The Ship Isn’t Going to Sink After All

I don’t expect this to be read by many people who need to hear this, but things are not as bad as you fear. Watch and wait. You’ll see. If you’re not ready to hear this yet, OK; maybe we’ll come back to it when you’re ready. I’ll just leave it here.

The ship will not sink after all.

I’m talking to those who aren’t celebrating after last week’s election—or maybe I’m talking to those who care about those who are not celebrating.

Here are a couple of examples. This first one, I like the person who posted. I think she’s a good mom and generally a good person. But I do not engage her on political issues. She reports having this uncomfortable conversation—which she believes should not be something she should have ever had to anticipate, let alone face—with her tween-age daughter. She assured her daughter that she and her husband would keep the children safe. They didn’t need to worry about the outcome of an election. The daughter then said, “Well, they don’t like childless cat ladies. I NEVER want to have kids, and I like cats. So, I guess they don’t want me here [in America]. And if they don’t want me here, fine—I will leave.”

This mom says they do not speak of politics around the house. The girl picked it up, essentially, from the milieu. The mom explains this burden “we” have put on her and her daughter, and ends with, “The coming generations will hold us accountable for what we do today, and if we are conveying that they don’t matter, that they cannot have a voice or live their lives in the abundantly free country many of us grew up in, they will abandon a country that their parents and grandparents forced them to suffocate in.”

By comparison to others, this was relatively mild. For example,

meme found on a Facebook here

I’m OK with history judging me on this vote, by the way, since I have neither those lacks nor those bad character traits.

And this one:

[Someone at] church told me my son would be deported, because he was born when I lived overseas, and that I’d be deported with him [4 laugh/crying emojis] all because [someone on TV] ran her mouth about nonsense. These oldhead liberals at church crack me up.

One more: This is from a HuffPost article called, “My Husband and His Family Voted for Trump, So I’m Canceling Thanksgiving and Christmas,” which then goes on to explain to the husband,

I am sorry about the holidays, but I cannot bite my tongue like I did with Hillary. I don’t want to disrespect your parents or your brother and his family in their home, or our home, so it’s best this way. No scenes. You can go see them. Seriously—I will not be in a room of 15 people who voted for Trump.

What a relief for the other 15 people!

We are not dealing with rational people right now. Just for clarity, J.D. Vance never said we should deport, or ignore, or “cancel” childless cat ladies; he said people with no children, and therefore no stake in the future of the country, should not be overrepresented in leadership positions. And he said it as an offhand remark in 2021 in an interview with Tucker Carlson. (Read more at your trusted NPR source here). It got dredged up by the Harris campaign, and taken out of context, to foment anger, which apparently worked on the demographic they aimed for—those who were already voting for her. The milieu in my home would not have caused such distress on a pre-teen girl, but then, our milieu is really very different—the sources for news, entertainment, conversation topics, etc. I think I wouldn’t have started the conversation with, “Don’t worry about the outcome of the election; we’ll protect you,” and then blamed the rest of us for the daughter’s distress.

As for the church person telling a US citizen that they’d be deported along with their child for allowing their child to be born while they were temporarily living outside US boundaries is so laughably ill-informed, I almost shouldn’t dignify it with the explanation, but children born to US citizens are considered US citizens, regardless of where they are born. Otherwise, you couldn’t get service members in their child-bearing years to live abroad with their families. Nor would ambassadors or even US workers in international companies. So, “oldhead liberals at church,” get a grip.

We—the majority of the country who are Trump voters—are, for the sake of love of country and our fellow Americans, being patient during this mourning process. We have been in that place of overwhelming loss, with a great deal more good reason.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, screenshot from here

Bret Weinstein and wife Heather Heying did a thoughtful podcast a few days after the election.  They come from a liberal background—up until “the science” was so obviously wrong, in 2020 and beyond concerning the pandemic, that they felt they had to speak up. And for that, even though she had been voted favorite professor at Evergreen College in the northwest, they were both fired for speaking the truth about actual data. So, yes, they were red pilled, and in this election strongly supported Trump. But they also remain close to a sizable number of people who cling to the left (bitter clingers?)

