Tag: election

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So What’s New?

Happy Holidays, everyone. Hope everyone had a good time out there. Let’s hop back on social media and see what’s going on in the world, and OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING.

Is 1776 commencing again? Are they shooting a Michael Bay movie? What’s going on here?

Is this an Assassin’s Creed re-enactment? Are you guys doing parkour? There’s stairs over there to the right. Why don’t you just take those instead. There are easier ways to get up there. You guys are going to get hurt doing that. Stop it.

Did they release a new Fallout game? Those ps5 graphics are looking pretty damn good. The fur on that Davy Crockett hats almost looks lifelike. Which side quest is this?

What are you doing sir? Where did you get that? That doesn’t belong to you. Put that back this instance. Stop playing around, man. You’re gonna get in big trouble.

So it seems a bunch of people who were convinced we’re dealing with a stolen election decided to storm the Capitol building to “save Democracy” because they’ve seen Braveheart™ one too many times. Noble intentions perhaps, but misguided and a bit on the problematic side.

To start with, the election wasn’t stolen. More people simply showed up to vote for the not-Trump guy. There was an increased eligible voter turnout of 7-10% in 2020 as compared to 2016. Here’s that pew poll showing that 56% of Biden voters were holding their noses and voting for the progressive with the pro-segregation past simply because they hated Trump that much:

A lot of people disliked the guy. The election was extremely close, but acting like it was a no-contest blow-out, and that it’s infeasible he could have possibly lost is ridiculous. Just because he claims he lost, doesn’t mean an entire election was illegitimate.

Given how Trump has acted the last month, the fears of the people voting against him weren’t entirely unfounded. He really hasn’t handled the entire affair very gracefully, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. His refusal to accept defeat no doubt had an effect on what transpired in Washington yesterday. He eventually got blocked on twitter and facebook after a day-long tirade of screaming “rigged election”:

Now there are all sorts of conspiracy theories all over social media about the event. A lot of the left is convinced that the police were in on this, and “let it happen”, while a lot of the right is convinced that these people were actually Antifa in MAGA disguises. Not only that, but a lot of the right is also now agreeing with the left that the police let Trump supporters in, seemingly because it changes the narrative against the Trump folks. Being inside the Capitol building can’t be a crime if they were just let in. It’s all so very ridiculous, but so par for the course at this point.

If anything, it seems the government buildings were a little too underprotected, given that a major event was happening in D.C. at the time, which isn’t a great look for government competency.

Evidently Trump had a “Save America Rally” at the Ellipse park just south of the White House. After that, a bunch of the crowd traveled the roughly mile and a half over to the Capitol Building to do whatever it was they were attempting to accomplish.

To be fair, I’m sure nobody was expecting anyone to storm the Capitol since it literally hasn’t happened in over two hundred years:

Nobody had ever flown planes into the Twin Towers until that happened as well, so there really isn’t a good excuse for the unpreparedness. You can guarantee they’re gonna be spending more tax dollars on defense now, so that $750 billion is about to go up. Maybe the White House will get some new automated turrets installed. Finally, something that benefits the people.

I’ve been seeing this kind of cognitive bias hot take a lot as well:

The old “if x group did this it would be different” narrative that people absolutely love falling back on, regardless of how detached from reality it actually is.

First off, the FBI is already aggressively pursuing anybody involved, which should be an easy task, given how many people were filming the whole ordeal.

DC Metro Police are on the hunt as well, and also offering $1,000 rewards for info about those involved with breaching the Capitol building.

There were also probably more Starbucks™ establishments destroyed during the 2020 rioting than any other type of building, making that tweet above a bit ironic. I don’t recall anyone particularly caring too much about the coffee establishments, let alone the police, who probably had better things to do that that time. Or maybe they didn’t. Who knows.

Oh yeah. There’s also this:

In another instance of irony, an executive order that increased penalties for the destruction of government property, and was aimed at people destroying statues during the riots last year, is gonna end up burning anyone who destroyed anything in the Capitol building.

