One way or another, it won’t be long now. And as we go into the last few days before Election Day, things are still too close to call in the presidential race, and, after all we have seen of Trump, he is still gaining in some polls and early voting. How could this be? Well, two causes come to my mind:
One, God is real, and he hates us all.
But even more important than that, it’s because the American public is deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply,
D
E
E
P
L
Y
STOOpid.
If you don’t believe me, just check out those Jordan Klepper interviews of Trump voters on The Daily Show or YouTube. Or even better, look up the “Jaywalking” segments of the Tonight Show. Jay Leno left TV years and years ago, but that was also years before Trump became a politician, so all you have to do is look at those interviewees and realize that the American public has become even stupider than that.
But the impression I’m getting in all this is actually the same as I got in the last midterms, namely that the press, in its coverage and its polling, is engaging in malpractice, and yet even with them doing their damnedest to sell Trump, the other half of the problem with Kamala Harris and the Democrats not being able to sell the deal is that Americans can’t stand her party, for reasons completely independent of how bad the Republicans are. In 2022, the “red wave” turned into more of a trickle. But now the party of lemmings has their Hero God Emperor on the ballot, and if the Lamestream Media is not clearly declaring the danger in this, it’s because Trump is largely their creation, as is his audience, which they are loathe to lose.
Journalistic Malpractice
It should be obvious why we use terms like “the rule of law” and say that the premise of a democratic republic is that people respect the results of elections. You can’t have a government otherwise. You certainly can’t have a democracy, OR a republic or whatever you want to call a free country if a minority seizes control by force. Yet that is what Trump tried to do in 2021, and ever since he has been saying the election was rigged and stolen, despite all legal recounts and evidence to the contrary. And instead of removing him from office after January 6, Republicans now hold his position as the core profession of faith that you have to believe if you want to stay in the religious cult that used to be the Party of Lincoln.
There is a reason that Nazis and Communists don’t win elections in this country, because everyone realizes what their end goal is, and even if they did get some voters, they certainly wouldn’t get any media support. But because Trump and his sponsors have done a takeover on our only “real” notDemocrat party, everyone in the establishment thinks that they are now obliged to treat them as legitimate when their Leader has not exactly been hiding his sympathies with Hitler and with modern dictators, and the thought leaders of his party are basically the right-wing version of a Leninist cadre that works with the system only until they can control the instruments of force.
Therefore given Trump’s demand to throw out the results of elections and surrender everything to his authority, he should not be given any official legitimacy as a candidate, and the mainstream media organizations (and non-mainstream podcasts) should not be giving him or his campaign any coverage or audience. And that means not letting them do interviews or go on your TV shows, and YES, that means all the members of a previously respectable party who are still going along with the lie of their leader.
In a free country, you can’t ban those parties, prevent them from holding rallies or stop people from voting for them if they get on the ballot, but you don’t give them any comfort or legitimacy. Moreover, every public resource has to be devoted into educating people as to why voting for a communist or Nazi lover is bad and why history shows such politicians are bad for the countries that vote for them, not to mention their neighbors.
(If you’re wondering why this needs to be hammered into everybody’s heads, go up and see the point after ‘God is real, and he hates us all.’)
But in the past month, we have been getting increasingly frequent news of Trump cancelling interviews and engagements, as well as refusing another Harris debate and an interview with 60 Minutes. And then there was that thing where he was supposed to be holding a town hall with Kristi Noem but when people started fainting in a stuffy room, he decided to turn the whole thing over to playing music on the PA system while he alternated between swaying in place and doing his jerking-off-two-men-at-once dance. For about 40 minutes.
If we kept getting news like this about Joe Biden, the “liberal media” would be on a non-stop agenda to pressure him to end his campaign. We know this because they DID.
If the media culture insists that there are some rules that everyone has to follow, and there are some red lines that cannot be crossed, and YET they let Trump cross them with impunity, that is if not overt bias, cognitive dissonance.
The discrepancy between Trump and other candidates (including Republicans) who have to live in reality is made that much more clear by downballot polls. They have since tightened since early voting started, but this week incumbent Nevada Senator Jacky Rosen still leads Republican Sam Brown by either 4 or 7 points, in Arizona’s US Senate race, Republican Kari Lake is gaining on Democrat Ruben Gallego but still trails by about 7 percent, and in Michigan, Democratic incumbent Senator Elissa Slotkin is leading Mike Rogers by more than 3 points. Yet Trump is tied or leading in all those states.
NAAAAH!
Nobody Likes Either Of These Parties
But then you look at some of the actual early voting returns, which can’t show how people specifically voted but do show party registration… and it’s STILL tight. The Nevada Independent has been showing rural Republican counties outvoting Democratic Clark County (Las Vegas area) in early returns, and it’s looking like all Democrats can do to maximize turnout in the next week and Election Day, cause that’s what it’s going to take to win the state for Harris.
Because the Democratic Party under Biden was not that popular going into 2024, the main reason Joe won in 2020 was cause of Trump Virus ™, and while Harris has done a great job of presenting herself to the media and her supporters (compared to Biden), she is still running into the sexism that helped Trump win against Clinton and the anti-black racism that inspired Trump to run in the first place.
That would be one thing if there weren’t so many Black and Hispanic voters who have turned off to the Democrats because the economy that Democrats say is so great for Wall Street isn’t working out so well for the working class. In 2022, the middle 20 percent of income earners were down 1 percent in income from 2000 after adjusting for inflation. And recent ads have been hammering Harris on support for immigration, and for supporting the right of transgender prisoners to get gender reassignment on the public dime. That isn’t necessarily popular with non-white demographics either.
