Why it didn't go right for the Left

A good explanation and revisiting a "thought leader"...

I remember very well how utterly shocked I was eight years ago when the Trump/Pence ticket defeated Hillary Clinton and, uhh—you know the other guy. Like slightly more than half the population, I couldn’t believe that the brash, uncouth, bombastic, trash talking NYC real estate developer and reality TV show host would be allowed to preside over these United States for the next four years. This is the best we could do as a country? Who were we??

Things are entirely different for me today. The biggest difference is that in 2017 I stumbled upon the biggest truth that had been hidden in plain sight. The story behind 9/11 was concocted by the USG and legacy media in order to launch a never ending war on innocent people outside of our borders. We may never know who were the real players, but we can know a few things for certain, our free press isn’t free to hold tyranny in check and the Oval Office isn’t where forces of good on the planet coordinate to keep the bad guys at bay. It’s the sanctum sanctorum where a ruthless cult imposes their will over our selected leaders.

It’s unclear to me when exactly the White House became corrupted. Some say it was during the Wilson administration which saw the greatest enemies of humanity take root in our country. The year was 1913 when our leaders decided that both Central Banking and a tax on our income would be a good idea, you know, to protect us from financial calamities and governmental insolvency.

Subsequent Presidents may have tried to do the right thing. FDR was a good guy, right? Then again, some believe we have good evidence that Roosevelt and insiders knew that the empire of Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and let it happen on purpose for various reasons that I won’t mention here.

Didn’t Ike Eisenhower try to warn us of the power and influence of the Military Industrial Complex had over our country before he left office? His successor, Jack Kennedy, posed the greatest threat to the real interests behind our government. He prevented an all out invasion of Cuba under false pretenses, he avoided a nuclear showdown with the USSR, he tried his hardest to keep us out of Vietnam. But alas, his life was taken by a lone gunman shooting a relatively rudimentary firearm (by today’s standards) from six floors up and behind but managed to hit the young President in the front of his throat and the side of his head while his Limo driver came to a near stop in Dealey Plaza before speeding off to Parkland Hospital where a rapid assessment of his injuries was conducted before the “real” autopsy could be performed behind closed doors at Bethesda.

Five years later, the people once again tried to put a man with integrity in the White House. Robert F. Kennedy would have clinched the top spot on the Democratic Ticket in 1968 if it wasn’t for a confused Palestinian man who was able to mortally wound him from behind by firing his weapon into the ceiling while standing in front of him. Geometry is hard. The Kennedy assassinations taught us that it doesn’t always make sense which is why we need to trust the governmental experts on crucial matters like these.

What I am trying to say is that politics is all theater to me, at least at the national level. I abstained from casting a vote in 2020 for the first time in my life.

When President Trump secured a resounding victory this week I felt for my Democratic friends. His win in 2016 came as a shock, but surely we learned how bad a human being he is during his first term. How could we pick him again and with a bigger margin of victory?

The problem that never-Trumpers have is that they are aware of the propaganda coming from one side but not both. That’s why this week’s election result was such a shock to them. I and some of my friends have been scouring media for a good explanation why Donald J. Trump will be taking the oath of office for the second time. The best I found came from the New York Times of all places.

In an opinion piece titled, “A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat” (holy moly, did the Times editors really approve of such a title?!), author Bret Stephens summarizes the reasons why the Republican party secured a landslide victory in the Electoral College while winning the popular vote as well.

Stephens asks:

“How, indeed, did Democrats lose so badly, considering how they saw Donald Trump — a twice-impeached former president, a felon, a fascist, a bigot, a buffoon, a demented old man, an object of nonstop late-night mockery and incessant moral condemnation?”

He then explains (emphasis mine):

“The theory that many Democrats will be tempted to adopt is that a nation prone to racism, sexism, xenophobia and rank stupidity fell prey to the type of demagoguery that once beguiled Germany into electing Adolf Hitler.

It’s a theory that has a lot of explanatory power — though only of an unwitting sort. The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her over-reliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”

There was also the larger error of anointing Harris without political competition — an insult to the democratic process that handed the nomination to a candidate who, as some of us warned at the time, was exceptionally weak. That, in turn, came about because Democrats failed to take Biden’s obvious mental decline seriously until June’s debate debacle (and then allowed him to cling to the nomination for a few weeks more), making it difficult to hold even a truncated mini-primary.

But these mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

Regarding the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there was no migration crisis at the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.

Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border, that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants committed crimes.

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

Last, liberals thought that the best way to stop Trump was to treat him not as a normal, if obnoxious, political figure with bad policy ideas but as a mortal threat to democracy itself. Whether or not he is such a threat, this style of opposition led Democrats astray. It goaded them into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

I voted reluctantly for Harris because of my fears for what a second Trump term might bring — in Ukraine, our trade policy, civic life, the moral health of the conservative movement writ large. Right now, my larger fear is that liberals lack the introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change.

