soldiers "left" or "far left" is a misnomer. No properly-thinking liberals or leftists of the past would so gleefully support censorship, compelled speech, party unification with the most massively rich corporations in history, using the power of the government to spy on private citizens and/or punish political enemies, the cynical embrace of extreme essentialism over universalism, and/or outright hatred towards farmers, truckers and the working class in general.
The modern cohort of Twitter-brained imbeciles absolutely loves being called "far left." The new flanks of a Republican party, that's quickly and fairly radically overstepping their win-by-default on culture war issues, also loves tarring them "far left," and the feedback loop of continues, into infinity. All of the questionable contrivances that have been being used to describe this young, broken cohort — like "cultural Marxism" — make little sense. If Karl Marx were alive today, does anyone actually believe he'd side with people who'd make laws compelling the use of preferred pronouns over laid off workers, truckers facing byzantine regulations, or top-down policies forcing farmers to go out of business?
I'm no Marxist, and I agree with many prominent thinkers that the old designations of "left" and "right" are becoming meaningless in today's age, but I think what you've so wonderfully written about here — which is tantamount to finding real, true clarity and intelligence in a deeply chaotic time — shouldn't be limited by the outmoded terms that are being wielded like a weapon by the people we're trying to escape.
I do think the identity politics stuff is marxist at its core. The left tried creating a war over class, but it didn't work, so they are giving identity politics a go.
That is the whole point of the privilege argument. If success in life is nothing more than being born with the right plumbing and skin color than success is really nothing more than randomness. And if wealth is randomly and unfairly distributed, then it justifies government confiscation and redistribution, at least in their eyes.
It is marxism, except it uses identity, not class as the lever.
The extreme embrace and exploitation of the outer limits of identity politics — by mostly overeducated rich types who've been in charge of shit for generations — is absolutely moronic and cynical and gross. But we're talking about a group of people closely aligned with controlling levers of government, media and, again, the largest corporations in human history. These are the same people who've exploited division within the lower classes for all of human history. For even the stupidest pseudo-progressive kids on Twitter, mega-corporate culture, and products by Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are inextricable with their identities. That doesn't make any of this "leftist" or "Marxist." Quite the opposite, if you get down to it.
And all of these terms are being used to find and create (and remove) "heretics," so it's best to avoid them. It's not "left wing" or "right wing," it's "idiot wing."
One other thing to note: this is not the same group of of people who have tried to create a class-based politics. The people who exploit identity politics mean to stop a class-based politics from forming by making everyone hate each other. This group will do absolutely anything to stop working black people, working white people, working Hispanic people and working Asian people from voting as a unified block.
Precisely. This is so NOT about socioeconomic class and raising the quality of life for people in the lower SES classes. It is about inciting hate and distrust, in-groups and out-groups, in order to divide the polity and create the need for more authoritarian, centralized power.
That's sort of the thesis of that Martin Gurri book "Revolt of the Public," isn't it? That the way to look at political divisions in today's landscape isn't left wing and right wing, but by those already inside the sort of "circle of world leadership" and those outside of it, and that those inside of it will do anything to keep everyone else out.
A lot of the reaction against the self-described intellectual wing of left-wing politics is totally understandable. There have now been generations of ivory-tower-dwelling smartypants (like Marcuse), who've never so much as mowed a lawn or cleaned a bathtub, deciding to dictate what exactly it is the working classes want, and how they should get it, and what their preferred politics are. These smartypants types then get pissed as hell when yellow vests or Brexiters or Trump voters or truckers or farmers or any other actual working class movement doesn't follow their ignorant template to a T.
They are authoritarians/fascist. Definitionally a perfect fit. So who is most likely to fight for centralization of power and government? It is the democrats or left. But the regime holds both legacy republicans and democrats. The fight is those who love liberty, freedom, and the constitution vs the fascist authoritarians.
I'm gonna tell you a harsh truth here: two homeless people often don't need billionaires telling them to fight one another. Do you think the USA is responsible for so many of the wars in this world? Many want to blame us for, but often enough it's just one group of poor people fighting another group with this country not even paying attention until stuff gets way out of hand. Another truth: this country was set up as an "identity" one; landowning white males...and everybody else subservient.
