Correction and A Blame Game
We all knew that Trump was insulting and racist from day one. The country was shocked to wake up on November 4, 2016 to find that he had been elected. Many who didn't vote that year said that Hillary Clinton wasn't a strong enough candidate to vote for, and thus Trump managed to grab the 270 needed to get into the White House.
Trump blamed other people for what was wrong in America and wanted to "make it great again." During the Obama years the country as a whole experienced more open and accepting attitudes. Trumps election could be viewed as a "correction" for America to snap back to more conservative ways, which is exactly what the "Make America Great Again" campaign was all about. Early in Trump presidency he blamed non-Americans for all the problems. He accused Mexicans are thieves and rapists, which is why we needed to build a wall. He accused Muslims of being terrorists and Blacks from ruining America because they came from shithole countries. This gave rise to people with a strong belief in traditional values to point to other people and accuse them of being un-American and foreigners just because they looked, spoke, and acted differently.
GOP leaders and those who voted for Trump stood by silently as he blamed other people for what was wrong with the country. Democracy failed us in 2016 and we had no one to blame but ourselves. We have a right, not an obligation, to vote. Perhaps the negative campaign ads against Hillary were enough to cast a shadow of a doubt against her.
Trumps lies began within hours of taking office. One of the first lies was the number of attendees to his inauguration. As news outlets challenged his assertions, even using photographic evidence, Trump insisted that "fake news" was being reported.
As Trump played the blame game and continued to show his put his lack of knowledge and eloquence on display through continual verbal and tweeted attacks, many wondered how considerations of liberty, inclusivity, equality of opportunity, and collective consciousness were being pushed aside.
Initially, those who didn't vote for Trump tried to be tolerant of his rhetoric. The Paradox of Tolerance states that unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance, which is what we began to see emerging in America over the last four years. When Americans began to push back by pointing out the similarities of Trumps actions to the rise of fascist leaders in history, Trump's supporters responded with accusations that non-trump supporters were all socialist.
Simplifying the Political Parties
The Republican Party is a party of fiscal responsibility and individual freedoms; under Republican values you make your own future and you are responsible for whatever you sew in life. The Democratic Party is a party of inclusivity and opportunity for all, but also promotes the idea of helping you out if you screw your life up. Republicans want to give you the opportunity to make money on your own by running your own business, which means lowering taxes. Democrats have to raise taxes in order to then help everyone whose lives are screwed up.
Those who have "made it in life" often do not understand why their money must be used to help those who can't figure out how to make it.
Trump has been running for reelection for the last four years. His accusations that all democrats are far left extremist even had me wondering if I was included in the far left ideals. I worried about it for a long time until I did my own research about the spectrum of far left to center to far right.
Trupmers vs. Actual Leftist Intent
Over the last four years the terms "Trump supporter" and "Leftist" have been used as pejorative terms. It was a horrible tit for tat game that harmed the country and turned America into one big war of the Hatfields and McCoys.
Trump wanted everyone to believe that the Leftist are vicious and vindictive people who would kill the 2nd Amendment, convert America to socialism, and who use their wealth to control a deep state of affairs in the country.
He really sold these ideas well. Trump is a great salesman, a great closer of the sale. To use an expression, Trump cold probably "sell ice to an Eskimo." Now I know that the word Eskimo is now considered unacceptable, and should be replaced by Alaskan Natives, but I used that expression because I want to point out that my Trump supporting circle of friends do not see any reason to stop using words like Eskimo or Indian; for them the words are part of their traditional ways of doing things.. Those words were used by colonizers as a way to indicate exclusivity for their colonial rights. In today's world we should be striving for inclusivity. These subtle changes in word usage reveal a person's inner feelings.
With regard to the 2nd Amendment, the Democrats don't want to come for your guns, what they really want is a standard set of gun application and registration laws for every state. For example, Indiana and Mississippi have less regulation over firearms, and as such, guns purchased in those states make their way into all other states. Gun trace reports have shown, again and again, that guns appearing in states with more regulation were sold in states with less regulation. Furthermore, there's a serious lack of control with regard to convicted felons from gaining access to guns. This is what Democrats was to being under control, but the Constitution gives every state the right to set their own gun regulations. For more on this you can look at https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/durbin-questions-barrett-on-difference-between-a-felon-s-right-to-vote-or-own-a-gun-93750341772
Ideals of the Democrats are a far cry from socialism, but Trump used that claim to convince people that America will convert to a socialist state under democratic leadership. This goes back to the idea that Democrats help you out if you screw your life up. That idea is a socialist idea. Trump's claims about socialism were a huge factor in persuading Latino and Cuban immigrants in the Miami, FL area to vote for Trump because they have a long family history and experience with Fidel Castro and a fear of communism/socialism and dictatorships.
As for the wealth controlling the deep state of affairs in this country, I have always found those accusations a bit bizarre. The top leaders in both parties are among the 1%ers. How can you be the pot calling the kettle black? Even worse, how do the people believe that the kettle and the pot are NOT the same color? Are there deep hidden organizations of absolute rich controlling the political puppet strings? Every good conspiracy theory and James Bond type action movie will clearly show you how it works. These are conspiracy theories, but if any of you want to swear a blood oath to form a secret puppy group with the intention to help one another out through life, then by the time you are all in your 70s you will have established your own hidden deep organization controlling political strings. That's just how it works.
Fake News
Trump showed everyone how to disagree with anything you don't like, claim superiority, and refer to everything as fake news. Instead of having conversations with people where different opinions could be shared, these past four years has pushed the country into a place where someone's opinion doesn't matter. Every heated conversation seems to require source citations all the time, and then the validity of your sources must be proven on a scale from left bias to center to right bias, and ultimately be disregarded as fake news. It's the extreme left and right bias sources we have to be careful of because both are filled with conspiracy theories. If you want an unbiased news channel, then stick to AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, and ABC News.
