Trump’s SOTU: The Rope by which the Democrats Hanged Themselves

The Congressional Black Caucus reacts to news of historically low black unemployment rate
I’m late to the show. I finally had time to watch the whole of the president’s 2018 State of the Union Address. Until today, I’d only read recaps and watched snippets.

Yeah, I’ll admit right here that I was as interested to hear the content of the address as I was in verifying whether the Democratic side of the aisle really was as lock-step sour as reports claimed.

They were. It really was amazing to watch. Unprecedented.

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that in the halls of Congress, on the evening of January 31st, 2018, our Democratic Party committed suicide. A certain critical mass of pissiness has been reached, and Americans watched it unfold live. Our Democrats proved once and for all that they are no longer the party of working Americans, but rather just the party of angry identity politics. Worse. They can’t even be called a party of victims. No, they’re a party of the mere ideology of victimhood as it’s weaponized through political correctness. They’re a party of the act of posing as a victim.

When the president announced that black unemployment had reached its lowest point in history, the Democrats on the Congressional Black Caucus showed themselves entirely uninterested. They didn’t budge. They scowled and smirked. One almost got the impression that employment was something that didn’t interest them.

When the president spoke of his moderate plans for immigration reform (a goal both parties have supported for years) they booed. Likewise when he spoke of the need to limit the number of MS-13 gang members coming in over the border. Our Democrats actually booed American parents, present in the hall, of children killed by these gangs.

When the Republican side of the aisle began chanting “USA USA USA”, Democratic congressman Luis Gutierrez stood up and walked out. Apparently love for America is repugnant to this congressman.

Millions of Americans watched Gutierrez walk out. And illegal aliens and America-haters watched too. These latter of course will appreciate the congressman’s gesture. As would Iranians, ISIS recruits, Venezuelan socialists, and Kim Jong Un.

Many are putting the Democrats’ hissy fit down to TDS--Trump Derangement Syndrome. And sure, that’s what’s at the root of it. They hate Trump far more than they love America.

But note: This means that Trump has become the rope by which they hang themselves. Because, to judge by polls, American citizens who watched the president’s address were impressed. According to a YouGov poll, 75% overall had a positive reaction, while 80% had the impression the president was trying to unite rather than divide the country.

So why do our Democrats hate this president so much? Is it because he's on the right, and they’re against his right-leaning policies?

Not at all. The Democrats themselves, since Bill Clinton, have been moving ever rightward. In terms of bread and butter issues (i.e. whether policy initiatives help the working class or corporate CEOs) one finds both party mainstreams are virtually identical. Obama was nearly as pro-1% as George W. Bush before him.

So why do they hate Trump so much?

What they hate about him is that he unmasks them. He doesn’t take their political correctness game seriously, he doesn’t bow to it; instead he regularly offends against all the PC rules, almost with glee, and they hate him for it because, quite simply, political correctness has become their entire strategy. Having abandoned working Americans to the corporations who fund their campaigns, political correctness is all the Democrats have left to distinguish them from mainstream Republicans.

Look at the Democrats on virtually any issue and you will see this clearly.

They are not interested in employment for women (which is also up after Trump’s first year) but rather in the minutiae of feminist social grievance. They’re not interested in protecting American workers from the estimated 12-20 million illegals that compete for their jobs under the radar, but rather in leveraging claims of “Racism racism racism!” whenever anyone wants to talk about illegals. They’re not interested in addressing the insane murder rates in majority black urban neighborhoods, but rather in politicizing the occasional instances of unwarranted police violence against blacks.

Oh, and if we’re talking about higher education (an area that especially concerns me) they’re not interested in keeping it vibrant and open, but rather in demanding “safe spaces”, whining about “microaggressions” and debating whether a white person who decides to have dreadlocks is committing “cultural appropriation”.

Yeah, the important stuff.

And so the Democratic Party can’t stomach a president who has work to do on the big issues and who repeatedly trolls them on the only issues they get traction from. They hate him because he reveals them for what they are: fakes.

