Image: Nicholas J. Fuentes adopted the term “Groypers” as a self-designation, signaling irony and in-group humor [2]. What began as performative irreverence, however, often hardened into a posture that substitutes provocation for careful reasoning.
Nick Fuentes: Dazed and Confused
So Nick Fuentes will be voting for Democrats and urging his followers to do the same. If this young man seems dazed and confused, that’s likely because he is a charlatan posing as a political activist and simply struggling for financial gain.
In contemporary discourse, figures such as Nick Fuentes are often described using broad ideological labels—“extremist,” “far-right,” or “radical.” Yet such labels sometimes obscure a more basic problem: the absence of a consistent political philosophy. In Fuentes’ case, the evidence suggests not a coherent ideological system but a pattern of rhetorical improvisation, shifting positions, and incentives aligned with maintaining attention and revenue [1].
First, Fuentes rarely presents a sustained political framework comparable to traditional ideological systems. His commentary often jumps between historical nostalgia, populist grievances, internet humor, and personal provocation. Rather than building arguments from stable principles, he frequently relies on spectacle and reaction rather than systematic argument [1][3][4]. This pattern makes it difficult to identify a clear philosophical core underlying his public statements.
Second, the content of Fuentes’ messaging often changes depending on audience reaction and media attention. Themes appear, intensify during moments of controversy, and then fade without systematic development. Reporting on Fuentes’ movement and online broadcasts notes how the surrounding community tends to organize around moments of controversy rather than policy development, reinforcing a cycle of reaction and escalation [2][7].
Third, defenders sometimes frame his rhetoric as satire or irony. Yet satire typically clarifies a deeper argument by exaggeration. In Fuentes’ case, irony frequently replaces argument rather than sharpening it. The result is ambiguity: audiences are left to infer whether statements are literal, ironic, or deliberately provocative. Reviews of his broadcasts and interviews show a recurring pattern in which controversial remarks are later reframed as jokes or irony when challenged [3][5][6].
Fourth, the economic structure of modern online media rewards attention rather than coherence. Personal livestream platforms, subscription communities, and donation-based broadcasting encourage controversy because controversy drives engagement. Fuentes’ career trajectory—including livestreaming, audience-funded programming, and branded political communities—fits this broader pattern of personality-driven media entrepreneurship [3][5][8].
This does not mean that every criticism Fuentes raises is baseless. Skepticism toward institutions, frustration with elite consensus, and debates over immigration or globalization are longstanding features of democratic politics. However, raising such issues is not the same as developing a systematic political philosophy capable of addressing them.
A more precise conclusion, therefore, may be that Fuentes is best understood less as an ideological theorist and more as a politically confused media personality. His commentary often substitutes provocation for analysis, and the structure of his platform incentivizes continued controversy regardless of intellectual consistency. Under these conditions, the line between political advocacy and entertainment becomes blurred.
For scholars, journalists, critics, and commentarians, the analytical task is therefore straightforward: evaluate Fuentes’ claims according to standards of coherence, evidence, and philosophical clarity. Doing so may reveal that the central issue is not ideological extremism so much as the absence of a stable ideology at all—combined with incentives that reward performance more than political thought.
Early Life and Education
Nicholas J. Fuentes was raised in a middle-class Catholic household. He reports that his ethnicity is Irish, Italian, and Mexican; his father is half Mexican, accounting for his Hispanic surname. His family background is conventional: his parents are professionals who value education and religious observance and who are not public political figures [3].
Fuentes attended local schools in the Chicago area and, after graduating from Lyons Township High School, enrolled at Boston University. It was during his time there that he first attracted national attention—not for academic distinction, but for his increasingly confrontational political commentary. He became active on YouTube and other platforms while still a student, criticizing progressive campus culture and what he viewed as complacency within mainstream conservatism.
Following public controversy surrounding his online activity, Fuentes did not complete his studies at Boston University, choosing instead to pursue political broadcasting and activism full time [4]. While this decision places him among a tradition of American polemicists who bypass formal credentialing, it also partially explains the unevenness of his arguments. His rhetorical confidence often exceeds his historical knowledge, philosophical grounding, or empirical discipline.
Political Stance
Neither Democrat nor Republican, Fuentes describes his political stance as nationalist conservative. He regularly attacks what he calls the “donor-class Right” [5], accusing Republican leaders of prioritizing corporate interests, foreign interventionism, and symbolic gestures over cultural and demographic concerns.
Fuentes has claimed the following positions:
Opposition to mass immigration
Skepticism of globalism and multinational institutions
Advocacy for a Christian moral framework in public life
Economic nationalism rather than laissez-faire libertarianism
Cultural traditionalism regarding family and gender roles
These positions are not, in themselves, fringe. However, Fuentes frequently undermines them by presenting personal grievances, cultural resentments, and sweeping generalizations as settled truths. His tendency to collapse complex social questions into moral binaries weakens arguments that might otherwise merit serious consideration.
Although critics attempt to situate Fuentes within historical extremist movements, he denies adherence to racial supremacy as a formal doctrine, framing his views instead in terms of national cohesion and cultural continuity. Yet his habitual reliance on demographic insinuation and collective blame invites precisely the interpretations he claims to reject.
Politically, Fuentes has expressed intermittent support for Republican candidates—most notably Donald Trump—while remaining hostile to party leadership [6]. This oppositional stance has energized younger activists but has also locked Fuentes into a permanent posture of negation rather than construction.
Despite his youth, Fuentes has achieved a level of cultural penetration that many professional politicians never reach. His livestreamed program, America First, has drawn tens of thousands of viewers and inspired conferences, donor networks, and activist initiatives [7].
Financially, Fuentes operates through viewer donations, subscriptions, event ticket sales, and merchandising—standard mechanisms for independent media figures. Public reporting suggests that his operation sustained full-time activity for several years without institutional backing [8]. This entrepreneurial success reflects genuine organizational ability.
The Groyper movement stands as Fuentes’ most visible achievement. What began as an online meme subculture evolved into a coordinated activist network capable of disrupting conservative events and shaping online discourse. Yet the movement’s confrontational style often mirrors Fuentes’ own immaturity, privileging mockery over persuasion.
The intensity of institutional backlash—media denunciations, congressional mentions, deplatforming—demonstrates Fuentes’ visibility rather than his wisdom. Influence, in this case, measures reach, not intellectual depth.
My Personal Response
My greatest fear surrounding the controversy arising from the Fuentes effect is that Fuentes will become more widely known and then embrace the Left. Although leftist policies are currently anathema to Fuentes’ thinking, he could be welcomed and embraced by the sufferers of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) after speaking out against the president (see video below).
If Fuentes’ finds himself the darling of the left, it might become convenient for him to use his influence to elect leftists. I’m hoping he is too strongly dedicated to his principles to have that happen, but he is very young, and the young can be driven primarily by emotion. The emotion of belonging can be very strong.
Sources
[1] Editors. “Nick Fuentes”. Britannica. Accessed December 18, 2025.
[3] Nicholas Thompson. “The Making of a Far-Right Provocateur.” Wall Street Journal. 2021.
[4] John McCormack. “Who Is Nick Fuentes?” National Review. 2020.
[5] Nicholas J. Fuentes. America First. Broadcast statements and interviews, 2019–2023.
[6] Interviews with Nicholas J. Fuentes, archived by Right Side Broadcasting Network.
[7] Michael Edison Hayden. “Inside the Groyper Movement.” Southern Poverty Law Center.
[8] Congressional testimony and public reporting on online deplatforming, 2021–2023.
Sample of a Fuentes Rant: Keep in mind that despite a keen intellect, the very young can be wrong. Over the next three years, this rant will likely not age well!
On the Other Hand: Could Coleman Hughes Be Correct about Fuentes?
Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Problem of Judgment
Since the mid-1960s, the name Noam Chomsky has exerted a great deal of influence on American dissident political thought [1]. Chiefly known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and media power, Chomsky has often been regarded as a moral voice of dissent, despite the fact that his opposition has made a convincing case refuting that status.
Currently, recent revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein further challenge that reputation. These disclosures impose a broader question: do Chomsky’s past political positions, such as his association with Epstein, reflect a recurring pattern of poor judgment?
The Epstein Relationship
Public scrutiny of Chomsky, who labels his political leanings “anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist,” has intensified after newly released emails and financial records show that Chomsky maintained a relationship with Epstein years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex crimes involving a minor.
According to multiple reports, the two men met repeatedly and remained in contact well into the 2010s [2]. Chomsky himself admitted that Epstein assisted him with a financial matter involving roughly $270,000 [3], which was transferred through Epstein’s network. More recent disclosures suggest the relationship went well beyond that single transaction.
Emails reveal Chomsky describing his interactions with Epstein as “a most valuable experience,” and he maintained “regular contact” with Epstein even after Epstein’s criminal conviction was widely known [4][5]. In addition to emails, Epstein’s personal calendar and correspondence show that meetings, dinners, and travel plans were arranged between the two [6].
Even more telling are reports revealing that Chomsky offered Epstein advice on how to handle negative media coverage. In a 2019 email, Chomsky suggested to Epstein that he avoid public attention and characterized press scrutiny as excessive or “horrible” [7][8]. Again, by 2019, Epstein’s crimes had been widely reported for over a decade.
Even Chomsky’s supporters have acknowledged his poor judgment. A 2025 analysis in The Nation noted that Chomsky has historically been inclined to treat “fools, knaves, and criminals too lightly,” suggesting that Epstein may fit into a broader pattern rather than an unfortunate but isolated lapse [9]. More recently, Chomsky’s own wife publicly described their association with Epstein as a “serious error in judgment,” attributing it in part to misplaced trust [10].
A Pattern of Intellectual Leniency
To understand whether this episode is unique, it is useful to analyze Chomsky’s earlier political positions. Critics have long argued that Chomsky’s worldview often leads him to downplay or reinterpret wrongdoing by figures who align—directly or indirectly—with his broader negative criticism of Western power.
The Cambodia case is the most extensively documented example. In their 1977 article “Distortions at Fourth Hand” [11], Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman urged caution toward refugee testimony and criticized what they saw as exaggerated media reporting on Khmer Rouge atrocities. This position drew sustained criticism from later scholars and analysts, who argued that Chomsky’s skepticism led him to downplay credible evidence of mass violence and to rely on selectively favorable sources.
Political scientist Stephen J. Morris [12], for example, accused Chomsky of minimizing repression and misrepresenting available evidence, while later analyses by writers such as Bruce Sharp [13] identified methodological flaws and omissions in his treatment of the Cambodian record. Survivors and scholars, including Sophal Ear [14], have likewise criticized Western intellectuals who appeared to discount or reinterpret the scale of Khmer Rouge atrocities.
Chomsky’s defenders argue that he never flatly denied the atrocities, and that his primary target was Western double standards rather than the Khmer Rouge itself. That defense has some merit, but it does not resolve the central problem: the asymmetry of scrutiny.
The same 1977 article that urged skepticism toward refugee accounts of Khmer Rouge mass killings offered no comparable skepticism toward the pro-Khmer Rouge book Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution by Gareth Porter and George Hildebrand [15]—a volume that, as Chomsky and Herman themselves noted, did not contain a single sentence critical of the regime.
Yet, they gave the book their implicit endorsement, contrasting with sources they attacked. The pattern, in short, was not neutrality. It was the application of a demanding critical standard to evidence of atrocities by U.S.-opposed regimes, and a conspicuously lighter touch toward sources that minimized those atrocities.
Similarly, Chomsky has often pitted authoritarian governments in the Global South against U.S. imperialism in his ongoing critique of the West. While this perspective has been influential in academic and activist circles, Chomskyan challengers argue that such a view often leads to moral asymmetry—judging and viewing Western actions harshly while applying a more forgiving lens to others.
The Epstein case appears to fit into a similar pattern of Chomskyan readiness to bracket or relativize serious abuses when they cannot be comfortably assigned to the actors and structures he regards as primary villains. Epstein was not a political figure, but he occupied a position within elite networks that Chomsky has often harshly berated. Instead of maintaining distance, Chomsky engaged with Epstein, accepted financial assistance, and even offered reputational advice. The gap between Chomsky’s theoretical critique of elite power and his personal association with a disgraced financier remains impossible to ignore.
The Role of Personal Trust
One possible exculpatory excuse for this pattern is Chomsky’s intellectual disposition. Some supporters describe him as principled but also unusually willing to engage with a wide range of individuals, including controversial ones.
Other supporters point out that this disposition has led him not only to cultivate relationships with ideological allies but also to defend the institutional rights of his adversaries—for example, insisting in 1969 that Walt Rostow, a chief architect of the Vietnam War, must be allowed to teach at MIT in the name of academic freedom, despite Chomsky’s own fierce opposition to Rostow’s policies. Such openness can be interpreted as a strength—an unwillingness to adopt simplistic moral binaries, but it may also leave him vulnerable to manipulation.
