The poisoned well of American politics

But the genius of Trump morphed a disaster into an opportunity.

In the next article I’ll try to explain how this is possible in my estimation.

Side Note to the election results.

I’m not used to American television. You Americans surely put up with a shocking (and I mean, shocking, exhausting) amount of commercials!
At times I thought that the entire point of election coverage was insurance plans and prescription drugs, with frequent interruptions informing us about Arby’s, pillows, windshield wipers, a crooked penis condition (!) and, yes, repetitive announcements about the upcoming interview with a politician…

 

Midterm: Everybody Wins?

The political climate that lead to this US general election could be described as intensely insane. The stakes have never been higher. Traditionally a midterm election is expected to counterbalance the power of the sitting president: the opposition party electorate is more energized, independents may want to hedge.
This time is different: an existential battle is underway.
Trump represents the very last chance for conservatism to survive. He’s the surprise that keeps on delivering.
Democrats are furious over his ruining their seemingly unassailable plans for domination. They pulled out all the stops to try and destroy his platform.

  • The barrage of selectively negative reporting against Republican candidates, expanding on the anti-Trump rhetoric, was accompanied by
  • Hollywood celebrities (often vulgarly) chiming in and
  • unprecedented amounts of money being spent on Democrat candidates.
    D has become the party of the élites. R means underdogs with relatively limited budget now.
  • Google, Facebook, Twitter and others were reaching new highs in their selectively burying, censoring and banning conservative voices.
  • As I suggested, illegal voting was a concern, considering that many races were very close. A couple of new undercover videos from Project Veritas highlight new evidence of illegal aliens being encouraged to vote.
  • Violent verbal and physical attacks have become normal.

 

And yet the final result is a significant victory for Donald Trump: yes, Republicans lost control of the House, but not by much; their lead in the Senate is even increased, and that’s significantly better than how most of the presidents of the last century or so fared in the midterms, especially Obama.

 

Key points to understand the outcome

 Contrary to what happened two years ago, Nate Silver and the other pollsters were right on the money in their predictions for the overall result, as I expected.
Some key races, though, evidenced “surprise” results that seem to indicate again that intentionally skewed polls were deployed in order to influence the electorate, as Trump himself denounced in his first press conference after the election.

 Donald Trump was particularly effective in helping those key candidates he chose to support. He also knows how to pick his fights, reinforcing his image as a natural winner.
Picture what chances could Ted Cruz have had without a presidential endorsement; the new Florida governor Ron DeSantis is another clear example of a bold move made by the President (endorsing a seemingly weaker candidate in the primary) that paid off.

 Many representatives from the old guard, Republicans who didn’t share his agenda, lost their seat or retired (think Paul Ryan).
Some emerging new wave candidates who chose to carry water for the establishment or in any case didn’t click with him, like Mia Love or Nikki Haley, are on the way out. Marco Rubio should take notice.
The new Senate majority is now reasonably aligned with the electorate and Trump’s goals. This is now his party.

 Democrats wanted to get control of the legislative power to be able to remove Trump from office through an impeachment process that would represent a shameless exploitation of the system: a political coup in disguise.
Only a morally bankrupt ruling class could devise such a Machiavellian plan, where someone is necessarily targeted for prosecution without even knowing what charges could be leveled, if any.
They deserved a severe beating just for that. And yet their constituency seems to have liked the idea.

At any rate now that the path to impeachment is blocked by a strong R Senate, the Mueller investigation theater could only lead to further media attacks, not much more. Which is par for the course.

 Democrats have something more fundamental to rejoice about, beyond taking the House: demographics continue to push in their direction. More and more Latinos become citizens and/or vote, year after year; now even in the crucial stronghold of Texas an increasing number of races are heavily contested.

Had there been no Trump presidency, the Republican Party would have gone the way of the dodo. Imagine in a couple of decades a country split between the establishment Democrats and a new Socialist Party.

