Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Imbecility Leads The (Once) Free World
In spite of the United States being closer to a civil war more than any time since 1865, there is one statement that I think one can safely say would find few, if any, dissenters on either side of the divide: at least one of the two Presidents who have held since 2016 or now hold office is an imbecile.
Not being a citizen of the United States my interest in its politics was driven by broader geopolitical concerns, and wider fears about the West’s inabilities to survive its external enemies and its own self destruction.
For my part, in 2016 I had no feeling either way of who would make a better president. Both had serious credibility problems – Whitewater, the Clinton foundation, and Hilary’s mendacity made it impossible for anyone who knew about her history to believe a word she said, though she had had experience in foreign diplomacy, though the Obama doctrine had not made the West stronger; Trump had lost money for various investors numerous times, and when it came to the GOP nomination played very dirty. He also lacked experience. The one thing to an outsider that made him look interesting was that he was not playing by the old rule book in international relations, and that might or might not be a very good thing.
Any hesitations about what would happen if Trump won the election (which the US media assured all and sundry could never happen) were drastically transformed by the response of President Trump’s opponents on his taking presidential office. Trump playing dirty to defeat Cruz or Rubio was like a fist fight in kiddie league compared to the full scale assault upon Trump that immediately was pitched as the need for impeachment by journalists, celebrities and Democrats. Daily, I would read the media report that Trump said or did X, and then when I found footage of statement or deed, which had not been edited to fit the accusation, it had a totally different context and even content from what was being reported.
But as shocking as I found it that I simply could no longer trust reports from media which claimed to be reputable, the far more important concern for me was that the elite, who were supposed to be responsible for ensuring strength and unity at home, had shown that they were incapable of accepting the will of the people for an election term. Thus it was that the strongest geopolitical power for democracy in the Western world no longer had any kind of consensual centre from which it could issue genuine allegiance.
During his term Trump had kept the US from new wars (as promised), bought back some degree of border control (which his voters wanted), and, until COVID, significantly improved economic conditions by increasing employment for every identity group, as well as wages for many. COVID provided an opportunity for his critics not only to raise the hysteria already way beyond fever pitch to new cries of Trump being a mass murderer.
By the time the election of 2020 had come around I had come to the conclusion that the elite ideas brokers in the USA were representatives of the greatest threat to democracy I had witnessed in my sixty six years on this earth, and I certainly did not see how their depiction of what Trump represented – Hitlerism – had meant that their moral commitment was more about accepting the will of the American people than removing him from office.
Though whatever happened during the election, I also think there is a good case to be made that the damage done to democracy as a system of government and to the economies in dealing with COVID might be irreparable. Certainly the emergency powers assumed by states (and not just the USA), including the demand for strict compliance and narrative conformity about what the state has decreed to be the scientific answer to the problem – e.g. all efforts to go into vaccines rather than treatment studies and development, most obviously – has enabled those seeking to curb any kind of populist resistance to elite decision making.
Trump was as much sucker punched by this as he was by the changes to voting laws that enabled ineligible voting and voting interference to take place. He had also failed to halt the power against free speech that had moved from universities to the corporate world and finally into social media so that Trump would find himself banned from all major platforms, along with many other ‘conservative’ youtubers and podcasters who had previously had large followings of people sick to death of what the elites were dictating as the truth on everything from medicine to climate to race and the election.
In the concentrated effort to gain complete control of what people thought and said by ensuing that the political party and media which support it still required an election victory to seal the deal. And, there were two obstacles they had to deal with – who had the personality and popular appeal with voters to defeat a candidate that almost every journalist and pundit in the country had previously thought unelectable, and how would they ensure that their candidate got victory.
That these companies and the mainstream media openly supported one party and ultimately one candidate was not so untypical. But that the only candidate that they thought had the character and qualities to defeat Trump, and the character who ultimately managed to garner the biggest support amongst members of his party for his candidacy had to be kept in a basement and shielded from reporters in conducting his campaign was less typical. What was becoming clearer by the day, is the reason he was being kept in a basement was that he was an imbecile.
Given that whiteness and old men had become a regular term of abuse within the Democratic party perhaps it was not too much a stretch of the imagination to think that this kind of contradiction would not be noticed because the party itself had consisted of people who if not outright imbeciles (represented by the AOC wing of the party), could, at least, be treated as imbeciles. Or perhaps it was because the elite had come to the consensus that the country was full of imbeciles and only an imbecile could defeat an imbecile in an election that only someone made to look like an imbecile could win the presidency. Though, in Joe they hit the jackpot – he could not put two sentences together without looking like an imbecile.