Sec. 2.  Policy.  (a)  It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a monument, memorial, or statue within the United States or otherwise vandalizes government property.  The desire of the Congress to protect Federal property is clearly reflected in section 1361 of title 18, United States Code, which authorizes a penalty of up to 10 years’ imprisonment for the willful injury of Federal property.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/

These people are gonna be in bigger trouble than if they had destroyed a Starbucks™, something people literally did and received misdemeanors and probation for.

The silver lining in all this, is that it will no doubt lead to a bunch of draconian Government overreach. We’re now going to have the NSA scrubbing through grandma’s facebook account and putting a gun to Apple’s head to let them see all the personal pictures on your phone. It’s for the governments your safety though, so don’t worry about it. So, thanks for that folks. Good work.

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Pour Your 40oz Out For The Grifters

note: this article was written on 11/27/20 and auto-uploaded

So it looks like Trump is on his way out. The people I feel for the most with this exchange of power are the battalion of grifters who got rich off doing nothing other than being anti-Trump. How are they going to make a living now?

I agree with the guy with the Totoro avatar. Trump was a boon for grifters. Numerous people and organizations watched their stars rise by hanging out in Trump’s mentions on twitter, and yelling into the void like coked-up children.

People like the Krassenstein brothers: two himbos with the combined IQ of two six-year-olds stacked on top of each other under a trench coat. Ed and Brian unintentionally provided hours of entertainment with their absolutely special-needs level hot takes on Trump and politics. Unfortunately, they both got the boot off Twitter for running fake accounts, but not before amassing over 1.6 million followers between the both of them. They liked to comment on either other’s posts in a completely naturally and not at all forced manner like so:

I’ll also miss Eugene Gu, the fake doctor pretending to be a real doctor, who spends 12 hours a day obsessively yelling at Trump on twitter. You know, stuff actual doctors have the time to do. He’s gained half a million followers by replying to every single Trump tweet approximately 10 seconds after they’re posted. You know, stuff an actual doctor would totally do. Here he is writing a novel to Trump over a meme he posted last year:

Next up is Jeff Tiedrich. He’s a bit of a mystery wrapped in an enigma. He also might legitimately have an undiagnosed mental disorder. Literally all the guy does is whine about Trump on twitter, and it’s netted him over 600k followers in 2 years. He’s also suckered 100 people into paying him actual monthly donations on Patreon to whine about Trump. The grift is real. He’s going to have a really hard time making a living when Biden is in office. I hope he invested that money wisely. Here he is making the same old corny joke sixteen times, because his followers are evidently all children and never stop finding it funny:

Last but not least is The Lincoln Project™, one of the most magnificent grifts that was ever grifted in the history of grifts. It’s a PAC started by a bunch of George W Bush and John McCain cronies with the intention of surfing the #Resistance wave to untold fortunes. Their shtick is being anti-Trump to goad largely Democrat voters to donate to them. It’s working wonderfully by the way. They have 2.7 million followers on twitter and have pulled in about $60 million this year alone.

Most of the people involved are level-headed enough to have scrubbed their social media of anything that might give the grift away, except Rick Wilson. Rick is the loose cannon of the bunch. The guy has a history of saying incendiary things that he curbed (mostly) once he started his grift aimed at Democrats. Here’s a super cut of some of his greatest hits:

He doesn’t shit all over Obama and Biden since the Lincoln Project started. Anyone wanna venture a guess why that is? Here’s some of his other hits:

Those are some quality tweets, Rick. The last one is from Ben Howe, who used to be the Lincoln Project’s video editor until someone dug up the above tweet and he was canned for obvious P.R. reasons. He has me blocked on twitter for some reason, even though I’ve never interacted with him. I guess being blocked is better than being shot in the face though, right Ben?

Let’s see how this grift survives now that Trump is out of office. We might need to start a go-fund-me for a few of these folks once they’re out of work in a month.

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Election Accomplished

Congrats everybody. We successfully electioned. Well, as successful as one can election in the U.S. I suppose.

It appears as though the 2020 election was essentially a flip of the 2016 election:

It’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t exactly a landslide. Far from it. This election came down to a few close races in a few states. There was only a 0.3% difference between the candidate’s total votes in Arizona, a 0.7% difference in Wisconsin, and a 0.2% difference in Georgia. These 3 states alone accounted for 37 electoral votes. All three ultimately went blue, but with such tiny margins (only 12k votes in Georgia), they could have easily gone red.