Half century of Reaganism. The Democrats, starting with Bill Clinton, took a "if we can't beat them then join them" stance, but really that meant beating the Right at their own games. Now it's 2022 not 1982. The Wall Street Journal front page headline under Trump read "Rural America is the New Inner City." Compare that to Hillary won 64% of US GDP by county, then Biden winning the same counties as her he won 71% of US GDP by county. Trump didn't even get 30% of US economic output in 2020. Biden won 171 out of 202 counties in the country with a Whole Foods. The Democrats are using the Republican tactics of Nixon, Reagan, etc. now against the GOP's base which has been greatly impoverished since 1980. Impoverished by Republicans I might add; this country's had far more Republicans in power since 1980 than we did the 4-5 decades prior to it. Example: That first red wave with Newt in 1994, the US House has averaged now OVER 90 more GOP seats the past THREE decades than the House averaged the SIX decades prior to Gingrich getting the gavel!
Most everything Trump supporters feel these days, isn't far removed from what minorities in this country felt 40 years ago. Again, "Rural America is the New Inner City." Congratulations on you've figured out that Democrats have little to do with Marx, and that there's reasons that Wall Street and the world's richest centi-billionaire Capitalists love Liberals. "Wokeism" to some extent shares similarities with Marie Antoinette French aristocrats in macaroni wigs debating the finer points of late 18th century fashions in their finely decorated salons. But be careful, for the revolutionaries that overthrew the Bourbon dynasty Ancien Regime weren't Conservative, and soon had Napoleon as dictator. That helping the problems of the poor, a.k.a. what Trump's base really is anymore, in the real world will require a lot of Liberal solutions and not scapegoats. Example: I sarcastically tell people that "xenophobia" is NOT an Ancient Greek word for how no ruling classes since the Dawn of Civilization have ever scapegoated immigrants and foreigners for their own aristocratic oppression of their own people. Nope! Never happened before!
"Take the Red Pill" go look up states by foreign born percentage, economy/GDP, and life expectancy to see why Trumpism has a bigly yuuge problem. That Trump is Mister "I love the POOR-ly educated", go look what happened in America one century ago that we had the biggest crackdowns on immigration and trade in our history. In John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," during the "Dust Bowl" and "Great Depression" who and what was the profile of the "filthy Okies" in the 1930s? Biggest crackdown on Mexican immigrants ever we deported MILLIONS of them(many back then even with American citizenship); those farmers from the Heartland then lost everything they became the migrant workers so hated; forced to pick fruit from sun up to sun down in the blazing California heat they used to own their own lands 1000s of miles away were now harvesting all that food for others' profits they weren't even paid enough to eat properly! And that's if "lucky" enough to even get work for that day they were otherwise confined to their refugee camps! But as the Bible says, people reap what they sow. Trump supporters despise minorities, but they're fastly becoming the minority in their own country.
As the Irish say, good AND bad things come in threes. The ruling class oligarchy is in the process of getting its third, very valuable data set regarding American behavior. The first two concerned Covid and the transgender agenda. The former was about knowing how many people will unquestioningly obey any order, now matter how unconstitutional, if it's framed as "following the science," and/or "keeping you safe."
The latter is about knowing what percentage of Americans are willing to abide the destruction of objective reality and the government coercion that enables it, in exchange for avoiding confrontation and/or being called a name. Because if you insist a man can't get pregnant or menstruate, or that you won't abide the bastardization of pronouns, or children shouldn't be "transitioned" without parental knowledge, the Biden administration has announced it will withhold lunch funding from from your school.
The third data set is all about the raid and learning the percentage of Americans who would effectively abide a de facto police state as long as "their side" is "winning."
Expect all of this data to be exploited at every opportunity. It what the progressive movement is all about.
Given how dogged the attacks on Trump have been, starting even before Day 1 of his presidency, there is no other conclusion to be reached except that the centralized and elite powers with the most influence over our nation fear him greatly. But the unanswered question is “Why?” Given the involvement of the intelligence agencies in the attack effort, I am left to conclude that they fear him because he stands in the way of the Globalists, who want to make the US subservient to a broader international body, and the only way to achieve that is to weaken it: by stoking internal societal division, manipulating media and elections by diminishing/tarnishing anti-Globalist voices, devaluing the currency so it can no longer serve as the global standard, and ceding our independence to international organizations and treaties. I do not know whether the Globalists’ desire is due simply to a belief in the threat of climate change and the need to reduce energy consumption (even if it lowers standard of living for people globally) or is a more nefarious plan to centralize wealth and power in a true 1984-style structure of global governance (the Davos set and China apologists). But I cannot escape the conclusion that this is the most unifying explanation for our current chaos and the ongoing destruction of our long-established sociopolitical norms.