As for Trump, being an imbecile, the day he announced his run for presidential nominee, his critics laughed hysterically about what a complete imbecile he was. And when he won office, they stopped laughing, and the question of his imbecility became a psychiatric matter that should be acted upon by the appropriate authorities (whoever they were – some hoped Rod Rosenstein would step up to the plate).
For sure, Trump was not playing by any known political rule book and he could be shockingly brutal, and make up all sorts of nonsense, and he used the word ‘bigly’ and he did pull funny faces and gesticulated pretty wildly sometimes. But his rallies were like parties where the crowd would whoop and holler and lap up his humour, which always got the loudest roar of approval when he went for ‘the dishonest people’ at the back. If this was an imbecile, one wondered how was it that not a single Democrat candidate could enthuse an audience like this imbecile. And in spite of Joe having zero in the charisma stakes, in spite of such zingers of repartee as ‘C’mon man’, maybe the Democrats really did think it took an imbecile to beat an imbecile, and that’s why with all the talent on display they chose Joe.
In any case, I think it fair to say that even those who really hated what the Democrats were supporting and doing, especially since Trump had taken office, only saw one of the possible nominees for the Democrat presidential candidate as a total imbecile. Like so many other wannabes in American political life – with the exception of the articulate, smart and attractive Tulsi Gabbard – the cast in the run off for the Democrat presidential candidate were as vacuous as they were instantly forgettable.
And while Harris, Warren, and whoever else there was were might have been political grifters, drenched in duplicity accompanied by boundless ambition, I doubt if the word imbecile is the first word that springs to mind when one considered them. ( It is true that VP Harris’s statement that the border crisis is caused by climate change is imbecilic, but I suspect this is what she thinks she should say to the imbeciles who support her – anyway AOC, with typical wide-eyed daring had gone the extra yard on that front in the imbecilic stakes by claiming climate change was the result of racial injustice. I have always harboured the thought that climate change might be the result of the dogs next door who yelp at all hours of the day and are responsible for everything that irritates me in retirement. But I have kept that imbecilic thought to myself).
While the Democrats chose an appeal in the run off, the fact was that while the media did represent the Donald as an imbecile, they also wanted to represent him as Hitler. And that only showed their accusation of him being an imbecile was not serious. For say what you like about Hitler, calling him an imbecile does not really cut the mustard, at least not until pretty late in the day, when yes he went fully deranged. Sure, his ideas about Jews were imbecilic, but taking the totality of the whole man, he was a master of political maneuvring, a master at capturing the mood of a people desperate to follow a leader who would restore their sense of purpose and national destiny, and a master of political rhetoric. And if he was an imbecile what does that say about Neville Chamberlain or FDR?
While Biden’s opponents see him as many things – a hair-sniffing, handsy creep, who made a career as a bagman for the DuPont family, who, attended the funeral of, and eulogised, the former KKK member Robert Bird, who has used his office not only to fill his family’s pockets, and used the FBI and media to shut down the story of his son’s crooked, possibly traitorous, and illegal personal behaviour, who was accused of sexual misconduct by his own staffer – none of these are incompatible with him also being an imbecile. And to be fair, even though his incessant plagiarism was pretty damned stupid, he was not so much an imbecile as a political hack for sale to the highest bidder.
But we know now that even his minders take him for an imbecile. A fact that Joe had to blurt out to the entire world when at a conference with the Russian leader, who none has ever considered an imbecile, that he had been given a list of journalists allowed to softball the questions – whose answers we presume he was supposed to have learnt by rote. Meanwhile the world could also see how Vlad was taking his sword to Western journalists who thought they could catch him out saying – “Yes you are the smartest most decent people I have ever admit, and now that I look deeply into my conscience, I admit it – I killed them all. Please forgive me.” While that didn’t happen Joe marched bravely on giving that big sparkling false tooth grin while pondering his favourite ice cream flavour.
If the media were unable to get their story straight about whether Trump was an imbecile or Hitler, from the get go they thought that because his supporters were deplorables, they were also imbeciles, like the rest of their audience, who they also treated as imbeciles. But by then the media had long since stopped bothering with facts – their stories constantly came from anonymous sources, or sources with partisan interests, and they could rely upon fact checkers to convince people that things that were not facts were facts, and vice-versa.
Thus it was that during the Trump presidency that the media, in complicity with the Democratic party and one of its fronts, conspired (yes, one does not need to wear a tin foil hat to note people making up and disseminating misinformation/ lies for political gain) to concoct a story about Trump being a Russian plant.
They also denied that Obama has authorised spying upon the Trump campaign, even though the Russian plant fabrication had involved the Democrats and their operatives in intelligence having to make the story fly by having its intelligence agencies identify people in the Russian conspiracy who they could not actually manage to interrogate (the dialectic of imbecility has established that when people say that Russians and Trump and his supporters conspired to hijack an election that is not a conspiracy theory).
They also denied what could be heard all over YouTube – i.e. that Biden had used his political office and threatened withholding US military aid to the Ukraine to protect the investigation of his son being on the pay roll as a highly paid consultant to one of the most corrupt energy company’s in the world, at the same time as they attempted to impeach Trump for a supposed overheard phone call threatening to withhold military aid if the Ukraine president did not investigate the son of an opposing presidential candidate.
By the time November 2020 came around the mainstream media had told so many porky pies that none in their right mind could believe them. But the remaining audience they did have had long since lost their minds, and they could be relied onto believing anything, including that Joe was the man to bring the USA back to a reliable centre.
To those who thought the media had been lying about Russia, the Ukraine, Hunter Biden and his lap top (there was nothing there to report!) and all manner of other things including they themselves (they were all white supremacists), the election result looked like just one more lie. As for the election itself, it certainly seems bizarre for example – and I quote from an essay by Joe Holt – that
In almost every county throughout the state (of Pennyslvania), the President was awarded a percentage of votes 40% less than the percent the President won on election day … If Trump won a county by 80% of the vote on Election Day, he won 40% of the mail-in vote for a county. If the President won 60% of the vote on Election Day, he won 20% of the mail-in vote in another county. This pattern occurred in almost every county with the only noticeable exception of Philadelphia, where the President only earned 30% of the vote on Election Day.
Thus it was after the elections occurred that social media had to step on board with the mainstream media to shut down any serious consideration of election fraud. The ostensible reason for this closing down of free speech was that such talk of fraud had created an insurrection, a putsch no less that was organized by President Trump.
Anyone who bothered to look beyond the mainstream footage could see that a demonstration that had got out of control, that included some thugs (spurred on by Antifa) and misguided over enthusiastic protesters, some of whom had entered through a door opened by some security guards, was far less violent than the Black Lives Matter Protests that had taken months earlier, where fire razed buildings to the ground, where businesses were looted, and some people were killed in what the media unanimously reported as being “mainly peaceful protests.”
Treating their audience as imbeciles it became increasingly common for all mainstream journalists to use identical formulations when reporting. Meanwhile in the capitol riot – an attempted putsch so they said – one unarmed woman, a protestor, was shot at point blank range by a security officer. The media intent on making a rabble look like white supremacist terrorists, having discovered that a policeman who had been on duty that day had subsequently died of natural causes concocted the story he was murdered by the same white supremacist terrorists.
In fact, the issues that led so many to cry foul about the election result were multiple. But if one was interested in why people were so convinced that the election had been rigged, one had to do a lot of hunting to see that the claims were about foreign interference and voting machines, which prior to this election had been problems identified by the Democrats, to ballot harvesting, dead and non-existent voters, the unprecedented cessation of counting, prevention of proper scrutineering, and much else beside.
But by January Google, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook started simply wiping numerous sites, posts and tweets that had been making the case – just as they did for those with medical credentials who were critical of Fauci.
The question of facts had become a question of narrative, and the issue was who controlled the narrative.
And what was the case was identical to the point raised earlier – on the one hand the elite pushed the narrative that only imbeciles voted for Trump, or believed the election was a fraud, or, indeed, did not get on board with the other topics that it was pushing – only an imbecile would not believe in climate change, only an imbecile would not believe the science on COVID as represented by Fauci.
Only an imbecile would think defunding the police was not a good idea because only an imbecile would not see systematic racism everywhere in the USA, hence too only an imbecile would not see that critical race theory should be taught in schools, corporations, universities and state departments, only an imbecile would think women had vaginas, hence only an imbecile would think it wrong for biological males to compete in women’s sports, and hence too only an imbecile would think it not a good idea to have transgender soldiers.
Only an imbecile would be opposed to diversity and hence only an imbecile would object to recruitment to US intelligence agencies and the military proudly displaying their commitment to diversity – in what everybody else could see was the most imbecilic advertising campaign that hat had ever been dreamt up (and that is really saying something).
The list is far longer and the logic/ dialectic relentless. It is the logic and dialectic of progress as understood, taught and forced upon the American population through its institutions. Nevertheless at least half the country think: only an imbecile could believe this shit. Which is why, and the Democrats never understood this, that while much support for Trump came from the forgotten working class, it also came from those frustrated by the most pressing demand of the dialectic of imbecility, i.e. that one forsake all independence of thought and get on board with the program.
Where one stands on the riven ness of the US today very much depends who one thinks are the imbeciles – Trump and his supporters, or Biden and those who want you to believe that they are making the world safer and better.
Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen books.
The featured image shows “intrigue,” by James Ensor, painted in 1890.