This win was essentially a 3 pointer at the buzzer. It was a close call, just like in the sports ball games. Trump wasn’t taking it all that well that his team was losing however:

Twitter even rolled out a special new fact check notification to plaster all over his tweets. That was very nice of twitter.

He also sent out some crazy emails that make me bummed that I wasn’t on his mailing list. I feel like I was missing out on some great entertainment in my inbox these last few weeks:

So how did we get here? How could “Literally Hitler” have come so close to winning another election? Put on your tinfoil hat and hear me out.

How did we go from a whole-ass lineup of potential Dem candidates, many of whom were quite popular, to ending up with a guy who already had a long terrible government record, and a gal who dropped out of the running last year after polling at single digit approval ratings? It happened completely organically of course.

Just joking.

When people rally behind candidates that aren’t endorsed by the establishment, said establishment will always find a way to torpedo those candidates. Tulsi Gabbard started to overtake Kamala Harris in the polls in October of last year. This is coincidentally also around the time Hillary Clinton (the establishment) started to field rumors that Tulsi was a “Russian asset”:

The “I’m With Her” types can still be found all over social media to this day calling anyone and everyone a Russian asset:

Well, if someone as honest and uncorrupt as Hillary Clinton said it, it obviously has to be true Jeanne. Your misnaming of Tulsi also really drives home the point that you obviously follow politics and aren’t merely regurgitating stuff you’ve heard from potentially dubious sources. You can go back to healing yourself with crystals and checking your horoscope, Jeanne. Thanks for your input on this matter.

Kamala Harris eventually dropped out in early December 2019, and Gabbard followed suit in March of 2020.

What about Andrew Yang? He was a fairly popular candidate. They got to him too, unfortunately. This is where we have to face the unpopular-for-some-people truth that the mainstream media is also part of the establishment, i.e. those who hold the power to shape our elections.

This great website details the countless incidents between March 2019, and February 2020 wherein completely impartial, unbiased media outlets such as MSNBC and CNN constantly left Yang out of debate graphics and polling charts, listed his name wrong, and even used a completely different Asian guy in graphics of him:

https://vocal.media/theSwamp/a-visual-history-of-the-yang-media-blackout

Once or twice could be misconstrued as honest mistakes, but these incidents occurred over 50 times in the lead-up to the election. We’re on to you, the media.

Bernie Sanders had a huge following leading up to the 2016 election, and he too was unceremoniously disposed of by the establishment. Unfortunately, I wasn’t archiving all this at the time, but you can find stuff like this all around the internet of 2016:

This article refers to emails released via WikiLeaks showing that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then head of the DNC, favored Hillary Clinton, acted on her behalf, and actively attempted to undermine the Sanders campaign. She subsequently resigned from the position, only to immediately be hired by Hillary:

https://fortune.com/2016/07/24/wasserman-schultz-clinton-campaign/

Schultz was also Clinton’s campaign co-chair during her 2008 run for President, prior to ending up as the head of the DNC. I can’t help but feel there are quite a few conflicts of interest going on in this scenario. And people have the gall to believe U.S. politics is full of corruption. The nerve.

Let’s go back to 2012 now.

Anybody remember that year’s rising star who got royally screwed by the establishment? Anybody remember Ron Paul?

Here he is topping all kinds of polls, prior to being unceremoniously unpersoned by the powers that be. Why did this happen? Because he was vehemently small-government and anti-war. The establishment wants more government power and more war. When he was doing a little too well, the media decided to refuse to acknowledge his existence on television, which predictably hurt his campaign. The Daily Show did a great segment on this back in 2011 that you can find on YouTube under: (John Stewart) Media vs Ron Paul

This literally happens every election cycle. It’ll happen in 2024 too. There will be some candidate or candidates who get popular, only to be blacklisted by the media and slandered by establishment politicians. People will buy into it, and we’ll end up with a nice wholesome establishment warmonger yet again.

Here are some random charts showing media coverage of candidates for the 2012 race and the 2020 race:

The less coverage the media gives a candidate, on average the worse they tend to do. If a candidate is gaining in the polls, the media can merely cease covering them and this will reduce their poll numbers. Conversely, more coverage can positively affect the polls. Notice in the second chart that the media chose to give Harris the second most coverage despite the fact that she never polled beyond single digits. Now she is Vice President. Surely, this is just a coincidence.