I liked the article despite some glaring omissions. First, Stephens taught me what priggishness means:

“exaggerated and arrogant properness, or an attitude that is morally correct and shows disapproval of what other people do”

What an excellent word for our times!

Second, the author did a reasonable job of explaining the nuts and bolts of what happened. I particularly resonated with his assessment of the tone of the Democratic party, especially their lack of “introspection to see where they went wrong, the discipline to do better next time and the humility to change”.

But Stephens omits something very big: the influence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on a populist movement that legacy media has still not acknowledged properly. As a staunch supporter of his endeavor to clean up our environment which led to his focus on the problems in our medical regulatory agencies and the double standards we have with evaluating safety of vaccines, I was moved by how popular he became after his endorsement of President Trump. When Trump invited him upon the stage at a rally in TX soon after, the explosive response of the crowd reassured me that it didn’t matter if Kennedy ends up playing a powerful role in a new administration or not, enough people have heard his message and agree with it. People come and go, ideas will persist if they are sound and nurtured properly.

I don’t think it is possible to know how many votes Trump won because of Kennedy’s endorsement. Kennedy received nearly 650,000 votes despite being on the ballot in only two thirds of states and imploring his supporters to vote for Trump and NOT him. Trump won the popular vote by a margin of four million votes. It’s very likely that Kennedy delivered this symbolic victory.

Kennedy, like his father and uncle poses the real threat to the kleptocracy that we have now. That’s why pundits like Stephens shrug him off. The destabilizing force that Kennedy represents to the status quo will never be legitimized by those who are threatened by him.

Notice that Stephens only mentions what the Dems got wrong and nothing about what Trump did right. Trump made a very strategic move to build a coalition of powerful voices which included Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, lifelong Dems who were mercilessly mocked by their own party.

Do Harris supporters remember that Gabbard exposed the VP’s horrendous record as a CA prosecutor targeting the innocent in a primary debate in 2019 that effectively ended her Presidential campaign? Do they remember that Gabbard left her position as the Vice Chair of the DNC to endorse Bernie Sanders when she became aware that the party was pulling out all the stops to suppress his rise and insert Clinton instead? Do they remember that Hillary called Gabbard, an Iraqi veteran, a Russian Asset because she exposed her machinations? Do they know that the Biden administration put Gabbard on a terrorist watch list earlier this year?

He also embraced Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on the planet who spent a significant portion of his fortune to buy Twitter, a platform that suspended the accounts of many qualified voices of pandemic response dissent and political opponents of the current administration including the President Elect so that there would exist at least one place where public discourse could unfold outside the influence of our own government. Twitter (now X) is not perfect but it’s a lot better than what we have had for the last eight years.

A friend whom I consider to be extremely intelligent, especially in regard to their geopolitical acumen informed me that the author of the article, Bret Stephens is a foreign policy neocon and his opinion should be taken with a grain of salt. I didn’t know who Stephens was; I didn’t know what his political views were, that he was a Pulitzer Prize winner and once editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. But what did that matter? He wrote an opinion piece and his opinion resonated with mine on this topic.

My concern is that we are outsourcing our sense-making when we ought to be using our own calculus, gumption and intuition. There’s a difference between trusting a source on factual matters vs. hearing an opinion. I am pretty sure Bret Stephens thinks 19 Jihadists flew planes into buildings on 9/11. I don’t have to extend to him an iota of trust to agree with him.

Revisiting a teacher, Christopher Wallis

Last week I published an essay on the failure of so-called thought leaders and spiritual teachers during the pandemic.

In it, I highlighted the attitude of one such teacher, Christopher Wallis, towards any information that ran counter to his opinion. I don’t expect every intelligent person to agree with me. I do expect intelligent people to avail themselves of what is presented before dismissing it.

Edge of Mind Podcast

The truth is, I felt it necessary to tell the story of my association with Wallis in that essay because after three years of going our separate ways, he once again caught my attention on social media because of his increasingly strident calls to vote for Kamala Harris in the weeks before Election Day. I wasn’t surprised by his endorsement. I was surprised by the derision he fomented amongst thousands of his followers on FB towards anyone who would even consider voting for “he who shall not be named”.

Though I acknowledged that I didn’t trust 45 and soon to be 47 and that I found his bombastic, self-aggrandizing tone hard to tolerate, I felt that Wallis was missing the bigger picture about what the Democratic party had become and who it really represented right now. My point was that not every person who hesitated in supporting VP Harris was a misinformed misogynist. Wallis responded with incredulousness.

When I explained that as a doctor my top priority aligned with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s—to clean up our medical regulatory agencies so that vaccines are properly tested for safety using standards that tens of millions of healthy children deserve, it apparently reinforced his opinion of my knowledge of medicine. Kennedy’s antivax propaganda had already been debunked a thousand times over! How can a doctor not know that?!