What this State of the Union Address showed more than anything else is that the Democrats loathe Trump so much, they’re willing to let the whole country see their real priorities. Viz.: They’re not interested in marginalized groups actually doing better, but only in maintaining and leveraging the marginalization. It's now all they've got.

Through the sheer perversity hollow ideology imposes on them, the Democratic Party has basically committed political suicide.

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

LaVar Ball: Ass-Clown of the Year

The arrest of three UCLA basketball players in Hangzhou for shoplifting early this month was shameful enough. But it’s the reaction to the event by LaVar Ball, father of one of the players, that takes the cake for clueless. I nominate him Ass-Clown of 2017.

The debate over whether the man should thank the US president for getting his son out of ten years jail time in China is one thing. Of course he should thank him. He’s a moron for not doing so. But it’s not just that. What most people are forgetting in all this is what it means to be part of a nation, part of the United States.

China is our main global competitor at present. The shoplifting by these "students" (I’ll use the scare quotes because I don’t think athletic scholarships should even be a thing) was of course widely reported in the Chinese press. Think about that for a moment. Given China's population of 1.4 billion, that means hundreds of millions of Chinese, catching this event in the news, were confirmed in their prejudice that America people of color are troublemakers and losers. Good job for your son there, LaVar.

LaVar said he would have thanked President Trump if he’d flown his kid home on Air Force One. “There’s a lot of room on that plane,” he said on CNN. Uh-huh. Does the man really have no idea what it means for national leaders to visit another country? Imagine how it would have played in Chinese media if our president, after getting them bailed out for their criminal behavior, had actually then flown these entitled "student" morons home in the presidential jet. Imagine the message it would convey, how the Chinese media would use it to dis American common sense in general and America’s leader in particular.

Rather than being a smart ass on national TV, LaVar Ball should be hanging his head in shame. Ball's son, a youth representative of the US, disgraced tens of millions of Americans in front of literally hundreds of million Chinese. And yes, he and his two teammates disgraced people of color. Why aren't more black Americans calling out the father on his cluelessness? This “father” thinks his son stealing is no big deal; and the Chinese, reading American reports, will naturally assume this to be typical of how American blacks think.

That CNN treated LaVar Ball with anything but contempt tells you something about CNN. Not thanking your country’s president for saving your son’s future? Shoplifting “ain’t that big a deal"? It's true I myself have never given much of a damn about ball players. But as for this ex-ball player and his "father", they are trash role models and a disgrace to America.

My novel A Taipei Mutt is now in print. The Asian capital unmuzzled.

Jeff Flake and the Meaning of Failure

I'd heard about Sen. Jeff Flake's early retirement protest, but hadn't watched his speech. A friend messaged me: "You really should watch it. It’s very good. My concern is that the 'good' people are resigning, when that is exactly the opposite of what we need." She pasted the link:


Since I commented at length in reply, I've decided to blog my remarks here.

E.M.: Watched the whole Flake speech. My reaction to it is mixed. Yes, I don't like aspects of Trump's governing, and I do think his personality doesn't help. That said, I find it odd that you call Flake one of the "good" people--though you did put the word in quotes. He knows how to hit all the pious notes, and he does have some good points, but here's what I see in in his speech.

1) It is the establishment talking, the establishment registering its protest against Trump. This is the same establishment that wanted Dubya, that wanted Clinton, that loathed both Bernie and Trump, and loathed them for some of the very same reasons: a) Both Bernie and Trump stood for discontinuing the neocon foreign policy of ongoing US "nation building" in the Middle East; b) Both Bernie and Trump wanted out of international trade deals.

When Sen. Flake here talks about "international agreements" and "organizations", etc., you should keep in mind what these words mostly mean to the establishment: they mean more corporate-run globalization, more corporate-run wars.

I think Flake's speech had a lot in common with Dubya's speech a few days back. Dubya mentioned the word "freedom" multiple times: America and freedom, freedom and America, freedom freedom freedom. But I know what the establishment mainly means by "freedom": they mean freedom of capital to move across borders and thus evade control by national governments. The freedom they value is the freedom of the oligarchs to play the whole globe as a chess board and evade every downside--all while they keep talking about “freedom”. (NB: Though I was impressed by some of Flake's points as valid, Dubya's speech I found horrific in its falseness.)

