"You Lost Me!"
Answering a reader...
This comes from a person who subscribed to my podcast after reading The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss. As follows:
I was hoping that listening your podcast after reading the Forth Turning that I would attach to your podcast. I’m a registered independent and believe that answers lie in the middle. I’m hoping that we can get to a more central approach to gov. However after listening to you in your discussion with Schaalman it was apparent that you are actually on the radical right. Republicans and democrats are both making mistakes and progress, yet we need to stop fighting like 3 yr olds. You showed how attached you are to Trump and so you lost me.
We need a better leader, not Trump, not Newsom yet someone truely in the middle that will likely lean towards one side yet regardless of their party affiliation I’ll vote for them.
You lost me!
It’s funny, I was just listening to the latest episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Salem Witch Trials, wherein Salem was attempting to put itself back together after that terrible winter. This would be late into the 1600s, heading into 1700. It took about ten years before they could talk about what happened and attempt to come together as a community.
It felt very Fourth Turning-ish in that the worst had passed, and now it was time to move on and heal. As the podcast points out, how do you sit in church with someone who accused your wife, your husband, or your child of being a witch, which led to their execution? How do you sit with people who went along with it?
Other Fourth Turnings in history would have the same kind of thing playing out, like at the end of the American Revolution or the Civil War. Piecing things back together, finding a common path forward was its own kind of tumultuous period.
How do you forgive your enemies? How do you move on? Maybe over time, the pain fades and the need for common ground becomes more important.
We’re clearly nowhere near that point if people are still calling Trump Hitler and trying to shoot him. Things are only getting more intense, with Tucker calling him the “antichrist” and then backtracking.
This reader believes we should move on, but note how she (he?) points fingers still and wants to put me in a category - the dreaded Trump supporter and “radical Right.”
To me, therein lies the problem, not just with the Left, but with anyone consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome. If she (he?) were genuinely interested in coming together, there would not be such an irrational reaction to my supporting Trump or being “radical Right,” which I am not, and I don’t think anyone but a Leftist would call me that.
In Salem, you had to believe that witchcraft was real, and that what you could only imagine in your mind’s eye was true. What drove me away from the Left and the Democrats was that they demanded I went along with their mass delusion that Trump was everything the media and the Democrats said he was. But I couldn’t because it wasn’t true.
As long as that mass delusion remains the status quo on the Left, there is no moving on. I am not saying the Republicans don’t have problems. They do. And it’s true that there are big problems with both parties. But what we’ve been fighting, I think, for ten years is reality itself. The Left wants America and the world to go along with both their imagined utopia and that conviction that Trump is an existential threat.
This reader’s letter simply proved to me how far we are from coming together. When I can wear a MAGA hat in my mostly white, mostly liberal town without them throwing a massive fit, then we will have moved through this moment.
The reason I fight so hard for the Right to win, and why I support Trump specifically, is that so far he’s the only one who has survived the attacks coming from the Left, now from the Right, and even globally. That’s why he’s the Gray Champion of the Fourth Turning.
Just imagine what would become of this country if the Left takes back power with that mass delusion and mass hysteria still intact? They’re already trying to shoot Trump and clearly don’t support democracy. We should be very worried about what they will do.
I'm still with Trump because, to my mind, he’s still the closest thing to “normal” we have between the two sides. I trust him to guide us through this moment.
Does that make me “radical Right”? If you exist inside a mass delusion, yes. People who know me know that isn’t true.
And p.s., thanks to all of those who subscribed or paid to subscribe, and the kind support in general for my last post.
You called it. From the beginning of your piece, I questioned the person's "independent" longing for the middle. They clearly outed themselves when they "othered" people on the right. You nailed it. Clearly a leftie though they are in denial.
The subscriber lives in a fantasy world. Trump isn't radical right at all, he is simply an American. First.