I invited him, on several occasions, to read my explanation of how both sides use information disingenuously and then laid out a basic analysis of the initial Pfizer trial results published in the NEJM and how it suggested fraud and clear negligence of the FDA and the CDC in authorizing the first mRNA “vaccine”.

This was just the tip of the iceberg. Subsequent data dumps from Pfizer prove that their investigators were engaged in poor practices, misrepresentation of data and other criminal actions. Wallis wouldn’t bite. There was no way I could have a point, so why bother?

When Trump was declared the winner on November 6th, Wallis posted a meme which stated:

“If you voted for Trump, you can go ahead and unfriend me now”

Wallis eventually had some kind of reckoning a day later. To his credit he took down all of his inciting posts and recorded a 16 minute long video urging his following to not despair. Here were the most interesting points in his commentary which was intended to mollify the fear in his camp (statements are paraphrased for clarity):

• “We do not know for certain that there will be irrevocable harm in the next four years”

• “Some of the real problems we will face will be the lack of mitigation of climate change, the deportation of immigrants, the possible of infringement of rights of women and LGBTQ people.”

• “Take solace in that the steps towards a Christian theocracy will galvanize people on the left.”

• “My understanding of climate science tells us this that this is a huge setback, but there may still be hope in four years.”

• “I am not convinced that RFK JR. will do anything good because RFK doesn’t know the difference between good science and bad science.”

• “He (RFK) is “kind” of an environmentalist, but the problem is that he is not going to advocate for public health policy. He’s going to advocate for people taking their health into their own hands and trying whatever they want.”

• “In his brilliant book “Nexus”, Yuval Harari teaches us that falsehoods spread more quickly than truth because they are simpler whereas the truth is harder to grasp.”

• “We need to hold social media platforms liable for their algorithms that amplify falsehoods and not truth. If they were liable, that would be one way we could ensure that truth will rise to the top”

• “To the blue team, don’t despair. To the red team, don’t think that your problems will be solved by some savior.”

• “One last thing, hug someone on the other team.”

I suspect that most readers will immediately recognize his foundational problem. While reminding us that certainty is impossible, Wallis is certain that his sources are right and his understanding of “the science” as a layperson is correct. This is precisely why he advocates for holding social media platforms liable for their algorithms that amplify lies and not truth. What is truth to him? It’s what smart people know to be true: the expert opinion or “trusted” news sources. Everybody knows that.

Is it any surprise that his message to his grieving following is filled with incorrect assumptions and inaccuracies? Just like anyone who has been programmed by sophisticated propaganda, Christopher knows he has the facts right. Certainty is borne of faith, diligent investigation always leads to more questions. The overwhelming majority of those who do unconscionable things to others don’t think they are doing anything wrong because they know they are right.

I laud his appeal to come together. But though I always enjoy a hug, he would have served his audience much better if he had instead encouraged us to take a breath and listen to what the other team is really saying.

I also can empathize. If I believed what he does with that level of certainty, I would be alarmed at the present situation too.

Interestingly, he makes a very insightful observation midway through his homily:

“If someone believes their survival is at stake, they will go for someone who they believe will protect their self interest even if that person his hateful to them.”

What he leaves unsaid is that in an effort to protect their self interest, people will also harm and dehumanize others.

Christopher Wallis and his community are a microcosm of what is happening in our world right now. At this moment, one side of this country is living in irrational fear of the other. This is a very dangerous situation. It’s a situation that requires cool headedness, not explosive reactivity. It requires wisdom. It requires the kind of fearlessness that arises from true self-inquiry. If our so-called thought leaders cannot rise to the occasion maybe it’s time to hold them accountable.

Last week Wallis’s rhetoric and desperation was born of fear. The author, scholar of Sanskrit and well-established teacher of the exquisite philosophy of Tantra denigrated those of us who asked him to pause and consider another view and then publicly demanded anyone who voted for Trump to end their association with him. It didn’t matter if you were family or a long time collaborator of his. This is what fear does. It is a mind virus that separates people by narrowing the field of what is acceptable.

I doubt that he and his “team” recognized a certain pattern of reactivity:

• Our survival is at stake!

• There is only one sensible course of action!

• The threat can be defeated if everyone makes the same choice!

• Those who don’t are believing lies spread by enemies of the truth!

• If you don’t believe what we do, you are part of the threat and we can no longer be friends.

• We must muzzle those who enable the spread of the lies and shout this truth from the rooftops with increasing stridor: SAFE AND EFFECTIVE!

If there ever was an oversimplified statement it was “Safe and Effective”.

Christopher, do you remember how the “brilliant” Yuval Harari explained why falsehoods spread much faster than the truth?

Please leave your comments. All are welcome here.