Dispatches from Deep inside Progressiville
In the 1979 suspense thriller When a Stranger Calls, a legendary movie reveal on the order of The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects occurs at the film's climax. Having been terrorized by sinister, anonymous phone calls for most of the film's running time, the babysitter suddenly finds out that "the calls are coming from inside the house!"
These are words – or words to that effect – that many in my community might collectively gasp if they knew how I voted on November 8, 2016. (Tar and feathering to follow.)
I live and work in a passionately progressive sub-hamlet of a major metropolitan city in California. (OK, it's Los Angeles.) I voted for Trump. According to the zeitgeist, those two facts shouldn't even be in proximity to one another on the page – let alone be true in real life.
Per the modern liberal California mindset, like the menacing stranger in the film, I am odious, insidious, and nefarious. These are adjectives of which I now share joint custody with the president – ever since poor-sport leftists, in their pique and petulance, decided that being Trump and voting for him are effectively the same thing. I am repugnant, by definition. So I am hiding in plain sight in my community – effectively closeted because of my political beliefs.
On November 9, 2016, the day after The Election That Dare Not Speak Its Name, the Los Angeles Unified School District issued a memo from the superintendent of schools acknowledging that "emotions are running extremely high" following the election and that "there may be anxiety and concerns among our students." The memo went on to say additional counseling services would be available and that we should encourage students to "embrace diversity, renounce intolerance, and respect differing ideologies," especially "when the need for healing and common understanding are greatest."
Credit is due to the superintendent of schools for moderation in tone, particularly considering the hair-on-fire hysteria of much of the left, but it's nonetheless noteworthy that the second largest school district in America saw the need to issue a memorandum about how teachers, counselors, and parents should help children cope with the results – of a democratic election.
The very same Day after the End Times, the well-meaning principal of our elementary school posted a school-wide memo via email that included a link to a Huffington Post article entitled "What Do We Tell The Children?" The virtue-signaling and hypocrisy of this article are too myriad to quote, but suffice to say that honoring the outcome of the election (yeah, right) and fighting bigotry (except the bigotry that reviles differing viewpoints, of course) were just two of the tone-deaf directives urged by Ariana Huffington's hard-left website. This is the same worthy successor to The Weekly World News that relegated Trump to the entertainment section over a year before the election – then reversed itself six months later with an imperious and embarrassing editorial by AHUFF herself.
Oops.
One measure of how left-leaning my community is? The entire school my kids attend gathered in the auditorium to watch Obama's inauguration in 2009 – enraptured. One guess as to whether that was reprised in January of 2017. Too triggering, I imagine. Who wants to see a creature bent on our destruction put his hand – or his claw – on a Bible?
And what rough beast, his hour come round at last, slouches toward Washington to be sworn in?
Signs of the burgeoning "resistance" were everywhere in my community. A makeshift "revolution wall" popped up at a nearby crossroads with DIY signs condemning "Agent Orange." Children as young as second grade, worried about the evil president and his desire to hurt all foreigners. A local vegan restaurant painted a huge Shepard Fairey-like mural of Trump on its side with the word "DISOBEY" across it. Kindergarten-age children in "pussy hats" shopped at the local Whole Foods with their parents, having attended the Women's March (that excluded pro-life women) the weekend prior. A middle-schooler in my carpool commented that his family had decided not to share Christmas with their close relatives who were "Trump people."
It was easy to see from what source these kids' talking points and attitudes originated, if you had even a moment with their parents. These otherwise often delightful and engaging people were wont to suddenly start riffing on the nightmare we are now enduring at the tiny hands of the fascist, racist, sexist, misogynist POTUS.
I became expert in nodding earnestly and offering up innocuous commentary such as "right?" when stuck in these one-sided rants. I decided I could join in honestly when the conversation, such as it was, turned to Trump's impolitic tweeting, his clumsy rhetoric, or his vulgarianism – things I generally think are off-putting but could honestly care less about. I learned to look for the subtle signs of a MAGA in my midst. Anyone not randomly alluding to the American Armageddon in casual conversation, not re-laminating the Stronger Together bumper sticker to the family Prius, or not dressing their kids in old Obama HOPE t-shirts might be a stealth Trump supporter.
