[BITList] A Two Fingers To A Politically Correct Elite

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A very good summary of what just happened!


 From The Irish Independent
Dublin, Ireland
Sunday, November 13, 2016

A Two Fingers To A Politically Correct Elite

Hillary Clinton has damned her party to irrelevance for at least the 
next four years in a stunningly self-inflicted defeat. People didn't 
vote for Trump because of what he is, it's what he's not that appealed 
to them.

COMMENTARY By Ian O’Doherty


Tuesday November 8 2016 - a day that will live in infamy or the moment 
when America was made great again?

The truth, as ever, will lie somewhere in the middle. After all, 
contrary to what both his supporters and detractors believe - and this 
is probably the only thing they agree on - Trump won't be able to come 
into office and spend his first 100 days gleefully ripping up all the 
bits of the Constitution he doesn't like.

But even if this week's seismic shockwave doesn't signal either the sky 
falling in or the start of a bright new American era, the result was, to 
use one of The Donald's favorite phrases, huge. It is, in fact, a total 
game changer.

In decades to come, historians will still bicker about the most 
poisonous, toxic and stupid election in living memory.

They will also be bickering over the same vexed question - how did a man 
who was already unpopular with the public and who boasted precisely zero 
political experience beat a seasoned Washington insider who was married 
to one extremely popular president and who had worked closely with another?

The answer, ultimately, is in the question.

History will record this as a Trump victory, which of course it is. But 
it was also more than that, because this was the most stunning 
self-inflicted defeat in the history of Western democracy.

Hillary Clinton has damned her party to irrelevance for at least the 
next four years. She has also ensured that Obama's legacy will now be a 
footnote rather than a chapter. Because the Affordable Care Act is now 
doomed under a Trump presidency and that was always meant to be his 
gift, of sorts, to America.

How did a candidate who had virtually all of the media, all of Hollywood 
, every celebrity you could think of, a couple of former presidents and 
apparently, the hopes of an entire gender resting on her shoulders, blow 
up her own campaign?

I rather suspect that neither Donald nor Hillary know how they got to 
this point.

Where she seemed to expect the position to become available to her by 
right - the phrase "she deserves it" was used early in the campaign and 
then quickly dropped when her team remembered that Americans don't like 
inherited power - his first steps into the campaign were those of 
someone chancing their arm. If he wasn't such a staunch teetotaler, many 
observers would have accused him of only doing it as a drunken bet.

But the more the campaign wore on, *something truly astonishing began to 
happen - the people began to speak. And they began to speak in a voice 
which, for the first time in years in the American heartland, would not 
be ignored.

Few of the people who voted for Trump seriously believe that he is going 
to personally improve their fortunes. Contrary to the smug, middle-class 
media narrative, they aren't all barely educated idiots.

They know what he is, of course they do. It's what he is not that 
appeals to them.

Clinton, on the other hand, had come to represent the apex of smug 
privilege. Whether it was boasting about her desire to shut down the 
remaining coal industry in Virginia - that worked out well for her, in 
the end - or calling half the electorate a "basket of deplorables", she 
seemed to operate in the perfumed air of the elite, more obsessed with 
coddling idiots and pandering to identity and feelings than improving 
the hardscrabble life that is the lot of millions of Americans.

Also, nobody who voted for Trump did so because they wanted him as a 
spiritual guru or life coach.

But plenty of people invested an irrational amount of emotional energy 
into a woman who was patently undeserving of that level of adoration.

That's why we've witnessed such fury from her supporters - they had 
wrapped themselves so tightly in the Hillary flag that a rejection of 
her felt like a rejection of them. And when you consider that many 
American colleges gave their students Wednesday off class because they 
were too 'upset' to study, you can see that this wasn't a battle for the 
White House - this became a genuine battle for America 's future 
direction. And, indeed, for the West.

We have been going through a cultural paroxysm for the last 10 years - 
the rise of identity politics has created a Balkanized society where the 
content of someone's mind is less important than their skin colour, 
gender, sexuality or whatever other attention-seeking label they wish to 
bestow upon themselves.
In fact, where once it looked like racism and sexism might be becoming 
archaic remnants of a darker time, a whole new generation has popped up 
which wants to re-litigate all those arguments all over again.

In fact, while many of us are too young to recall the Vietnam war and 
the social upheaval of the 1960s, plenty of observers who were say they 
haven't seen an America more at war with itself than it is today.

One perfect example of this new America has been the renewed calls for 
segregation on campuses. Even a few years ago, such a move would have 
been greeted with understandable horror by civil rights activists - but 
this time it's the black students demanding segregation and "safe 
spaces" from whites. If young people calling for racial segregation from 
each other isn't the sign of a very, very sick society, nothing is.

The irony of Clinton calling Trump and his followers racist while she 
was courting Black Lives Matter was telling.