2) These early retirement announcements by Flake and Corker, in my mind, are mainly proof that the populist, anti-globalist right represented by Trump (in his often flailing way) is successfully pushing the establishment out of the GOP. I'm glad of that. I don't think the smarter members of this particular movement are against real freedom in any demonstrable way: quite the contrary. It's the Republican establishment that is the greater threat to freedom, since it will always compromise on principle under corporate pressure, and the voters now recognize this. The Republican establishment is unconnected to the voters, and the voters now know it. As was proven in the last election, where Trump and Cruz wiped out all the establishment GOP candidates. I think between the two of them they took 80% or something of primary votes.

3) I find it painfully ironic that Flake speaks of the need to recognize failure but not excuse it. He said: “[We all need to be forgiven at times for failures, myself included.] But too often . . . we rush to forgive and excuse our failures, so that we might accommodate them and go on failing.”

He's saying this of course because he’s keen to call out what he sees as Trump's failures. But you know why Trump and not Jeb Bush is in office? Because of failure. Because of the gigantic failure of our CONGRESS for decades now--Flake's "dignified" Congress.

In short, if Flake wants to talk about not allowing a nefarious “new normal” to take root, I’d say the new normal that should not have been allowed to take root happened years ago. Trump's tweeting or slipshod language are not the main problem America has to deal with. The main problem is the brokenness of "normal" Washington. You know this too. In short, Flake is good at calling out Trump's failures, but did he resign when his whole party was rubber-stamping whatever Wall Street or the corporations wanted? Did he resign when the plan on the table was to outsource another gazillion manufacturing jobs because that’s what the oligarchs wanted? He didn't. And the voters know it.

4) As for the valid elements in Flake's speech, yes, I think it's pretty dismal the level of discourse that our two-party political circus has sunk to. And Trump is pretty much a circus barker. It does set a bad example for youth, and it maybe does weaken our standing in the world a bit. (But on this latter I'm still not fully decided. Because there are so many factors to take into account. Is Trump's personality weakening our stature, or are his demands that our partners take up some of their responsibility actually strengthening that stature?)

In any case, as for the descent of discourse into ad hominem attacks and vulgarity, I think that ship sailed before Trump. I don't think Obama descended there, but our media culture has been there a long time now. And yes, the liberals since last year have been just as vulgar and spiteful as anything Trump or his supporters can come up with.

Where do I stand on the issues? That's a longer subject. In general, I'm happy to see a movement on the right that is challenging the neocons and the Washington normal. I'm happy to see a smart right that his eviscerating the left's identity politics, which I consider un-American, authoritarian, abhorrent. I don't agree with some of their positions on this or that, and don't think Trump himself is likely to drain the swamp in the way most of his base hopes. But I'm glad the movement is there.

As for the American left, I really see no hope for it. I think it's got no sane foreign policy, no workable economic theory; that, bizarrely, it doesn't even seem to notice economics anymore. I thought Bernie was an honest and committed leftist, and might have been able to put together a serious challenge to the establishment, but even Bernie would have been too subject to riding the unbreakable identity-politics wave that is now the Democratic base. And so in office he'd likely have been abetting all kinds of authoritarian PC nonsense I would have been opposed to.

Clinton herself, if she is the left, which I think she is in terms of representing a huge voting base that calls itself left, is just a PC neocon. Which is what I'd call the majority of "left" voters in the US at present. They’re Republicans waving various PC flags.

As for the left that is our youth movement--Antifa, the millions of liberal-leaning university grads, etc.--they’re political children, with no idea of what the left needs to be. And they won’t learn either.

So . . . there will be no standing against the establishment from this political left. Because, like it or not, Bernie is not an army, but an individual. Yes, he gathered a big following. But many many of his followers are likely more drunk on the identity-politics Kool-Aid than they are interested in fighting capitalism in any comprehensively left way.

A lot of typing here. Rather quickly too. I hope you can get the gist.