Bret Weinstein uses a metaphor of a ship that is being badly captained, in such a way that the ship is going to go down, along with everyone aboard. So there’s an honorable mutiny—the capable sailors come forward and restrain the captain and take over. There are also sailors who do not mutiny, who stay loyal to the captain no matter what. They’re angry with those who stepped in and changed the sails and set the ship aright. In fact, they insist the captain is saving them and these sailors stepping up to make the necessary changes are going to kill them all. Those angry ones are wrong, but they will nevertheless benefit from the lifesaving actions of those who took over.

Metaphors always have limits. The American voters are not mutineers nor insurrectionists; they abided by the law and used their vote for a peaceful transition of power. There is, nevertheless, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who insist these pro-American voters are killing democracy and inflicting us all with fascism. But they are wrong, fortunately.

Weinstein offers a main point, which maybe will help us move forward: we all want the ship to stay afloat.

I think the irony of the moment is you have something like half the population convinced that something terrible has just happened. And that half the population, I think, does not appreciate that, actually, the terrible thing was already well underway. We were living under what was at least a turnkey totalitarian state in which, actually, the key had begun to be turned, and we had all sorts of examples of political prisoners, of lawfare being wielded, people being disenfranchised, borders being open for cynical reasons that we can't know, the costs were accumulating for the insane captain's perspective on how the civilization—or the ship, in this case—was to be run.

And so, at some level, the fact that you believe that something terrible has happened in this mutiny doesn't mean your life wasn't just saved by the mutineers. You may not get that. But we should all be able to agree that we are bound together, and that what we need is for the ship to be well governed. And what we disagree over is which of these prospects was the terrifying one.

I may disagree with him slightly here; I think there are some, in power positions, who were rooting for the malaise and eventual demise of our beloved constitutional republic—for the ship to sink, as it were. But most of the people have been what Stalin (or was it Lenin?) called “useful idiots.” They believe what they’re told by the tyrannical state, without question, and they act accordingly.

I continue to puzzle over why they believe what they’re told, without questioning. They even seem to see a different reality from actual, provable reality. Some of it must be the sources they use for information. In fact, that must be a lot of it. But some of it must be choosing to believe what they believe, against the evidence.

As Mark Twain said, “How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!”

I am, of course, working under the assumption that reality as I see it is close to the actual reality. I aim for that, anyway.

A day or so before the election, Chris Martenson put out a short Peak Prosperity video. He began with a clip of Oprah saying, “We don't get to sit this one out. If we don't show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.”

Chris Martenson, upper right, shows clip of Oprah,
screenshot from here

Martenson then said, “I agree. Just, we have— It's just amazing how fundamentally different we are.” We thought it was entirely possible that, had Harris won, the totalitarian state would have moved so far down, we might never have seen a way out of the tyranny. Seriously. Martenson pointed out that this administration oversaw shadow banning and actual banning, censorship—so much that it filtered down to regular people on Facebook. (My BIL had his post taken down when he told his own personal experience with COVID and the eventual treatment—which included hydroxychloroquine. Several Facebook friends had posts removed and were put on some sort of time out or probation they call Facebook jail. Many of us, including me, had those ubiquitous misinformation warnings placed under our posts.)

In the Weinstein video, they put out some of what we faced. A January 2022 report shows what people from the two parties believed should happen:

·        Find/identify the unvaxxed.

o   20% REP             55% DEM

·        Unvaccinated should be locked in homes.

o   20% REP             60% DEM

·        Unvaccinated should be sent to quarantine camps

o   20% REP (way too high)               40% DEM

·        Take children from unvaccinated parents.

o   Near 0% REP                    30% DEM

·        Imprison critics of the vaccine.

o   10% REP             50% DEM

This is not to say these things happened in the US; they didn’t. But Democrats wanted them to at much higher rates than Republicans. There were, however, actual CDC plans to carry them out. The day Weinstein and Heying recorded the video, they noticed a piece by Jeffrey Tucker, of the Brownstone Institute, saying that the CDC had plans built for quarantine camps, which plans remained on the CDC site until 2023. Tucker says this was called “interim operational considerations for implementing the shielding approach to prevent COVID-19 infections in humanitarian settings,” in case you didn’t get terrified enough by this year’s Halloween.