No. You're leaving out Americans in general. Ann Coulter wrote the book "In Trump We Trust" but she soon turned on him after he became President because "he didn't really win in 2016" that she predicted the hows and whys of he would lose in 2018 and 2020 both(that have now come to pass). Much like she derides him now that he got an incumbent's bump did marginally better with every demographic group in this country("marginally" being the operative word) except one group he did way worse among in the last election: white males!
THREE elections we've had where OVER 10 million more Americans despised Trump at the ballot box than supported him in EACH of them. Not talked about nearly enough is it wasn't just that Hillary got 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, an additional almost 10 million Americans that year voted and Trump and her BOTH! And they were ones even botherd to show up to throw away their votes in protest!
To Trump's credit he had the most consistent polls of any President in history. To his detriment, those were always many more hated him than loved him that he's the only President ever been polled never to have above 50% approval a single day he was in power. THREE elections again said the exact same thing. Just because America hated Hillary, didn't mean this country didn't also hate Donald Trump, and hated him before he'd spent a single day in the White House. Trump got the worst voter percentage of any President since the 1800s who didn't otherwise have a Teddy Roosevelt or Ross Perot level 3rd party candidate running, i.e. the strongest 3rd partiers of the past 120+ years. But in 2016 there wasn't even a Ralph Nader level one. His Mexican standoff with Hillary she got made history that year, but Trump was mortally wounded. That once Hillary was out of the picture and he'd got power, he then became 100% the target of the nation's wrath.
I am an Iowa conservative. I hated Trump. I wrote the state party to complain about their coddling of Trump as far back as 2011. 2 things changed my mind. 1) the campaign assaults against people trying to see Trump for themselves.. in Chicago and Phoenix and other cities and how the media ignored those assaults.. and 2) 2 very good and respected friends were open Trump supporters.. they caused me to take a second look at his philosophies and his positions on topics… from that moment on, I saw Trump not as a sideshow distraction, but as a representative of the common man.. a person who spent his life as much around New York construction workers as celebrities …
I think you are right. I have friends who are sick with TDS who insist that Trump ran for office in order to enrich himself. Any objective person can see that that is wrong. Trump's whole empire was built around the Trump name and he knew full well that half of America would turn on him when he went into politics. That's why they are taking the Trump name down all over the world.
You have excellent company: Glenn Greenwald, Batya Ungar Sargon, Bari Weiss and others. What you are chipping at here with your incredibly brave and articulate piece is a foundational principle that I see very few people recognize: The Left and the Right NEED each other. They also need the one to check the other when out of balance. I don't like to use the moniker "Trump Derangement Syndrome" but in a digitally, and I would argue, economically and socially isolated group dynamic, it is akin to Mass Formation Psychosis- a traumatic event affecting the entire community (Trump's election) leads to a cognitive dissonance resolved by latching onto a cause or even a solution that is then echoed incessantly as the ONLY resolution. This is why I am torn apart on Twitter or Facebook by certain people and NO amount of reasoning or facts budges their sudden and consuming hatred of me for merely suggesting that Trump may not be guilty and that despite his many flaws was demonstrably a pretty good president for America over all.
People essentially on the Right may be shocked to realize that we need our Left brothers and sisters to come to their senses, not so they can vote for our candidates or even just agree with us on the nature of reality, but so that we can see one another as fellow human beings that contribute, in unique ways, to our continued survival and even prosperity. This essay is a beginning. That, trust me, is a tremendous compliment coming from an Uber Conservative like myself. :)
To me the biggest redpill moment was how the deep state worked to sabotage a president they didn't like. It never dawned on me before that the administrative state views working for Republicans as optional.
The second was the left's blackballing of anyone who worked for the Trump administration, whether they did anything wrong or not. After that, I do not grant the left the assumption of good faith and concern for country any more.