From a number of reports, it can be gleaned that Epstein specialized in cultivating relationships with influential figures; this specialty accounts for the many references to Donald Trump. Epstein presented himself as a philanthropist and intellectual patron, often targeting academics, scientists, and well-known business figures. In this sense, Chomsky’s association with Epstein may be interpreted not as ideological alignment but as a failure to recognize manipulation.
However, this explanation does not withstand close analysis. Epstein’s criminal record was publicly known long before many of these interactions occurred. Continued engagement under such conditions suggests not merely naïveté, but a willingness to overlook serious moral concerns.
It should be noted that the Donald Trump-Epstein relationship [16] contrasts in important ways with that of Chomsky-Epstein. Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was a pre-conviction social friendship from the late 1980s to early 2000s that ended abruptly around 2004–2007.
Reports and legal filings have been used to argue that Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after news of inappropriate behavior toward a teenage girl there, publicly distanced himself well before Epstein’s 2008 conviction, called him “not a fan” in later years, and alerted authorities to concerns about Epstein’s conduct as early as 2006.
None of this news about the Chomsky-Epstein relationship suggests that Chomsky engaged in any of the crimes associated with Epstein. However, reports of that close relationship remain troubling even if not shocking to Chomsky’s oppositional critics.
Implications for Chomsky’s Legacy
The significance of this controversy extends well beyond a Chomskyan personal reputation. Noam Chomsky has long derived authority from his claim to moral clarity—his insistence on exposing hypocrisy, power abuse, and ethical double standards. The Epstein relationship undermines that claim in a direct way.
Maintaining contact with a convicted sex offender, accepting financial assistance routed through Epstein, and offering reputational advice cannot be dismissed as mere eccentricity or intellectual openness. These acts remain conscious choices made in the presence of widely known facts. Such behavior indicates a failure not only of understanding, but also of a moral disposition to prioritize relativistic sensibilities.
This pattern aligns with earlier criticisms of Chomsky’s political judgment. His inclination to approach Western wrongdoing with extreme contempt, while failing to apply any harsh evaluation of other cultures, has long been observed and criticized.
In the Epstein case, that same instinct appears redirected into the personal sphere: a willingness to discount or compartmentalize serious wrongdoing when it does not fit neatly into his established framework of critique. That decision does not reflect neutrality; it clearly demonstrates selective judgment.
Reassessing Intellectual Authority
It is also worth reconsidering the broader assumption that Chomsky’s stature in one field secures his authority in others. While his early contributions to linguistics—particularly in generative grammar—were influential, they have been seriously debated and, in many areas, revised or challenged by subsequent research.
His reputation in linguistics rests on the claim that he transformed the field from simple description into a genuine science. That claim has been strongly challenged. What he actually produced was a highly abstract, internally shifting framework that substitutes theory for empirical accountability. His reputation as an unassailable intellectual figure has been challenged and even refuted by well-respected linguists [17][18][19].
More importantly, even successful intellectual achievement does not excuse poor judgment in ethical or practical matters. The Epstein association demonstrates that analytical sharpness in abstract domains does not necessarily translate into sound decision-making in real-world contexts. If anything, Chomsky’s case illustrates how intellectual confidence can coexist with, and perhaps even enable, serious lapses in judgment.
Chomskyan Accountability
The evidence surrounding Chomsky’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein should not be treated as an isolated misstep. It is better understood as part of a broader pattern in which moral evaluation becomes inconsistent and, at times, selectively applied. This pattern, therefore, requires a more critical and less deferential reading of his work.
For readers, the takeaway is straightforward: authority must be continually tested against behavior. Chomsky’s career demonstrates that prominence and forceful critique do not guarantee reliability in judgment. In this instance, the failure is not subtle—it is clear, documented, and consequential.
[11] Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman. “Distortions at Fourth Hand.” The Nation. June 25, 1977, pp. 789–790. Also available at chomsky.info/19770625/.
[12] Stephen J. Morris. “Whitewashing Dictatorship in Vietnam and Cambodia.” The Anti-Chomsky Reader. Encounter Books. 2004.
[19] Steven Piantadosi. “Modern Language Models Refute Chomsky’s Approach to Language.” From Fieldwork to Linguistic Theory: A Tribute to Dan Everett. Eds.Edward Gibson and Moshe Poliak, Language Science Press. 2023, pp. 353-414. Published online July 5, 2024 .
Fiction Alert! This story is fiction. It does not depict any real person or actual event.
Graveyard Whistler: A Political Poem Find,”Liberal Mud with Commentary”
Graveyard Whistler unearths a piece of doggerel that nevertheless caught his fancy, as it presented, in his opinion, a much needed corrective to the misuse of a beloved term.
Foreword from the Graveyard Whistler
Let me make it clear right away: I despise politics. National politics, hate it. Local politics, hate it. Office politics, hate it the worst. So I rarely delve into issues that might lead me to the necessity of discussing politics. However, as I have so often touted the treasure trove from my old, late buddy Stoney’s Stone Gulch Literary Arts, I feel the need to address some political issues that Stoney addressed.
At first, my inclination was to simply avoid all of his political scribblings, but then after I actually read this offering, I realized I had actually learned something, which has changed my view about political issues. You will notice that it’s not just a poem—actually, it’s a piece of doggerel, as Stoney called it—but it has a commentary that is well researched with sources. I’m still not allowing myself to become immersed in those issues, but I don’t feel that avoiding them completely does me or anyone else any good.
You see, I’ve always considered myself “liberal”—that is opposed to stuffy conservative thought that disavows all progress, including science and minority rights—and until encountering this piece called “Liberal Mud,” I did not realize the difference between “classical liberal” and “modern liberal.” To me, liberal was liberal which was a good thing, always. Full stop.
As usual, Stoney has not made it clear that he wrote this piece; it just kind of popped up at the bottom of a clipping of Stoney delivering a speech to a college assembly. How I would love to include that image of Stoney speaking—but alas! when he gifted me with his site-full of writings, he insisted he remain anonymous, so any image or even Stoney’s real name will never appear in my writings.
Without further ado, I present the piece of doggerel—and that’s what Stoney called it—for what it’s worth:
“Liberal Mud with Commentary”
This piece of doggerel titled, “Liberal Mud,” is brazenly political; it focuses on the nature of the much abused term, “liberalism,” which denotes freedom from the overreach of governmental restraints.
The term, “liberal,” has been much abused. For example, in contemporary American politics, the party that claims the label of liberal is the party whose policies are formulated to control every aspect of life of the citizens of the United States from healthcare to business practices to what each American is allowed to think. That party even seeks to quash freedom of religion, which was a major impetus leading to the founding the country.
Under the guise of “liberalism,” that party claims large swaths of the citizenry who have fallen for the corrupt concept of “identity politics.” For example, the party claims huge numbers of African Americans, women, gays, and young voters. The party appeals to many of the uninformed/misinformed in those “groups” simply by offering them government largesse and claiming to represent their interests.
A common misconception is that the Democratic and Republican parties switched policies a few decades ago. That lie has been perpetuated by Democrat vote seekers because history reveals that the Republican Party has always been the party of freedom; it was, in fact, President Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves during the American Civil War.
As Rev. Wayne Perryman has averred: “Many believed the Democrats had a change of heart and fell in love with blacks. To the contrary, history reveals the Democrats didn’t fall in love with black folks, they fell in love with the black vote knowing this would be their ticket to the White House.” As they have experienced the result of luring the votes of black folks, Democrat politicians have worked the same old lie to get the votes of the other identity groups: women, gays, young voters.
Originally, the term, “liberal,” indicated the positive quality of allowing freedom from government overreach, and generally those who wish to unleash themselves from harsh constraints on behavior that harms no one are, in fact, liberal. The American Founding Fathers were the liberals of that period of history. Those colonists who wished to remain tied to England, instead of seeking independence, were the conservatives. In current, common parlance, there is a distinction between “classical liberal” and “modern liberal.”
Whether an ideology is liberal or conservative depends entirely upon the status quo of the era. If a nation’s government status quo functions as a socialist/totalitarian structure and a group of citizens works to convert it to a republic, then that group would be the liberals, as was the case at the founding of the democratic republic of the United States of America. However, if a country’s governing status quo structure functions as a democratic republic, and a group of citizens struggles to change it into a socialist/totalitarian structure — a la Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or any other current member of the Democratic Party — then that group would be the liberals, however, mistakenly that term would be when applied to such a stance.
Conservatism is the desire to maintain the status quo despite the nature of that status quo, but then again it is necessary to delineate what that status quo is. If the status quo allows freedom, then it should be conserved; if it does not, it should be liberalized. It is unfortunate that those terms have become so flabby, but then that is the nature of political speak: the side that has the lesser argument will always seek to convert language, instead of converting their feckless policies.
This piece hails forth in the current acceptance of a liberalism that is anything but liberal: modern liberalism vs classical liberalism. The piece (doggerel) might well be titled “Totalitarian Mud.” But part of the point is to report the denatured use of the term, “liberal,” as it decries the effects of that denatured term.
Liberal Mud
Every soldier takes to battle His duty for survival Marching against the rival.
The enemy muscles the air Against all that is fair Against putrid politics.
Liberal dust smothering light, Converts gloom against the fight To save freedom from the sand.
Liberal breath pollutes the way Through politics that betray Their fellows natural rights.
Liberal thieves convert the vote To steal the sacred note As enemies rise from hell.
Licking their wounds, their paws, Leaving the press no answer Save all the fake men of straws.
No hypocrite gives more haste Than a mind without a compass. It remains a terrible waste
To slime the brain’s red blood In the bog pond of liberal mud.
Commentary on “Liberal Mud”
The fight for freedom never ends. True liberal thought that leads to fairness must continually be pursued to avoid its opposite, tyranny.
First Tercet: Fight for Freedom
Every soldier takes to battle His duty for survival Marching against the rival.
These particular soldiers represent the fight for what is right, correct, that which gives the most freedom to the most people. Modern-day liberals would take away these soldiers, the fight, and the freedom and replace them with goose-stepping thugs who would enforce totalitarian rule. One need only observe examples of the Democratic party such as the Clintons, and how they mistreated the military to understand the verity of this observation.
Lt. Col. Robert Patterson reports in his book, Dereliction of Duty: Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security, that Clinton’s kick-the-can attitude toward taking out Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s nuclear facility convinced Patterson that Clinton was the “greatest security risk to the United States.”
In Ronald Kessler’s book, The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents, Kessler recounts how a simple greeting of “Good Morning, ma’am” to the First Lady Hillary Clinton would provoke a reply of “F*ck off!” from that future failed Democratic presidential hopeful.
The Obama White House managed to behave no better toward the men and women in uniform, as President Obama continued to downsize both the troop strength and the pay and pension of each troop.
Second Tercet: Vanity Leads to Loss
The enemy muscles the air Against all that is fair Against putrid politics.
The great example of this claim is the winning of the War in Iraq by President George W. Bush, only to be squandered and lost under the vain, tepid, backward responses of President Barack H. Obama.
Thomas Sowell has summarized the situation accurately stating:
Despite the mistakes that were made in Iraq, it was still a viable country until Barack Obama made the headstrong decision to pull out all the troops, ignoring his own military advisers, just so he could claim to have restored “peace,” when in fact he invited chaos and defeat.
Third Tercet: The Glass Eye of Dictatorship
Liberal dust smothering light, Converts gloom against the fight To save freedom from the sand.
The dust of liberal thinking covers all the furniture of a republic. Gouging out the eyeballs of freedom, replacing them with the glass eye of dictatorship. Suspending industry, encouraging the sex-crazed lazy to spend tax dollars on abortifacients.
Fourth Tercet: Lies, Deception, Obfuscation
Liberal breath pollutes the way Through politics that betray Their fellows natural rights.
But somehow the putrid politics of the Democratic Party breathe on, polluting the environment with lies, deceptions, obfuscations that kill and maim as society turns violent in the wake of lawlessness.
Observe Democratic Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake offering looters “space to destroy” by commanding law enforcement to stand down. Of course, after making such a ludicrous remark, she then lies and says she didn’t say that.
Fifth Tercet: Leading from Behind Is not Leading
Liberal thieves convert the vote To steal the sacred note As enemies rise from hell.
The Obamaniacs’ “lead from behind”— the likes of fake purple heart winner turned Secretary of State John Kerry accepts a deal with a terror sponsoring nation that will lead to the obliteration of a neighboring democracy and encourage other dictatorships to go nuclear.
Sixth Tercet: The Birth of Fake News
Licking their wounds, their paws, Leaving the press no answer Save each fake man of straws.