* * *

Update: Weird. Patrick Buchanan makes almost precisely the same series of points I made here. If I didn't know better, I'd say he's reading my blog. To judge by time stamp (my blog is set to British time) Buchanan's article hit a few hours after mine. Yes, I'd say it's better argued than mine. See "It's Trump's Party Now".

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.

PANIC: Washington Elites in Full Propaganda Mode

CNN before the election; CNN after the election.
by David Hammond

Well, I honestly thought we had dodged a bullet involving war with Russia by not electing Hillary Clinton, but it looks like I was wrong. Given Clinton's defeat in the presidency, her controllers are now simply attempting to advance the timeline. Never mind the absurdity of the CIA complaining about election meddling, when that's been their particular specialty, in foreign governments, for at least the past seventy years. Never mind that our government has the gall to lie to us about "fake news" when our own Supreme Court has ruled that the mainstream news media is under absolutely no obligation to tell the truth. Never mind that the CIA has a documented history of infiltrating our news media through Operation Mockingbird and who knows what else, and has been called out by the highest members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, decade after decade, for being inherently deceitful from the inside out. Never mind that Julian Assange, top US intelligence officers, and even former UK ambassador Craig Murray have all explicitly stated that the expose of corrupt DNC activity was a leak, not a hack.

I suppose it may also be relevant that exactly twenty years ago TIME magazine proudly reported on the feats of American political consultants who manipulated the Russian election to ensure a Boris Yeltsin win, using a covert plan that involved specialized polling (similar to the Clinton campaign’s weighted polling that split Independents in half, giving her at least a constant 10% bump nationally) a negative ad campaign, propaganda, and other tools of the political manipulation trade.

This latest media propaganda blitz isn't so shocking on its own because similar tactics have presaged every war of choice America has ever been in. But to see so many intelligent people hysterically lap it up while apparently salivating for war with Russia and decrying "fake news" is getting a little creepy.

And the craziest part is that nearly every cheerleader is on the so-called left (of which I have been a lifelong member) when aren't we the ones who are supposed to see through government BS and lies as they goad us into yet another war? Surely such hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance can't be simply because our president is a Democrat, can it? Not even sure if I want to know the answer to that.

America, you are being lied to, yet again. You are being herded into yet another war of choice by powers that will say absolutely anything to get you to believe whatever they want you to believe. As Rahm Emmanuel infamously put it: "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Unfortunately, the establishment candidate's loss is just such an opportunity and they are capitalizing on it fiercely. How can this even happen? They are basically eliminating alternative news media with HR 6393, which was just quietly passed in the House, a bill that is quite literally the beginning of government censorship, with all of social media onboard. And, of all organizations, they're using Snopes as one of their go-to judges of what is “fake”, a widely-discredited source that routinely serves up misinformation, disinformation, and flat-out lies. Germany is even following suit by threatening to sue Facebook for €500,000 for every "fake" post allowed to stay up for more than 24 hours. When this kind of law can pass muster, it really doesn't matter which side of the aisle you are on. It should send a chill down the spine of anybody who appreciates their First Amendment rights. And as always, who is watching the watchers? This is nothing short of a open gate straight to tyranny.

Yet their technique has always been to point frantically to a threat so big and so encompassing that people will be clamoring for whatever medicine they want to sell. Its called problem -> reaction -> solution, and it's been their modus operandi for as long as anyone on the planet has been alive. Of course, they create the problem, fake the reaction, and then enact their preplanned solution, but is anyone really paying attention?

Right now, our government and their pliant mainstream media are engaged in a full-on fake news blitz, telling a lie so big and so outrageous that you'll have no choice but to believe it, or risk thinking the whole world has gone insane. This is called gaslighting, by the way. Look into it because it's one of the newest forms of mass manipulation in the book, and it's being aimed directly at you. Essentially a spin-off of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' famous quip “Tell a lie big enough and loud enough, and people will eventually believe it,” contemporary gaslighting adds subtle techniques of psychological manipulation to disorient the populace into submission.

Of course if Hillary Clinton had won, and the Trump camp were making these same ludicrous accusations, based on the same dearth of evidence, the left would be howling and scowling and ridiculing them day and night. When are people going to realize that, left or right, we are being repeatedly played to acquiesce to the establishment agenda? Naturally, I did not vote for Trump and I do not support Trump. But I have a very big problem with glaring hypocrisy and selective outrage--especially when those playing such games dangerously throw all logic and common sense out the window while risking war with a nuclear power.

