Don't Worry

For some reason I've gotten about half a dozen queries from ex lovers the last month or so. The preponderance have been in text form, but a few actually were upset enough to call. I've replied to them first with the qualifier that while I'm fairly confident of my assessment I could very well be wrong, then going on to give an abridged version (my texting thumb ain't as spry as it used to be ya know) of the answer to this most pressing enigma they woke up to find staring them in the face. So I figured I'd park a post giving a bit more detail as to what my conclusion is (as my reply of, "They tried to screw us, but the condom broke and now they're trying to victim blame/slut shame everybody to avoid paying child support and hoping they wife don't find out" probably requires some expansion). That way instead of texting around the bush I could just point any stragglers here.

The question they've all been asking is some variant of,

"Publicola? Hi, it's [insert name here]. Listen, I'm really upset and so confused and I just don't understand this at all. I've been trying to figure it out and then, well,  I remembered that you're a redneck, so can you please tell me how the [multiple expletives and a vow to Tyr deleted]  Trump won????"


To start, I was a bit surprised myself. I believe in preparing for the worst, so I was bracing myself for Hillary to start the Apocalypse win the presidency. But there are reasons Trump won that make sense to me. In a nutshell, the progressives ran a candidate so horrific that even Trump could beat her - and we should all be glad for that. But it wasn't just about her as a candidate; it was about what she represented - the culture and the ideology of the progressives.

Before I get into the nuts and bolts of all that, I recommend two videos (that really aren't safe for work) from a satirist that goes by the name of Jonathan Pie. The first is his summation of the candidates:



The second is his analysis of why Trump won:



Now, I'd dearly like to tell you that watching that last video (again) doesn't (still) kick start a 750cc chuckle machine, but I wouldn't want to lie to ya.

Here's another (nsfw) video I stumbled onto one night whilst relaxing in my schadenfreude where another foreigner has a better take on things than a lot of progressives that were born here:



Takeaway quote (found at 6:31) - "Suddenly now gun control doesn't seem so appealing does it? If your government does, ever, by any chance, turn your [sic] back on you you better be [expletive deleted] armed, ya know."

Hillary was pushing the gunowner control thing pretty hard. It's likely that Bloomberg was an influence on that (though I haven't looked up the numbers I'm pretty confident he had large checks waiting for her as long as she'd help further his agenda in that regard) and the progressive wing of the democrat party (that is to say, the democrat party since the progressives took over back in '08) thought it was a good idea to burn their fingers in that particular fire again.

In a nutshell gunowner control cost the dems control of the house back in 94, possibly the presidency in 2000 and 2004, and here in Colorado it put 3 democrat state senators out of work (2 were recalled, the 3rd quit before she could be recalled) and cost the democrats here control of the senate, which they still haven't taken back despite all the progressive carpetbaggers in hell Denver and Boulder.

But I don't blame them - I mean it's not like it's so obvious that a foreign exchange student could have pinpointed the problem with their gunowner control agenda in an offhand quip in a vlog or anything, so how could any democrat know that it was still a losing platform... (Imma have to make an appointment with an ophthalmologist as I just rolled my eyes a bit too hard.)

Here's an interesting attempt to explain the progressive's approval of gunowner control - stability privilege. Which may be true for some of the progressives at ground level. But overall there are 2 reasons I see. The first is that the progressive culture and the progressive politically ideology are about control. You can't control someone whom you cannot use force against easily. The second is that the progressive culture and political ideology are all about the collective (or collectives). Ownership of weapons by individuals is just too individualistic a notion for them to comfortably grasp, so they have trouble conceptualizing any need for those sorts of individual Rights.

Moving right along, the progressives are having a hard time putting all of this - or perhaps any of this - together. Though there are a few that have little glimmers of insight, they don't persuade the rest of their fellow travelers and still miss other pieces of the puzzle that I'd think they'd have figured out by now. For example, Bill Maher.



Here's the full length version of the Real Time with Bill Maher show from 11-11-2016. The panel discussion starts at the 13:50 mark.



