Why Aren't We Listening to the Ones Who Were Never Fooled?

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

Let's use an analogy:

     Suppose you had an opportunity to invest your money and you were seeking financial advice. Who would you listen to, a person who has a solid track record for making profitable investments and can boast of a history of making solid returns based on a working, pragmatic knowledge of the investment market or someone who's pumped tens of thousand of dollars into, say, Trump University and lost their life savings?

     Which one would you be more willing to listen to, especially since you're about to put some skin in the game?

    Well, unless you're another fool who deserves to be parted from his money, you'd listen to the former.

     So why is it that the MSM and grassroots organizations always, Always, ALWAYS listen to just right wing apostates who were fooled by that con man who bilked people of millions through one scheme after another, such as Trump University, for instance?

     At the very least, the political acumen of those who were duped by a palpably obvious swindler and cheat like Donald Trump would be so suspect that they cannot be taken seriously. Personally, I'd rather listen to people who'd been smart, perspicacious and pragmatic enough to be able to see past the smoke and mirrors from the start and were never fooled by Trump or any of his fellow swamp dwellers.

    Yet we've been trained to listen to only those right wing apostates who were fooled by these miscreants and could be, theoretically, fooled again by the next political Elmer Gantry to wander down the pike. "This is where I went wrong and why I saw the light," they practically blubber like so many Jimmy Swaggerts and wailing, "I have sinned!"

     Because we've been conditioned to believe that the people to believe are the ones who had sinned, had their Come to Jesus/Road to Damascus moment, had seen the light. What's there not to believe? They're former Trump voters. Those liberal, Democrat voters? Oh, who cares what they say? They have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Of course they hate Trump. They have a political bias.

     And this is why it's always easier to get invited onto a sound stage of a major network if you're one of those reformed apostates known as Never Trumpers, those in the Lincoln Project or Republican Voters against Trump. The latter has been troweling out a series of videos featuring people who were, obviously, easily deluded by Trump at least once and are now on their individual paths to political redemption, however short or long it will be, by telling us how they learned their lessons.

    Here's a guy named Darin, a Republican voter out of Illinois. Darin says, "“I voted Republican straight across the board my entire life (which alone ought to make his political judgment highly suspect) until I saw Trump and his role in January 6. I can’t support a person like that.”

      So, obviously, for these people, lifelong Republican voters, you have to cross a red line flashing in blinding neon red, a person has to hurdle a ridiculously high bar, like trying to sack one's own federal government, before they finally wake up. You'd think there would be more people like this, ones that can still be reached, that cannot get sucked into the Cult of Personality that Trump had erected over the last nine years.

     But, for some of us, we don't need to see a candidate or incumbent cross the Rubicon in order for us to see their true intentions and nature.

Who Cares If You Were Right All Along?

It's not as if there was a paucity of red flags to see, or enough room for doubt and plausible deniability. Long before Trump sicced a mob to stop the certification of Electoral College votes then gleefully watched the ensuing riot on TV from the safety of the White House while refusing to do anything to stop it, long before he stole Top Secret classified documents that he then refused to turn over even after being subpoenaed by the government, long before he ignored a historic pandemic that claimed the lives of well over 1,000,000 Americans, we only needed to look at the spectacle of Trump throwing his hat in the ring.

     It really should've ended as quickly in 2016 as it had in 2012 when Trump began hurling conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate and place of birth. Trump came down that golden escalator and immediately began bragging to a paid crowd of mercenary shills about how "really really rich" he was in a skyscraper owned by him and inveighing against Mexicans being, ironically, "rapists and criminals".

     Even Republican voters like Darin seeking a fresh, outsider voice should've been given the willies by Trump's conduct and remarks once his campaign caught fire like a mountain of old tires at the edge of an industrial town. The following month, he began taking pot shots at John McCain, a guy who'd initially endorsed him, by saying he was only a hero because he was captured.

     Then he refused to turn over his school records from Wharton, then he refused to turn over his taxes. Despite revealing himself to be about as transparent as a block of lead, Trump then creepily stalked Hillary Clinton during the debates, bragged about not paying his taxes, saying he was 'smart", and mocked a disabled reporter.

     And, still, these apostates who are now being listened to by solemn, serious people who were also duped by this con man, rapist and racist, still voted for him on Election Day 2016. And it was obvious even by that time that Donald Trump was several years past his shelf life and proved it by delivering an endless highlight reel of some of the stupidest, most ignorant things ever uttered by a political candidate.

     Where was this Lincoln Project that night? Where were they in 2017 when Charlottesville convulsed the nation with an orgy of racist hatred? Where were they in 2018? Nowhere because it didn't exist, yet. The Lincoln Project wasn't formed until 2019. And the former Trump administration officials who are even now sucking up oxygen on sound stages, save for Miles Taylor (who was formerly known as Anonymous) were silent during the Trump years.

     They were enablers then later cashed out with an endless skein of bookdeals.

    But we weren't listening to Democratic voters and liberals who'd seen Trump for what he was all along. And we'd heard from hardly any more Democratic lawmakers who'd also seen him for the danger he was.

     Because they had a political bias, don't you know?

     Yet, these are precisely the people we ought to be putting on TV, those who were not feeble minded enough or craven enough to let a madman have his way in order to cling to a prestigious job that offers access to power. And, if we were smart as a nation, especially in yet another election year that's the most important one in human history, we'd choose to listen to them and not those who'd been fooled once or twice by the worst and best con man in history and could easily be fooled again.