One day at the beach, a crew of new friends and my family all suddenly stopped, sensing some ineluctable shift in social electricity. We turned to each other for what seemed an eternity of apprehension – then threw caution to the wind and asked tentatively, "Wait, are you...did you...?"
Maybe it was that there, on the Pacific Coast, with the ocean at our backs like a corner table at an Italian mob restaurant, we felt safe enough to ask the question that could otherwise legitimize shunning in our community. Once we had all unmasked ourselves and had our Come to Donald moment, the freedom to talk was like the euphoria of finding other people when you were young who were really into the same loud, weird, awesome band everyone else hated.
Under the tyranny of California sunshine that weather-shames you into always being outside, we found joy in hammering diaper-wearing lefties, pussy hat hypocrites, the fake news media, Empress Pantsuit, and Barry-O'Trojan Horse to our hearts' content. Thereafter, we would seek each other out on the down-low – always in private – in an effort to find some time to speak freely about our president, Captain Middle Finger. We formed a secret society of sorts, just to be able to talk openly about the president of the United States of America.
But some social casualties were inevitable. I gave up social media as the many blood pressures I was raising caused me to shed my Pollyanna view of respectful dialogue. A friend of decades and his wife stopped inviting me and my family to their annual New Year's Day brunch because of how I voted, and an even older friend was shamed by his wife for inviting me to their home – which I have been doing since Jane Fonda sold exercise videos.
The election of Donald Trump has been a gigantic litmus test for America. It is said that true character is revealed only under duress. If that's so, then this country is filled with a whole lot of people who present well in the day-to-day world when things are going their way. But when the fates don't favor them, they're revealed to be namby-pamby embarrassments, with dubious reasoning skills, largely indefensible positions, hearts full of hypocrisy and hatred, and a dumb-assery that is fast becoming legend. (Here's to you, Joss Whedon, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Judd Apatow, Kathy Griffin, Rosie O'Donnell, LeBron James, Eminem, Chelsea Handler, Stephen King, etc.)
But maybe I should really be thanking these folks instead of mocking them. Thank God for the left! (Or maybe: "Thank Science for the left" – in the progressive translation...) After all, but for the north star of the left's virtue, I would surely wander blind in a desolate wasteland of extreme bias, moral rot, and random cruelty to other humans. We all would.
Even so, one wonders how many silent Trump voters exist in the spaces adjacent to the caterwaul of leftist outrage?
How many calls are coming from inside the house? https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/dispatches_from_deep_inside_progressiville.html
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This might be the most insane pile of dung that I have ever wasted time trying to read. It has no subject and it makes no coherent argument.
It is word salad taken to the level of an all-you-can-eat buffet.
But it was hilarious to read! Like one long rambling psychotic screed! I used to work at a Psychiatric ER with my wife in Phoenix as a Counselor and you are right, "word salad" is the exact Psychiatric term that was used for it in the paperwork. It was sad but I had to admit that sometimes listening to it it was difficult to remain professional and to keep a straight face. This one was one of those! Completely pointless, but funny!
I managed to read 4 paragraphs before I thought to myself "what is this nonsense". I went back over it and re-read it thinking that maybe I missed the point and a second reading will make it coherent, but it did nothing of the sort. I have read some insane philosophical essays but this essay (if you can call it that) is just words strung together for the sound of their own voice making noise.
The American Thinker has never been considered respectable journalism or even philosophical thought, but this screed has dug a new low for them
Then they better get a better job or a better class of friends.....poor wittle red voting snowflakes.
Funny!
And whose of us who vote blue in a deep red area wouldn't have to worry about losing friends, or our jobs, or having people taking pot shots at us....
The fuck it doesn't.....
