The Resistance to Process
I don’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I don’t wave a flag, and usually roll my eyes at those who claim those who don’t worship the symbols of America are un-American. Symbolism is fine; I just don’t feel one can be compelled to have the correct feelings. I think this is the greatest country on the planet, and our system, imperfect as it is, is the best of all those available.
I’m not big on using “anti-American” or “unpatriotic” as an attack line, and I’ve never called President Obama a Kenyan, a Muslim, or anything more than what he obviously was, a man with no qualifications for the presidency who used political opponents’ personal lives against them in every one of his political campaigns while posing as some mountain of integrity. Yet the opponents of our current president aren’t content to point out that he has said offensive words and refuses to reveal his tax returns.
More than once I’ve heard the election of Donald Trump to the presidency is a disaster on the level of Pearl Harbor, JFK’s assassination, and 9/11. Invariably from democrats seeking to get contributions flowing from the Bernie Sanders dead-enders, this particular line of attack is damaging to the country on a level most seem unaware of.
One of the reasons these three particular events had such impact on the U.S. is because they disrupted the order of society. Pearl Harbor was a sucker punch from a nation at war; they hit us first, killing two thousand of our young soldiers whose only crime was serving in the military protecting our country. The result was the mobilization of our entire country into war and ultimately dropping two bombs that killed hundreds of thousands. As horrific as the start of the nuclear era was, to this day most Americans saw it as justified — “You started it, we finished it.”
The assassination of President Kennedy was another disruption of American society so powerful we still feel its impact in 2017. In this case it was one man, not over two thousand, but a man we all felt we knew, and more importantly one who had been put in his position by an election. Kennedy’s murder was not just the elimination of a politician, but the overturning of a process we all agree with as the proper way to put a president in power. One man’s actions tossed away the efforts and beliefs of millions (including those who did not support Kennedy).
The events of 9/11/01 are fresh with some of us. We remember where we were that day. But increasingly we are seeing people for whom 9/11 is a case of “Well, yeah, but…” If you were younger than, say, five on that day, you have no recall of the day or a vague one of parents being distraught. If you are now around twenty, much of your thought of those events has been shaped by people who don’t put 9/11 on the same level as Pearl Harbor, for example: The wars and controversies that followed are taught by teachers, commentators and entertainment figures as a whole, blunting the impact of those planes crashing into office buildings. 9/11 is still a day that will live in infamy, but it has been taught as one piece of a whole, its being another case of ‘smashing through the system’ ala JFK’s assassination rarely considered.
Which brings us to the critics and, let’s be honest, haters of President Trump.
Since Trump’s win, the left has been relentless in claiming that — unlike any other previous presidential election — Trump’s was not legitimate. The tell for someone who may or may not believe this but doesn’t care about anything more than cementing this belief is the use of the phrase “Russia hacked the election.” It is an imprecise phrase, but it is not one stumbled on my mistake: You use it, and you know what you’re doing. You are muddying the waters, you are trying to imply something evil and nefarious and nebulous, some Putin operatives hitting keys and listening in ala THE LIVES OF OTHERS, some all-controlling KGB-like worldwide conspiracy. You are the modern birthers, which may be a bit of payback for that bit of hate directed at President Obama by citizen Trump, but you are legitimizing Trump’s birther nonsense retroactively by using a smear with no connection to reality.
Even if you believe every accusation made about the sharing of Hillary Clinton’s and the DNC’s emails with Russia, the election was not hacked. Some DNC computers were hacked. But saying that deflates the Putin Hacked Our Election narrative, makes the listener think, “You mean spreading around emails that revealed Podesta, Clinton and Wasserman-Schultz were liars about how they ran their primary? That’s bad, but ‘hacked our election’ bad?”
This is the point in such commentary where I’m supposed to say Donald Trump is a vile person BUT he’s our president. It’s a tactic used to ingratiate one with the Trump-hating left, to show one is ‘unbiased.’ You will look for such a thing in vain here.
Instead, I’m just going to point out that this man who said, in private, that he liked grabbing women by the pussy and kissing them after getting permission — a sacred law of feminism, not much mentioned in the post-Bill Clinton era — and who hates gays, immigrants and Jews is as imperfect as all of us. He’s also a man who gave women high-profile jobs in his businesses decades ago, who is married to an immigrant, and has Jews in his immediate family. I see no reason to mount a defense of a guy who, when he announced he was running, I called plenty of names. He was my least-favorite candidate but one or two in the primaries.
Some see him as a fascist, or say they do. They seem to think “fascist” means “Really bad leader who doesn’t like abortion,” which is the one subject that drives his opponents like no other. Having observed the abortion debate for decades, I have never seen pro-choice Americans so furious about a pro-life politician. When he won, his opponents ignored their own repeated declaration that to ignore the results of the election was not only un-American but dangerous to our very nation’s integrity. They took to the streets. The New York Times resurrected the ignored Russia storyline, which was seized on by democrats. In late March of 2017, we are already seeing that narrative fade as actual facts show no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia but a great deal of evidence that President Obama’s administration may have used claims of needing to monitor Russia as an excuse to tap an opposing party’s political campaign. Seeing President Obama’s history of getting friendly judges to open his opponents’ sealed divorce proceedings — not once, but twice — and attempting to do the same with McCain and Romney, it is not birther-level lunacy to suggest that the Obama administration tried to use the apparatus of government to find dirt on candidate Trump.
The Resistance, as the opponents of Trump have called themselves, march in the streets with their faces hidden in a display of play-acting street theater that would be embarrassing to the partisans of a defeated candidate in all previous elections. Egged on by the nightly Russia-Trump narrative pushed on CNN and MSNBC, those charging President Trump is a Nazi because he has exercised his right as president to institute a travel ban have, strangely, not been as forceful with his second ban. It is clear why: When you are play-acting Resistance Warrior, you get bored with the incessant shouting about living in a police state when you are being protected by police officers; you get scared when you read about people who are actually being arrested for destruction of property; and you really don’t give a damn about people whose entry into the country is being delayed for three months.
Resistance players enjoy seeing those young people on T.V. in foreign countries where the political situation is in flux or decay, with their fashionable bandannas, looking cool like Che Guevara in his cute hat (which he may or may not have worn while killing political opponents). They like that, the exciting sense that they are participating in something Bigger Than Ourselves, seeing boys and girls your age at night, outside the classroom, doing something more than studying, watching TV, playing games, sitting at a bar. It isn’t real, though; the people protesting in other nations under actual totalitarian regimes are being arrested, imprisoned, and even killed because they do not have the freedoms that are their right.
The Resistance players are a hateful, destructive group not because they slander Trump as a fascist, but because they are setting an example, the way those who began to spin 9/11 starting on 9/12. The next time Democrats win a presidential election, the Resistance is betting, everyone will simply accept the results, because that is what you do — it’s unpatriotic not to accept the results of an election.
Thanks to that’s, that’s not the case anymore. We may very well have seen our last peaceful transition of power.
The Resistance is not about freedom or the integrity of elections, but the demolition of a process that has made this a secure nation open to diverse points of view. By attempting to silence diversity of viewpoints and call into question the president’s legitimacy without any evidence, they bring our entire system into question.
The Resistance is Putin’s pet. It is an organization of people so selfishly devoted to their party over the nation, it is determined to start the next Pearl Harbor, the next JFK assassination, the next 9/11 in slow-motion.