Everyone suffers the abominations, and the corrupt liberal press continues to fail to hold to account those who are steering their country into a poverty stricken mess, too weak to defend itself, too dependent on government to know how to earn its own living.
Seventh Tercet: Mindless, Rudderless, Moral Mess
No hypocrite gives more haste Than a mind without a compass. It remains a terrible waste
The moral compass of the country has been hacked into a pile of unworkable fragments.
Final Couplet: Lack of Moral Clarity
To slime the brain’s red bloodIn the bog pond of liberal mud.
The final two movements echo the adage: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” And the minds of so many young folks have been wasted in the dumpster of fake “liberal” ideology.
Applying the Lessons of History
Poetry and politics are uneasy bedfellows. They struggle to fall asleep, often simply through mistrust, but often because the nature of beauty remains deeply personal, and politics, by its nature, must look outward.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending upon how one looks at it, all that can be done about “politics” — identity and otherwise — is to continue to debate the merits of each policy that presents itself. One would also continue to hope that those debaters know their history and have some skill in applying the lessons of that history as they analyze and scrutinize each policy.
I know this entry must have seemed like a bunch of mud to slog through, and I promise I will not be engaging in this kind of rhetoric very often—I’m not swearing off entirely because Stoney does have a few other pieces that I think might help light up the political landscape.
Anyway, I do hope you can find some benefit from following such a piece. Stoney has an interesting mind, an expansive mind, so I feel it would not be fair to him if I just leave out whole swaths of his views. Plus his writing ability remains unique in the annals of the world of literary studies. While I do believe that poetry and politics make strange if not impossible bedfellows, sometimes it is necessary to give both their due.
Cornelius Eady’s “Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered” attempts an elegy motivated by political propaganda instead of poetic insight. With clumsy imagery such as “melted from / The ice pack” and melodramatic effusions such as “see what fucking / With the bull gets you,” the piece descends into propaganda which fails to speak to the gravity of the event to which it refers.
Introduction and Text of “Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered”
Cornelius Eady is a fairly well-known American poet, whose work often exploits race and identity but also often focuses on music. Because the field of po-biz in its postmodern garb currently awards talentless and bombastic versifiers, who engage little more than identify politics, Eady can boast of having received Lamont and National Book Award nominations.
However, Eady’s 2026 piece “Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered” falls flat because it focuses on political propaganda; it shows no characteristic of an authentic elegy and no formal poetic craft.
Renée Nicole Good was a recent citizen of Minnesota, who, on January 7, 2026, was impeding the work of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as they engaged in their task of locating and arresting illegal migrants for deportation, many of whom had criminal records for murder, rape, and armed robbery.
As Good attempted to ram her Honda Pilot into an ICE agent, the agent shot and killed her. The event has sparked national attention, with political activists exploiting the sorrowful event to score political points. Democrats governor Tim Walz and mayor Jacob Frey have continued to gin up further violence, encouraging their citizens to continue to impede the ICE agents as those federal agents simply attempt to do their job.
An Elegy Goes Astray
It should be obvious that the subject to this “elegy” does not comport with the definition of a that form; the death of Renée Nicole Good is not a tragedy in the traditional, literary definition, but it is sorrowful event that we all mourn and wish desperately had not happened.
Good’s character flaw lay only in her failure to understand and/or accept the truth of the political turmoil that currently grips the nation, especially Trump Derangement Syndrome, a condition that dictates that anything happening under the Trump administration is evil and must fought against by any means necessary–including attempting to run down an ICS agent with two ton vehicle.
While Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem’s labeling Good a “domestic terrorist” has received pushback, it does seem that the definition of that phrase clearly speaks to what Renée Good was doing that day:
Domestic terrorism in the United States is defined by federal statute in 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5), which states that it means activities that meet three criteria: (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that violate U.S. or state criminal laws; (B) appear intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence government policy by intimidation or coercion, or affect government conduct by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within U.S. territorial jurisdiction. [my emphasis added: describing Good’s activism and actions]
Serious Matter Captured by Propaganda
The death of any individual causes concern and sorrow, especially when violence is involved, and the death of Renée Good is horrifying and remains particularly sad because she died because of the misguided urgings she believed from her fellow travelers—including the governor of her state and the mayor of her city.
Now comes the verse maker Cornelius Eady adding more dreck to the filth that has already been spewed about this horrific event. And this time the discourse is masquerading as an elegy—an elegy for an unfortunate, misguided woman whose action has been labeled domestic terrorism!
The subject matter is grave, but Eady’s treatment of it as a elegiac poem makes a mockery not only the human subject but the art of poetic elegy itself. The piece collapses into political sloganeering along with a clunky metaphor that undermines both elegiac seriousness and poetic craft.
Instead of focusing on complex human experience, the versifier substitutes caricatures for genuine people and emotion, such as a “dormant virus” and the “super cops”; these phrases ring in as contrived mountebanks rather than genuine images.
Instead of engaging with any nuanced reality of Good’s actual life and violent death, the piece’s political propaganda sorely diminishes the ability to even grieve, and it has no chance to illuminate.
The piece conflates contrived imagery of viral ice-packs with law enforcement as it inserts overt hostility (“see what fucking / With the bull gets you”). Eady’s obscene, flabby phrasing sacrifices reality for blunt political postering, yielding a piece of discourse that sadly falls flat as an elegy.
Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered
Up rides the super cops, The cancellation squad. A dormant virus, melted from The ice pack, And the conversation Is end-stopped when The shell cracks her Car window, does its Dumb duty, Brings silence To a poet’s mind.
The President says: You’re a terror bot If you don’t comply. Homeland security Puts on a ten gallon Texas size hat, Says see what fucking With the bull gets you. There is a picture of her Just before it tips rancid, Just before she’s dragged Into how they see her.
I wish I could read the words As they blaze their last, unsuspected Race through her skull. A language poem that ends on The word Impossible.
Commentary on “Renée Nicole Good Is Murdered”
The piece’s political sloganeering and awkward images undermine the gravity and craft of elegy, and diminish the gravity of the event it intends to mourn.
First Movement: “Up rides the super cops”
Up rides the super cops, The cancellation squad. A dormant virus, melted from The ice pack, And the conversation Is end-stopped when The shell cracks her Car window, does its Dumb duty, Brings silence To a poet’s mind.
When a piece offered as a poem begins with a bald-face lie in its title, what can one expect from the rest of the piece? The fact is that Renée Nicole Good was not “murdered.” She was killed by an ICE agent, acting in self-defense, as she appears to ram the agent with her two ton vehicle, a Honda Pilot.
The opening stanza attempts to set a dramatic scene with bold imagery: “Up rides the super cops” and “The cancellation squad.” The labeling of ICE agents as “super cops” is talky and unserious, and calling them the “cancellation squad” is equal as vapid. What’s with the grammatical error using a singular verb with a plural subject? That one might be overlooked and laid to an attempt at conversational dialect.
Quite the reverse is true about the “cancellation” notation; instead of canceling anything, ICE’s work entails removing crime and restoring the social order that works well for its citizens. The cartoonish labeling reveals more about the ignorance of real news, immaturity, and disingenuousness of the would-be poet than it does about the target of his ire.
The next line—“A dormant virus, melted from / The ice pack”—is even more asinine. There is no connection between a virus and the Minneapolis shooting of Good. The phrase hangs out like a concocted political conflation, intending to bring to mind the pandemic era as it critiques law enforcement actions as disease-like. Such a metaphor reduces real individuals to abstract threats and hazards.
Poetic metaphor and image require calibration: a powerful metaphor/image resonates with emotional truth. Here, the metaphors as well as the images feel arbitrary and jarring, unanchored to experience or sensation. It, therefore, becomes political propaganda rather than poetic reflection.
The speaker of the piece is undermining his thoughts by marginalizing them with clumsy syntax and incoherent imagery. Lines such as “The shell cracks her / Car window” attempt to point to violence but lack clarity or context, leaving the reader unsure whether the “shell” is literal or figurative.
These surreal pivots never come together to reveal any recognizable emotional reaction or narrative flavor. Abrupt shifts, awkward line breaks, and absurd references place the verse into the doggerel category rather than with crafted poetry.
Instead of exploring grief or loss, the imagery functions to flatten any complexity of thought in favor of bald assertion. As a result, the piece establishes a tone that bespeaks propaganda instead of elegy.
Second Movement: “The President says”
The President says: You’re a terror bot If you don’t comply. Homeland security Puts on a ten gallon Texas size hat, Says see what fucking With the bull gets you. There is a picture of her Just before it tips rancid, Just before she’s dragged Into how they see her.
The second movement intensifies these absurdities already presented in the first movement; it shifts into over-drive as is becomes pure political caricature. The claim about what the “President says” reads as hyperbolic ventriloquism rather than credible critique of actual quotation.
Effective elegy builds a sympathetic connection between public tragedy and private humanity, but this piece merely reduces the subject’s death to a cartoonish struggle between an imaginary oppressive state and a pathetically symbolic victim.
The reference to “Homeland security” donning a “ten gallon / Texas size hat” reduces would-be satire to stereotype, substituting fake bravado for engagement with real political language. DHS secretary Kristi Noem often dons Western style outfits, quite appropriately as the former governor of South Dakota.
Profanity-laden lines aim for shock but dislocate the tone of a piece intended to elegize its subject. This tonal imbalance further distances the piece from the contours of elegy. Even gestures toward tenderness—“There is a picture of her / Just before it tips rancid”—feel tacked on and tacky as they are aiming at rhetorical bluster.
Third Movement: “I wish I could read the words”
I wish I could read the words As they blaze their last, unsuspected Race through her skull. A language poem that ends on The word Impossible.
The final movement tries to offer some introspection by the speaker, but his attempt lapses into melodrama. Imagining words “blazing” as they “race through her skull” aestheticizes the violent act rather than honoring the dead.
The closing epigram—ending on the word “Impossible”—feels unconvincing because it sounds so completely contrived, lacking the emotional grounding so necessary for resonance.
Through its three movements, the piece substitutes forced metaphor/image, political sloganeering, and abstraction for specificity, empathy, genuine emotion, and reality itself.
Because of all of those weaknesses, the piece fails to meet the demands of a true elegy, instead it collapses into rhetorically heavy, emotionally shallow doggerel that neither illuminates the horrific event, nor does it pay tribute and honor its subject.
A no-achievement president confounds the ability of a poet, who tries to celebrate the outgoing leader but can find no achievements to celebrate.
Introduction with Text of Ben Okri’s “Obama”
On Thursday, January 19, 2017, one day before the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America, the U.S.A. edition of The Guardian published Ben Okri’s poem [1] simply titled “Obama,” about which the publication claimed, “With Donald Trump about to enter the White House, a poet celebrates the achievements of the outgoing president.”
One will peruse Okri’s poem in vain looking of any achievements that might be associated with President #44. One will also peruse this poem in vain looking for any “celebration.” The poem offers four musings of a philosophical nature, each handled in each of the four movements that structure the piece:
“Sometimes the world is not changed / Till the right person appears who can / Change it.”
“For it is our thoughts that make / Our world.”
“Being a black president is not a magic wand / That will make all black problems disappear.”
“And so what Obama did and did not do is neither / Here nor there, in the great measure of things.”
Each musing remains a vague utterance, especially in relationship to its avowed subject. The promise of celebrating achievements becomes a dumbfounded leitmotiv that like the Obama presidency fails to deliver anything substantial.
Toward the end of the piece, the speaker even seems to have become aware that he had not, in fact, offered anything concrete regarding the achievements of this president. Thus, he rehashes an old lie that people wanted this president to fail so they could support their racism.
For any opposition to a black president has to be racist!
The opposition cannot be opposing a black president because they do not agree with his policies; that opposition must be the result of the “race-hate, twin deity of America,” despite the blaring fact that that race-hateful America elected this black man to their highest office twice.
Okri usually provides level-headed, balanced thinking on most issues, even the race issue. He knows the difference between achievement and lack thereof; thus, in this poem, he has his speaker spouting philosophical stances and then only implying that they apply to Barack Obama.
Okri, the thinking man, knows that Barack Obama is the epitome of an “empty-suit.” Obama can lay no claim to achievements accept negative ones. This poem might even be considered one of those that “damn with faint praise” [2].
Obama
Sometimes the world is not changed Till the right person appears who can Change it. But the right person is also In a way the right time. For the time And the person have to work The secret alchemy together. But to change the world is more than Changing its laws. Sometimes it is just Being a new possibility, a portal Through which new fire can enter This world of foolishness and error. They change the world best who Change the way people think.