Finally, here is a former MSNBC producer highlighting some of the behind-the-scenes working of the major news outlets:

So, yes, the media absolutely has a hand in gate-keeping who does and doesn’t end up in the lead in our U.S. elections, which is going to need to change if we want to have actual fair, Democratic elections in the future.

Taking all this into account, Biden was potentially destined to be the candidate going back as far as June of last year. All these debates might just be one big dog and pony show, giving people the illusion that they are participating in Democracy, when the only choice they actually have is voting between whatever final red or blue candidate is handed to them.

Having said that, it does no good to prop up a candidate unless people are willing to show up and vote for said pre-selected candidate. How do you get people to vote for your potentially unpopular, pre-selected candidate? There is an answer for that too.

You have to actively make the alternative look as bad as humanly possible. This is where we end up with the “lesser of two evils” scenario within U.S. politics. If your candidate is shitty, just make the other guy look even shittier. People will predictably vote for the smaller turd nugget.

It’s at this point we have the media attempting to convince people that Trump is a fascist, and literally Hitler for the better part of the last year and a half. Both of these assertions are ridiculous to anyone who has any grasp of history. The average American has little grasp of history, so this tactic is actually quite effective unfortunately.

They pulled this with Bush 2 back when he was in office. He was deemed a fascist, war-monger, anti-Christ for eight years, until he was replaced by his future pal Obama, who ended up having a very similar record on everything that was supposed to be bad during Bush administration. Now they are best friends and play Fortnite™ together on the weekends.

There are people who are still surprised when they see countless pictures of the Bushes and Obamas hanging out. “How can Michelle hug a war criminal?”, the enlightened one will usually ask. Because she’s married to Obama, sir and or ma’am. Do you think her husband was building playgrounds for 8 years in the middle east?

Having said that, at least Obama ran on a good platform that was in direct opposition to the negative that occurred during the Bush administration. It’s just a shame that he didn’t actually carry through with any of it.

Biden simply ran on the platform of “At least I’m not Trump”. His only selling point seemed to be that Trump handled Covid bad, and he somehow wouldn’t have. Trump did handle Covid bad. Biden would have handled Covid bad as well, so this is a ridiculous platform to run on.

Let me introduce you to the H1N1 virus of 2009, aka the Swine Flu. Biden was vice president during this time. If you notice in the diagram above, the U.S. is a black color. That color represents the countries that got hit hardest by this virus. The U.S. managed this virus somewhat poorly as you can see. The U.S. has a rather long history of managing viruses rather poorly, regardless of which party is in the White House. Believing that Biden is a Christ figure who would have lessened our current virus burden by much is a stretch. The way we manage viruses needs to be reassessed, independent of political party.

Far too many people are under the impression that the two big parties in the U.S. are diametrically opposed to each other. The old good guy and bad guy trope. The truth is that they tend to share more of their platforms than they differ. Neither is terribly anti-war, neither is doing a bang up job on education, both love big money and corporations, and neither seems to really care about the drug addiction and homelessness problems. This is how I tend to see it:

In this masterful artwork, you can see a great divide between the two parties on the left. On the right, you can see a great overlap between the two parties. A lot of people vote like the image on the left is a reality, when perhaps things are a little bit closer to the image on the right. Biden isn’t even in office yet, and there are already disappointing realities being unleashed on a near daily basis. These probably aren’t representative of the change people were hoping for:

Biden is already picking some real winners. He probably won’t have the same revolving-door cabinet of weirdos that Trump went through, but things aren’t looking all that progressive thus far. It’s still establishment, but it’ll be a kinder, gentler establishment.

Luckily, we can sleep soundly knowing the mainstream media outlets are about to take a giant four year nap. It’ll only be right wing or smaller left-leaning outlets who are going to report on all the bad things coming our way from this point on. Meanwhile, the Democrat-leaning mainstream is going to be doing this non-stop:

Thank goodness Trump is finally gone so we can get back to doing journalism about dogs, psychics, and socks. You know, the hard-hitting stuff. Make sure you don’t hold anyone to task for following through on campaign promises now. It’s not like that’s your job or anything.