The Blaze put out a piece in their Lifestyle section called “Every Lie They Told You about Trump: A Brief Overview.”  It’s way too brief to touch on “every lie,” but I’ll let you explore that one on your own.

Tom Woods, in his email from Thursday (November 14), quoted Dave Smith, who reminds us of this story from eight years ago:

The US intelligence agencies framed the sitting US President for treason. They all knew that Donald Trump wasn’t involved in a conspiracy with the Russians, but they lied.

Well, that President is back AND the boss of the Intelligence agencies is now, not only someone completely outside of that conspiracy, but someone who was slandered with that same accusation, by the same nasty woman whose campaign came up with the whole Trump frame job to begin with.

It turns out there are people who should fear a Trump presidency—not because he’ll be a tyrannical dictator; clearly they weren’t afraid of tyranny (or "loss of our democracy," as they put it), as long as they were the tyrants. But they should fear that Trump will hold them legally and lawfully accountable for their actions. They will call any such legal actions the political retributions of an authoritarian dictator, but the myriad of Trump voters know what it really is.

Weinstein brought back the ship analogy an hour further into the podcast. It had taken some bravery to stand up publicly as they had, along with many others. He says,

If we had failed, we would have been made to walk the plank, and the ship would have gone down somewhat later. There was no escape. And this is why I think so many people took what they at least perceived to be such risks with their own personal well-being, was that we didn't have a choice, right? We really believed—and I still believe—that the other outcome was utterly intolerable, and that this was probably our last shot to gain control of the helm and steer the ship back on a reasonable course.

But I was imagining the ship, if the other outcome had happened, the ship would go down, and a lot of people would be scratching their heads at the last moments as to whether the mutineers might have been onto something, which is a—that's a terrible screenplay I don't want to live.

The Constitution had been hanging by a thread. The repair is going to feel kind of severe and crazy for a while. Coming to know the truth will help with the healing; it really will.

image from a Christian Homestead video

I put a new book on my reading list: Political Ponerology: The Science of Evi, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism. In a recommendation of this book, David Solway, for PJ Media says, 

In effect, you cannot change a mind that was never properly formed or classically educated or a mind devoid of any vestige of common sense or practical smarts. A coalition of conservative thinkers and ordinary working families constitutes a winning combination.

For those who eventually find your way here at a time when you have become open to it, I suggest adding a full list of conservative thinkers to your content providers. Check out Epoch Times, The Blaze, The Daily Wire, PJ Media, Tucker Carlson—just for starters. And check out free Hillsdale courses, particularly Constitution 101. And then have some open-minded discussions with those 15 people who voted for Trump who are at your holiday table (maybe you’ll be ready for this step next year). Maybe you will unlearn some of the untruths that have been making you so panicked/angry/over-emotional, miserable, and miserable to be around.

And, once you’re ready to add some levity back into your life, use the Babylon Bee as your news source; while they are a satire site, they do hit on the truth more accurately than the sources that led you astray before. And if you don’t understand the satire, well, that will put you on a journey toward truth too.

image from a Babylon Bee story on Facebook

One more Weinstein quote, about how the rest of us are feeling right now:

I just want to try to just capture the fact that something took place that I think all of the people, whose names you know, who took a risk on this were feeling, simultaneously, the day after, and it was not vitriolic; it was not angry; it was not any of the things that you might imagine; it was this feeling of “I can't believe that I feel hopeful. And I can't remember how long I've been living under this feeling of pressure, that we cannot afford to lose, because we are in the bullseye.”

I’m sorry there are people feeling lost and afraid the ship is sinking. But it’s not. And those of us who had witnessed the peril, we just feel so relieved. And we’re ready to help right the ship and sail forward.

Bonus: three lists (with some repetition) of progress in President-elect Trump's first week:

found on Facebook, here

 A facebook story, original credited to
@the_typical_liberal and dc_draino

found on Facebook here