Don't need a reason to fire anyone in states with right to work laws.
I live in a blood red area and I have always voted blue. I'd vote green if I thought that they had a chance of being elected.
Skirting the CoC [ph]
Comment deleted for skirting the CoC. jwc2blue
I regret editing "position of authority over children" out of the original comment.
I just flew in here, and don't hAVe full context, but when you state your rules based in Christianity, do they not determine what "sexuality" boundaries are acceptable, as determined by U and your faith ?
How exactly can U preach what U want, yet, call out another with different 'Fantasies" /////?
A fantasy is in the eye of the fantasizer ], regardless of hiss size, or what you fantasize his size to be
or
not to be,
but, that aint the question here. How do you determine what is what's right and wrong, cause I got some pRETTY FCKN BADASS COOL AS SHIT FANTASIES, that could make your head spin like Linda Blair tripping out with centrifugal forcing someone in the deepest depths of vertigo gyration , having a nonstop sensation with Elvis hip exclamation
get my point ?
Me thinks that when that telephone rang, it was a telemarketer from the planet Zorgon. You should have let the answering machine pick that call up.
When I first started reading this article I had the feeling from it that it should have been posted in my Classic Cinema group, as a film noir, but when I got to this paragraph I realized that it was about a recent comedy:
Most entertaining article I've read all day.
I’m a native Californian born in the 40s. I have watched this state go from one we loved to a Stalinist Kalifornia that despises individualism
a state that could not only elect governor moonbeam in the 70s, but insanely bring him back in the 21st century has clearly lost its collective mind
"It is said that true character is revealed only under duress. If that's so, then this country is filled with a whole lot of people who present well in the day-to-day world when things are going their way. But when the fates don't favor them, they're revealed to be namby-pamby embarrassments, with dubious reasoning skills, largely indefensible positions, hearts full of hypocrisy and hatred, and a dumb-assery that is fast becoming legend."
"we found joy in hammering diaper-wearing lefties, pussy hat hypocrites, the fake news media, Empress Pantsuit, and Barry-O'Trojan Horse to our hearts' content."
Talk about hypocrisy.
The reality is that Trump was certainly a litmus test for America. Do you support "Captain Middle Finger" who breaks all the rules, stomps on 240 years of Presidential standards, admits when it comes to grabbing women by the genitals he doesn't even wait for consent along with "impolitic tweeting, his clumsy rhetoric, or his vulgarianism", or do you reject that kind of disgusting behavior? If you see those as positives, you have a very warped view of our American system of governance. I would much rather see a woman expressing her individuality and freedom by wearing a pussy hat than to support a President who say's he grabs attractive women he doesn't even know by their genitals. Even if there wasn't this giant dark cloud of Russian interference in the election Donald Trump is an uncouth, vulgar, serially bankrupt, twice divorced, adulterous narcissist that most Americans find difficult to present to their children as a role model.
If it makes you feel awesome being a member of Trumps exclusive "bad boy" club, that's fine, enjoy the time he affords you in the spotlight, but don't imagine he's actually going to fix anything, he's just making a mockery of the Presidency. Yes, there are anti-establishment types who revel in the disruption, they hate the current bureaucracy which is understandable, but setting the establishment on fire isn't the answer and won't actually fix our many problems and huge gap between American citizens that has only widened under this divider in-chief.
Trump is a flawed person. But he’s a million percent better than any of the Marxist statist Democrats. Trump has made millions of Americans proud again of our country after Hussein Obama’s effort to destroy our country.
as a minarchist I have longed for a leader who would tear down the Marxist fascist institutions of government and swing the pendulum back towards Constitutional governance
its no surprise that the left hates what he’s doing
That's just plain delusional beyond description.
It would have been pretty easy for him to do if that was his agenda since he was handed a country in financial free fall, double digit unemployment, two unfunded unnecessary wars and tens of thousands of returning injured veterans coming home to an underfunded VA. He could have just sat on his hands and let us go off the cliff if he wanted to destroy our country. Thankfully he was far from your rhetorical cartoonish impression of him.
