A little over 8 years ago some friends said that they were going to stage an intervention on me. They were gravely concerned about my mental state due to a decision I made. That decision was to vote for John McCain instead of Barack Obama. In 2008 well meaning college educated friends thought that voting for an intelligent, selfless, well meaning conservative was an intervention worthy action equivalent to shooting heroin or having a mental illness. I subsequently ruined a number of social gatherings just by mentioning my political preference. Friends who were laughing w/ me opened the trapdoor beneath me and unleashed their vitriol the moment my opinions became known. I’ve been called a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a flat earther, selfish and everything in between — by friends. By association, the media has called me worse. I wrote a bit on the internet and social media but stopped due to the swarm of hate and the fear that I might one day lose my job the way the Mozilla CEO did. Over the years I just stopped talking politics at all except in the company of family and the few friends mature enough to stomach an alternative viewpoint.
Many things led to Trump. But the vilification of legitimate conservative opinions is chief among them. John McCain and Mitt Romney were made out to be Death Star pilots. That doesn’t leave many metaphors left to describe someone worse than them. So is there any sense in trying to win liberals? Why not nominate someone who — whatever his qualifications — can at least win an argument on the internet? He’ll be trashed as dumb and evil no matter what. I did not vote for Trump. I was never even close. But I totally get why people did. The Non-TED-Talk Americans just stood up and hit our intellectual culture over the head with a frying pan. On that I say, “well struck and well deserved.”
More at this address: https://medium.com/@uuilly/a-closeted-sf-conservative-af1ef1097d3d#.61ealnmrc
Via a Brit Hume tweet- https://twitter.com/brithume/status/797418988477251584
16 comments:
Don't put off reading the rest of this post by the closeted conservative ;)
The name calling's gone on for 50 years and, as Dr Goebbels told us, you tell a lie often enough and people begin to believe it.
It's just gotten to the stage of holy writ.
If I were put in charge of the Ton Ton Marcoute.....Britt Hume would be one of the first to get two behind the ear.
What are you talking about. Brit Hume is one of the few mainstream news good guys.
There are similar stories in leftist enclaves all over America.
Many things led to Trump. But the vilification of legitimate conservative opinions is chief among them.
It's none of them. Trump won because the Democrats became a right-wing corporatist party that could no longer win manufacturing laborers' votes in the rust belt. Read the opinions. These people will vote Trump RIGHT out if he fails to deliver - which I have every confidence that he just very well might.
Conservatives have absolutely no answers for America in 2016 and the Trump people know it. Even York says Trump is a nationalist like Andrew Jackson (who had his own racial problems with the Trail of Tears, incidentally) so all this bullcrap I'm hearing from conservatives about how they can glom themselves onto Trump's win is absurdist hilarity. Those positions poll worse than their alternatives all up and down the board. Less war, less corporate control of politics, more for the working class have nothing to do with what the Buckleys have been selling you for 50 years.
Balls - your side is still only about taxation and welfare. The big administrative anti-liberty bureaucratic nanny state.
Get bent. (Sorry, but I'm a bit huffy after explaining this to the wildebeests of TOP). "My side" basically has one to ten that matter. That is not a side. "Your side" will now have an agenda decided by a pro-choice, trade isolationist who promised things to the northeastern/midwestern factory laborers who pushed him over the top that he will now either deliver on or get his ass thrown out with a deadly (to narcissists) blow of extreme reputational loss. He cannot help them by being the bitch to big business and your precious COC that he promised he wouldn't be, either. So if he goes that route, just to appease your own establishment - (or for whatever reason), good luck. The Republicans will revert to their decline in all but unearned and unapproved political power. The same issues that Bernie got just as much traction on are still in play. And you must accept that for Trump to enact him takes him most of the way to transforming the Republican Party into a pro-working class party that finally shuts up this nonsense about statism, liberty and other shibboleths with no purpose other than to distract from a life of corporate control for wage slavery. Trump will do nothing worse to welfare than WJC did and if he touches their SSI or Medicare then he will be thrown out on his ass. Deal. These voters of his were not the droids you were looking for.
both sides are too dependent on inside the beltway lobby crowd and corporate string pullers.
I prefer my corporate string pullers at least understand freedom and liberty - ala the Koch brothers.
Leftists have the real dark money - soros, google, China...
Dark and dirty.
Once the Koch suckers start polluting your Colorado streams and waterways then you'll see how UNFREE they want you to be - to drink clean water or breathe clean air.
Stop playing the corporate game. The ONLY reason Trump got the EC votes (NOT popular votes) he needed was by going against what you're saying.
So he can revert to the type of a typical Republican. And he will see where that gets him.
The Kochs are no better than Monsanto. They're worse.
You are sounding like a different person. He did not win for your party. Again, his voters were not the droids you were looking for. Poll them on the issues. Poll all the country on the issues. Your talking points here are not what the country wants.
We dodged a bullet pushing the Clinton Crime Family out. I am also skeptical Trump can keep all his crazy promises. Things will get better - or they will get worse. We shall see.
Hillary is a leftist. We can call her a conservative all day long, but she had no intent on conserving the constitution. She made no secret she intended to torch the 1st and 2nd amendments. (+ others.) Citizens United? - that was her first order of business. Retribution and a death blow to free speech -- all with one leftist Clinton swipe of the pen.
Monsanto and Koch are the same? I dunno, R&B. You'll have to educate me.
Hillary is shady. Trump is shady. They are both ideologically flexible, not really all that fickle. They are snakes. But Trump did the thing that won and he might be a great leader by bucking both THEIR preferences AND the donor preferences when necessary. But he might not. He seems to have great political intuition and now capital with the upset but no experience. Repeating the old talking points gets no one anywhere - at least if you actually expect a successful presidency. He is an insurgent ideologically as well as politically, and will use his capital thusly - or not. But neither side will get all or none of what they want, I bet. That's how he won. By being independent in priorities as well as politically/financially. So he will either build his success with more independence or he will be a bitch to the national partisan committees. You think he will do that? I doubt it. He is completely independent of both of them, as far as I can tell. To waste that independence would be more stupid than I would predict a needy narcissist with a raging lust for legacy and service like him would be.
Bleachbit.
Koch are polluters and segregationists. They preferred Hillary to win. GMOs are a boondoggle for unecessary proprietary herbicides and loss of small farm independence by patenting what the wind could blow into their fields. These herbicides are carcinogens. But Monsanto at least doesn't want to control the politicians as ardently as Koch does. The same Koch that born into a fortune by building oil wells for Stalin and Hitler - for whom he had much praise.
Dark money indeed: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34413-jane-mayer-reveals-history-of-koch-family-and-the-nazis
True that Koch wanted Hillary.
If Trump replaces Scalia well, kills Obamacare and the Iran deal, and increases border security we are already ahead. He can do all of that in six months.
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