Maher catches part of it, but they quickly fell back into the same group identity politics and socially sensitive thought processes that got them so screwed up in the first place. The short clip is from around 30 minutes into it, but pick it up around the 28 minute mark for some other speculations that aren't just mindless insult flinging.

Tim Allen did an interview with Megan Kelly that also touches on some of the problems that drove folks towards trump.



Here's another (nsfw) take on things from a left leaning youngin that mainly discusses gender issues (and consequently spends a lot of time arguing with feminists/Social Justice Warriors/Progressives):


I do admit that I have a very gun-centric view of things. Indulge me, cause I'm coming back to this again: the progressives thought they could ideologically brow beat voters into submission, in some part by hurling euphemisms such as "common sense" and "reasonable" in front of the same old bovine excrement they've been on about for decades. It's as if they thought that once they dressed up the concept with flowery adjectives full of peace, love and good happiness stuff, that no one would see it for the heap of ineffective and morally detrimental non-solution it always has been.

I don't think most Trump voters saw Trump as a stalwart champion of the Right to Arms specifically and property Rights in general. They did see 2 things though - Hillary was talking about confiscation (that's what "the Australian model" means)  and they saw that if she got elected they'd never be able to find .22LR again, as the store shelves wouldn't be filled before they were emptied.

In '08 the Great Ammo Shortage happened. By '11 things were still scant but improving. In '12 it happened again (though not quite as badly). If Hillary got elected '08 would've been looked back upon fondly as a time where we didn't have to make .22LR cartridges out of stray brass nick knacks purloined from Aunt Mabel's curio chest. Trump might screw us over, but for a while at least we could (continue to) stock up.

The gun thing was part of it. A big part of it I'm thinking. But it was not the sole reason.

The group identity politics jumped the shark. For example -

Most folks that weren't pro-gay/alternative romantic lifestyle were a bit uncomfortable with same sex public displays of affection, but they could tolerate it. The same folks, especially of a religious bent, probably got a bit aggravated when gay marriage was tossed upon the country by the courts, but they could still tolerate it. Then the government put a gun to someone's head and demanded they bake a cake to celebrate a ceremony contrary to their religious beliefs, folks were told what pronouns they were required to use, and finally Pappa Bubba had to stand there outside the door where his tween daughter went in to take a tinkle and do nothing as a guy with a beard longer than his decked out in a skirt and heels walks in that same enclosed space. How exactly did they think this was gonna turn out?

Whether you think any of the just described scenarios is cool or not, if you want to understand why Trump beat Hillary then you have to put yourself in the place of someone that doesn't have such an "enlightened", "nuanced" perspective of life. A lot of folks in this world think in binary, because a lot of things in this world actually are binary. There is good and evil, there is right and wrong, there is male and female. If you see it differently then understand I'm not trying to argue with you - I'm trying to tell you that a lot of decent, sane, kind, compassionate people see some things as binary and sometimes mutually exclusive.

But it's not just, or perhaps even mainly the lgbt thing. That's just a good example of where the progressive's group think and social intimidation backfired on them. We could go down a similar road with the black lives matter movement, or with illegal immigration. The point is that some of the progressives flaws turned off enough people that they voted for Trump.

Progressives - I keep meaning to write a long winded post explaining the origins of what I see as their culture, and the conflict they have with mine (which is the Scots-Irish culture, but rednecks or Southerners or whatever other label you want to put on us is fine). But until I can find the time and motivation to finish that post I'll give a brief summation:

The progressive culture is related to but not synonymous with the progressive ideology. They do share the same base tenants, where they diverge is mainly that the ideology is a bit more detailed and evangelical. (And by evangelical I'm not talking about "in a Mormon's kinda way", I mean in a "The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition" kinda way.)

Those two base tenants are;

1: Society must be structured from the top down.

2: The focus of society should be on the collective, or collectives.

Those two holy writs sum up the foundation of the progressive culture and ideology.  Everything, every policy position, every decision making process within the progressive culture and/or progressive ideology stem from those two notions.About the only time you'll find conflict is with abortion - and that can be explained (though it's too lengthy to get into now). But the progressive position on the size and role of government, taxation, social services, finances, medicine, environment, etc. all flow from the two ideas mentioned above.

