Nobody would discuss how strange everything became on the Left after Trump won the first time. But here’s the truth: We went stark raving bonkers, especially the women.
There was never anyone to pull us back from the abyss. The legacy media profited from our collective hysteria. The Democrats amplified it to scare voters to the polls. It worked for a while, until it didn’t.
And most of all, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seemed to like watching the world burn on their behalf. I never thought that at the time, but looking back on it, I can see how cynical they were, how greedy for power they became. Along with the legacy media, Hollywood, and all institutions and corporations, we were their weapons of war, and they never seemed to care what that would do to us over time.
The day my father died, I arrived at the VA hospice five minutes too late. His body was still warm. The day before, I recorded this scene from It’s a Wonderful Life. The next day, he was dead.
When the hospice nurse handed me his flag and said, “On behalf of the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump…” I burst out laughing. I was laughing at my father’s deathbed.
It was like a Facebook status update come to life, where I seemed to believe my narrative of who I was and what I stood for had followed me into that room, or that everyone else in that room would find it as ridiculous as I did that Trump was the president. No one else laughed. It wasn’t funny. And I seemed delusional.
I wish I could say that was my wake-up call, but it wasn’t. That was only the beginning. It would get so much worse.
When my younger sister, a Bernie supporter, showed up, we were screaming at each other in a hospice with all of the other dying veterans and their families within earshot.
“Bernie would have won!” she screamed. “Bernie was why she lost!” I screamed back. My best friend had to break us up, “Not in front of your dead father’s corpse,” she said.
That was 2018, in the midst of the Me Too movement, when it was already clear to me that we were already half-past crazy. Losing Al Franken due to a tenuous MeToo claim was proof enough that we were afflicted with mass hysteria. It wasn’t any kind of imaginary illness, but it was hysteria all the same. It was over the things Trump had been accused of — racism and rape. His win was like the Devil riding into Salem.
Now, anyone and everyone could potentially be a rapist or a racist and could be accused of anything at any time. The institutions would respond, and someone would have to be fired. If they apologized, if they groveled, they could maybe “confess as a witch to live.” But that was when I began to wake up, to pull back, to start seeing my side critically.
We were gripped by paranoia and undone by absolute madness. I couldn’t do anything about it except try to be that person who stands between an accusation and a purge. But that only made me a target, and it wasn’t long before they were accusing me of being a “white supremacist” and a “racist.” Some of them still do, even to this day.
What was really unforgivable was how we treated the other half of the country, the side that voted for Trump. We felt emboldened to spit on them, kick them, beat them up, all for wearing a MAGA hat and supporting Trump. All of the lies sold to us had become reality to those still trapped inside the Doomsday cult.
Here is a video of Trump supporters being harassed:
I thought, if they’re calling me a “white supremacist” and a racist, and that isn’t true, maybe they’re lying about Trump and MAGA. So I decided I had to know. How much was real and how much was delusion?
To humanize someone, all you have to do is see things from their point of view. It doesn’t make them bad people for caring about a secure border. It doesn’t make them “racists” for wanting to clean up the streets of DC. It doesn’t make them Handmaids for wanting to save unborn babies.
It didn’t matter, though, because there was no bottom to what the Left could say about Trump and MAGA, even going so far as to call them “maggots” - they believe they are justified because of the lies sold to all of us by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, the Democrats and the legacy media.
The Democrats used Trump to cover up their own failures. Obama’s massive ego and god-like status meant he couldn’t lose to Trump, and he would not cede power to the winning side, no matter what.
Hillary Clinton played the game, too. She could never admit that she had declined Facebook’s “help” and left enough money on the table to cost her the election, or that she hadn’t gone to Wisconsin, or that she wasn’t even supposed to be the nominee. It was supposed to be Joe Biden, or even Bernie Sanders.
Obama couldn’t face the failure of having chosen the wrong candidate just to make history with the “first woman president.” Hillary couldn’t face the failure of having dropped the ball. So they needed Trump. They needed a crisis that could not be wasted. And all of us paid the price.