The same goes for the idea that we need to overturn this election. Caveat: Unless you are personally willing to fight in a civil war, then please stop immediately. Unless you are willing to throw this country into blind chaos and bloodshed, then please stop. And again, just think: if Trump supporters demanded overturning the election, the left would climb over themselves to use that as evidence of crazed depravity, leveling every possible insult imaginable, and very likely threatening violence. Don't expect that the same thing wouldn't happen if Clinton supporters get anywhere near actually overturning this election.

And isn't it ironic that an establishment complaining about "fake news" was all in for a candidate who openly stated to Goldman Sachs that “You have to have a public position, as well as a private position”? The message is quite clear: It's basically okay to lie to you, the public, as long as we're the ones doing it. But if somebody exposes our lies--Russia for instance, or some recently-murdered DNC staffer, namely Seth Rich, then it's clearly not okay.

And while the mainstream media implicates everybody not named Hillary Clinton for her loss, we're suddenly pretending it's the 1950s again and there's a Russky hiding under every bed and anybody who disagrees with the establishment's deceitful narrative is a Kremlin operative. The fact that our current Democratic Party's primary allies are the CIA, Internet censors, and McCarthyist hacks should strike the sane left observer as alarming, but then this is 2016 I suppose, so God only knows what's possible.

Who can be blind to the painful irony in the fact that the evidence for this supposed “election hacking” is nothing more than "a secret report, leaked by an anonymous insider, backed by no proof whatsoever, from an agency with a history of lying to the public." (Thank you, Estela Jordan, for that concise summary.)

And doesn't it seem a bit odd that the Orwellian NSA, which tracks every detail of our personal lives, somehow can't quite manage to trace this hack? “Of course they can't trace it,” sanity says, “because it's a leak, not a hack.” But plain sanity isn’t going to stop the government and its mainstream media lackeys from telling you otherwise.

According to CNN, our current president warned: "Mr. Putin can weaken us just like he is trying to weaken Europe if we buy into notions that it is okay to intimidate the press or lock up dissidents."

Oh really, you mean as in writing off all alternative and investigative news media as "fake news" while threatening to lock up true patriots like Edward Snowden, thus forcing them into exile? This from the same guy who promised to champion whistleblowers--then went on to prosecute more than all other presidents combined?

And isn't it getting a little hard to stomach that, even if Russia did hack the emails, their only crime was exposing the monumental lies and deceit that have become the hallmark of Clinton, Inc. and the DNC--yet never a single word about that is mentioned? So does this now mean that we shoot all messengers for delivering bad news? That exposing a lie fully implicates you in that lie or makes you a greater threat than the liar? What kind of upside-down, backwards, bizarro logic is that? Even if Russia did it, their only real "crime" would simply be exposing the truth about our so-called leaders.

There's no way the government can pull off this blitzkrieg of deception unless Americans abandon all logic and reason and allow the cognitive dissonance to fully take over. That again is part of the strategy of gaslighting. In insistent and logical tones, the manipulator repeats illogical things. And so our Washington elites continue screaming "Fake news from Russia!" over and over again, screaming it in the face of the universal recognition that the Wikileaks emails are entirely authentic, screaming it and waiting for us to grow uncertain of our mental footing and begin screaming along.

And as always, the final choice here is ours. No, we do not have a truly representative government, but we do still retain some influence. We can take their word for it and simply acquiesce, just like we did with the Iraq war, or we can stand firm and hold them to somewhat sane standards of accountability while boldly calling them out on their clearly illogical lies and propaganda. I pray that Americans make the right choice this time.

Trump or Clinton? Neither!

Happens all the time these days. I post something on Facebook indicating I don’t support Hillary and immediately get this from Jane, a friend of a friend: “So your thought is to elect Trump? And that would be better?”

Instead of writing another editorial, I’ll just give you our ensuing dialogue.