There are more minor, but still important mores that progressives adhere to. One it seems is that appearance is more important than substance; to seem, rather than to be in other words. In this worldview words create reality, rather than words are merely used to describe reality. For example if a person say they're a man, then they're a man despite everyone's eyes seeing a 5'7" 115 pound blonde with 34D-26-34 measurements clearly visible through their tank top and yoga pants. If a person says they don't want to confiscate anyone's guns, they just think we should give "the Australian model" a try, then they're just talking about "common sense"/"reasonable" reform, despite "the Australian model" having confiscation as its main theme. If a person says they require "safe spaces" to congregate with people like them, then that's not racist or sexist, even if they requirement for admittance into an alleged "safe space" is being of a specific race or sex. If a person says green energy is economically viable, then by golly it's economically viable despite all those government subsidies that keep any company involved from going bankrupt. If a person says that religion had nothing to do with that tragic event then religion is a non-factor, despite all the cellphone videos showing the fellow driving his bomb-filled truck into a crowd yelling "Allah Ackbar" just before he blows the truck up. If a person places a sign on the door that says "No Weapons Allowed" then no one will be able to harm anyone else in that place, despite murderers having a habit of ignoring signs, or over 500 people being beaten to death every year.

A lot of people think that's ridiculous - the notion that just because someone speaks the words then it must be real. A lot of people understand reality very differently from folks who insist that appearance matters more than substance. And a lot of those people decided not to vote for Hillary. Apparently enough of them voted for Trump to win.

Again, it does not matter if you agree with any specific example. What matters is that a large swath of the American electorate rejected not just Hillary, but what she stands for. What Hillary stands for is what the progressives (cultural and ideological) stand for, as she's one of them on both counts.

Victim-hood is another part of it. The progressives don't' just celebrate it - they revere it. In the progressive pantheon "the victim" is akin to a high priest or priestess. If someone is "the victim" then no one else has as much moral authority to speak on a particular issue as they do, and the more circumstances which one can claim victimization of some sort, the more subjects one may speak on authoritatively. That leads to a whole bunch of folks trying to display how they were abused in some fashion or another.

Now let's leave aside the problems this presents for folks that have been victimized but are trying to recover from it. Remember that society should be structured from the top down and collectives are more important than individuals in their worldview. That leads to people coming up with new ways to describe how not only they, but whatever group they belong to have been defenseless in the face of an aggressor, real or imagined.

A person could be a member of one of the smallest minorities in this country (let's say, an American Indian). But if he doesn't complain or speak passionately about how he's been held back by this oppressive society (or even oppressive societies centuries past) then he'll rank lower on the social scale than say an American of African or Spanish descent - even if they make several times more than him a year and overall lead a much more luxurious lifestyle. And Bastet forbid if a person belonging to a minority holds non-progressive views.

A lot of people don't value victimhood. They feel compassion for someone who was treated wrongly, but prefer to see someone in that circumstance go on to succeed through their own merits rather than wallowing in their misfortune. A lot of those people voted for Trump.

As a relevant aside, recently a few progressives have been criticizing Baby, It's Cold Outside as being "aggressive and inappropriate". A 72 year old Christmas-ish tune gets re-written because it doesn't explicitly comport with modern progressive values and a few folks see it as a virtue signalling opportunity. Luckily Mark Steyn does a good job of refuting the progressives perspective, as I don't have the time to delve into this as I should. While this particular incident had no direct bearing on the election, it does nicely illustrate the sort of humorless"political correctness" that the progressives have been pushing, and is a good example of why the progressives have been suffering so much rejection at the polls - a lot of folks think they're just downright silly.

Another thing the progressives got wrong was their choice of candidates. No, I don't mean that Hillary was an incredibly bad nominee (though she certainly was) - I mean the progressives shouldn't have picked Trump.

In the republican primary the progressives, through the DNC and the Mainstream Media, were all rooting for Trump because they thought he'd be the easiest person for Hillary to beat. So they did whatever they could to pump him up until he got the nomination. Then of course they turned on him, but by then the damage was done. They - the left, progressives, democrat establishment, etc. - elevated Trump to the position of equal without realizing it and that let him gain superiority over them. And. They. Can't. Stand. That. So they're in a good bit of denial, as admitting that they created the tar-baby that ensnared them would be just too damn painful.