 

Kill the Killjoy

The key issue to the current media landscape is the unending state of shock generated by Trump’s triumph in 2016. Progressives cannot accept reality whenever they’re not having their way; the stars seemed to have aligned perfectly, but the personification of everything they despise stole their trophy.
Since their reaction amounts to a collective temper tantrum, no amount of calm reasoning could ever change their minds.

They project onto their enemy the hatred they feel inside; as a consequence they feel justified to use any means necessary to stop him. Which includes things like wanting to limit the scope of the 1st Amendment but also punching a stranger in the face just because he wears a MAGA hat.

In order to understand where we’re headed we must first have a firm grasp on how hard the Left pushed in order to divide the Nation.
As an external observer I can testify to the fact that this kind of polarization has become the norm in Europe and elsewhere, but the American society (beyond being far more important for its influence on the rest of the world) is the most interesting specimen to observe, due to more primal, unfiltered and unbounded reactions to societal perturbations.

This Right wing meme, reporting actual quotes, was drawing a connection between the election results and the risk of someone getting killed, in order to maximize the motivation for Republicans to vote. I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Violence was and is to be expected regardless of the outcome from the ballot box.

 

It’s true that political campaigns have always being contentious and often marked with vile attacks, beginning at the very least from Ancient Greece.
But I think civility requires that people draw the line at openly suggesting a presidential assassination. Leftists crossed that line too many times.

Personally I was also shocked by the pettiness and ugly resentment expressed by Robert De Niro. He’s just nasty and sad, like an old drunkard.

 

Actor Peter Fonda savagely attacking the President by suggesting to put his son in a cage with pedophiles.

Should we even bother to comment?

But really, we could pick a number of tweets or statements from celebrities expressing levels of vitriol which, if used against anyone other than a white male Republican, would torpedo the career of the author.

 

Who’s to blame for domestic terrorist attacks?

I believe the anti-human nature of the emotions bubbling up under the surface of this “let’s de-normalize Trump” movement became fully apparent to me with what happened in January 2017 in Chicago, when a group of black young adults bound and gagged a special-needs man, keeping him captive for hours, during which time they tortured him on a Facebook live stream while swearing against whites and Trump.
Evil happens on all sides, but I couldn’t help but notice how this episode received minimal coverage. Had it been Trump supporters beating a young black man this episode would have become a go-to argument for years, even picked up by history books.

Of course violence and intimidation have been a staple of the “I’m with her” 2016 campaign.

 

The recent acts of terrorism perpetrated by two deranged men that could be pinned on the right gave the articulate partisan activist/TV anchorman Don Lemon (who happens to be black and gay) the opportunity to claim that white men represent the biggest terror threat to America. Which is absurd. Had the races been reversed, Lemon’s career would be over.

The first episode involved a somewhat non-white (half Filipino claiming to be Seminole) homeless loon who sent fake bombs to various leftist personalities.
The second, dramatic attack caused the death of 11 people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh: this abominable criminal opened fire on the community while shouting anti-Jewish slurs.
It must be made clear that the perpetrator’s personal and social media history indicate that he was a deranged man from a broken family, i.e. the product of today’s liberal society, and he was firmly opposed to Trump and the Republicans.
It’s a typical sight: collectivist “right-wingers” that could find themselves at home in the Nazi party but who have little in common with actual conservatives.
It doesn’t matter that they are denounced by Republicans who don’t want to have anything to do with them: for the mainstream media somehow they represent the authentic, deeply seated nature of the Right, possibly disguised under alleged code words, imaginary “dog whistles” and a façade of respectability. Which is an outrageous misrepresentation.

While I’m writing this piece reports are emerging of a horrible slaughter carried out by a lone gunman (a US marine veteran with mental problems) in a Thousand Oaks (CA) bar, with 13 dead.

 

Let me be blunt and direct: if we had to assign blame, the Democrat-Media Complex is the principal responsible for most episodes of extreme violence in connection with politics.
It is true that their responsibility is quite partial and indirect, but they are the closest thing to an instigator. Both in relation to shootings that involve mentally unstable lone wolves and to episodes of street violence perpetrated by packs of leftist thugs.