The incessant need to source every ounce of information and then cite your sources has become very tiresome, especially when experts in their fields are challenged when they present very well thought out summations of how they view a situation. It's a good bet that you should not be challenging someone validity when they are presenting a topic related to their PhD, or someone who has spent days researching a topic in order to gain and understanding or form an opinion.
Whenever we get into an argument with someone you should not immediately assume that the person knows less than you. I've been guilty of it, but if there's anything I've learned from the fetish community it is that you can't assume anyone's level of experience, and that most of the arguments I see on any topic started off because of assumptions of equal experience.
Don't attack someone if their opinion is very different than yours, even if you know their opinion is absolutely wrong. Check your attitude, take a deep breath, and either walk away from an opinion based argument or dig deeper to find out why they have a different opinion. Of course if someone is insisting that the derivative of sin(x) = 1-cos(x) when you know for a fact that the derivative of sin(x) = cos(x), then you should find out why they are incorrectly educated and fix the problem; if you walk away from a teaching moment where you can make a difference to help someone learn, then you are furthering the evil of mis-information.
Within HLP, I ask all members to be respectful of the opinions of other members. If you feel someone might be stating extreme or hyper-partisan left or right conspiracies, then kindly ask for a citation and then refer to the Media Bias Chart to see how their opinions are influenced. Remember that words matter, so say something like "I'd be curious to find out where you saw that," rather than a dismissive "what's your source?"
I invite others to deep dive into researching topics like I do to formulate your own opinion to share with the rest of the HLP community. Just be prepared to defend your opinion, but at the same time I would like to see others limiting their belittlement of different opinions unless you are an established subject matter expert or have taken the time to do their own deep dive on the same topic.
Trump's Presidency
Even though Trump is insulting and racist many people still loved him for what he did for them. Although many believed Trump's claims that he did a great job with the economy, there was a decline in employment and income during his 4 years compared to Obama's 8 years. What people really liked, and benefited from, were his tax policies. Although I felt a benefit as a business owner, my mother and other friends who don't own businesses paid more in taxes.
Everything he did was to further individual freedoms and help people sew their own sees for life and their future. That sounds great until you look closely at some of the things he did.
One example of his work is how he reversed protections of nature (which include, but are not limited to climate control) because those protections hindered small businesses from growing. Effected small business owners enjoyed that they could go back to their previous ways of operating without the extra expense to protect nature. He reversed protections of parks, protections of Native American lands, protections of waterways, and off shore protections all in the name of business progress and freedoms.
While some lauded his foreign policies, others cringed as his speeches clearly indicated that America was turning toward xenophobia. Trump was the leader of the free world representing the country that other turned to for help, yet his actions were sending America down a path of isolationism along with a growing belief that Americans are better than the rest of the world.
Trump wasn't all bad. He had some good Executive Orders, like EO 13945 which is currently preventing banks from foreclosing on homes during the pandemic, and preventing renters from being evicted. EO 1393 is an attempt to prevent drug companies from giving kickbacks to doctors or pharmacist and instead force the drug companies to apply those kickback to lowering drug costs.
But then there's EO 13925 which he tries to make it illegal for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to apply any censorship to those expressing their opinion. EO 13925 was his response to how Twitter started to censer his tweets. Some of us believe that the President of the United States should never say anything that is intentionally misleading. Trump repeatedly used his own media machine to rewrite situations into his own "truths." This is why fact checking has become such big business. The terms "fact checking," "social distancing," "curbside," and "unprecedented times" were unknown a short time ago, but now everyone knows exactly what they mean.
We also shouldn't forget how teens used TikTok to sabotage Trump's Tulsa rally causing Trump to use his Executive Powers for personal retribution when issuing EO 13943 to take down TikTok as a company.
Under The Future Biden Presidency
For the LGBT community I'm hoping for a renewal of the acceptance that we began to feel under Obama, but then lost under Trump.
This recent commercial from Oreo Cookies tells a story of a parent accepting his lesbian daughter, which is really sweet, but this type of commercial seems like it's a throwback to what we saw in ads 15 years ago rather than what we should be seeing today:
Alas, this is the ground that we lost and have to make up again.
We have to remember that we are all Americans, who we voted for does not define us. There are more people in this country with opinions that fall in the center than to the left or right, the proverbial "purple" group. We have to stop using "Trump supporter" and "Leftist" as pejorative terms.
Remember, the word "Trump" is not longer relevant, we do not need to waste any more time and energy convincing people that Trump is good or bad; this is no longer an issue. In the last four years, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a lot of people being as selfish as humanly possible in the name of their "freedoms." It's time to move on.
Like all presidents, Biden and Harris make wrong decisions, or at least decisions that wrongly impact some people while helping others. People will always argue over the economy and taxes for reasons I've already stated above. Biden is not the ideal candidate, he is no JFK or Reagan, but it was interesting to see him admit previous mistakes he made during his political career and talk about how he would work to correct them as president.
When Trump got into office everyone had to deal with him as a leader. Some embraced him, some tried to be tolerant, but being tolerant of his words resulted in yet another correction for the country during this election.
Half of the country will embrace Biden and the other half might never embrace him. I can only hope that Biden will not give the GOP party any rhetoric in the same way Trump lashed out against the Democrats and their ideals.
Let's see how it works out, especially since we still need to get through this pandemic and get the country back on track with global relationships and with the global economy. There's a lot of work to do that can only be done if everyone comes together in the center of the political spectrum.
Your Founder and HLP Alpha,
Matt Redding
AKA Kabous Pup