And Trump was handed a nation with a healthy economy and stock market on the rise and unemployment on the decline and still managed for the first year to try to find a way to try to take credit for it, even though he had just sat on his hands and not fucked with it.
He is the classic example of someone born on 3rd base who thought he hit a triple. Except in his case he was born on third and then was thrown out several times (bankrupt) and then managed to find a foreign league (Russia) to give him a contract just so they promised not to say anything about the money or the hookers.
Oh and Manuchin is saying that Trump is thinking about re-joining the TPP. Personally I thought it was a great idea and that it was stupid for all of the candidates to run against it. Also his new tariffs on steel and aluminum is his most stupid idea since he decided he didn't have to check for hidden cameras at the Moscow Hilton. Yes it's aimed at China, but they are not in the top ten of who we import our steel and aluminum from (We import the most from Canada!) and it's not going to hurt them a dime's worth and is just going to start an un-needed trade war that will cost Americans jobs.
if obama handed trump a fantastic economy why did trump have to remove thousands upon thousands of obama era regulations to free up obamas economy?
all the companies moving back to the usa? part of obamas plan also?
ya wanna try again? LOL
Please list "all" these companies you speak of. The ones I found were already making those changes before Trump was elected because our economy was already doing well under Obama with the stock market hitting 19,872 before Trump was inaugurated which was an all time high at that point having recovered from 75 year lows that Obama was handed when he took office. The facts show that under Trump the Dow rose 26% (19,872 to 25,075) in his first year, which is impressive, but during the same period under Obama the Dow rose 33% (7,949 to 10,572).
Ford: "The decision not to build the plant in Mexico, where Ford had planned to build the next generation Ford Focus, was scrapped because “we’ve seen decreasing demand here in North America for small cars, and we simply don’t need the capacity anymore,” Fields said on Fox Business News . Instead, he said, Ford will build it in an existing facility in Mexico."
GM: GM leaders stressed that the investments in the U.S. were part of a longtime trend. The company noted that it has announced investments of $2.9 billion in the U.S. in 2016 — and more than $21 billion since 2009.
Lockheed Martin: the “government’s next contract in the F-35 project would cover 90 planes, compared with 57 in the previous batch. The increase was in the works before Mr. Trump was elected, and other Lockheed officials said the added positions would come as production increases.”
Michelle Krebs , a Detroit-based senior analyst for Autotrader who has been writing about the automotive industry for 35 years, told us few of the automakers’ announcements were a surprise to her or anyone else who covers the industry.
“The overall big picture, most of these things were in the works,” Krebs said, adding that perhaps some things have been added on the “fringe” because of Trump.
if obama handed trump a fantastic economy why did trump have to remove thousands upon thousands of obama era regulations to free up obamas economy?
Obama pulled the American economy out of the worst recession since the 1930's and got the nation moving again. His work was brilliant, because it was team work and he surrounded himself with brilliant people and actually listened to what they had to say.The exact opposite of what that malignant narcissist in the Oval Office is doing now as he is driving us toward war and economic disaster because of it and some of his other proposed policies. Nearly all of the so-called executive orders Trumps signed rolling back regulations were tiny minor changes that were all show and no go. They didn't create any jobs that were not already being created anyway. The economy was running full steam ahead when Trump was sworn in and his executive orders had little or no effect on that, though his ignorant tariffs will sure as hell fuck the economy up if he is stupid enough to go through with them. He's actually surprised that the Market is down because of his announcement! What the hell did that idiot think would happen? I mean is he really that stupid?
BTW, I love how you still vote your own comments up. Someone has too!
for the most pathetic and anemic recovery ever...
and then trump killed obamas regulatory BS and unleashed our economy for real
obamas "new normal" was simply not good enough. meanwhile trump did more for our economy in only one year.
obama does not get credit for this economy unless obama planned for trump to win and then erase thousands upon thousands of obama regulations...