posted July 11, 2020 04:54 PM
What If It’s All A Lie?
Kurt Schlichter
Jul 07, 2020Would you be shocked to learn that a big hunk of the citizenry is absolutely convinced that Donald Trump will not only be re-elected but re-elected in a landslide? It’s true, and it’s not an ironic or performative belief, but rather one drawn from a perspective that the mainstream media utterly ignores. This means you probably have no idea it even exists, and that could lead to an unpleasant surprise in November.
Well, unpleasant for you.
Remember that apocryphal anecdote about how Pauline Kael moaned that she did not know anyone voting for Dick Nixon? If you’re here, then that’s very likely you.
You can dismiss these people as stupid – many of them really believe that Jesus stuff, deny systemic racism, and have no fear of civilization being destroyed by the weather in a decade or so.
After all, President Hillary Clinton did.
Didn’t there arise in your mind, that agonizing Wednesday morning after Mrs. Clinton’s ruination, just the faintest notion that you had been lied to? You tracked the polls, and you reviewed the percentages – most hovering above 90% – that assured you that the glass ceiling was in for an epic shattering. And yet, no shattering was forthcoming. Whether expressly or by omission, you were lied to.
And it is happening again.
Understand that under Trump, lots of folks did well. They got jobs again. Their 401(k)s grew. They did not have to send their kids out to fight some stupid new war. And they got respect instead of contempt.
Are they in denial over Trump’s alleged death spiral? To buy that, they would have to trust the media, and they don’t. Maybe that’s because they are hapless rubes, or maybe it’s because the media, when it’s not having to offer corrections for what it got wrong, is making good on its new consensus that its job is not objectivity but activism. If the media is willing to lie about Trump and Russia – even Robert Mueller’s pack of Democrats could find no collusion – what else might it lie about?
Perhaps the polls?
Ask a Trump voter if he or she – sorry, that’s the extent of their pronouns – knows a single 2016 Trump voter who is voting for Biden. That is, if you can. Do you actually know anyone voting for Trump? And not some distant Fox-watching uncle you spar with over turkey – or possibly tofurkey – at Thanksgiving. Someone close, someone you spend time with. If not, doesn’t that seem…problematic? After all, when you only experience one perspective, you tend to be really shocked when people with another one come along and makes you cry on election night at the Javits Center.
Diversity is the value du jour, but is there any diversity of opinion in your life? Poll your pals (you can phrase it as a solicitation for confirmation so no one mistakes you for one of the wrongthinking others) about some of the issues of the day. Isn’t abortion cool? Regular people should not have scary rifles, right? White Fragility was really eye-opening, huh? Anyone in your life likely to answer “No?” Well, lots of people in your country would. If you were shocked and stunned that Tom Cotton suggested letting the 101st Airborne go to town on the rioters, you need to get out more.
But the rigorous intellectual solidarity of your caste might not strike you as a bad thing. After all, your views are manifestly right, and to disagree with them is a moral failing deserving of consignment to the lowest circle of cancellation hell. In fact, some of your kind consider it a moral obligation to cut such reprobates out of your life – begone Mom, and take your “All lives matter” anti-intersectionality cisgendered patriarchal colonialism with you!
Sure, the comfort and safety – you can even tell yourself that it’s real physical safety, since dissenting ideas might make you literally shake – of your padded and puffy little world is no doubt pleasant. Living with no doubts always is. But it does create a certain vulnerability. In the military – you probably don’t know any of that kind of people either – the Army guys often observe that, “The enemy gets a vote.” And, at least for now, so do the people who don’t live in Manhattan or D.C. or Santa Monica. But they do vote, and they do see things very differently, and they will crawl over shattered Budweiser bottles to keep the people like you who hate them out of power.
They see you trying to suppress their ability to express themselves. Perhaps you tell yourself that what they have to say is so obnoxious it does not deserve the protections your own speech does. And perhaps you find yourselves backing the corporations’ right to censor offending words, woke corporations now being allies. They see you attempting to obstruct their religious exercise. You shake your head at those superstitious rubes wanting to gather for worship while applauding your pals gathering to protest whoever it is that is for racism.
The Trump people are annoyed, and they intend to vote. You smile, confident in the polls telling you that Joe Biden, whose basement dwelling really has nothing to do with his obvious decline, is way ahead. Sure, that happened last time, but this time the polls are dead on. They have to be, right? You can’t imagine that someone, in this environment of vitriol against dissenters that you support, might hesitate to admit to a stranger on the phone an inclination to vote for the guy who is literally Hitler.
You can console yourself that all the people and all the outlets telling you exactly what you want to hear are telling you the truth. But somewhere inside your noggin there’s that nagging voice whispering the troubling question: “Am I being lied to again?”
It’s Pauline Kael’s world, and you’re living in it.
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/07/07/what-if-its-all-a-lie-n2571940
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