RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hey, what’s up. Long time no talk.https://amgreatness.com/2018/05/30/dear-ex-friends-in-the-resistance/

I think the last civil conversations we had occurred just days before November 8, 2016. You were supremely confident Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election; you voted for her with glee. As a lifelong Republican, I bit down hard and cast my vote for Donald Trump. Then the unimaginable happened. He won.

And you lost your fucking minds.

I knew you would take the loss hard—and personally—since all of you were super jacked-up to elect the first woman president. But I did not imagine you would become totally deranged, attacking anyone who voted for Trump or supported his presidency as a racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic Nazi-sympathizer.

The weirdness started on social media late on Election Night, as it became clear Hillary was going to lose. A few of you actually admitted that you were cradling your sleeping children, weeping, wondering what to tell your kindergartner the next morning about Trump’s victory. It continued over the next several days. Some of you seriously expressed fear about modern-day concentration camps. Despite living a privileged lifestyle, you were suddenly a casualty of the white patriarchy. Your daughters were future victims; your sons were predators-in-waiting. You threatened to leave Facebook because you could no longer enjoy the family photos or vacation posts from people who, once friends, became Literal Hitlers to you on November 8 because they voted for Donald Trump.

I admit I was a little hurt at first. The attacks against us Trump voters were so personal and so vicious that I did not think it could be sustained. I thought maybe you would regain your sanity after some turkey and egg nog.

But you did not. You got worse. And I went from sad to angry to where I am today: Amused.

As the whole charade you have been suckered into over the last 18 months starts to fall apart—that Trump would not survive his presidency; he would be betrayed by his own staff, family, and/or political party; he would destroy the Republican Party; he would be declared mentally ill and removed from office; he would be handcuffed and dragged out of the White House by Robert Mueller for “colluding” with Russia—let me remind you what complete fools you have made of yourselves. Not to mention how you’ve been fooled by the media, the Democratic Party, and your new heroes on the NeverTrump Right.

A few days ago, I received a text message from “Stacey,” of the Real Justice PAC, notifying me of San Diego County’s upcoming June 5 elections. We “will have a chance to replace our Republican District attorney with a progressive Democrat,” she informed me.

Naturally, I wanted to learn more about the latest progressive crusade.

Real Justice claims to be an outgrowth of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. The group’s objective is to elect prosecutors who will “fight for social justice.” To this end, “big organizing” is required to mobilize “massive audiences” for a “big agenda.” Using the power of “social media, digital tools and the voices of a new generation of leaders like Shaun King who are organizing massive audiences to take action locally and nationally through rapid response campaigns.” The last thing anyone wants is a call from Shaun King’s people. That’s the guy with a conspicuous lack of melanin who co-founded Black Lives Matter.

All this talk of a “systematic, mass participation approach” and the aggressive unsolicited phone calls and text messages reminded me of another organization—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN).

ACORN’s mass participation program for electing social justice-minded bureaucrats entailed “enlisting millions of new and politicized voters.” ACORN called for mass democracy to “create an electoral environment hospitable to fundamental change in American society,” which required an “enlarged and politicized electorate” to “sustain and encourage the movements in American society that are already working for the rights of women and minorities.” And don’t forget “protection of the social programs, and . . . transformation of foreign policy.”

No matter how much sane Democrat strategists desperately want her to go away, Hillary Clinton refuses to leave the stage.

“As the 2020 presidential race ramps up, plenty of top Democrats we talk to would prefer new energy and faces to Clinton nostalgia/redemption,” Axios reports.

That’s an understatement.

Eighteen months after the American people told Hillary exactly where to go, the soulless political operative the great William Safire called a “congenital liar,” is everywhere. Promoting her whiny What Happened memoir and hurting her party by keeping her almost innumerable misdeeds front and center. Likening Republicans to Klansmen and Nazis. Supporting the left-wing Resistance to President Trump. Embarrassing her fellow Democrats with her abusive rhetoric aimed at half of America.

In recent travels overseas, Hillary has been badmouthing President Trump and her fellow Americans. During a March visit to India, Hillary viciously unloaded on her enemies – in particular, the 63 million Americans who voted for President Trump in 2016. Ordinary Americans are pessimistic, racist, sexist hicks, she said.

“If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won,” she said. “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.”

“‘You know you didn’t like black people getting rights,” she said. “You don’t like women getting jobs. You don’t like seeing that Indian Americans [are] succeeding more than you.”

Watching the disgusting (and decidedly unfunny) performance of the comedienne Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night, I thought of two things. One was, “What would her mother think of this shockingly vulgar and carelessly cruel exhibition?” I’d say the same thing about Ms. Wolf’s children, if she had any, which I believe she does not.

The second thing I thought of was Edmund Burke’s mournful observations, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, about the moral coefficients of the destructive antinomian impulses that coruscated through France in 1789-1790. The date is important. Burke, although he saw clearly that “in the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows,” was writing before the Terror. The depredations he foresaw and cataloged had so far affected mainly manners and morals—the human heart, not yet heads separated from bodies. That would come later.

Of course, we know what was to come. Burke merely foretold it. Yet the insight of hindsight makes Burke’s observations all the more poignant. “All the pleasing illusions,” Burke wrote,

which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason [note the irony]. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.