Everything was spot on except Trump never mocked a disabled person. That was yet another story manipulated and weaponized by corporate media. There's numerous videos of him contorting his body anytime he mocks a person, he even did it mocking Ted Cruz. Search "Trump mocks disabled person lie" on YouTube and filter the results by upload date.
I knew it was a lie from the beginning because I use the exact body language Trump used when describing somebody who is completely flustered when proved wrong.
Damn that was a good read. I can’t stand Trump the man, but the lefts insistence on Orwellian type policies and culture is why I voted for him in 2020. They’ve doubled down and I hope people continue to wake up/be red pilled.
I hold very little hope they will be.
Most Americans want to stay fat, dumb, & happy (oops, did I just offend fat, dumb & happy people?)
They get upset when gas prices go through the roof, but don’t pay much attention to egregious violations of the constitution and rule of law. Unless it hits them in the pocketbook.
Exactly. Until your life is affected by the bozo's you won't be woken.
"A red-pilled America is probably starting to think the reaction to Trump, rather than Trump himself, might be the even bigger threat." Yes, I've often wondered why front row America lost their mind over a man they could vote out 4 years later. Your observation, "once people are dehumanized, as Trump and his supporters have been, there are no limits to what can be done to them," is what disturbs me most.
Jefferson Smith's plea to "love thy neighbor," reminds me of the only rule I had posted in my classroom: Treat your classmates how you want to be treated. A take on "love thy neighbor," it's Golden for a historical reason -- it works.
I am thrilled RCP linked to this piece -- it bears reading and rereading. Thank you, Sasha.
That ridiculous reaction to Trump and the entire state trying to bring him down for made up shit is why I, and I'm sure millions of others voted for him in 2020. Prior to 2016, I could see no circumstance where I would ever vote for him, but Hillary, Obama, and their minions in the media, justice department, and FBI managed to change my mind.
Everyone appreciates your well thought, succinct, intelligent response. Keep up the good work.
Your icon picture is interesting for a 13-year-old.
Or is that just where your brain stopped developing?
Because if you don't see DNC fascism, you are willfully blind.
Xi appreciates yours
Your response proves the author’s point. More HYSTERIA about Putin, Russia, etc. Go peddle that bull caca somewhere else. People are wise to the lies and we’ve damn well had enough. Come November 8th people in Congress who behave like you are going to get their tickets punched to return to private life again. Grow up.
And Xi yours. I'll take Putin over Xi any day of the week.
Excellent piece.
Please reconsider the Trump mocking a disabled reporter story. https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/fake-news-trump-did-not-mock-disabled-reporter-and-other-lies-from-the-left/
It's the fake news that first woke Brandon Straka up and inspired him to start Walk Away.
Exactly. I read that line and jumped straight to the comment section to say exactly what you just said.
Looks like she missed that development.
Still not nearly as bad as the “Very fine people” hoax.
Or as effective on the lazy and ill informed. Biden even regurgitated that lie in the debates.
Here's a very informative montage of Trump speech clips:
https://youtu.be/CsaB3ynIZH4
He mocks everyone in the same manner. It has nothing to do with whether a person is disabled or not.
Ummm... It makes all the difference in the world. Guy who gives shit to the disabled for being disabled is an asshole. The guy who gives shit to everybody regardless of who they are is just how he is. He is not mocking the disabled specifically which was the accusation.
You are correct, Gk is simply "selective" in his "feelgoodisms"
They are used for many people. Watch the video I linked you to.
Ignoring reality is not a good thing kam. Why do you think the media showed just the still photo and not the video everywhere? Live and learn.
Yes. It does. If Don Rickles only insulted Italians, that would indicate he may be a bigot. He mocked everyone. We knowingly elected Don Rickles as President and that is okay.
It makes you a liar. Why did you lie about it?
Was Jerry Lewis mocking the spastic? Was Mister Magoo mocking the deaf? Were the 3 Stooges mocking morons?
But did you see the video I linked you to? Context matters.
For your edification:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/arts/salman-rushdie-free-speech.html
(you seem to consistently not grasp why folks who 20 years ago would be your political bedfellows are concerned about the woke movement - which the right is finally starting to copycat, I'm surprised it took them this long .. once you decide censorship or social pressure or the use of one's identity to win an argument is okay to do, when feelings trump the Bill of Rights .. then majority eventually rules. The left started banning Mark Twain and ethnic jokes and "offensive" Halloween costumes two decades ago .. and the majority ethnicities did not return the fire (eg hillbillies didn't complain about Redneck jokes). But now they are and now they do and the establishment is shocked .. just shocked. - so here is reminder of how it used to be and could be again if we get over ourselves.)