For it is our thoughts that make Our world. Some think it is our deeds; But deeds are the children of thought. The thought-changers are the game-changers, Are the life-changers. We think that achievements are symbols. But symbols are not symbols. Obama is not a mere symbol. Sometimes even a symbol is a sign That we are not dreaming potently Enough. A sign that the world is the home Of possibility. A sign that our chains Are unreal. That we are freer than we Know, that we are more powerful than We dare to think. If he is a symbol at all, Then he is a symbol of our possible liberation. A symbol also that power in this world Cannot do everything. Even Moses could Not set his people free. They too had to Wander in the wilderness. They too turned Against their leaders and their God And had to overcome much in their Make up and their history to arrive At the vision their prophets had long before.
Being a black president is not a magic wand That will make all black problems disappear. Leaders cannot undo all the evils that Structural evils make natural in the life Of a people. Not just leadership, but Structures must change. Structures of thought Structures of dreams structures of injustice Structures that keep a people imprisoned To the stones and the dust and the ash And the dirt and the dry earth and the dead Roads. Always we look to our leaders To change what we ourselves must change With the force of our voices and the force Of our souls and the strength of our dreams And the clarity of our visions and the strong Work of our hands. Too often we get fixated On symbols. We think fame ought to promote Our cause, that presidents ought to change our Destinies, that more black faces on television Would somehow make life easier and more just For our people. But symbols ought to only be A sign to us that the power is in our hands. Mandela ought to be a sign to us that we cannot Be kept down, that we are self-liberating. And Obama ought to be a sign to us that There is no destiny in colour. There is only Destiny in our will and our dreams and the storms Our “noes” can unleash and the wonder our “yesses” Can create. But we have to do the work ourselves To change the structures so that we can be free. Freedom is not colour; freedom is thought; it is an Attitude, a power of spirit, a constant self-definition.
And so what Obama did and did not do is neither Here nor there, in the great measure of things. History knows what he did, against the odds. History knows what he could not do. Not that His hands were tied, but that those who resent The liberation of one who ought not to be liberated Blocked those doors and those roads and whipped Up those sleeping and not so sleeping demons Of race-hate, twin deity of America. And they turned His yes into a no just so they could say they told us so, Told us that colour makes ineffectuality, that colour Makes destiny. They wanted him to fail so they could Prove their case. Can’t you see it? But that’s what Heroes do: they come through in spite of all that blockage, All those obstacles thrown in the path of the self-liberated. That way the symbol would be tainted and would fail To be a beacon and a sign that it is possible To be black and to be great.
CommentaryonBen Okri’s “Obama”
Ben Okri is a fine poet and thinker. His unfortunate choice of subject matter for this piece, however, leads his speaker down a rocky path to nowhere.
First Movement: “Change”? But Where is the “Hope”?
The speaker of Okri’s “Obama” has a mighty task before him: he must transform a sow’s ear into a silk purse. And of course, that cannot be done. But the speaker tries, beginning with some wide brush strokes that attempt to sound profound: only the right person appearing at the right time can change with world.
Changing laws is not sufficient to change the world, so sometimes it is only a “new possibility” which functions like a new door “through with a new fire can enter.”
The speaker is, of course, implying that his subject, Obama, is that “portal” through which a new fire has entered. Readers will note that the speaker is only implying such; he does not make any direct statement about Obama actually being that new door or new fire.
The election of 2016, after eight years of this implied new fire that has supposedly changed the way people think, proved that American citizens were indeed thinking differently.
They had grown tired of stagnant economic growth, the destruction of their health care system, the rampant lawlessness of illegal immigrants, the war on law enforcement officers fueled by that “hope and change” spouting candidate, the ironically deteriorated race relations, and the installation of a petty dictatorship fueled by political correctness.
This beckon of hope and change had promised to fundamentally change [3] the United States of America, and his policies indeed had put the country on a path to an authoritarian state from which the Founders had guarded the country through the U. S. Constitution. Obama proceeded to flout that document as he ruled by executive order, circumventing the congress.
Indeed, after those abominable, disastrous eight years, people’s minds had changed, and they wanted no more of those socialistic policies that were driving the country to the status of a Banana Republic.
The speaker, of course, will never refer to any of the negative accomplishments of his subject, but also he will never refer to any positive accomplishment because there simply are none. Thus, no achievement is mentioned in the opening movement.
Five days away:
Second Movement: Symbols, Signs, Still No Achievements
The speaker then continues with the mere philosophizing, offering some useful ideas that have nothing to do with his subject. He asserts the importance of thought, how thought is the mother of deeds. He then begins an equivocating series of lines that indeed fit quite well with the shallow, misdirection of the subject about which he tries to offer a celebration.
The speaker makes a bizarre, false claim, “We think that achievements are symbols.” We do not think any such thing; we think that achievements are important, useful accomplishments.
A presidential achievement represents some act which the leader has encouraged that results in better lives for citizens.
Americans had high hopes [4] that the very least this black president could achieve would be the continued improvement of race relations. Those hopes were dashed as this president from his bully pulpit denigrated whole segments of society—the religious, the patriotic, and especially the members of law enforcement [5].
Obama damaged the reputation of the entire nation as he traveled on foreign soil, apologizing for American behavior [6] that had actually assisted those nations in their times of distress.
The speaker then ludicrously states, “symbols are not symbols,” which he follows with “Obama is not a mere symbol.”
In a kind of syllogistic attempt to define a symbol, the speaker admits the truth that Obama actually had no achievements. If achievements are symbols, and Obama is not a “mere” symbol, then we hold the notion that Obama does not equal achievements, except for whatever the word “mere” might add to the equation.
But the speaker then turns from symbols to signs. Signs can show us whether we are dreaming correctly or not. Signs can show us that we are more free than we know. But if Obama is any kind of symbol, he symbolizes “our possible liberation.”
But he is also a symbol that “power in this world / Cannot do everything.” He then turns to Moses’ inability to liberate his people.
The sheer inappropriateness of likening the lead-from-behind, atheistic Obama to the great historical, religious figure Moses boggles the mind. The speaker then makes an astoundingly arrogant inference that Americans turning against Obama equates to Moses’ people turning against him “and their God.”
Americans turning against leader Obama means they will have to “wander in the wilderness” until they at last come to their senses and return to the “vision of their prophets.”
The speaker again has offered only musings about symbols, signs, power, lack of power, dreams, and misdirection, but he offers nothing that Obama has done that could be called an achievement.
Third Movement: Color Is not Destiny
This movement offers a marvelous summation of truths, which essentially places all leaders in their proper places. Leaders can serve only as symbols or signs to remind citizens that only the people themselves have the power to change the structures of society that limit individuals.
Black presidents possess no “magic wand” with which to make all “black problems disappear.” Even Nelson Mandela should serve only as a sign that we are all “self-liberating.”
The speaker rightly laments that we tend to look to our leaders to perform for us the very acts that we must perform for ourselves. Our leaders cannot guarantee our inner freedom, only we can do that.
He asserts that Obama must remain only a sign that there is “no destiny in colour.” Our destiny is in our own will and in our own dreams.
The speaker correctly asserts, “Freedom is not colour; freedom is thought; it is an / Attitude, a power of spirit, a constant self-definition.”
Sadly, Obama has never demonstrated that he understands the position taken in Okri’s third movement. Obama is so steeped in political correctness and radical collectivism that he always denigrates the stereotypical white privileged over the stereotypical groups of race, gender, nationality, and religion.
Obama’s warped, highly partisan stance would never accept the statements about freedom as described by Okri. Obama believes that only the state can grant freedom to the proper constituencies as it punishes others. Okri’s analysis runs counter to the Obama worldview [7].
Thus, again, in its third movement, this poem that claims to be a celebration of the presidential achievements of the 44th president offers only philosophical musings, and although some of those musings state an accurate position, there still remains no positive achievement that can attach to Obama.
Fourth Movement: Obama, Neither Here nor There
With complete accuracy once again, Okri’s speaker states baldly, “And so what Obama did and did not do is neither / Here nor there, in the great measure of things.” Certainly, one who looks for positive achievements will find the blandness of this statement on the mark. The speaker then adds that history will record what Obama did and also what he was unable to do.
Then the narrative goes totally off the rails. American racists, those “racists” who had elected this black president twice, threw up road blocks that limited this president’s accomplishments.
They wanted him to fail because being black he had no right to succeed. The speaker implies that those American racists thought that this black president did not deserve liberation, meaning they thought he should be a slave—a ludicrous, utterly false claim.
The speaker then concludes with a weak implication that Obama is a hero, who demonstrated that it is possible to be “black and to be great”:
They wanted him to fail so they could Prove their case. Can’t you see it? But that’s what Heroes do: they come through in spite of all that blockage, All those obstacles thrown in the path of the self-liberated. That way the symbol would be tainted and would fail To be a beacon and a sign that it is possible To be black and to be great.
The problem with this part of the narrative again is, on the one hand, that it is only an implication, not a positive statement making the claim that Obama was, in fact, a hero; on the other hand, it is obvious why the speaker would only imply these positive qualities to Obama: the man is not a hero; indeed, he is a fraud [8].
Fraudulent Claims of Literary Prowess
There is a certain bit of irony in having a poem attempt to celebrate the achievements of a colossal fraud [9]. Nowhere is the evidence of Obama’s characteristic as a fraud more evident than in his claims to have written his two books, Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope.
Jack Cashill’s “Who Wrote Dreams from My Father?” [10] offers convincing evidence that Barack Obama could not have written the books he claims to have authored. And Cashill continues his analysis of Obama’s writing skills in “Who Wrote Audacity of Hope?” [11].
Writing in the Illinois Review, Mark Rhoads [12] poses the same question regarding the Obama works. Even Obama’s presidential library [13] will offer no evidence that the president possessed any literary skills.
Clearly, Okri’s poem provides a mélange of attitudes toward its subject. On the one hand, it wants to praise the outgoing president, but on the other, it simply can find nothing with which to do so.
That the poem concludes with a bald-face lie is unfortunate, but understandable. Still, it cannot hide the truth: that Barack Obama offered it no achievements, which it could celebrate; at best, only phony ones [14].
The phenomenon known as Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) has established a pattern of behavior and language applied by the political opposition of President Donald Trump. That outrage arises from ignoring facts or context, leveling unfair criticism, and engaging in melodramatic emotion, wherein calm reasoning is abandoned.
Introduction: Extreme Rhetoric
Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) has fostered an atmosphere in which contemporary political rhetoric and public discourse operate as fallacious argumentation, in which every statement or action becomes distorted and weaponized.
Political disagreement does not employ discussion, analysis, and explanation regarding policy differences but instead, it operates on disgust and indignation that the opponent even holds differing views.
TDS is often manifested in Trump’s opponents through ad hominem attacks, in which personal slander takes the place of logical argument—substituting name-calling and character assassination for substantive argument.
Trump has been called a Russian puppet, sexual predator, dictator, threat to democracy, racist, white supremacist, convicted felon, traitor, insurrectionist, clown, idiot, nazi, fascist, and the pièce de résistance—Hitler.
Even obvious joking sarcasm when spouted by Trump becomes fodder for re-interpretation and bad-faith reporting. For example, during the presidential election campaign of 2016, when Trump facetiously called on Russia/Putin to find Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails, the following exemplary headline appeared on PBSNews :“Trump asked Russia to find Clinton’s emails. On or around the same day, Russians targeted her accounts,” suggesting that Trump was asking a foreign government to interfere in the election campaign.
In addition to ad hominem attacks, immediate condemnation of any policy issuing out of the Trump administration results in reasoning and careful inquiry being abandoned [1], resulting in the use of the most extreme, heated language.
However, Trump himself is not the only target of this invective; all of those terms and others are applied to his supporters: during the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” and during the 2024 campaign, Joe Biden called them “garbage.” Those who oppose Trump, his administration, and his supporters are not simply critical of them; they are obsessed them.
A dangerous mixture of outrage, exaggeration, and hypocrisy involved in attacking Trump has caused TDS sufferers to lack the ability to think clearly about issues. Any idea suggested by Trump is immediately railed against simply because it was suggested by Trump.
The Origin of Trump Derangement Syndrome
The phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” did not originate as a clinical diagnosis, although its predecessor “Bush Derangement Syndrome” was coined by the psychiatrist and political analyst Charles Krauthammer, who observed that extreme, irrational reactions to President George W. Bush often went far beyond substantive policy disagreement.
Krauthammer used the term to highlight how emotional fixation and hostility replaced reasoned analysis and proportional criticism. The revival of this concept during Donald Trump’s presidency reflects the same phenomenon, magnified by social media, a 24-hour news cycle, and an increasingly polarized political culture [2].
However much words do matter, Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is more than rhetorical excess; it has real consequences that harm individuals, families, public institutions, and the broader political environment. The following examples illustrate how hyper-emotional fixation on Donald Trump—when divorced from clear reasoning and grounded fact—creates verifiable and dangerous effects on American society:
Escalation to Political Violence
The starkest danger of TDS is that it fuels political violence rather than dissent through words. During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump survived at least two assassination attempts motivated by political hatred and extremism.