This happened for eight years during the Obama administration, which is why people still think that everything bad that exists only started happening approximately four years ago some how. You have popular sentiments like this:

Thank god those cages that Obama and future president Biden built are going to poof out of existence now that Trump is gone. Not to be too hyperbolic, but this is kind of like re-electing Hitler to dismantle Auschwitz. Even Snopes isn’t going out of their way to run interference for this unfortunate fact:

When it comes down to it, perhaps we’re still stuck in traffic, but we’ve merely switched lanes. We’re still not getting anywhere soon, but the view will be slightly different for a bit.

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Elections Are Rad

You all ready for the 2020 elections? This is the big one, friends. This will decide whether we have 4 more years of authoritarian dystopia, or 4 years of a slightly different authoritarian dystopia. Get out there and vote. Huge stakes. Some of the biggest stakes. I’ve heard people talking, very smart people, and they’re saying these stakes are big. Huge even.

Which color of corporatist, war monger kool-aid do you want to chug? You want that fruit punch, or the baja blast? Both will give you diabetes, but the baja blast gives you a kinder, gentler, sweeter form of diabetes. Some people don’t mind the diabetes, as long as the diabetes is civil and soft spoken while it eats their leg away.

I’m already seeing the same goofy-ass predictions on social media that occurred in 2016. People posting their convoluted forecasts that seem to defy all logic and convey a complete lack of touch with reality. Here are a few:

These aren’t the worst, but I forgot to save the worst at the time I saw them, so these will have to do. For anyone who needs a refresher on how monumentally wrong the media and pundits were in 2016, here’s a small sample:

I think the reason these folks are so terrible at predicting elections is that they tend to have a very one-dimensional view of reality. They all live in the same area, surrounded by people who think and act exactly like they do. There’s very little diversity of thought, or life experience in these circles. If everyone you know says Hillary Clinton is going to win, what reason do you have to think otherwise? Just about everyone in my gated community is voting Democrat, so they’re obviously going to win, right? To be fair this goes the other direction too. There are no doubt plenty of people who can’t fathom an outcome where Biden wins this current election. The difference is that these people usually aren’t employed by the major media companies followed by millions of people.

Hillary was pretty damn sure she had that election in the bag as well though:

The fact of the matter is that this election will be close, just like the 2016 elections were. Anyone not living in a complete bubble would agree I should hope. The media lives in a bubble, which is why they are constantly wrong.

Anybody remember right before Joker came out in theaters, when the media desperately tried to create a false narrative that people were going to be influenced by the main character and shoot up theaters? The internet remembers:

This of course, never panned out. The media never got their sensational bloodbath(s) to write further articles about while raking in those outrage clicks and making ad revenue hand over fist. Poor media. I feel sorry for them. 😢

Sensationalism gets views. It’s why people who aren’t even in the media insist on typing out stupid shit like this and posting it on social media:

This is beyond asinine. It was probably also posted merely to get clicks and draw traffic to this weirdo’s account, but there are people who actually believe these conspiracies.

Anyone remember prior to the 2016 elections when the media also incorrectly predicted that Trump supporters would riot if he lost the election? This magazine cover remembers:

Turns out they almost hit the mark here. What they got wrong however, was that it was Hillary that lost, and her followers were the ones doing the things depicted in this image. This is projection at its finest. It’s also why you should take media predictions with a grain of salt, if not ignore them completely. It’s usually just outrage porn to capitalize on people’s fears and sell more copies.

Another thing to ignore are those ridiculous “This person/group/pet has predicted the election results before” nonsense. You can stumble into this distinction via pure chance. Let’s say on a given year 10,000 pundits, organizations or whatever make a prediction between 2 candidates. With a simple coin toss guess, roughly 5,000 will guess correctly. Four years later, of those 5,000, half will guess correctly on a coin toss prediction. After 12 years, 1250 were right. After 16 years, 625 were correct. 20 years later (5 elections) 312.5 were correct. By this time, those that guessed wrong the first year, but correct every successive year have a 4 election, 16 year streak, and so on.