“We”? Are you speaking for a specific team of trolls or just trolls generally?
That was funny.
Excellent.
There is a common belief that the Left went crazy when Trump became president. But, the reality is they started on that path to lunacy when Obama arrived on the scene.
Watch this Obama ad from 2009: https://youtu.be/51kAw4OTlA0
Look at the crazy in the women's eyes and the submissive supplication from the men. Look at the communist-style graphics in the opening scene. Listen to the pledges of loyalty to dear leader. The Fourth Turning started in 2009.
I hadn't seen that before, but wow - as one of the commenters said - it goes full 1984 at the end.
What's amazing is how many of the "pledges" in the video would be seen as unacceptable by the Left today. Particularly striking is Michael Strahan saying, "I pledge to consider myself an American, not an African-American." Amazing. Such a great time capsule piece - thanks for sharing.
This train got rolling during the first Obama term. If you recall, Bill Daley was Obama's Chief of Staff. He left after a very short tenure because, and I don't recall the exact quote but it is close to this: everything was about politics. (remember - Bill Daley was from the Chicago machine - for someone like him to rue overt politicization is pretty remarkable)
It used to be that good policy made good politics, and that was the route to power. Overall, it worked and power, via the consent of the governed, was earned. When Obama ushered in the era of politics above policy, only successful politics was good politics. And with control of the media, all Dem politics are now pre-ordained as successful. Power was no longer earned, it was either taken or fabricated. Power is now mostly fabricated. And thus the loss of consent of the governed.
There are people I love who are caught up in this hysteria. They are genuinely terrified of Trump and people who voted for him. It is very hard for me to find anything I can say that will promote calm, objective thinking. I voted for Trump in 2016, and they can see that I'm not a monster, but that doesn't help. This essay might help.
I don't want people to like or vote for Trump, or think anything at all about him except to see the terrible danger that accompanies hate, the rot that sets in when we nurture the contempt in our hearts towards any human being, when we boast about and take pride in it.
Thank you for this essay. I will send it to some of the people I care about the most in the hope that they can both remember their core solidarity with other human beings and put aside the fear, anger and hatred that now obscures it.
For as dangerous as we've been told Trump is, where is the damage he has caused. He's an unlikeable character, a weasel, a liar, a cheater, and I'm sure plenty of other bad things. I'm still waiting to see all of the negative consequences we've been told that he would cause to kick in.
I have many friends like yours who view him as some major threat. It's amazing that on one hand, they see him as a bumbling moron, an imbecile, and unqualified for office. On the other, they truly believe that he almost became a life-long dictator on 1/6. Many of the same people believe he's holding nuclear secrets to sell, like he could actually pull that off while being with the Secret Service 24/7 and having an extremely public profile.
You don't become or stay successful by lying and cheating in a business environment - only in politics. Our ruling class just loved Trump... until he challenged their hold on power and money which he surely did. From day one they never treated him like a legitimate person much less a duly elected President. Well, he 'returned the fire' and punched back at everyone because they deserved it.
This is one of the most succinct pieces about the history and feelings of the non-partisan-minded, thoughtful-but-not-Trump-deranged person in the Trump era.
It's near-perfect, but I do have some (important) semantic issues I wanted to chime in on. The pill registered, but disgusted democrats/old liberals/"original formula" lefties, et al., are taking is maybe better described as what Matt Taibbi called the "neither pill." I'd maybe go one step further and say it's the "something better has to emerge, and I'll support any efforts towards that something better and stop voting for either of these horrible parties" pill.
I really think calling the modern democratic party, or their newly-minted young, faux-progressive foot soldiers "left" or "far left" is a misnomer. No properly-thinking liberals or leftists of the past would so gleefully support censorship, compelled speech, party unification with the most massively rich corporations in history, using the power of the government to spy on private citizens and/or punish political enemies, the cynical embrace of extreme essentialism over universalism, and/or outright hatred towards farmers, truckers and the working class in general.