We were left twisting in the wind. We were handed the heavy burden of surviving what they told us was not survivable. They needed our votes, so they scared us every day, and they turned us against each other.
The reason Trump is in power now is found in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Trump isn’t a monster. But we turned him into one because we needed an existential threat. I see the monsters they became every day. I see them on social media and on TikTok.
I see them in their lawn signs, in their films, and at awards shows. I know them in my own life, what they did to me, and how they treat me. I had to walk in the shoes of Trump supporters to understand how it feels to have the people with all of the power throw you away like human garbage.
Identity First vs. America First
I have survivor’s guilt when it comes to the Democratic Party. I see most of them, not all, as unhinged lunatics trapped inside a hell of their own making. But I also feel bad for them. I resent Barack Obama and the legacy media for trapping us in fear and never even trying to shake us of it.
I know how we got there. I recall the euphoria of electing the first Black president. I remember believing that racism drove the obstruction to his rule. I remember how the Tea Party was “racist.”
The Freedom Caucus was racist. Bernie Sanders and his supporters were racists.
I was a “woke” blogger for years, advocating for people of color and women because I, too, believed the isms, the ists, and the phobes had to be eradicated. If Trump were America First and America First were racist, then we would be Identity-First because identity mattered more.
That fundamentalist ideology was everywhere by then. It was in every public school, most universities, and was finding its way into our culture. It was a belief system, a set of rules, an ideology, and something that felt like religion that devolved into a cult.
My daughter began to get depressed in high school, something she’d never experienced. Who doesn’t get depressed in high school, I thought. But later, she would confess to me that it was when she was taught that she was an oppressor because of the color of her skin, and that marginalized groups had to be elevated to fix what was wrong with all of us and this country.
Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the Identity-First populist leaders for the Democrats now because they can channel their rage over racism specifically and then also tap into the economic angst of Gen-Z, especially with student loans, their fear of climate change, the gender cult, and social justice.
Even Obama seems ready to embrace what Mamdani is offering, but then again, maybe that was always what Obama wanted, he just didn’t think he could sell it.
Kamala Harris has always been a radical trapped inside of a moderate package, and perhaps this is her moment, too. Maybe she’ll unmask and resonate at just the right moment to capture the nomination without anyone’s help. We’ll finally see the real Kamala, the one she was told she had to hide for fear of scaring the “racist” and “misogynist” American public.
She already has an army of women on TikTok saying “Blackout the system” after Kamala Harris said the system was broken.
To capture the spirit of Identity-First will require identity. The white women, not to mention the Black voters, aren’t anywhere near ready to embrace and stand behind a white man. Anyone who thinks they’re ready to stand behind Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, or Beto O’Rourke doesn’t know the party very well.
The Abyss
I can’t get back that moment when my father’s flag was handed to me. I’d spent almost every day with him for an entire year before that. I know that social media has driven much of the madness and division over the past decade. But I also know the extreme lengths the Obama administration went to make sure we all saw Trump and his supporters as monsters that required a “whole of society” effort to expel.
So, I guess my question to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and all the Democrats, as well as the legacy media, is this: Was it worth it? Was it worth tearing families apart? Was it worth destroying a once-thriving culture? Was it worth losing to Trump a second time? Was it worth the mass delusion that has destroyed the best minds of a generation?
Was it worth a cold Civil War that has divided this country, divided families, ended friendships, torn us apart in ways we still haven’t yet processed?
Was it worth it to turn to corruption to shut down any investigation of wrongdoing? Was it worth risking your reputations and your legacies just to try to make Trump the monster you needed him to be?
Here are Megyn Kelly and John Solomon:
Was it worth it now that you’re here, staring into the abyss, with nothing left to sell except fear? Fear of someone who never existed, fear of crimes that never happened, fear of people you don’t even know?
Maybe finally, it’s starting to sink in. When you go after the monster, you best not miss.
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