The number of people/farm animals/inanimate objects that might have guessed 4,5,6 elections correctly is going to be rather huge, and thus inconsequential. We’re talking a 1 in 2 chance of being correct on any given year in a two-party system. This is like the astrology of vote predictions. Meaningless, but entertaining perhaps.

Everyone should just remain calm and realize that regardless of who wins, nothing substantive will change. You still won’t get affordable healthcare, the government will continue finding ways to spy on you and strip you of your rights, and your taxes will continue funding wars overseas that you have no say in. There is a silver lining though:

That is true progress. We are truly blessed to live in this progressive era.

Before I head out, I have some actual good news for real though. Turns out the Patriot Act expired last June:

This is the same Patriot Act that bad president Bush initially passed, and good president Obama kept renewing after getting elected on a platform condemning it. Every time it’s about to expire, the government votes to keep it around, but only after adding new dystopian amendments that consistently ignore Constitutional rights. Trump had initially backed the Act, until he suspected it had been used against him by the previous administration, at which point he unpredictably started to see it as a problem.

It’s important to reiterate that Democrats and Republicans have both consistently backed this Act. This means there’s a good chance the next Democrat or Republican elected after Trump will attempt to push the bill, or a similar bill through again. So if Trump does end up with a second term, at least there will be one upside: four years of slightly less government spying.

Happy voting, everyone!

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How Did Trump Win The Presidency?

As you may have heard by now, Donald Trump is officially the 45th president of the United States.  He wasn’t my first choice, being that I’ve always voted third party, but I can honestly say that his win doesn’t surprise me in the least.

He was running against a corrupt, establishment, career politician, whose party had become so used to getting away with murder that they weren’t even trying to cover their tracks any more.

Between the countless WikiLeaks email revelations, the damning undercover videos released by the likes of James O’Keefe, and the sloppy reporting and blatant partisanship demonstrated by many “reputable” news organizations (CNN anyone?), anybody who was actually paying attention should have realized that the cards were grossly stacked in favor of Clinton from the outset.  Despite all this corruption being brought to light, the Democrats still felt entitled to a win due to their own rampant hubris.  When you go through life with as much self-righteous entitlement as many of them do, the possibly of failure never seems like an option. Perhaps this is why Hillary Clinton wasn’t ready to deliver a concession speech upon losing the presidency to Trump.  There was no way in her mind that she could possibly have lost with such an overwhelming advantage.

If Donald Trump had run against Bernie Sanders, perhaps he would have lost.  A large portion of the Democratic voter base wanted Bernie Sanders to be the presidential candidate.  He had an enormous groundswell of support that was inescapable on social media throughout the year.  Unfortunately what the voting public wanted and what the Democratic establishment wanted were two very different beasts.

The Democratic establishment wanted a career politician who already had his or her tendrils in every sector of the American political/financial sector, and Hillary was that candidate.  Bernie was a mere civil rights protestor who worked his way into politics to further his civil rights agenda.  The Clintons however, were both on track to be politicans since they were in their teens.  They have been a political power couple for 40 years, planning their every move around climbing the political ladder.  The Clintons both represent the very corruption that Bernie ran on a platform of purging from U.S. politics.  It’s quite ironic that the very corruption he rallied against, took him out of the running for president, and yet he refused to disavow them.

How exactly did Trump win though? For one, there was a huge discrepancy between the reality of whose corner Americans were in, and whose corner the media wanted you to believe Americans were in.  The media set Trump up as the bumbling buffoon who had no chance of winning.  These channels and sites ran the narrative over and over that Hillary was sure to win by a landslide victory, all the while, doubling down on reporting Trumps transgressions, while ignoring Clinton’s, and actively painting her as some sort of victim.  Even their scientifically-sound, factually-accurate polls continually placed Hillary as the shoe-in, despite all of those polls ending up incorrect.

The thing is, these polls were propaganda.  The weren’t there to serve as an informative litmus test for how the country as a whole was swinging politically.  They were meant to serve as an ego boost for the Democratic party, i.e. “We’re winning the battle you guys. We’re the best!”.  Unfortunately, cooking the polls by largely asking partisan Democratic voters who they are voting for, then passing it off as a sample of the entire populace doesn’t do you any favors.  The people who viewed Hillary as the guaranteed winner might have been less apt to go out and vote, while those who saw Trump as the underdog, might have doubled down in their efforts to get him elected.