After all, no rational white person would defend the KKK, yet here was a 
white woman defending both BLM and the New Black Panthers - explicitly 
racist organizations with the NBP, in particularly, openly espousing a 
race war if they don't get what they want.

Fundamentally, Trump was attractive because he represents a repudiation 
of the nonsense that has been slowly strangling the West.

He represents - rightly or wrongly, and the dust has still to settle - a 
scorn and contempt for these new rules. He won't be a president worried 
about microaggressions, or listening to the views of patently insane 
people just because they come from a fashionably protected group.

He also represents a glorious two fingers to everyone who has become 
sick of being called a racist or a bigot or a homophobe - particularly 
by Hillary supporters who are too dense to realise that she has always 
actually been more conservative on social issues than Trump.

That it might take a madman to restore some sanity to America is, I 
suppose, a quirk that is typical to that great nation - land of the free 
and home to more contradictions than anyone can imagine.

Trump's victory also signals just how out of step the media has been 
with the people. Not just American media, either.

In fact, the Irish media has continued its desperate drive to make a 
show of itself with a seemingly endless parade of emotionally 
*incontinent gibberish that, ironically, has increased in ferocity and 
hysterical spite in the last few days.

The fact that Hillary's main cheerleaders in the Irish and UK media 
still haven't realized where they went wrong is instructive and *amusing 
in equal measure. They still don't seem to understand that by constantly 
insulting his supporters, they're just making asses of themselves.

One female contributor to this newspaper said Trump's victory was a "sad 
day for women". Well, not for the women who voted for him, it wasn't.

But that really is the nub of the matter - the 'wrong' kind of women 
obviously voted for Trump. The 'right' kind went with Hillary. And lost.

The Irish media is not alone in being filled largely with dinner-party 
liberals who have never had an original or socially awkward thought in 
their lives. They simply assume that everyone lives in the same bubble 
and thinks the same thoughts - and if they don't, they should.

Of the many things that have changed with Trump's victory, the bubble 
has burst. Never in American history have the polls, the media and the 
chin-stroking moral arbiters of the liberal agenda been so 
spectacularly, wonderfully wrong.

It was exactly that condescending, obnoxious sneer towards the working 
class that brought them out in such numbers, and that is the great irony 
of Election 16 - the Left spent years creating identity politics to the 
extent that the only group left without protection or a celebrity 
sponsor was the white American male.
That it was the white American male who swung it for Trump is a timely 
reminder that while black lives matter, all votes count - even the ones 
of people you despise.

You don't have to be a supporter of Trump to take great delight in the 
sheer, apoplectic rage that has greeted his victory.

If Clinton had won and Trump supporters had gone on a rampage through a 
dozen American cities the next night, there would have been outrage - 
and rightly so.

But in a morally and linguistically inverted society, the wrong-doers 
are portrayed as the victims. We saw that at numerous Trump rallies - 
protesters would disrupt the event, claiming their right to free speech 
(a heckler's veto is not free speech) and provoking people until they 
got a dig before running to the *media and claiming victimhood.

Yet none of Clinton 's rallies were shut down by her opponents (unlike 
Trump's aborted Chicago meeting) and the great mistake of the anti-Trump 
zealots should have learned was that just thinking you're right isn't 
enough - you need to convince others as well.

But, ultimately, this election was about people saying enough with the 
bullshit. This is a country in crisis, and most Americans don't care 
about transgender bathrooms, or safe spaces, or government speech laws. 
This was about people taking some control back for themselves.

It was about them saying that they won't be hectored and bullied by the 
toddler tantrums thrown by prissy and spoiled millennials and they 
certainly won't put up with being told they're stupid and wicked just 
because they have a difference of opinion.

But, really, this election is about hope for a better America ; an 
America which isn't obsessed with identity and perceived 'privilege'; an 
American where being a victim isn't a virtue and where you don't have to 
apologise for not being up to date with the latest list of socially 
acceptable phrases.

Trump's victory was a two fingers to the politically correct.

It was a brutal rejection of the nonsense narrative which says Muslims 
who kill Americans are somehow victims. It took the ludicrous Green 
agenda and threw it out. It was a return, on some level, to a time when 
people weren't afraid to speak their own mind without some self-elected 
language cop shouting at you. Who knows, we may even see Trump kicking 
the UN out of New York .

Frankly, if you're one of those who gets their politics from CNN, Jon 
Stewart and Twitter, look away for the next four years, because you're 
not going to like what you see. The rest of us, however, will be delighted.

This might go terribly, terribly wrong. Nobody knows - and if we have 
learned anything this week, it's that nobody knows nuthin'.

But just as the people of the UK took control back with Brexit, the 
people of America did likewise with their choice for president.
It's called democracy.

Deal with it.

Ian O'Doherty is a columnist who works for the Irish Independent








	

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