  • They revel in the atmosphere of hatred and division;
  • they push for hostility against Republicans;
  • they invariably under-report/make excuses for criminals on the Left;
  • they elevate the status and visibility of isolated loons that represent their ideal, indefensible enemy on the Right (I’ll just name two through their initials: RS and DD) and put an extraordinary effort to paint them as conservatives, despite the loon’s inclination to subscribe to leftist tenets.

 

More insanity

 

This isn’t just a random guy on Twitter. This was Obama’s ex campaign manager, tweeting during the Presidential Election that gave us President Trump. In the meantime the leftist derangement has increased!

 

I’m afraid to utter these words out loud, but I wouldn’t really want to be in the shoes of the Secret Service officers in charge of protecting the President. Right now to me that’s the most pressing issue. Many parallels have been drawn with Abraham Lincoln.

I was a small child in the 70s when the Brigate Rosse (=Red Brigades, Communist terrorists) were active in Italy, kidnapping and assassinating. I didn’t experience directly the climate that led to the rise of those domestic terrorists, but I’ve seen credible evidence of the fact that it was quite similar to that of today’s American left.

 

A few years ago I almost stopped following Italian politics because I found it utterly pointless and depressing, choosing to focus instead on what was happening in the USA.
Well, as of late I’ve found American politics to have become increasingly dispiriting too.

 

 

Again: pure madness. The way impeachment works, even if they successfully removed Donald Trump, then Mike Pence would take his place.
And that is unacceptable to a legion of foaming mouth activists: the process isn’t designed to accommodate their wishes, therefore even a prominent Dem operative like Dworkin here demands that somehow the fundamental laws of the Republic are bypassed and their party seizes power.
This means advocating a civil war.

 

In conclusion I’d like to highlight three episodes that piqued my interest. I believe they are representative of how the climate became so toxic.

They have two things in common:

⇒ on the surface they seem somewhat innocuous: it’s only words, y’know. But they shed a light on a deeply disturbing disconnect from reality that lies behind.

⇒ if you don’t see what’s wrong with them you need to consult a specialist. Really, there’s no way to defend those ideas.

 

Exhibit 1: Invasion of the Racistey Racist Aliens from Planet Roddenberry

Not long ago William Shatner, the iconic Captain Kirk of the original Star Trek series, was accused of being a racist on Twitter on ridiculous grounds. All he wanted to say was that you shouldn’t erase important public figures and authors from history just because, being part of their society, they expressed thoughts, used language, behave in a way that would be considered inappropriate nowadays.
The issue du jour was the decision to remove the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder (the writer of Little House On The Prairie) from an award by a library association, because by modern standards she may be seen as racist.
Shatner:

I find it disturbing that some take modern opinion and obliterate the past. Isn’t progress learning from our mistakes?

Here’s the tragically hilarious attack by a twitter user whose name we won’t remember:

did you need to be told Star Trek was racist? That having an interracial kiss ONLY when ALIENS have infected the crew is coded racism?

Picture that: Star Trek aired in the 60s, right smack in the middle of a traumatic social revolution. The Democratic Party was still the party of overt racism and discrimination sanctioned by law, while the efforts of Republicans like Martin Luther King Jr. were moving the country in a new direction, pushing for the end of this ugly injustice.
Nichelle Nichols, the black actress in the sci-fi TV movie cast, wanted to leave the show for personal reasons, but MLK himself asked her to stay, since her presence -as a peer- in a Starfleet crew was influential, projecting a positive image.
The show writers were proactive in fighting racism and prejudice; one of the opportunities they took was that of airing the first interracial kiss of American television between Shatner and Nichols. Which went unnoticed by yours truly when I watched the episode in the 80s reruns, but was absolutely shocking for many in the 60s.