Another factor that played in to Trumps favor was the fact that a large portion of modern leftists are overly emotional babies who don’t understand how government works.  This was fairly evident before the election even took place, but is as clear as ever, post-election.

In the week since the election, we’re seen numerous riots throughout the country in Hillary-voting cities, rife with violence and destruction.  Mind you, these aren’t civil-rights protests, but a bunch of self-righteous millennials throwing temper tantrums because the candidate they voted for didn’t win.  Though to be fair, about half of them, as it turns out, didn’t even vote (color me surprised).  Remember all those people who destroyed property and wasted everyone’s time because Obama won, and they voted for a different candidate?  Yea… me neither.

Not all of these brilliant protests involve violence and destruction being carried out under the amazingly ironic banner of “Love Trumps Hate” however. There is currently a change.com petition attempting to “correct” the election that 4+ million individuals felt the need to sign, because it’s unfair their chosen candidate didn’t win.  It states that Hillary won the popular vote, which they feel should be more important than the electoral college, which she lost.  Now, it’s perfectly fine to feel that way, but the electoral college trumps *rimshot* the popular vote in U.S. elections.  It did in 2000, when it George Bush beat out Al Gore, just as it did all the way back in in 1876, when Rutherford B Hayes defeated Samuel J Tilden (who?).  And now some entitled babies want to change it to their own benefit.

Why else could Trump possibly have won?  Let’s see… Perhaps it’s because of the absolute lack of ability to make a cogent argument that the Democrats have displayed time and time again.  If, whenever someone takes a stance against something like illegal immigration, your response is to not provide a viable counterpoint, but instead to hurl accusations of “racist”, you lose that argument in the eyes of a rational centrist.  If the topic of abortion comes up, the other side gives a reason why they are against it, and your response is merely to call them “sexist”, you lose that argument.  If someone expresses concern about the rise of radical Islam, or the rampant human rights violations in Islamic-state countries, and all you bring to the table is calling them “Islamophobic”, you lose the intellectual debate.  Ad hominem attacks do not equate to valid arguments.  To anybody undecided in these debates, the side who proposed extreme things like bans and walls potentially won out over the side who proposed absolutely nothing but personal attacks.

It appears a lot of the left is completely unaware of this critical flaw in their ability to debate and argue, unfortunately. One need look no further than the popular leftist folk all over the t.v. box and social media to verify this.

Trevor Noah, the current figurehead of Comedy Central’s Democrat promotion arm that masquerades as a non-partisan comedy program “The Daily Show”, non-ironically believes that Hillary Clinton lost the election because of racism, sexism, and misogyny, and that she “would have been president if she were a man”.  Never mind the fact that she has enough corruption under her belt to fill multiple books, including more death and destruction than a Michael Bay movie, while her opponent was merely a brash jackass.  Obviously, nobody ever votes on conscience, or votes for the lesser of two evils.  Everybody votes primarily on gender and race politics, always, in every election, ever.  How are you even on a political-based show, you monumental goof.

Then there are the celebrities with children’s levels of political knowledge, who never let that hinder the constant stream of regurgitated, misinformed opinions they spew out into self-constructed echo-chambers of social media group think.  Think Sarah Silverman or Patton Oswalt.  Both are comedians whom I actually find funny, but whom aren’t capable of exercising any level of nuance in their political opinions.  Both also have millions of followers on their twitter accounts, largely because of their political beliefs and constant virtue signalling, and less because of their actual comedy.

patton01

It’s amazing that for a lot of liberal comedians, writing actual material has been replaced by this virtue-signalling on social media.  Why craft a clever joke when you can just type out “Trump won because sexism and racism you guys!” and get loads of empty likes from people who would fail a basic competency test on U.S. government.  I’ll tell you why.  Because comedians generally have low self-esteem and a need for acceptance, which overrides their need to exhibit integrity and reasoning to obtain that acceptance in an intellectually honest fashion.  Hence this constant pandering to emotions in exchange for validation on social media platforms.

silvermantweet

The factor a lot of people seem to be overlooking in Trump’s win, is that for most rational people, the left has become the greater of the two evils in recent years.  The party that used to preach tolerance, has become the epitome of intolerance, hurling baseless accusations, and creating false oppression narratives to set itself up as the eternal victim.  After all, the “victim” is the one who is always on the “right side of history”.  Being the victim comes with great power in today’s fabricated oppression culture.