The modern cohort of Twitter-brained imbeciles absolutely loves being called "far left." The new flanks of a Republican party, that's quickly and fairly radically overstepping their win-by-default on culture war issues, also loves tarring them "far left," and the feedback loop of continues, into infinity. All of the questionable contrivances that have been being used to describe this young, broken cohort — like "cultural Marxism" — make little sense. If Karl Marx were alive today, does anyone actually believe he'd side with people who'd make laws compelling the use of preferred pronouns over laid off workers, truckers facing byzantine regulations, or top-down policies forcing farmers to go out of business?
I'm no Marxist, and I agree with many prominent thinkers that the old designations of "left" and "right" are becoming meaningless in today's age, but I think what you've so wonderfully written about here — which is tantamount to finding real, true clarity and intelligence in a deeply chaotic time — shouldn't be limited by the outmoded terms that are being wielded like a weapon by the people we're trying to escape.
I do think the identity politics stuff is marxist at its core. The left tried creating a war over class, but it didn't work, so they are giving identity politics a go.
That is the whole point of the privilege argument. If success in life is nothing more than being born with the right plumbing and skin color than success is really nothing more than randomness. And if wealth is randomly and unfairly distributed, then it justifies government confiscation and redistribution, at least in their eyes.
It is marxism, except it uses identity, not class as the lever.
The extreme embrace and exploitation of the outer limits of identity politics — by mostly overeducated rich types who've been in charge of shit for generations — is absolutely moronic and cynical and gross. But we're talking about a group of people closely aligned with controlling levers of government, media and, again, the largest corporations in human history. These are the same people who've exploited division within the lower classes for all of human history. For even the stupidest pseudo-progressive kids on Twitter, mega-corporate culture, and products by Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are inextricable with their identities. That doesn't make any of this "leftist" or "Marxist." Quite the opposite, if you get down to it.
And all of these terms are being used to find and create (and remove) "heretics," so it's best to avoid them. It's not "left wing" or "right wing," it's "idiot wing."
One other thing to note: this is not the same group of of people who have tried to create a class-based politics. The people who exploit identity politics mean to stop a class-based politics from forming by making everyone hate each other. This group will do absolutely anything to stop working black people, working white people, working Hispanic people and working Asian people from voting as a unified block.
Precisely. This is so NOT about socioeconomic class and raising the quality of life for people in the lower SES classes. It is about inciting hate and distrust, in-groups and out-groups, in order to divide the polity and create the need for more authoritarian, centralized power.
That's sort of the thesis of that Martin Gurri book "Revolt of the Public," isn't it? That the way to look at political divisions in today's landscape isn't left wing and right wing, but by those already inside the sort of "circle of world leadership" and those outside of it, and that those inside of it will do anything to keep everyone else out.
A lot of the reaction against the self-described intellectual wing of left-wing politics is totally understandable. There have now been generations of ivory-tower-dwelling smartypants (like Marcuse), who've never so much as mowed a lawn or cleaned a bathtub, deciding to dictate what exactly it is the working classes want, and how they should get it, and what their preferred politics are. These smartypants types then get pissed as hell when yellow vests or Brexiters or Trump voters or truckers or farmers or any other actual working class movement doesn't follow their ignorant template to a T.
They are authoritarians/fascist. Definitionally a perfect fit. So who is most likely to fight for centralization of power and government? It is the democrats or left. But the regime holds both legacy republicans and democrats. The fight is those who love liberty, freedom, and the constitution vs the fascist authoritarians.
I'm gonna tell you a harsh truth here: two homeless people often don't need billionaires telling them to fight one another. Do you think the USA is responsible for so many of the wars in this world? Many want to blame us for, but often enough it's just one group of poor people fighting another group with this country not even paying attention until stuff gets way out of hand. Another truth: this country was set up as an "identity" one; landowning white males...and everybody else subservient.
Half century of Reaganism. The Democrats, starting with Bill Clinton, took a "if we can't beat them then join them" stance, but really that meant beating the Right at their own games. Now it's 2022 not 1982. The Wall Street Journal front page headline under Trump read "Rural America is the New Inner City." Compare that to Hillary won 64% of US GDP by county, then Biden winning the same counties as her he won 71% of US GDP by county. Trump didn't even get 30% of US economic output in 2020. Biden won 171 out of 202 counties in the country with a Whole Foods. The Democrats are using the Republican tactics of Nixon, Reagan, etc. now against the GOP's base which has been greatly impoverished since 1980. Impoverished by Republicans I might add; this country's had far more Republicans in power since 1980 than we did the 4-5 decades prior to it. Example: That first red wave with Newt in 1994, the US House has averaged now OVER 90 more GOP seats the past THREE decades than the House averaged the SIX decades prior to Gingrich getting the gavel!
Most everything Trump supporters feel these days, isn't far removed from what minorities in this country felt 40 years ago. Again, "Rural America is the New Inner City." Congratulations on you've figured out that Democrats have little to do with Marx, and that there's reasons that Wall Street and the world's richest centi-billionaire Capitalists love Liberals. "Wokeism" to some extent shares similarities with Marie Antoinette French aristocrats in macaroni wigs debating the finer points of late 18th century fashions in their finely decorated salons. But be careful, for the revolutionaries that overthrew the Bourbon dynasty Ancien Regime weren't Conservative, and soon had Napoleon as dictator. That helping the problems of the poor, a.k.a. what Trump's base really is anymore, in the real world will require a lot of Liberal solutions and not scapegoats. Example: I sarcastically tell people that "xenophobia" is NOT an Ancient Greek word for how no ruling classes since the Dawn of Civilization have ever scapegoated immigrants and foreigners for their own aristocratic oppression of their own people. Nope! Never happened before!
"Take the Red Pill" go look up states by foreign born percentage, economy/GDP, and life expectancy to see why Trumpism has a bigly yuuge problem. That Trump is Mister "I love the POOR-ly educated", go look what happened in America one century ago that we had the biggest crackdowns on immigration and trade in our history. In John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," during the "Dust Bowl" and "Great Depression" who and what was the profile of the "filthy Okies" in the 1930s? Biggest crackdown on Mexican immigrants ever we deported MILLIONS of them(many back then even with American citizenship); those farmers from the Heartland then lost everything they became the migrant workers so hated; forced to pick fruit from sun up to sun down in the blazing California heat they used to own their own lands 1000s of miles away were now harvesting all that food for others' profits they weren't even paid enough to eat properly! And that's if "lucky" enough to even get work for that day they were otherwise confined to their refugee camps! But as the Bible says, people reap what they sow. Trump supporters despise minorities, but they're fastly becoming the minority in their own country.
As the Irish say, good AND bad things come in threes. The ruling class oligarchy is in the process of getting its third, very valuable data set regarding American behavior. The first two concerned Covid and the transgender agenda. The former was about knowing how many people will unquestioningly obey any order, now matter how unconstitutional, if it's framed as "following the science," and/or "keeping you safe."
The latter is about knowing what percentage of Americans are willing to abide the destruction of objective reality and the government coercion that enables it, in exchange for avoiding confrontation and/or being called a name. Because if you insist a man can't get pregnant or menstruate, or that you won't abide the bastardization of pronouns, or children shouldn't be "transitioned" without parental knowledge, the Biden administration has announced it will withhold lunch funding from from your school.
The third data set is all about the raid and learning the percentage of Americans who would effectively abide a de facto police state as long as "their side" is "winning."
Expect all of this data to be exploited at every opportunity. It what the progressive movement is all about.
It is dangerous to "other" the MAGA crowd. It will lead to no good. Hate is poisonous to the hater.
Great piece. The left has lost its mind and it's getting scarier and scarier.
Excellent article. Thank you.
Given how dogged the attacks on Trump have been, starting even before Day 1 of his presidency, there is no other conclusion to be reached except that the centralized and elite powers with the most influence over our nation fear him greatly. But the unanswered question is “Why?” Given the involvement of the intelligence agencies in the attack effort, I am left to conclude that they fear him because he stands in the way of the Globalists, who want to make the US subservient to a broader international body, and the only way to achieve that is to weaken it: by stoking internal societal division, manipulating media and elections by diminishing/tarnishing anti-Globalist voices, devaluing the currency so it can no longer serve as the global standard, and ceding our independence to international organizations and treaties. I do not know whether the Globalists’ desire is due simply to a belief in the threat of climate change and the need to reduce energy consumption (even if it lowers standard of living for people globally) or is a more nefarious plan to centralize wealth and power in a true 1984-style structure of global governance (the Davos set and China apologists). But I cannot escape the conclusion that this is the most unifying explanation for our current chaos and the ongoing destruction of our long-established sociopolitical norms.