The first happened at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, [3] when a gunman shot at Trump, wounding him on his right ear. The gunman killed Corey Comperatore, a rally attendee and former fire chief, who took a bullet protecting his family. The gunman also wounded several other people before being killed by Secret Service.
A second assassination attempt was thwarted by authorities at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida [4]. This perpetrator was arrested, stood trial, and was found guilty of the assassination attempt; he awaits sentencing on February 4, 2026.
Another unmistakable instance of politically motivated violence occurred on September 10, 2025, when Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was fatally shot during a public event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. While speaking at an outdoor gathering, Kirk was struck in the neck by a single bullet fired from a distance, an attack that Utah officials and others characterized as a political assassination [5].
These incidents demonstrate how obsessive political animus can translate into lethal intent, transforming rhetoric into action and endangering not only public figures but bystanders, law enforcement, and the democratic process itself.
Political Polarization Breaking Family Bonds
TDS has also deeply strained familial relationships. In too many households across the country, deep political disagreements have resulted in personal and familial estrangement. A Time magazine feature documented families [6] who stopped speaking entirely during the Trump years, including one case in which a woman was uninvited from Thanksgiving and later cut off from close relatives solely because of her political views related to Donald Trump.
What had once remained ordinary disagreement has hardened into moral condemnation, with ideological choice being prioritized over blood relations. This dynamic tarnishes one of our most cherished and fundamental social units—the family—leaving emotional scars that persist long after the election cycle has passed.
Exploitation of Tragedy for Political Weaponization
Another disturbing example of how TDS has distorted reactions to violent events is evident in public opinion data following the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
In a snap poll conducted shortly after the attack, roughly one‑third of Democrat voters agreed with the statement “I wish Trump’s assassin hadn’t missed”[7]. That such a large proportion of the opposition political party actively wished that an opponent had been killed should place a huge red flag on the issue.
Such sentiments reflect a deeply disturbing willingness to engage in the ultimate violence in addressing political differences. This response illustrates how TDS can override basic empathy and moral restraint, further polarizing discourse and normalizing violent attitudes toward political opponents.
Rejection of Policy on Source Alone
TDS sufferers without thinking oppose any policy regardless of merit simply because it comes from Trump. During his presidency, Trump championed criminal justice reform through the First Step Act, a bipartisan measure that reduced sentences for nonviolent offenders and earned praise from figures like Van Jones [8]. Yet many on of his top opponents dismissed it outright, calling it a sham despite its tangible results in releasing thousands from prison.
Even as they voted for the bill, these congressional member expressed negative criticism of it as too limited, exclusionary, narrow: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
This knee-jerk rejection ignores benefits to real people—mostly minorities—and poisons the well for future bipartisan efforts. The danger lies in discarding proven solutions, leaving societal problems festering while politics trumps progress.
Lawfare Weaponization against Citizens
Mainstream media outlets and Democrat officials, gripped by TDS, have pursued “lawfare” against ordinary Trump supporters, turning legal processes into political retribution.
After the January 6 riot, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department charged hundreds of nonviolent participants—parents, grandparents, workers, small business owners, some individuals who were not even present at the capitol—with felonies carrying decades in prison, while ignoring similar or worse rioting by groups such as Antifa and BLM [9] .
This selective prosecution creates two tiers of justice: one for Trump opponents who face lenient treatment, another for his supporters treated as domestic terrorists. The danger lies in weaponizing the rule of law itself, eroding equal protection under the Constitution and fostering a climate where citizens fear political expression.
Families lose breadwinners to draconian sentences, communities fracture, and trust in impartial justice evaporates—leaving Americans vulnerable to future authoritarian overreach from any side that may promise a return to fairness under the law [10].
Economic Self-Sabotage through Hysteria
TDS has led opponents to sabotage policies that later prove beneficial [11], harming the economy they claim to champion. Tariffs on China, derided as reckless by TDS critics, pressured Beijing into trade concessions that revitalized American manufacturing jobs in key states. Critics who railed against them without nuance prolonged economic pain for workers.
By prioritizing anti-Trump animus over pragmatic assessment, this mind-set risks national prosperity. It endangers livelihoods when ideology blinds leaders to data-driven gains.
Suppression of Free Speech on Campuses
Universities, which formerly boasted their positions as bastions of open inquiry, have seen TDS manifest as censorship of Trump-related views [12]. Professors and students expressing support for Trump’s policies face shouting-downs, doxxing, low grades, or job threats, as seen in cases at Yale and NYU ,where conservative speakers were mobbed or disinvited.
This kind of unfair discrimination chills intellectual diversity, turning campuses into echo chambers. The danger is profound: it trains a generation to equate disagreement with moral failing, undermining the reasoned debate essential for maintaining a free society.
Foreign Policy Paralysis
TDS hampers coherent foreign policy by fixating on Trump over real threats facing the United States and other nations. While Trump brokered the Abraham Accords [13] normalizing Israel-Arab ties—hailed as historic by many—his opposition fixated on and imaginary “divisiveness,” denigrating and downplaying the breakthrough.
One might recall that the phrase “Abraham Accords” ran noticeably missing during the Biden administration’s four years. Instead of trying to build on the success of those Accords, the Biden administration essentially ignored them, and instead proceeded to cozy up to Iran just as President Barack Obama had done.
So it remains obvious that “The reason for the administration’s hostility to the Abraham Accords goes beyond jealousy or the desire to deny credit to a hated predecessor” [14]. The Biden administration’s reaction to the Abraham Accords demonstrates another blatant example of TDS causing its sufferer to bite off its nose to spite its face. World peace be damned, if Donald Trump has anything to do with it! (my emphasis added)
Such tunnel vision weakens America’s global stance. It allows adversaries like Iran to exploit divisions, endangering allies and U.S. interests when personal hatred eclipses strategic thinking.
Workplace Discrimination against Supporters
TDS has infiltrated some workplaces, where Trump voters have faced bias in hiring or promotions. Recent surveys indicate some hiring managers admit to bias against Trump supporters in hiring and promotions. Reports highlight concerns over social media scrutiny for political views, especially in tech sectors after the 2024 election.
A ResumeBuilder.com poll of over 750 U.S. managers found 1 in 6 less likely to hire Trump supporters, citing poor judgment (76%), lack of empathy (67%), or workplace tension risks (59%) [15]. One in 8 managers are less likely to promote such employees, with similar rationales; some even encourage quits.
Managers often check social media indirectly, as direct bias questions are avoided, amplifying unaddressed discrimination [16]. Post-2024 election, tech firms like Google and Meta tightened internal policies to curb activism, removing political posts and limiting discussions on elections or related symbols.
While no widespread firings for Trump support are documented in these sources, the surveys flag a “concerning trend” of political bias akin to other protected categories, urging HR to enforce objective evaluations. Broader DEI rollbacks under Trump policies (e.g., executive orders in 2025) shifted focus to merit, but hiring biases persist in certain areas.
Cultural Institutions Alienating Half the Nation
Hollywood and elite culture, steeped in TDS, produce content that vilifies Trump supporters as rubes or villains, deepening cultural rifts [17]. Films and shows routinely caricature “MAGA” hats as symbols for bigotry, alienating millions of viewers. This breeds mutual contempt, fracturing national cohesion. When culture wars replace dialogue, shared identity unravels, leaving society brittle and weakened against common challenges.
Tom Hanks played a Trump supporter named Doug on SNL’s “Black Jeopardy” during the 50th anniversary special in February 2025. The character wore a MAGA hat and an American flag shirt, hesitating to shake a black host’s hand, while speaking with a Southern drawl. Critics called it a racist caricature amid Trump’s growing support with black Americans.
In Bong Joon-ho’s “Mickey 17” (2025), a Trump-like politician rallies crowds with “First we survive! Then we thrive!” slogans. Supporters wear red hats, and the figure obsesses over image in a gaudy setup, reducing women to breeders. Even some Reddit users [18] noted it as Hollywood propaganda tying MAGA visuals to bigotry.
These depictions use MAGA hats as symbolic icons for backwardness or hate, alienating everyday Americans. Commentary points to “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in elite content driving rifts between supporters of Trump and his opposition.
Hypocrisy and TDS
One of the clearest markers of Trump Derangement Syndrome is not merely excess emotion, but selective memory—an amnesia that conveniently erases facts that negate the preferred narrative. This hypocrisy is especially evident when examining Donald Trump’s public reputation prior to his decision to run for president as a Republican. That distinction matters: does anyone really believe that if Trump had run for president as a Democrat, he would have received the same level of sustained media hostility and moral outrage, or would his celebrity excesses have been reframed as colorful flaws rather than disqualifying sins?
Before entering politics, Trump was not widely regarded as a pariah or an existential threat to democracy. On the contrary, he was a mainstream celebrity, a frequent guest on talk shows, a fixture in popular culture, and a recognizable brand associated with success and entertainment.
His television program The Apprentice was a major hit [19], running for fourteen seasons and drawing millions of viewers weekly. Trump was welcomed in elite social circles, praised by entertainers, courted by politicians, and treated as a cultural icon rather than a moral monster.
That history poses an uncomfortable question for TDS sufferers: if Trump was allegedly a racist, fascist, authoritarian, or “Hitler” all along, why was he celebrated so enthusiastically for decades [20]? The answer is obvious but rarely admitted—Trump became unacceptable only after he challenged the status quo of entrenched political power.
This hypocrisy is further illustrated by the now‑forgotten fact that Oprah Winfrey [21], one of the most influential cultural figures in America, once raised the prospect of a Trump presidential run on her nationally syndicated show. In a 1988 interview, Winfrey openly entertained the idea by asking Trump whether he would run for president, a notion that drew no negative response from the audience.
At the time, such a notion was not treated as dangerous or absurd, but as intriguing. No cries of impending dictatorship followed. No accusations of fascism emerged. The man has not changed; the political context has.
Similarly revealing is the selective outrage surrounding immigration enforcement. Tom Homan, who later became a senior immigration official under Trump, previously served in the Obama administration [22], where he oversaw large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants.
Under President Obama, deportations reached record levels, earning Obama the nickname “Deporter in Chief” among immigration activists. Yet Homan’s actions under Obama attracted no media hysteria and no moral condemnation.
Once those same policies—and in many cases, the same personnel—were associated with Donald Trump, they were suddenly recast as evidence of cruelty, racism, and authoritarianism [23]. The policy substance remained largely unchanged; only the political association shifted. This double standard exposes the core of TDS: opposition not to ideas or actions, but to the individual himself.
Such contradictions reveal that Trump Derangement Syndrome is propagated not by principle but by animosity. It is not driven by consistent moral reasoning, but by prejudicial hostility that rewrites history to justify present outrage.
When yesterday’s admired celebrity becomes today’s Hitlerian villain, yesterday’s lawful deportations become today’s unconstitutional atrocities, and yesterday’s encouragement becomes today’s horror, the problem is not Trump—it is the inability of his critics to apply standards with balance and proportion.
In this way, hypocrisy is not a side effect of TDS; it is one of its defining features.
Toward Official Recognition of TDS
Taken together, these examples demonstrate that Trump Derangement Syndrome is not a harmless turn of phrase or a bit of political snark; it is a corrosive mind-set with real-world, measurable consequences.
When outrage replaces analysis, disagreement hardens into dehumanization, and fixation eclipses fact, the result is not merely bad manners but real harm—to families torn apart, to public trust in institutions, to free expression, and even to human life.
The pattern remains consistent: an inability or refusal to separate Donald Trump the individual from objective evaluation of policies, principles, and people associated with him. In that environment, reason is not merely sidelined; it is treated with suspicion.
The growing recognition of this phenomenon has moved beyond commentary and into the realm of formal inquiry. The introduction of the Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) Research Act of 2025 by Representative Warren Davidson reflects an acknowledgment that the effects described here warrant serious examination rather than reflexive dismissal [24].
Whether one supports Trump or opposes him, a healthy republic depends on the ability to argue without hysteria, to criticize without hatred, and to reject violence, censorship, and collective punishment as political tools.
Ultimately, the danger of TDS lies in what it does to the culture of self-government. A nation cannot remain free if its citizens are trained to see political opponents as enemies to be destroyed rather than fellow Americans to be debated. Reclaiming proportion, restraint, and reason is not a concession to Donald Trump; it is a necessity for the survival of civil society itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s November 2016 Blog Post: “The Election, Lao Tzu, a Cup of Water”
(For the full text of Le Guin’s post, readers may consult the Le Guin blog.)
Introduction: The Absurdity of the Opening Claim
Ursula K. Le Guin begins her blog entry with the shocking assertion that “Americans have voted for a politics of fear, anger, and hatred,” framing the 2016 election as a popular endorsement of negativity and thus collective moral failure rather than a legitimate political contest. This claim is absurd on multiple levels.
Le Guin reduces the motivations of over 62 million Trump voters to a monolithic emotional outburst, ignoring the many and varied reasons people cited for their choices—economic anxiety, desire for policy change on trade and immigration, distrust of establishment politics, or even optimism about shaking up the status quo.
Exit polls from the 2016 presidential election year revealed that, as the driving force, voters prioritized issues like the economy (52% said it was the most important issue) and terrorism (18%)—not the abstract qualities of “fear, anger, and hatred.”
By accusing half the electorate of being emotionally deranged, Le Guin engages in the very division she later decries, creating a false binary where one side is enlightened and the other is barbaric.
Instead of offering a balanced, informed opinion, this diatribe creates a caricature that exempts the losing side of any introspection about why its message failed to resonate. If anything, such rhetoric fuels the “fear, anger, and hatred” that it claims to oppose, by demonizing fellow citizens rather than seeking understanding.
Further Analysis of the Absurdity of the Opening Claim
Le Guin’s opening assertion—”Americans have voted for a politics of fear, anger, and hatred”—is a masterclass in the very thing she claims to oppose: divisive, enemy-making rhetoric that poisons democratic discourse.
The Logical Contradiction
Notice the immediate self-contradiction: Le Guin writes that she is “looking for a place to stand… where the behavior of those I oppose will not control my behavior,” yet her opening sentence does precisely the opposite. By characterizing roughly half the American electorate as motivated by “fear, anger, and hatred,” she has allowed her opponents’ victory to control her into making sweeping, uncharitable judgments about millions of people she has never met.
She wants to rise above and avoid “fixed enmity” while at the same time she asserts that tens of millions of her fellow citizens have voted for hatred itself. Such dishonest rhetoric does not seek amicable understanding; instead, it creates the very enemy she claims she wants to transcend and avoid.
The Mind-Reading Fallacy
How does Le Guin know what motivated Trump voters? Did she conduct psychological surveys? Interview thousands across different states and demographics? No—she simply assumes the worst possible motives for people who reached a different political conclusion than she did.
This act embodies the fundamental attribution error writ large: when some individuals agree with an action, they attribute their agreement to principle, reason, and good intentions. When they disagree, they attribute it to character flaws, base emotions, and moral deficiency.
Many Trump voters would describe their choice in terms of economic anxiety, distrust of establishment politicians, desire for change, concern about immigration policy, or opposition to Clinton specifically. Were all of these just masks for hatred? Or might people have complex, varied motivations that do not fit Le Guin’s narrative?
The Irony of Fear and Anger
Le Guin’s post itself radiates fear and anger—fear of what Trump’s presidency might bring, anger at the election outcome. Her entire piece is written in response to these emotions. Yet she has no trouble recognizing her own fear and anger as legitimate responses to perceived threats, while denying Trump voters the same interpretive charity.
Perhaps Trump voters also felt fear—of economic displacement, cultural change, or being dismissed by coastal elites. Perhaps they felt anger—at politicians who seemed not to care about their communities, at being called “deplorables,” at seeing their concerns ignored. Why are Le Guin’s fears valid while theirs are evidence of moral rot?
The Dehumanizing Assumption
To claim that millions of Americans voted “for” hatred is to deny them moral agency and complexity. It suggests they woke up on Election Day thinking, “I want to spread hate today.” Such a suggestion is absurd. People generally vote for what they perceive as good, even when they are wrong about what that good is or how to achieve it.
Le Guin has done exactly what she accuses Americans of doing: she has named an enemy (Trump voters), attributed evil motives to them (fear, anger, hatred), and declared herself on the side of righteousness. She has simplified a complex political coalition into a moral monolith worthy only of opposition, not understanding.
The Historical Amnesia
Political campaigns have always involved fear, anger, and appeals to group identity—on all sides. Obama’s 2008 campaign ran on anger at the Iraq War and the financial crisis, fear about healthcare and climate change. Bush’s 2004 campaign exploited fear of terrorism. Clinton’s 2016 campaign emphasized fear of Trump himself (remember “Love Trumps Hate”?).
Every losing side in every election could claim their opponents voted for “fear, anger, and hatred” if they wanted to be uncharitable. Such nonsense is not analysis; it is rationalization disguised as moral clarity.
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Most destructively, when you tell people they voted for hatred, you make reconciliation impossible. If Trump voters are motivated by pure malice, there is no conversation to be had, no common ground to find, no way forward except total victory over irredeemable opponents.
Le Guin claims to seek a better way than war, yet her opening salvo ensures continued conflict. By attributing the worst possible motives to her political opponents, she guarantees they will never listen to her, never consider her perspective, never be persuaded by her arguments. She has preemptively ended any possibility of the bridge-building her post supposedly values.
How She Could Have Opened Her Post
An honest assessment might have been: “Americans have elected someone I deeply oppose, and I’m trying to understand why. Many Trump voters cite concerns about the economy, immigration, and political corruption. While I disagree with their analysis and fear the consequences of their choice, I must find a way to oppose these policies without demonizing my fellow citizens.”
But that would require the very humility and openness Le Guin demands from others while exempting herself. It is far easier for her to dress up contempt in the language of disappointed idealism and blame her opponents for making her angry than to actually practice the patient, water-like understanding she preaches.
Thus, the opening claim is even beyond absurd; it is the original sin that corrupts everything that follows. A contender cannot begin with “my opponents are motivated by hatred” and end with “let’s transcend division.” The post fails before it begins because Le Guin has already done precisely what she condemns: she has declared war while calling it peace.
Fundamental Weaknesses of the Post: False Dichotomies and Oversimplification
The post’s fundamental weakness lies in its rigid binary between “the way of the warrior” and “the way of water.” Le Guin suggests these are the only two paths available, ignoring the vast middle ground where most effective social change actually occurs.
Successful movements combine elements she artificially separates: the Civil Rights Movement, which she invokes favorably, involved both nonviolent resistance and strategic legal battles—literal fights in courtrooms, aggressive lobbying, and forceful rhetoric. To claim these were not forms of “fighting” requires tortured redefinition of ordinary English words.
Contradictory Treatment of Action and Reaction
Le Guin condemns “reaction” as victim mentality while praising “action,” yet her own framework collapses under scrutiny. She writes that “defending a cause without fighting… is not a reaction. It is an action.” But Standing Rock, her own example, was explicitly reactive—a reaction against pipeline construction.
There is no coherent principle here distinguishing reactive movements she approves of from reactive politics she condemns. The difference appears to be purely which side she agrees with politically.
Similarly, she claims “refusing to meet violence with violence is a powerful, positive act,” yet simultaneously insists we must “unlearn the vocabulary of war” because even metaphorical combat language shapes destructive thinking. If nonviolent resistance is truly powerful and positive action, why does it require such linguistic gymnastics to avoid appearing reactive or combative?
Historical Myopia
The post romanticizes nonviolence while ignoring inconvenient historical realities. Le Guin invokes Selma but omits that the Civil Rights Movement’s success depended partly on the implicit threat of more violent alternatives (the Black Power movement), federal enforcement power, and yes, warriors—the National Guard troops who protected the marchers. Nonviolent protest works best when backed by institutional force, a point her framework cannot accommodate.
Her dismissal of all “warrior” virtues except courage is historically illiterate. Many of history’s most effective peacemakers—from George Marshall to Dwight Eisenhower—were literal warriors who brought military discipline, strategic thinking, and organizational prowess to peace-building. The Marshall Plan was not passive water-like yielding; it was aggressive, strategic investment requiring warrior-like determination.
The Fatal Flaw in the Water Metaphor
Le Guin’s extended water metaphor ultimately fails because it proves too much. She writes that water “accepts whatever comes to it, lets itself be used and divided and defiled, yet continues to be itself.”
This situation precisely identifies the problem: water has no agency, no moral compass, no capacity for judgment. Water flows equally into irrigation ditches and sewers. It nourishes crops and spreads cholera. It carves canyons and drowns children.
The “way of water” cannot distinguish between accommodation and collaboration, between strategic retreat and cowardice, between patience and passivity. Water in a cup does not simply “give itself to thirst” through compassion—it sits there until someone drinks it.
Water does not choose to go to low places out of humility; it obeys gravity mindlessly. Attributing moral qualities to physical processes is poetic but philosophically empty—and it also smacks of the pathetic fallacy.
Despite the fact that the human body is composed of about 70% water, human beings are not water. They possess consciousness, moral reasoning, and the ability to make choices that may violate their immediate self-interest for principle.
Human beings who “accept[] contamination, accept[] foulness” while waiting to somehow remain pure are not practicing virtue—they are enabling evil through passivity. The Jews who boarded trains hoping water-like endurance would see them through were not weak for choosing that path, but they were tragically wrong about its efficacy.
The Unexamined Privilege
Le Guin’s ability to prefer the “way of water” reflects a position of significant privilege. When your house is flooded, you do not admire water’s patient persistence—you fight to save your family. When armed men threaten violence, water-like yielding means death.
The luxury of choosing nonviolent response requires either that the stakes are manageable or that others (warriors, police, soldiers) will ultimately enforce the social order protecting your protest.
A More Honest Framework
The real lesson of successful nonviolent movements is not that fighting is wrong, but that different situations require different tools. Sometimes negotiation works; sometimes litigation; sometimes protest; sometimes, yes, violence is the only response to imminent violence. Pretending otherwise is not wisdom—it is self-deception dressed in Taoist robes.
Le Guin wants courage, compassion, patience, and peace. So do most people—even the Trump supporters she disparages. But achieving these goods in a world with genuine conflicts, limited resources, and bad actors requires more than poetic metaphors and pathetic fallacies about water. It requires the very thing Le Guin rejects: strategic, sometimes aggressive, always purposeful struggle toward defined goals. Water cannot struggle. Human beings must.
The way of water is the way of erosion, not transformation. If scenario of the way of water were our model, we would accept that change comes only over geological time, grinding away opposition through mindless persistence.
But human dignity, justice, and freedom cannot wait for the river to wear down the mountain. These positive qualities require conscious, directed, forceful action—yes, at times even fighting—by people who refuse to be passive before injustice, no matter how poetically one describes their refusal.
Poem: “A Meditation”
To her rant against the November 2016 presidential election, Le Guin has appended a poem, “A Meditation,” which distills the post’s governing metaphor into lyrical form.
The verse reiterates her faith in erosion rather than confrontation, in “breath” and “tears” rather than struggle, as the means by which “the hardness of hate” is worn away. As poetry, the piece is spare and affecting; it achieves in image what the prose attempts through argument.
Yet the poem also magnifies the central weakness of the post itself. The river does not choose its course, nor does erosion discriminate between justice and injustice. By ending with a vision of moral change as a slow, impersonal process, the poem reinforces the post’s preference for endurance over agency.
In doing so, it offers consolation rather than strategy—an image of patience that is emotionally resonant but ethically incomplete when applied to human conflict, which demands not only compassion and courage, but judgment, decision, and action.
Ever since the 18th century, when Edward Jenner experimented with formulating a preventative for small pox, controversy has surrounded the use of vaccines. Vaccines have become a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and vaccine manufacturers now control most of the information about their product.
Edward Jenner’s Theory
In the closing years of the 18th century, a pharmacist named Edward Jenner began experimenting and seeking a preventative for the scourge of small pox, a dreadful disease that killed and maimed many of those who contracted it.
Jenner had heard of milkmaids who had contracted cowpox and then had become immune to small pox; thus, he formulated the theory [1] that has become the basis for vaccination: that small pox immunity could be effected by surviving the cowpox disease.
To test his theory, Jenner secured fluid from Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid, who had survived cowpox; he injected the fluid into the arm of James Phipps, an eight-year-old boy, who had been healthy.
The boy then suffered cowpox and recuperated, and six weeks later, Jenner injected the boy with fluid taken from a small pox pustule. When the boy failed to suffer small pox, Jenner concluded that his theory had been proved correct.
The problem with this happy tale of science is that the boy, James Phipps, died of tuberculosis at the age of 20. Also, Jenner had injected his own son with his small pox vaccine, who exhibited a negative reaction and began showing signs of mental retardation.
Jenner’s son also died of tuberculosis at age 21. In the 19th century, it was discovered that the small pox vaccination was linked to tuberculosis (consumption). Dr. Alexander Wilder, editor of The New York Medical Times and professor of pathology, explained:
Vaccination is the infusion of contaminating element into the system, and after such contamination you can never be sure of regaining the former purity of the body. Consumption follows in the wake of vaccination as certainly as effect follows cause.
The science of vaccines even in the 21st century has remained unchanged since Jenner’s theory was promulgated in the late 18th century.
While most fields of science have progressed exponentially, for example, from the Earth-centered universe to the Sun-centered galaxy, the equivocal theory of Edward Jenner’s vaccinology has remained the “settled science,” despite the many great strides in understanding of vaccines that have been made in every century since Jenner’s first discovery.
These new discoveries offer an abundance of evidence for questioning the notion that Jenner was correct and that vaccines are, indeed, safe and effective.
Legally Protected Yet “Unavoidably Unsafe”
In the United States, the measles vaccine [2] was introduced in 1963, followed by the mumps vaccine in 1967, and then rubella in 1969. In the early seventies after the three shots were combined into a single MMR dose, schools began requiring that students be vaccinated to enter.
After these mass vaccination programs began, vaccine injuries and death began to skyrocket. During in the the 1970s and 1980s, vaccine-related injuries and death resulted in lawsuits against vaccine makers.
The drug manufacturers were paying out millions of dollars to the plaintiffs of these lawsuits, and they threatened to stop manufacturing vaccines. Health officials became alarmed even though they admit that vaccines can cause both injury and death.
The powerful health care industry lobbied congress and in 1986, the governing body passed the law that prevents vaccine makers from being sued for the injuries and death that result from their products.
In the 2010 court case, Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC [3], the Supreme Court guaranteed that vaccine manufacturers, despite the fact that their product is deemed “unavoidably unsafe,” will remain protected from legal action against them.
Instead of suing a vaccine maker, those injured by vaccines can seek compensation from a government program known as the Vaccine Court or the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) after reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). According to the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) [4],
Since 1988, over 26,046 petitions have been filed with the VICP. Over that 30-year time period, 22,132 petitions have been adjudicated, with 9,738 of those determined to be compensable, while 12,394 were dismissed. Total compensation paid over the life of the program is approximately $4.9 billion.
Parents with healthy, thriving children who changed into difficult, withdrawn, unhealthy children after a vaccine have begun to speak up and question the heretofore claimed safety and efficacy of those inoculations.
And now with the rushed manufacture of the newest vaccine for COVID-19, the question of vaccine efficacy and safety has taken the spotlight, and more citizens than ever before are faced with the vaccine question. The following issues lead to questioning the safety and efficacy of vaccines:
Controversy has always swirled around the issue of vaccines from the beginning [5].
Vaccines have never been tested in any meaningful way, that is, against a placebo; thus, there is no evidence for the claim that they are safe and effective. RFK,Jr. Lawsuit against HHS [6].
Manufacturers of vaccines cannot be sued [7] when their product causes an injury or death. Therefore, they have no incentive to improve or maintain the purity and safety of their product.
Vaccine ingredients [8] particularly aluminum and mercury have been proven to damage human health.
Rates of autism [9] have increased as the number of vaccines required for children have increased. Not only autism but a host of other illnesses afflict American children, rendering them the sickest in the world, suffering ADD, ADHD, asthma, and SIDS.
The case of Hannah Poling [10].
Dr. Frank DeStefano, former CDC Director of Immunization Safety, has admitted [11] that “vaccines might rarely trigger autism.” “I guess, that, that is a possibility. It’s hard to predict who those children might be, but certainly, individual cases can be studied to look at those possibilities.”
Vaccine Advocates Refuse to Debate
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Alan Dershowitz participated in a debate [12], in which Kennedy presents a well-researched, in depth set of facts about the issue, as Dershowitz shows only how meagre is his own knowledge on the issue.
Dershowitz’s major point focuses only on a legal issue: if vaccines are safe and effective, then the Supreme Court would likely side with the branches of government in requiring all citizens to be vaccinated. But the law professor has nothing to offer to address the questionable claim that vaccines are, in fact, safe and effective. About the debate, Kennedy has said,
I want to thank Alan for participating in this debate. I’ve actually been trying to do a debate on this issue for 15 years. I’ve asked Peter Hotez, I’ve asked Paul Offit, and Ian Lipkin. I’ve asked all of the major leaders who are promoting vaccines to debate me and none of them have. And I think it’s really important for our democracy to be able to have spirited, civil discussions about important issues like this.
If pro-vaccine apologists, such as Drs. Paul Offit [13], Peter Hotez [14], and Ian Lipkin [15] remain so confident about their stance, it seems that they would gladly debate Kennedy in order to demonstrate their superior knowledge and to reassure the public that vaccines are safe and effective.
That the pro-vaccine apologists continue to refuse to debate the issue suggests a weakness that discredits their claims, making it vital that the public become aware of both sides of the issue.
This issue [16] remains controversial, even as new reports on the injuries and deaths from vaccines are being provided daily; yet many current mainstream media often make it difficult to acquire information when it counters the pharmaceutical claims for vaccine safety and efficacy.
The practice of social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter (until recently converted to X), and Facebook of deleting and canceling alternative voices has become an obstacle to finding reliable resources for data. Despite the difficulty of remaining informed about the vaccine issue, the research is out there. One simply needs to do some digging to find it.
[15] Kent Heckenlively, JD. “The Case Against Ian Lipkin.” BolenReport: Science Based Analysis of the North American Health Care System. Accessed December 30, 2023.
In addition to the sources already cited, the following is a list of links to scientists, physicians, nurses, and activists who have offered analyses on this issue.
Many of these sources originally appeared on YouTube but were later censored and disappeared. Luckily, many of them now exist on rumble, the free speech competitor of YouTube.
The following resources relate specifically to COVID:
J. Roberts/Medical Veritas 5 (2008). “The dangerous impurities of vaccines.” EXCERPT: In 1998 and 1999 scientists representing the World Health Organization (WHO) met with the senior vaccine regulatory scientists of the USA and UK at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington D.C. to discuss the safety of the manufacturing methods employed to produce vaccines. No journalists were present but official transcripts were kept. What they record is that all the many experts that spoke expressed grave concern over the safety of the manufacturing process currently employed to make the licensed vaccines, such as MMR, flu, yellow fever, and polio. It was reported by leading experts that the vaccines could not be purified, were “primitive,” made on “crude materials,” and the manufacturers could not meet lowered government standards.
Alliance for Human Research Protection. “How the case against Andrew Wakefield was concocted.” EXCERPT: The case against Andrew Wakefield was funded by Murdoch; hatched by Brian Deer; launched in the Sunday Times; magnified by the BMJ.
End All Disease. “Gandhi On Vaccines: ‘One Of The Most Fatal Delusions Of Our Time’.” EXCERPT: Almost one century ago, Gandhi published a book where he deconstructed the dangers and lack of effectiveness of vaccines and the agendas surrounding them. His voice rings true now more than ever.
Highwire. “Dr. McCullough Meets Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche.” EXCERPT: We covered how ill-advised mass vaccination with outdated mRNA vaccines continues to apply non-sterilizing ecological pressures on SARS-CoV-2 which work to: 1) prolong the pandemic 2) drive more mutations 3) increase transmissibility.
Debunking the Big Lie That Democrats and Republicans Switched Sides on Race
Republican failure to refute Democrats’ “big lie” that their parties switched sides on race has allowed that falsehood to spread. Republicans need to refute the Democrats’ lie to reclaim for their Party its history in fighting slavery and racism. The GOP has always been the party of Civil Rights.
The Big Lie and American Politics
The phrase “the big lie” [1] was popularized by Adolf Hitler [2] and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The primary purpose of the big lie technique as employed by Hitler and the Nazis was to turn German citizens against the Jews.
The technique worked so well that the Holocaust, resulting in the deaths of upward of eleven million people, including at least six million Jews, became a stain on humanity and a historical reference point.
Unfortunately, American politics has never become immune to the diseased concept of the big lie.
Numerous fabrications have flourished and influenced in heinous ways the relationship between various identities groups that make up the United States of America.
Debunking a Pernicious Myth
One of the biggest of the big lies in American politics is that the two major political parties, Democratic and Republican, switched sides on the issue of race. In Dan O’Donnell’s “The Myth of the Republican-Democrat ‘Switch’,” the writer offers a useful introduction to the issue:
When faced with the sobering reality that Democrats supported slavery, started the Civil War when the abolitionist Republican Party won the Presidency, established the Ku Klux Klan to brutalize newly freed slaves and keep them from voting, opposed the Civil Rights Movement, modern-day liberals reflexively perpetuate the rather pernicious myth—that the racist southern Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s became Republicans, leading to the so-called “switch” of the parties. This is as ridiculous as it is easily debunked. [3]
Because the Republican Party was founded to abolish slavery and has always been the party of Civil Rights—including the struggle for women’s suffrage—in the U.S.A, the Democratic Party seized the issue, turning racism into a Republican problem by claiming that the parties switched sides of race.
The big lie of the parties switching sides on race, however, is not the only falsehood that litters the political landscape. Various factions have filled historical reportage with inaccurate claims that persist; for example, a 2015 Washington Post headline blares, “We used to count black Americans as 3/5 of a person” [4].
Political ideologues and agenda-driven academics often claim that in establishing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers thought that blacks were only three/fifths human because of the three-fifths compromise; however, the “Three/Fifths Compromise” focused on representation to congress not on the humanity of each person.
Even Condoleezza Rice [5], an educated, accomplished former secretary of state, fell for this lie: “In the original U.S. Constitution, I was only three-fifths of a person.” Such a misstatement by a sophisticated and knowledgeable person just shows how widespread and deep some errors have been carved into the culture.
Then there is the false assertion that “Nazis” are right wing. The term “Nazi” is short for National Socialist German Worker Party, translation from the German, “Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.”
The political right has never endorsed “socialism.” Along with “fascism,” the term by definition includes statism or government control of the lives of citizens—the antithesis of the political right’s stance.
Confronting an Inconvenient Past
When confronted with the inconvenient history of their party regarding the issue of race, the American Democratic Party members and its sycophants insist that the Republican and Democratic Parties simply switched positions on race, after the Republicans had ushered in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This ludicrous claim can easily be laid to rest with a few pertinent facts.
On January 1, 1863, Republican President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which stated “that all persons held as slaves are, and henceforward shall be free.”
The country had already been suffering two years of a bloody Civi War to end slavery. Democrats had been lobbying for and passing legislation such as the Jim Crow laws and Black Codes for over a century—all designed to keep the black population from enjoying the fruits of citizenship.
President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Right Act of 1964 in to law; however, Johnson himself had labored tirelessly against earlier civil rights legislation.
By signing that bill, Johnson merely demonstrated that he had come to understand that the way for Democrats to acquire and maintain power in future was to pacify and humor blacks, instead of denigrating them and segregating them from whites as the Democrats had always done in the past.
Allegedly, Johnson had quipped, “I’ll have those ni**ers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” That infamous statement clearly reveals where Johnson’s loyalties lay: with acquiring power for the Democratic Party and not for recognizing African Americans as citizens. Endeavoring to deconstruct Johnson’s racist position, David Emery at snopes.com labels the claim regarding Johnson’s remark “unproven” [6].
But then as he continues his biased analysis, Emery reveals other suggestions that make it clear that Johnson’s beliefs rendered him the consummate racist. For example, Emery offers the report, in which according to Doris Kearns Godwin, Johnson quipped,
These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. (my emphasis)
After continued biased bloviating, David Emery admits, “Circling back to the quote with which we started, it wouldn’t have been entirely out of character for LBJ to have said something like, ‘I’ll have those ni**ers voting Democratic (sic) for 200 years’”; however, Emery doubts it, of course.
House and Senate Vote Tally for the Civil Rights Act 1964
The following is a breakdown of the voting tally in the House and Senate [7] for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 of members voting for the bill:
Democrats: House 153 out of 253 = approx. 60% Republicans: House 136 out of 178 = approx. 80% Democrats: Senate 46 out of 67 = 69% Republicans: Senate 27 out of 33 = 82%
While about 80% of the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, only about 60% of the Democrats voted aye. Also while in the Senate, 82% percent of Republicans voted for the bill, only 69% of Democrats did.
Attempting to Rehabilitate by Geography
In order to try to rehabilitate the Democrats’ negative voting record on civil rights, Democrat apologists point out that when one accounts for geographical positioning [8] of the members of the house and senate, the voting tallies this way:
Southern Democrats: 1–20 (5%–95%) (Ralph Yarborough of Texas voted yea) Southern Republicans: 0–1 (0%–100%) (John Tower of Texas voted nay)
Northern Democrats: 45–1 (98%–2%) (Robert Byrd of West Virginia voted nay) Northern Republicans: 27–5 (84%–16%)
This set of votes shows that no southern senate Republicans voted for the act, but there was only one southern Republican in the senate at the time. And also no house Republican voted for the act, but again there were only ten southern Republicans in the house.
This low number of Republicans in the house and senate when converted to percentages skews the reality of the fact that the overall vote, which is the vote that counts, clearly outs the Democrats as opposers of the act. And the Democrats’ main reason for voting against the act was based on race, especially in the south.
However, all of the Republican senators, both north and south, who voted against the act, did so because they favored Senator Barry Goldwater’s position, who remained against the act, not because of racial animus but because of his belief that it was unconstitutional in usurping states’ rights, especially in the area of private business.
The Republican Party was founded, primarily in order to abolish slavery. Yet over a century later, modern-day Democrats such as former house member, Charlie Rangel, continue to spread the big lie that the Republican and Democratic parties simply “changed sides” in the 1960s on civil rights issues.
That excuse is widely exercised by Democrats when confronted with their own undeniably racist past [9]. However, the facts do not support but rather reveal that claim as a big lie.
Three Misrepresented Issues
The persistent inaccuracy that the two parties switched sides is partially based on three significant issues that have been misrepresented by Democrats and their sycophants in the mainstream media:
1.Barry Goldwater’s position regarding the Civil Right Act of 1964. Goldwater [10] did oppose that bill in its final form because he argued that it was unconstitutional, in that it usurped state and individual rights. Goldwater had helped found Arizona’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and he had voted for earlier versions of civil rights legislation.
Thus, Goldwater’s opposition was not similar to the Democrats’ opposition based on racism; Goldwater’s opposition was based on his interpretation of the Constitution.
2.The Southern Strategy. With this strategy [11], the Republican Party was attempting to demonstrate to southern Democrats that by continuing to vote for racist/socialist Democrats they were voting against their own economic interests.
What gave Democrats the opening to use this strategy against Republicans was that the Republicans utilized racist political bigots, who were, in fact, Democrats themselves, to help win votes for Republicans.
This strategy prompted the GOP opponents to misrepresent the Republican’s purpose and thus label it primarily racist, when it was, in fact, based on economic growth, not racism.
3. The American South turning to Red from Blue. This claim falls apart with the fact that the “Deep South”—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana—took 30 years to begin changing from Democrat to Republican.
It was only in the peripheral South—Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas—that many working-class transplants, relocating from the northern states as well as from other parts of the United States, understood that the Republican Party offered policies that promoted business, commerce, and entrepreneurial success.
Those transplants, after all, had relocated south to improve their financial status through their new jobs. Gerard Alexander explains in his review:
The myth that links the GOP with racism leads us to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most strongly where and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense.
The GOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites and only later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least as much, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-class whites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but who were George Wallace’s base.[12]
If the myth of the switched sides were accurate, the Republican Party would have taken hold more strongly first among the traditional racists—that is, the older voters would have become Republicans before the younger ones and the transplants. But that did not happen, because the Republican Party attracted those who were “upwardly mobile” and “non-union.”
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racism in the country’s history had begun to wane as a social and political force. But the Democratic Party continued to foment unrest between the races in order to employ racism as an issue against their opponents in the Republican Party. That tactic is still in place.
After the election of 2020, under the Democratic administration of Joe Biden, the racial unrest began to escalate further with the ideas touted by proponents of Critical Race Theory [13] and the insistence that white supremacy [14] remains the country’s greatest threat.
Poverty Producing Policies
The main reason that the Democratic Party concocted the idea that the parties simply switched positions was to gain power. Reverend Wayne Perryman explains:
Many believed the Democrats had a change of heart and fell in love with blacks. To the contrary, history reveals the Democrats didn’t fall in love with black folks, they fell in love with the black vote knowing this would be their ticket into the White House.[15]
Economist Thomas Sowell [16] has also shed light on the subject: “some of the most devastating policies, in terms of their actual effects on black people, have come from liberal Democrats.”
Sowell emphasizes that the “minimum wage laws” everywhere they have been established have a “track record of increasing unemployment, especially among the young, the less skilled and minorities.”
According to historian Sam Jacobs [17], the 1960s Great Society and War on Poverty, the programs established by the Johnson administration, brought about conditions, which furthered the rise of poverty among black families.
By discouraging marriage, these policies have resulted in out-of-wedlock birthrates that have skyrocketed, “among all demographic groups in the U.S., but most notably African Americans.”
The U.S. out-of-wedlock birthrate in the 1960s hovered around 3% for whites and close to 8% for all Americans; that rate was around 25% for blacks. But, by the mid 1970s, those rates had increased to 10% for whites, 25% for all Americans, and over 50% for blacks.
Then by late 1980s, the birth-rate of unmarried black women had become greater than for married black women. In 2013, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks had climbed to almost 75%.
The Census Bureau [18] maintains that poverty is closely associated with out-of-wedlock births. By instituting a system that keeps blacks at a disadvantage, the Democrats have a captive audience to which they pander for votes.
The Democratic Party stations itself as the protector of blacks and other minorities, not with policies that assist those demographics but with policies that keep them dependent on government.
Unfair Race Policies Unsystematized
Despite the revisionist history and unsupportable claims of the CRT and white supremacy advocates, there is no argument that can refute the fact that racism as an issue of public policy has been unsystematized since the passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s. No more Jim Crow laws or Black Codes anywhere call for racial discrimination as they had done before the passage of those civil right laws.
Before the passage of those acts, not only did racist laws exist, they were enforced by legal authorities as well as the Ku Klux Klan, which, according the North Carolina historian Allen W. Trelease [19] in his book, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, “The Klan became in effect a terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”
And Eric Foner [20], Columbia University historian, in his study, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877, has averred that the KKK was “a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.”
Still, statist historians such as Carole Emberton, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo, continue to employ the “party lines of the 1860s/1870s are not the party lines of today” [21] bromide attempting to separate the Democratic Party’s engagement from the Ku Klux Klan.
Yet in the same breath, Emberton admits, “that various ‘Klans’ that sprung up around the South acted as a ‘strong arm’ for many local Democratic politicians during Reconstruction.”
Democrats continue to employ the often debunked claim that racism is still a “systemic” problem. They offer this prevarication so they can insist that only the Democratic Party is willing to fight against that “systemic” blight on society.
But again and again, the Democratic Party’s policies have been used, as Lyndon Johnson used them, to placate blacks by making them think they are getting something that no political party even has the power to give: financial security and equality with guaranteed outcomes.
Political parties, when in power, can help the voting public only by instituting policies that encourage financial success and individual freedom. They cannot guarantee that success. They cannot legislate individual success through identity politics.
Strategy to Gain Power
The Democratic Party and its allies continue to employ the big lie that the two parties exchanged positions on race, in an attempt to gain power and to rehabilitate the party’s racist past.
Party members and its minions continue to tie most issues to race because that tactic seems to have worked for gaining power. But when voters look at the basic facts, that claim begins to lose its strength.
For example, citing the voter ID issue as a racist Republican strategy simply bolsters the evidence that Republicans are, in fact, not racist. A majority [22] of black citizens and voters are in favor of the voter ID laws.
However, the Democrats continue to rail against voter ID laws because they know that those laws would impede voter fraud—a demonstrably proven staple in the machine [23] to elect Democrats to government.
Democrats have been attempting to whitewash their racist past for decades; to do so, they often fabricate history. For example, as a candidate for the presidency in 2000, Al Gore falsely stated [24] to the NAACP that his father, Al Gore, Sr., had lost his senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But Gore, Sr., voted against that act [25], as he supported and joined in the filibuster against that act. Gore, Sr. then sponsored an amendment [26] that would take the teeth out of the enforcement power of that bill, just in case it passed.
Did Dixiecrats Become Republicans?
Democrats also point to the rise of the Dixiecrats that supposedly shows racist Democrats becoming Republicans. However, only two major politicians who had been Dixiecrats switched to the Republican Party.
Fewer than 1% [27] of the more than 1500 Democrats-turned-Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party. They were prompted to switch party allegiance primarily for economic reasons rather than racial animus.
As the Democratic Party began moving toward socialism, many former Democrats experienced disdain for that socialist impact on business and entrepreneurship.
Senator Strom Thurmond traded in his party alliance with the Democrats to join the Republicans in 1964—not because he continued to support racism, but because he began repudiating it.
Frances Rice [28] explains: “Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and, after he became a Republican, Thurmond defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats.”
Governor Mills E. Godwin, Jr. of Virginia [29] abandoned the Democrats for the Republican Party in 1974. But again, like Thurmond, Godwin simply abandoned his racist past. Godwin also served as Virginia governor first while a Democrat and then as a Republican.
Hypocrisy about Racist Past
West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops and long serving Democratic senator, did renounce his earlier support for segregation and racism. However, Byrd voted against confirmation to the Supreme Court of Justice Thurgood Marshall [30], a Democrat and the first black to be appointed to the high Court.
Byrd also joined 47 of his fellow Democratic senators as he voted against Justice Clarence Thomas [31], a Republican. Neither a black Democrat nor a black Republican could pass muster with the former Klansman.
Senator Christopher Dodd [32] praised Byrd highly by stating that Byrd would have been “a great senator for any moment.” To this potentially inflammatory remark, the Democrats remained silent.
Then later after Senator Trent Lott spoke kind words of Senator Strom Thurmond, the Democrats with their usual hypocrisy lambasted Lott unmercifully. It made no difference that Thurmond had never served as a member of the Ku Klux Klan while Byrd had risen to the high position of Exalted Cyclops.
Regarding Democrat hypocrisy, John Feehery [33] has remarked: “. . . Democrats are super-sizing their hypocrisy to levels never seen. It is their embrace of nihilism that is pushing them to these extremes.”
Policies Harmful to All Citizens
Undoubtedly, the majority of the members of the Democratic Party are not racists today. Yet, it remains unconscionable that so many Democrats label Republicans racists and bigots in pursuit of political power against their opponents.
Democrats cannot legitimately deny the many studies that offer support to the argument proffered by Republicans that Democratic policies are detrimental not only to black citizens but to all citizens.
The current theoretical philosophy of Democratic Party consists of seizing through taxation the financial rewards from “the rich” and giving those rewards to “the poor.” In practice, this Robin Hood scam ultimately means taking from those who earn and redistributing it to friends and allies of the redistributors. Such a system cannot possibly succeed. It can only create victims whose ability to produce becomes atrophied by the false promises of pandering politicians.
Democrats continue to play the race card because they have become utter failures at convincing the majority of the electorate that their policies work. Citizens have become dissatisfied with the actual theft of their earnings, as they have watched as shabby, crime filled cities are, in fact, the result of Democrat policy fecklessness and fraud.
Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution Thomas Sowell has pointed out repeatedly that the policies of Democrats have prevented the black population from rising out of poverty.
Many of the poorest cities in the USA have been run by Democrats for decades. According to Investor’s Business Daily,
When Democrats are in control, cities tend to go soft on crime, reward cronies with public funds, establish hostile business environments, heavily tax the most productive citizens and set up fat pensions for their union friends. Simply put, theirs is a Blue State blueprint for disaster. [34]
Surely, it is time that African Americans, women, and minorities adopt a different mind-set and realize, as Rev. Perryman avers, that the Democratic Party is interested only in their vote, not in their welfare. And, in fact, there seems to be a shift coming in the voting preferences of blacks and Hispanics.
According to Darvio Morrow [35], CEO of the FCB radio network, Democrats for decades have relied on the theory that as the USA grows less white, its voters will become more firmly entrenched as a Democratic Party voting block.
However, Morrow explains, “The problem with this theory is that it relied on the premise that minorities were going to remain solid Democrats. And that premise is turning out to be false.”
American politics is a complex machine, and the force of big lies remains strong. Whether the republic can remain in tact will depend on refuting those lies and in their place establishing a culture of truth, in which facts dominate and falsehoods are rejected.
Despite their fervent support for the Marxist movement touting “Black Lives Matter,” today’s Democrats, including the former occupier of the Oval Office, Joe Biden, [36] continue to support the abortion provider known as Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood is one of the greatest perpetrators of violence against African Americans in this country. It is founded on racism, perpetuates racism, and kills more than 850 African Americans every day. [37]
While blacks constitute roughly 13% of the USA population, they account for 36% of the abortions. Nearly 80% of all Planned Parenthood clinics are located near black neighborhoods [38]. Activists such as Candace Owens [39] and Kanye West [40] have labeled this set of circumstances genocide.
According to the educational website, blackgenocide.org, blacks are the only declining minority population in the USA, and “if the current trend continues, by 2038 the black vote will be insignificant.” Because abortion accounts for most deaths of black lives in the USA [41], those pandering for black votes might want to give that claim some serious thought.
Sources
[1] “Big Lie.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary.com. Accessed May 17, 2023.
Essays: On Political, Social, Literary, & Other Issues
This room in my literary home houses links to essays addressing issues in literary studies, politics, social/cultural movements, science, or medicine and health care, some of which may be controversial or widely misunderstood either currently or historically.
Linda's Literary Home 