Anyone who disagrees with the modern leftist is immediately written off as wrong.  Any minority who proclaims to be conservative, or holds any kind of conservative value is immediately accused of “selling out”, or being an uncle Tom or “coon”.  Evidently, tolerance to these types of leftists doesn’t include the tolerance of differing views and opinions.  You must think the exact same thing I have been conditioned to think, or else there is something wrong with you, and shaming and name-calling are justified.

A lot of the young college-uneducated millennials love slinging around accusations of conservatives being fascists, and everybody and their mother being Hitler, despite having a very obvious lack of knowledge of history, or politics.  Donald Trump has nothing in common with Hitler, and anyone who is even remotely educated realizes this.  Fascists tend to believe in silencing dissenting opinions, and using violence to suppress those with differing views.  Remind me again who constantly tries to shut down rallies, and speaking engagements of people they disagree with, and continually engage in riots to “solve” their problems. Hint: 99% of them are in the #NeverTrump crowd.

This is what happens when a society fails to raise it’s children correctly though.  When kids are brought up without any adversity and are used to always getting their way, they don’t know how to react when things don’t turn out in their favor.  They throw temper tantrums and lash out.  This is what happens when everyone is given a participation award as a kid for simply showing up.  They can’t deal with the idea of losing at something.  When you lose at something in life, you either try again, or accept the loss.  You don’t break things.

This whole Clinton/Trump ordeal mirrors the Brexit vote over in Europe to an almost uncanny degree.  A vote was taken to decide if the U.K. would leave the European Union.  The vote passed by a 3.8% margin in favor of leaving the E.U.  People on the left immediately started calling everyone a racist or xenophobe because the vote didn’t turn out in their favor.  They then tried to get a petition going to redo the vote, only to have it overturned by the government.

One more possible reason that Donald Trump won the election, is that a good deal of the population had become fed up with the identity politicking of the left.  Everything has become about identity politics in the last few years.  Meritocracy has been completely thrown out the window, in favor of voting for people based on trivialities pertaining to pigment and chromosomes.  The common idiom of not judging a book by it’s cover has all but been neglected in favor of judging books solely by their covers.

There are warehouses full of people out there who voted for Hillary based solely on the fact that she is a woman.  Check out the comments section on mensa-level websites like BuzzFeed, Salon, or HuffPo to see the proof of this.  There exists zero nuance or fact in any of the comments posted under pro-Hillary, or anti-Trump articles on these sites.  It’s nothing but 24/7 identity politics and regurgitated ad nauseam arguments.

Progressive rule #36: If you don’t have a valid argument, throw out accusations of sexism

The fact of the matter is that Hillary Clinton had two types of people in her corner: those who were partisan voters, and would have voted for whomever ran as a Democrat, and those who voted for her merely because she was a female.  Nobody who was even remotely versed in politics went out and voted for Hillary because they viewed her as a good candidate.  She was a terrible candidate.  They were both terrible candidates.

Trump had three types of voters in his corner however.  Partisan voters who would have voted for the Republican candidate regardless, people who voted for him merely because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton, and people who voted for him because he was the anti-establishment choice.  He wasn’t a traditional Democrat or Republican.  He was essentially a third party candidate who managed to hoodwink his way into being the Republican nomination.  He has a lot in common with Bernie Sanders in this regard.  Neither of their parties wanted them to be the nomination.  Evidently 15% of potential Bernie voters decided to vote for Trump over Clinton, which is quite telling.

I’m going to end this here, because I could ramble on forever on this topic, but I’d rather take a few of these points and expound upon them in in future posts.  Hopefully I’ll up the creative output on this site in the coming year, and maybe even try to veer back into the comedic/creative writing field a little more.  Now that this 24/7 debacle of an election cycle has come to an end, my blood pressure will slowly lower and I can focus on things other than politics and social issues for a while.  I have about a dozen half-written posts on political/social topics, and those will see the light of day, but I’ll try to work in some other content as well.  I’m out.