No. You're leaving out Americans in general. Ann Coulter wrote the book "In Trump We Trust" but she soon turned on him after he became President because "he didn't really win in 2016" that she predicted the hows and whys of he would lose in 2018 and 2020 both(that have now come to pass). Much like she derides him now that he got an incumbent's bump did marginally better with every demographic group in this country("marginally" being the operative word) except one group he did way worse among in the last election: white males!
THREE elections we've had where OVER 10 million more Americans despised Trump at the ballot box than supported him in EACH of them. Not talked about nearly enough is it wasn't just that Hillary got 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, an additional almost 10 million Americans that year voted and Trump and her BOTH! And they were ones even botherd to show up to throw away their votes in protest!
To Trump's credit he had the most consistent polls of any President in history. To his detriment, those were always many more hated him than loved him that he's the only President ever been polled never to have above 50% approval a single day he was in power. THREE elections again said the exact same thing. Just because America hated Hillary, didn't mean this country didn't also hate Donald Trump, and hated him before he'd spent a single day in the White House. Trump got the worst voter percentage of any President since the 1800s who didn't otherwise have a Teddy Roosevelt or Ross Perot level 3rd party candidate running, i.e. the strongest 3rd partiers of the past 120+ years. But in 2016 there wasn't even a Ralph Nader level one. His Mexican standoff with Hillary she got made history that year, but Trump was mortally wounded. That once Hillary was out of the picture and he'd got power, he then became 100% the target of the nation's wrath.
I am an Iowa conservative. I hated Trump. I wrote the state party to complain about their coddling of Trump as far back as 2011. 2 things changed my mind. 1) the campaign assaults against people trying to see Trump for themselves.. in Chicago and Phoenix and other cities and how the media ignored those assaults.. and 2) 2 very good and respected friends were open Trump supporters.. they caused me to take a second look at his philosophies and his positions on topics… from that moment on, I saw Trump not as a sideshow distraction, but as a representative of the common man.. a person who spent his life as much around New York construction workers as celebrities …
I think you are right. I have friends who are sick with TDS who insist that Trump ran for office in order to enrich himself. Any objective person can see that that is wrong. Trump's whole empire was built around the Trump name and he knew full well that half of America would turn on him when he went into politics. That's why they are taking the Trump name down all over the world.
Ms. Stone,
You have excellent company: Glenn Greenwald, Batya Ungar Sargon, Bari Weiss and others. What you are chipping at here with your incredibly brave and articulate piece is a foundational principle that I see very few people recognize: The Left and the Right NEED each other. They also need the one to check the other when out of balance. I don't like to use the moniker "Trump Derangement Syndrome" but in a digitally, and I would argue, economically and socially isolated group dynamic, it is akin to Mass Formation Psychosis- a traumatic event affecting the entire community (Trump's election) leads to a cognitive dissonance resolved by latching onto a cause or even a solution that is then echoed incessantly as the ONLY resolution. This is why I am torn apart on Twitter or Facebook by certain people and NO amount of reasoning or facts budges their sudden and consuming hatred of me for merely suggesting that Trump may not be guilty and that despite his many flaws was demonstrably a pretty good president for America over all.
People essentially on the Right may be shocked to realize that we need our Left brothers and sisters to come to their senses, not so they can vote for our candidates or even just agree with us on the nature of reality, but so that we can see one another as fellow human beings that contribute, in unique ways, to our continued survival and even prosperity. This essay is a beginning. That, trust me, is a tremendous compliment coming from an Uber Conservative like myself. :)
To me the biggest redpill moment was how the deep state worked to sabotage a president they didn't like. It never dawned on me before that the administrative state views working for Republicans as optional.
The second was the left's blackballing of anyone who worked for the Trump administration, whether they did anything wrong or not. After that, I do not grant the left the assumption of good faith and concern for country any more.
Everything was spot on except Trump never mocked a disabled person. That was yet another story manipulated and weaponized by corporate media. There's numerous videos of him contorting his body anytime he mocks a person, he even did it mocking Ted Cruz. Search "Trump mocks disabled person lie" on YouTube and filter the results by upload date.
I knew it was a lie from the beginning because I use the exact body language Trump used when describing somebody who is completely flustered when proved wrong.