Alright all you Social Justice Warrior snowflakes, listen up! I’m about to discuss a certain election that was recently held in the US, and you’re probably not going to like what I have to say. So consider this your trigger warning. Proceed at your own risk
For the rest of you, I trust you’re all adults who can hear the name Donald Trump without breaking into a cold sweat and the sudden urge to flee to the nearest safe space.
To all of you, congratulations on surviving the 2016 presidential election. As has been noted by many others, this was an election unlike any we’ve ever seen. For my part, I tried to avoid writing about it.
Some of my reticence was the result of not quite knowing what to think. As a constitutionalist out of the Ron Paul mold, I had significant differences with all of the candidates. It was tempting at times to pronounce a plague on all their houses and try my best to ignore the whole thing.
But since one of the main purposes of this blog is to bring the light of Clarkian Scripturalism to bear on contemporary issues, keeping silent on the election was not really a viable option.
Neutrality was an option as well. But the obvious establishment propaganda campaign on behalf of Hillary coupled with a remarkably vicious elite jihad on Trump and his supporters – most of Trump’s backers were regular, hard-working Americans, people like me who had had it with the arrogant, lying, globalist oligarchy that had by means of bogus trade deals, unconstitutional foreign wars, Federal Reserve money printing, bail-outs, etc. run the nation into the ground – went a long way to pushing me, even if somewhat reluctantly, into the Trump camp.
In the end, I wrote far move about the election than I had ever intended. And in retrospect, I’m glad that I did. The 2016 campaign challenged me to think carefully about issues – for example, in light of all Donald Trump’s obvious moral shortcomings, could a Christian in good conscience still vote for him? (in case you’re wondering, I came down on the “yes” side of that question) – that I otherwise would have preferred to leave alone. For that I am thankful.
All that said, here are a few items that strike me as key takeaways.
We Dodged a Bullet
Had Hillary Clinton been elected, we would have gotten the New World Order on steroids. Secret trade deals such as the TPP and TTIP, undeclared foreign wars of aggression, the prospect of nuclear war with Russia, taxpayer subsidized mass immigration/migration and refugees, an invigorated LGBT movement and a concomitant stepped up attack on Christianity – all these things would have been the order of the day.
And if that weren’t bad enough, the election of Mrs. Clinton likely would have forever cemented the principle in American society that some people, by virtue of their status, are not subject to the law. That is a recipe for tyranny. In fact, it is itself tyranny.
God was merciful to us in that he did not give us what we deserved. Because in truth, Hillary Clinton is probably the president we’ve earned as a nation. No, he gave us a president, who, for all his flaws, is at least not a criminal and appears to be a genuine patriot.
For these things I am thankful.
Props to Julian Assange and to the Alternate Media
Somebody give that man a Nobel Peace Prize. Seriously. Never have I seen so much truth come out of one organization.
In fact, apart from the unlikely election of one Donald J. Trump, the rise of the alternate media – and on the flip side, the thorough and well-deserved discrediting of large swaths of the traditional mainstream media – is perhaps the biggest story of the 2016 election.
For my part, I couldn’t get enough of Wikileaks. It exposed, for anyone who cared to see, just how corrupt this nation has become at the very highest levels.
You know all those things you suspected over the years? Well, Wikileaks showed us, not only were they all true, but they were probably worse than you thought.
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was one of the first victims, being forced out of her role when Assange released emails showing she and her cohorts at the DNC conspired to boost Hillary’s campaign at the expense of Bernie Sanders.
Immediately upon her resignation from the DNC, Little Debbie was rewarded for her “services” with a new job working for Clinton’s campaign.
Donna Brazile, who replaced Wasserman-Schultz at the helm of the DNC, was herself caught up in a scandal when a few months later Wikileaks exposed emails showing she passed debate questions to Mrs. Clinton beforehand.
This is the sort of behavior that would get a student expelled from school, but apparently the Democrats think it’s perfectly okay from someone running for president.
Politico reporter Glen Thrush was caught not once, but twice, by Wikileaks sending his stories to the Clinton campaign for their approval before running them. And he wasn’t the only reporter caught doing this.
It was revealed that Barak Obama lied about not knowing of Hillary’s illegal private email server before the information became public. Not only did he know about it, he exchanged emails with Mrs. Clinton under of pseudonym using her non-government email address.
Remember all that violence at Trump rallies a few months back? Well, thanks to Mr. Assange we know the ultimate source of it was the DNC, swell bunch that they are.
Or how about this one: the DNC even conspired with CNN to rig interviews with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. For Pete’s sake! I guess they don’t call CNN the Clinton News Network for nothing. The best thing they could do for American journalism is to just close its doors.
I could go on, but by now it should be clear that Assange exposed massive corruption at the very highest levels of government. And what would have been dismissed as “conspiracy theory” in the past, has been shown to be business as usual.
The Arrogance of the RNC and Establishment Conservatives
Dirty tricks aren’t the sole province of the Democrats. The Republicans have their fair share of ne’er do wells too.
When Donald Trump announced his campaign in June 2015, he was largely dismissed as a sideshow. Only after he shot to the front of the pack and stayed was he perceived as a real threat to the powers that be in the Republican party.
As the primary season wore on, it became increasingly clear that the RNC was dead set against having Trump as the party’s nominee.
One particularly egregious example of this top-down arrogance came courtesy of a certain Curly Haugland, and unbound GOP delegate from North Dakota. As Mr. Haugland calmly explained to an incredulous CNBC panel, “We (the party) choose the nominee, not the voters.”
Columnist George Will voiced a similar sentiment in the Washington Post where he snorted, “A convention’s [the then upcoming RNC convention] sovereign duty is to choose a plausible nominee who has a reasonable chance to win, not to passively affirm the will of a mere plurality of voters recorded episodically in a protracted process.”
In plain English, Will thinks that only the wishes of elites such as himself matter. As for the Trump supporting rabble?, why their opinion just doesn’t count.
Two months later when it became clear that Trump would win the nomination, Will decided to take his ball and go home and announced he was no longer a Republican. “This is not my party,” he huffed. To which I would only add, good riddance.
In August, blogger Michael Snyder published a list of elite Republicans who up to that time had publically declared they were voting for Hillary. And this was before George H.W. Bush announced he was “with her.”
The Arrogance of the One Percent
One of the most popular memes over the past few years has been the notion of the one percent vs. the ninety-nine percent. This divergence includes, but is not limited to, the examples already discussed.
Here are a few more:
- No Fortune 100 CEOs backed Trump
- Trump received not a single endorsement from the nation’s top 100 newspapers
- Per World Magazine, Trump’s support from “Evangelical insiders” was virtually nil
- Russell Moore, who made conciliatory gestures toward Mormon Mitt Romney in 2012, blasted Jerry Falwell Jr. for his support nominal Presbyterian Donald Trump
- In October, Bill O’Reilly reported that at least three major media organizations had ordered employees to destroy Trump
- Hillary Clinton outraised Donald Trump 20 to 1 among billionaires
- Clinton did even better in Silicon Valley where she outraised Trump 60 to 1
- Echoing Barak Obama’s arrogant comments about average Americans who bitterly “cling to guns or religion”, Hillary Clinton described a large swath of the American public as belonging to a “basket of deplorables” who were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”
And none of this counts all the pay to play (bribery) donations made to the Clinton foundation by various and sundry grifters and con artists. It looks like they won’t be getting their money’s worth after all.
As the Good Book says, pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
Donald Trump – The Man Knows How to Win
Like him or not, it would be hard to deny that Donald Trump knows how to win.
In the summer of 2015, the Republican field numbered seventeen candidates. The favorite to win the nomination was, of course, Jeb Bush of the Bush dynasty. He had raised the most money, had the biggest name, and everyone knew he was going to represent the GOP in the 2016 election.
Only it didn’t work out that way. Trump destroyed Jeb’s bid for the White House almost before it began.
A brutal exchange between Trump and Bush during a debate in February really summarizes just how thoroughly Trump beat the one-time Republican favorite. Said Trump of the Iraq War, “The war in Iraq was a big fat mistake…It took him [Jeb Bush] five days before his people told him what to say, and he ultimately said it was a mistake.” Ouch.
More recently, when he was asked at the third and final presidential debate whether he would accept the results of the election were they to favor Clinton, Trump replied, “I will tell you at the time. I will keep you in suspense.”
This was a genius answer, and it may have won him the election.
A conventional politician would have mumbled some boilerplate about respecting the greatness of our “democracy”, with his words being forgotten as soon as he had uttered them.
Trump’s comments about “election rigging” and “keeping people in suspense” immediately triggered Hillary to cluck like some socialist schoolmarm, calling his response “horrifying.” Newspapers everywhere echoed this sentiment.
But Trump had struck a chord with many Americans who, with good reason, had come to distrust the establishment. After all, if the Democrats would rig the primaries for Hillary, as Wikileaks showed they did, and if the FBI could be intimidated out of recommending she be charged in connection with her obvious crimes in the Servergate scandal, why should they suppose the establishment wouldn’t attempt to rig the election?
Election rigging was one of the biggest memes of the last few weeks of the campaign. In this author’s opinion, it served both to energize Trump’s base and, in the event anyone actually planned to steal the election, made it harder for t hem to do so.
Had Trump agreed to accept the results with no qualifications, he would have had no grounds to challenge a dirty election.
Ironically now that Hillary has lost, it is some on the left who have resorted to rioting and refuse to accept the election results.
And Speaking of Riots…
Remember all those videos of Trump supporters beating up people at Bernie Sanders’ rallies?, or causing disturbances while Hillary Clinton was speaking? Me neither.
I do, however, seem to recall several instances of leftist thugs beating up Americans who were guilty of nothing except peacefully assembling to hear Donald Trump speak.
So why is it that so-called progressives are viewed as peaceful and loving while Trump voters are castigated as “deplorables”?
One of the supreme ironies of American politics is how those on the left can preach love and tolerance at the same time they’re pouring the vilest sort of vitriol on their political opponents.
Due to their foul mouthed and violent nature, I will not link to videos of anti-Trump riots that have broken out around the nation since the election. Suffice it to say that, in classic Marxist fashion, the rioting progressives do the very thing they accuse their opponents of doing.
Conclusion
When it comes to history, usually it’s something we read about. But every now and then, we get to see it firsthand.
For those of us who followed this election closely, we saw something unique in the annals of our nation’s history.
And when it comes to now President-elect Donald Trump, I suspect the 2016 election won’t be the last time I say that.
Julian Assange needs a pardon, U.S. citizenship and promotion as head of CNN.
LOL! Great idea, but the thought of heading up CNN makes saying in the Ecuadorian embassy seem pretty attractive.
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