Eric Mader: No. My thought is not "to elect Trump”. My thought is rather: A vote is a vote FOR someone, not merely a vote against someone else. Hillary does not deserve the votes of honest citizens, and I refuse to swell her numbers (and thus the illusion of her legitimacy) by giving her my vote. I will no longer join in the Democrat vs. Republican race to the bottom, but will vote third party. The mainstream Democrats deserve to lose, and I'm willing to take the risk of Trump in office if it will help delegitimize these utter fakes.

Jane Doe: Wow. If Trump wins, our world will be pretty scary, and if you supported the tenets of Bernie you will be in for a rude awakening. Unfortunately, at this time a vote for third party is a vote for Trump.

Eric Mader: You’re just being patronizing, Jane. I'm well aware of what rude awakenings there may be. And no: A vote for a third party is emphatically NOT a vote for Trump. A vote for a third party is a vote for a third party. That's why it's called "a vote for a third party".

Jane Doe: Call it what you will, but a Trump presidency certainly would not "delegitimize these utter fakes". He appears to be the biggest fake of them all. And because you are a US citizen you can express your opinions freely and vote for who you want. Good luck.

Eric Mader: Your response is characteristic. Realizing that I will not be voting Hillary, you immediately change the subject to Trump and how he's a bigger fake than Hillary--"the biggest fake of them all". I think which of these two is the bigger fake is arguable, because they are fakes in such different ways, but ultimately the argument is beside the point.

If a place offered you lunch with the choice of shit in a bowl or shit on a stick, your logic would have to be that the shit on the stick is the only wise choice because, look, the amount of shit in the bowl is larger. My choice is to not eat lunch. Who is wiser? Which is the course of action more likely to put that shit restaurant out of business, yours or mine?

I am not voting for Trump, so I'm not sure why you even mention him. The only way to delegitimize fakes in a democracy is not to vote for them. I'm not going to vote for them. You, however, are in the camp that keeps saying: "Mm, this shit on a stick, it really isn't that bad. Creamy actually. Mm, everyone should eat here."

I worked hard to elect Obama twice, the first time enthusiastically, the second time not so much. For me, this election is not between Trump and Hillary, it's between the possibility of democracy and the reality of corporate control over our whole political process. Whether you can see this or not, it is Hillary who is the consummate corporate candidate, which is why, surprise surprise, so many Republican establishment figures are now coming out in her favor. They're doing so because their Republican commitments, all along, have not been to maintaining a democratic republic but rather to furthering the smooth corporate takeover of our republic--ensuring, in short, that government continues to sell out the population to corporate interests. They know--which is bizarre, isn't it?--that the GOP candidate, this time, is actually a less reliable corporate rubber stamp than the Democratic candidate.

Anyhow, good luck to you. I'm fifty now, and I won't be supporting these people any more. I've spent thousands upon thousands of hours in politics, going back to my undergrad years, and am no longer giving the benefit of the doubt to anyone who's spent as much time sucking Wall Street and the corporate elites as Hillary has.


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Election 2016: Our Deep Malaise

Feeling anxious and strung-out? Worried about where America’s headed? Worried about where’s America’s gotten? Feel like you’ve no good choice in this drawn-out campaign nightmare?

Me too. Election 2016 has put me on edge. I’m pulled this way and that. I’m convinced, like many, that we've been pushed to a precipice, and there’s no way back.

“But which precipice will it be?” the Fates seem to be asking. “You don’t know now, do you? Just wait and see.”

And the Fates wink mischievously. And their mischief is more menacing than playful.

One thing I’m sure of in this mess is that Americans are no longer fooled by the political class. These recent months have proved it. More than anything, the election battles we’re watching are about a single glaring fact:

A corporate-controlled government and democracy are mutually exclusive.

Yes, it’s finally out in the open. The corporate-sponsored puppet show we’ve been watching the past couple decades is not in fact democracy. What’s more, it can no longer even impersonate democracy.

Though I’m glad to see Americans are finally wise to Washington, I’m not so glad about where they take it from there.

On the one hand we’ve tens of millions opting for something like a fascist solution.

“What we need is a strong leader who tells it like it is and puts everyone back in place!” they cry.