The really funny thing to me though, is that Trump is a progressive. Cultural rather than ideological (from what I can tell) but a progressive none the less. And this is another part of the fury the progressives (particularly the MSM) has towards him now - they felt like he betrayed their culture by siding with those nasty republicans and conservatives.

Plus Trump can be crass, base, unrefined and generally not socially acceptable to progressives. This goes back to the "appearance over substance" aspect of progressive culture. If the Clintons or Obama weren't in politics they'd still be accepted on the D.C. cocktail party circuit. Trump? Not so much. I'm sure they like the idea of him donating some of his money towards them or their causes, but personally they've likely looked down on him as being just low-class. So having someone they couldn't accept socially as "their boss" (cause progressives somehow believe that the president of the executive branch of the federal government is a "leader" for us all) really grates them. 

Progressives believe in a top down societal structure. Very top down. So they don't quite get that other cultures (mine for example) operate on a bottom-up principle. For example they see the NRA leadership giving marching orders to its members on some position they find extreme. The reality is when the NRA is doing something "extreme" it's because the members held the management's feet to the fire. In many instances the NRA didn't even state a position until they got so much pressure from their members (or saw their members acting on their own) that they realized they best get on board.

Similarly they misunderstand the motivations of the republican party and those that voted for Trump. The "establishment republicans" that get talked about so often are mainly cultural progressives that just happen to have an R beside their names. They try to run things like it's a top down system, but a lot of republicans don't go along with that. Trump wasn't the first choice of the establishment, but they figured he'd be easier to work with than, say Ted Cruz, and they were hesitant to cast off the large segment of republicans that did want Trump.

The MSM either doesn't understand this or doesn't wish to, so they dismiss Trump's popularity as being because of racism (or misogynism or anti-semitism) and/or uneducated voters. That's why most of the analysis you'll hear from progressives is going to be wrong;  they apply an incorrect structure to a culture (or cultures) they don't really want to understand.

It's important to remember that the MSM wasn't merely rooting for the other side, they are the other side. There are exceptions, but most reporters, editors, etc. are progressives. Most newspapers and TV stations are owned by progressives. It's difficult for them to be objective because they don't realize where their bias originates. So to them it may legitimately look like Trump is an evil Hitler-esque figure and those that voted for him are all in league with Lucifer, but that's incorrect on both counts.

In any event Trump won by running on a populist, nationalist platform that emphasized very blunt speech. This gave an outlet to many voters who did not accept the progressives' top down, identity politics approach. Voters generally rejected gunowner control (again) and since Hillary was preaching that message they had little choice but to vote for Trump. Many voters just reasoned that it was either Trump or Hillary and chose Trump.

When Trump won there were riots here and there. If Hillary had won there'd have been no riots because folks would have been saving their ammunition for the civil war that she'd start in about 4 months time. That's the way a lot of folks saw it, and they voted accordingly.

Now as for Trump himself, I'm still not certain that he wasn't just trolling. I think he's inefficient or at least inartful in the way he communicates, but I don't think he's prejudiced. I'm not sure if he'll follow through on everything or even anything he said during his campaign, and generally he concerns me. But he concerns me because he is a progressive.

The MSM will not give him any breaks. They've been riding him pretty hard already and they're just getting warmed up. The problem is they're progressives so their bias will blind them to really digging into things that I'd be concerned about. But part of their game will involve demonizing him at every opportunity, and their holy trinity will be to fling accusations that he or his supporters are "racist, misogynist and antisemitic". Hell they might as well make it into a jingle.

Ultimately we should all be concerned about anyone that's in the oval office, as power does tend to corrupt even decent folk. And under any president, the federal government bears watching as it hasn't been a benevolent entity in a very, very long time. But just as no one has turned out to be Hitler since Hitler (at least over here), I ain't too worried about Trump getting his genocide on, and you shouldn't be either.

Of course, my reason for not worrying is gonna be different than yours..