At the same time, while Republicans want to project their opponents as being some tranny Muslim commie conspiracy organized by George Soros, if Democrats keep the Senate they probably wouldn’t even do anything so radical as eliminating the filibuster. Which they would need to do in order to do practically anything else.
But if Democrats are as horrible as Republicans say they are, then Republicans should be pulling away with this, and not just in Nevada. And if Republicans are as horrible as Democrats say they are, Democrats should be pulling away with this. In fact, they ARE that horrible. As to why Democrats aren’t pulling away with this, see above for the advantage the media is giving Republicans by presenting them as still being a legitimate alternative. The problem for Republicans is when the rest of the country looks at their positions, and the policies they enact when they’re in charge, and decisively reject them.
There’s a difference between saying, say, that American public education is a ripoff because kids’ test scores have not improved relative to Asian countries in 20 years, versus saying, as Trump does, that if you send your son to school one day, they’re going to send him back as a girl. One is a policy issue, the other is culture-war paranoia. So even if there are real problems with the normie Democrat positions on issues, Republicans are not offering a serious alternative.
That doesn’t change the fact that the Democrats are objectively insufficient, but their incompetence and passivity mean that if they win this election, it will be mainly because voters are trying to restore the balance of power that Republicans did so much to destroy in only four years. If there’s anything that we should ponder, it’s that in the three years since the Dobbs decision, pretty much every state election and referendum to limit abortion rights has been defeated and every election to assert abortion rights has succeeded, even in states like Ohio where Democrats have been marginalized. A lot of these referenda are on the ballot this year, in states like Florida and Nevada. And it’s a little hard to believe that people who vote for abortion rights are going to vote in Trump, the president who is the direct reason Roe v. Wade no longer exists in the first place.
Conclusions
No one can safely predict how this is going to turn out. I would think, given Trump’s increasingly obvious senility, given that his tariff policy would undermine “conservative” positions on the economy, and given that his supine posture towards dictators would undermine our military strength by sabotaging our alliances, that Trump would be getting fewer votes. However, there’s all the people who were reluctant to vote for a woman in 2016 being that much more reluctant to vote for somebody who’s both female and black. And then there’s the growing suspicion that as Trump becomes more ridiculous than he was, that JD Vance is being presented as the brains behind the throne while Trump rules as a dumbass figurehead for public amusement, and a lot of “conservatives” seem to be on board with that idea. Except that Vance’s “post-liberal” statism would be almost as destructive to the economy as Trump’s tariff agenda, and his social policies would actually be worse.
Which again brings us back to the fact that it never should have been this close, even if Democrats win. That would be the problem even if there were no Electoral College, because Trump represents an anti-rational view that has hold of most of the Republican Congress and affects policy between elections.
In the present moment, some ask, “how did they let the Nazis come to power?” And the answer is clear: Because Hitler played a billionaire on “reality” TV and people thought, “This guy must know how to run an economy.”
There was an article from Vox I read recently that’s about a completely different subject: How AI is standardizing our cultural experience of the fall season. “AI-generated content is now infiltrating social media in ways that have a meaningful impact on people’s lives. Knitters and crocheters hoping to craft fall sweaters are being inundated with nonsensical AI patterns and inspo images on Reddit. An entirely fake restaurant has gained 75,000 followers on Instagram by claiming to be “number one in Austin” … Meanwhile, folks hoping to curl up with a cozy fantasy novel or a bedtime story for their kids are confronted with a library of ChatGPT-generated nonsense “written” by nonexistent authors on the Kindle bookstore, while their YouTube algorithms serve them bot-generated fall ambiance videos. Autumn, it seems, is being eaten by AI.”
This is what happens when people not only don’t know the difference between reality and media, but don’t want to know. So no surprise that maybe half of the country seems to think that politics is just some iteration of pro wrestling, about “owning” your enemies and scoring scripted victories. So no surprise that the people who (rightfully) scorn empty-headed Hollywood liberals who think their political opinion matters just cause they’re from Hollywood will worship an empty-headed East Coast celebrity because he was created for them, as Trump might put it, by Central Casting.
Something I saw on Facebook recently that summed the whole thing up:
2 died of Ebola – they said Obama should resign
4 died in Benghazi – they had Hillary testify for 11 hours, held 33 hearings and launched a 4 year probe
Over 300,000 Covid deaths (in 2020), an armed insurrection and theft of classified documents – they cheered, and want Trump as dictator
There is no “both sides” on that shit.
Trump, like other pathological liars, actually seems to believe that lying magically creates external reality, that if you get enough people to believe in your falsehood, that not only convinces them but makes the laws of physics and causality conform to your fantasy. It’s like being God, only better, cause God has to be celibate.
The Trump Virus of 2020 proved, or should have proven, that reality exists outside perception after all. You cannot bribe, bully or bloviate a virus. You cannot make a virus go away by calling it a “Democrat hoax.” And because Trump would not acknowledge reality – which would mean admitting he’d made a mistake – 350,831 people died, which could have included him.
The real joke is that Trump’s virus was what wrecked the economy that he says was so wonderful and led to the Biden corrections that caused inflation (after several markets in 2020 crashed for lack of demand). People lost friends, family and neighbors. And yet, lots of voters want to go back and give Trump back the White House, so he can do it all again.
But if Trump wins, he is either going to start World War III or another global pandemic, and that will cause a mass die-off and technological collapse that will make all that media fakery history. I will probably be dead because of it, and that will be something to look forward to. If anything this is why I still believe Harris will ultimately win this election for the establishment, because if there is anything this world has taught me, it’s that you don’t get out of it that easily.