Strong leaders can sometimes do great things, indeed. I just wish the strong leader they chose wasn’t such a moron. Conviction grounded in principle is one thing. A buffoon aping conviction is something else. And racist convictions--well, they shouldn’t be tolerated.

But is this buffoon we now see cavorting across the media really a racist? Or is he just being labeled one unfairly?

Before offering my own answer, I should point out that I don’t go along with the hyper-sensitive current PC definition of racism. I think one can say all manner of things these days that will be called out as racist, but that aren’t actually so.

And yet, even given my pretty thick skin regarding what is and isn’t racism, I’d have to say that, yes, Donald Trump is a racist. The things he’s allowed to happen at his rallies prove it. For America’s sake, I wish it weren’t true. It is. Trump is not to be trusted to lead a multiracial society.

But in opposition to this Fascist Clown Solution on offer, we’ve also a European-style socialist running, a man driven by true convictions rather than just aping conviction.

Bernie Sanders seems to me the only contender who’d actually fight to loosen the corporate stranglehold on our polity. Whether or not he’d succeed is a different question. But I can understand people’s strong belief that Sanders offers the best blueprint for the coming years. I largely agree with them.

Yet there are caveats in my support for Sanders. These have to do with the rise of political correctness.

I'm sympathetic to many organizations fighting injustice in America, and I recognize that the black community especially has valid grievances. Nonetheless in recent years I’ve become convinced that PC as a general phenomenon is a serious threat to our culture. On many crucial issues, and especially in their strategies for addressing issues, our social justice warriors are dead wrong. On campuses across the country, they’re destroying what little is left of American liberal education. Which is no small loss. Liberal education and pluralist liberal principles are necessary to our democracy. Speech codes, “safe spaces” and trigger warnings are not. Not to mention the nonstop demonization of all things European that passes for Humanities these days.

This SJW crowd largely backs Sanders, and they’re probably right to do so. I suspect Bernie himself never met a social justice warrior he didn’t like. Which leads me to question my own support for him. I’m a strong pluralist and Catholic, an avid believer in both Western cultural traditions and religious liberty protections, both of which have taken a beating under the PC onslaught. I’ve every reason to fear the justices Sanders would nominate to the Supreme Court. Bernie is not, by any means, my ideal candidate.

Then there’s Hillary Clinton. I’ll acknowledge straight off: Even a Trump nomination would not induce me to vote for Hillary. They don’t currently market nose clips reliable enough to allow me to vote for her. Hillary is, in my reading, something like the worst of both worlds. She will empower and pander to the SJW crowd even as she cheerleads the ongoing corporate dismemberment of our economy. She will do the bidding of the military industrial complex and the abortion industry with equal glee. Hillary is one of the few things I’m sure of in this election year. She is no good.

Many fellow Democrats point out to me that Hillary agrees with Bernie on nearly all the issues, then they ask: “Why would anyone who supports Bernie as you do not also support Hillary if she were the nominee?”

I have an answer: “Because while Hillary may agree with Bernie on a whole range of things during the campaign, this does not at all reflect what she would actually do once in the White House.”

Good Democrats refuse to hear this answer.

Would a Hillary administration be better than a Trump administration? I suspect it would. In the way that being slowly worn down into nihilism and despair is better than being beaten up by a drunk clown.

I hope you see my point.

If in the end America pushes its voters to choose between a fake Democrat and a fake Strongman--between, in short, a Total Sellout and a Fascist Clown--I will be very tempted to say: “Sorry, friends, I’m not going to dignify this election with my vote. Or rather: I’m going to write in the imperfect candidate who at least seems to me a viable candidate.”

If things keep going as they are, many Americans may end up doing something like this, and the candidate they write it may be Bernie, or John Kasich, or who knows. Bernie is more what a Democrat was before the 1990s. And Kasich is more what a Republican was before Fox News and friends dumbed the party down to what it has become today.

Admittedly, none of the above offers much help given the precipice we face as a country. And that is why I, along with so many others, am worried about what the Fates have in store.

Eric Mader

My new book Idiocy, Ltd. is now available at Amazon.