Well, according to today’s social justice warrior geniuses, what was indisputably a significant step in the direction of racial equality should be reinterpreted with special victimology-tinted glasses today, in order to re-brand those anti-racism efforts as “coded racism”. Please spare me. I’d laugh if you weren’t toxic and dangerous.

 

Exhibit 2: a sheep in sheep’s clothing, everybody cries wolf

Imagine a gay Jew walking down the street, hand in hand with his boyfriend, wearing a yarmulke. Then imagine Antifa masked men attacking him and shouting insults, proclaiming that he is a ugly white supremacist, a Nazi and a gay-hater
That would be crazy, right?
Well, in this time and age, what is impossible in real life becomes customary in online confrontations.

Take this guy, who’s indeed a gay Jew and was abused by thousands of people on Twitter, hundreds of which verified accounts (which means they are either celebrities, semi-celebrities or leftist activists that Twitter wants to elevate at the level of celebrities because they are on the correct side of the political spectrum).

He was accused of being a Nazi and of daring to compare Nazis to LGBT activists just because he’s a free speech advocate, therefore he opposed the words of a NY professor calling for violence against people who wear a swastika.
No matter how you want to put it, the point is that if someone thinks responding to a provocation with violence isn’t a good idea, it’s not OK to try and destroy his reputation just because of such opinion.
In the words of Chad Felix Greene, the unexpected victim of the Twitterstorm discussed here:

The term ‘Nazi’ is becoming as meaningless as the word ‘racist’ before it due to the natural inclination of progressives to expand definitions to win arguments. The Left wants there to be a Nazi threat in America because they can control people through fear.

 

Exhibit 3: the meek wannabe civil warrior

On August 2017 this guy called Justin Pickering published on Medium a deranged anti-Trump rant. We had a short exchange. He reiterated his view.
Afterwards he deleted his Medium account with all its content, although I can’t say if the two events are connected. Probably not, that must have occurred at a different time.

The thing is, he happens to be the CEO of a translation services company, a father/husband/accomplished entrepreneur who proudly presented himself through this treacle:

Politics: Freedom
Race: Human
Religion: Kindness

But here’s how he answered my remarks on Medium:

I will use my pen to denounce, defame, denigrate, and resist all things Trump for as long as I have breath in my body. And while I don’t wish for violence Mr. Grosso, if need be, I would lead men to fight for it.

To which I responded:

This declaration qualifies you as an enemy of America, an enemy of democracy, an enemy of good people. You want to defame and denigrate, i.e. use dirty tactics showing no respect for truth, and you may use violence to participate in a coup.

Congratulations, banana republic minion. You’re exactly what you pretend to be fighting against.

 

(Incidentally this guy reminds me of Paul Graham, the renown founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, a sharp thinker I used to admire but unfortunately fell ill with Trump Derangement Syndrome and kept hallucinating in public until he blocked me on Twitter, then I lost interest in his antics.)

 

Penumbra

This is the state of American Politics today. Ideological poison. Fueling hatred, racial division, suppression of dissent, intense bias, calls to violence. A collision course that is bound to create further opportunities for domestic terrorism; in many unhinged minds a civil war is a necessary step to take, in one form or another.

I’d say 90% of this is a creation of the Democrat-media Complex.

UPDATE: only after I clicked on publish I read of an anti-fascist fascist group converging on Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s family home last night, chanting slogans and threatening him, cracking the front door. Good thinking guys. That’s the way of promoting civility.

 

Trump finds an opening in this mess

 

What would you do if a good 40% of your citizens were used to the idea that you’re literally comparable to Hitler?

In my pre-election draft of this very piece I wrote:
“With the kind of incendiary rhetoric, street violence and dehumanization of the adversary put forward by leftists, there’s no magic recipe to dial down the heat and get back to normal.”
Turns out I may be wrong. Donald Trump does indeed possess a magic wand, and it’s not just for the economy.

It’ll still be a rough ride, but he’s now stronger than ever, ready for 2020.

Stay tuned for my next article.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *