2020 was a weird year. Can we all agree on that?
Here’s something weird about 2020 that you may not have noticed amid all the shouting and freaking out: Democrats nominated and successfully fielded a presidential candidate who is the exact same as Donald Trump in a curiously suspicious number of ways.
And they’re not trivial.
At least not to the Democrats who maligned Trump for four years in a furious and inexhaustible frenzy of partisan political note writing over hours, days, and weeks none of us will ever get back. And not only Democrats, but Never Trump Republicans and independent voters.
This doesn’t just work for libertarians:
https://twitter.com/LibertarianMama/status/1370431809612222465
No need to fact check me. I’m no wrinkler.
Here I even fact checked myself for you:
1. Racist, White Supremacist, Against Black Lives
All it took was for newspapers to start printing a “(R)” next to his name, and the exact same person, Donald J. Trump, who had this kind of relationship with the black community before––
––instantly became the living meme of everything that personally oppressed Rosa Parks. Like overnight. The Washington Post called him last summer the “most racist president in modern history,” and averred that Trump “revels in violence.” (More on violence below.)
In Oct 2020, NPR summarized the main talking points Never Trump America circulated most over the last four years:
“There are plenty of things you could point at to augment that argument: embracing birtherism, referring to African nations as ‘shithole countries,’ telling congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from, calling Mexican immigrants ‘rapists,’ refusing to denounce white supremacists during a presidential debate and so on.”
So why then did Democrats nominate and elect Joe Biden? Certainly not because they were familiar with or cared about what Joe Biden has really spent his career in politics doing.
They elected a former senator who fought tirelessly to prevent schools from integrating. His own eventual VP pick was prevented from integrating. Biden claimed he was upholding states’ rights (which progressives have always interpreted as a euphemism for white supremacy, like “peculiar institution”). Not surprising from a senator that eulogized Strom Thurmond, one of the most deplored racists in US Senate history.
Movement progressivism seemed to evince a broad-based will to entirely defund the police in 2020 over allegations of intractable systemic racism. But it was Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, who made increasingly more aggressive policing of black communities his policy focus.
https://twitter.com/onlygoodposts1/status/1024414919079419904
In 1994, Joe Biden sponsored a bill that made minimum sentencing for drug violations 100x harsher for drugs circulating in poor, black communities than for similar substances circulating in rich, white ones. Biden’s adult son has been addicted to this very class of drugs for decades. He was treated to hedge fund, venture capital, and private equity work, not prison, like so many black lives have been, because of Joe Biden’s work in Washington.
The result of Joe Biden’s influence on US public policy? By 2011, while he was sitting next to Barack Obama on top of the whole thing:
“More African American men [were] in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.” -Michelle Alexander, author of the bestseller, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”
Epic fail, Democrats. And epic fail, partisan duopoly. No, those aren’t mic drop sentences written to aggrandize myself. They are seething with anger for the millions and millions of hours spent by black bodied people just waiting to be let free, with less than help or encouragement, dehumanized and belittled daily by the prison staff, in ways petty and horrific; and at the innumerable voters and activists of the center-left who cried out so boldly against systemic racism for the last four years, and then elected Mr. New Jim Crow himself president! These people turned black bodies into commodities in America all over again.
2. Sexist - He doesn’t respect women or their boundaries
The next-loudest lament of Donald Trump in the White House, is that he’s a sexist, woman-hating, serial abuser of women, maybe even a rapist.
There’s no way to be certain, but probably 99% of words spent smearing Trump as a sexist are absolute bovine excrement, like hyperventilating over harmless, obviously jokes about his own family members, or meanly joking about people’s looks. Maybe that’s inappropriate or mean-spirited, but it’s only sexist if you’re suggesting that a woman’s looks are more important about her than a man’s are about him, and therefore especially egregious to attack (which is sexist).
This is the kind of claptrap we can all do well without in any confrontation with any level of complexity. What’s the point of it in politics? Anyone piling it on to more serious allegations for some sweet, sweet cap on top of their graven image of something to hate today, so they can relish the entire mess all the more, is trivializing abuse they’re posing as advocates against. And themselves creating the reality television dystopia they claim Trump inaugurated.
As for those more serious allegations, none have resulted in any indictments against Donald Trump in a court of law ready to determine the facts. Most never surfaced until October 2016, which unfortunately adds a lot of reasonable doubt about them.
And there’s a glaring problem with Democrats’ treatment of Trump over these allegations, and their repeated insistence that such serious allegations should be believed over any doubts, even without any evidence, moving as they did on social media channels to convict in their opinion, any man who had been accused of sexual misconduct within minutes or hours of learning someone had said something: Someone made an allegation of sexual assault against Joe Biden while he was running for president in 2020, and it was as credible as any made against Trump.
The same press that drowned Kavanaugh’s nomination and much of Trump’s campaign in saturation coverage of sexual misconduct allegations was deafeningly silent over what Tara Reade had to say about Joe Biden last year. At the time, my fifteen-minute cursory investigation of search data found:
“This many days after Christine Blasey Ford made her allegations public on Sept 16, 2018, NBCNews.com had published 208 pages referencing her."
That’s according to the Google search index of NBC News’ website using the query ‘Christine Blasey Ford,’ and limiting results to those published from Sept 16, 2018 – Oct 17, 2018. Today, NBCNews.com has only two pages referencing Tara Reade.
During those 31 days, the New York Times published 300 pages with references to Ford on its website. But today, the Times has only published six reports. One of them is the New York Times’ executive editor defending the paper for waiting 19 days to make its first report.
Meanwhile, Google has indexed 312 pages on the Washington Post, referencing Christine Blasey Ford in the month following her accusation. But the Post has only published two reports and three op-eds covering what Reade has told us about Joe Biden.”
Alyssa Milano, the visible leader of the MeToo movement in 2017, seemed to undo her work as an advocate for women speaking up about sexual abuse, by subordinating it to partisan politics so a Washington career politician with the same rap sheet as Donald Trump, but a “(D)” next to his name would win. Quoth the duopoly: Look on my works, ye dog faced pony soldiers, and despair.
3. Anti-Immigrant and Isolationist
Donald Trump exploded onto the 2016 GOP primary with a shameless pander to American nativists of the Pat Buchanan, Michael Savage, Lou Dobbs, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders variety. Their audiences ate up the Trump phenomenon, and shock jocks Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones piled on with their gigantic talk radio shows. In 2016, these clowns would be kingmakers against all comprehension by Washington elites.
Trump also appealed to the nascent, but growing and energetic Alt-Right movement popularized by racist political activist Richard Spencer. So Donald Trump made himself an easy target for one of the Democrats’ favorite accusations since the 60’s of their peers across the aisle in the GOP.
Early in the primary, he seemed to openly desire this characterization from his opponents. And Trump got it in heaps. Joe Biden claimed in one of the presidential debates that Trump was one of the most racist presidents in modern US history.
But what about Joe Biden? Yes, what about him? If Joe Biden is half as racist against non-white immigrants as Donald Trump’s critics say 45 was, then something went catastrophically wrong in the Democratic Primary. Shout “whataboutism” at your screen all you want. The record shows Joe Biden is literally worse Donald Trump when it comes to racism against black bodied lives in America, and not any better than him when it comes to non-white immigrants here.
In terms of public policy with real, direct, and devastating impacts on the lives of people of color in America, Joe Biden is everything Never Trumpers hated Trump for. As Vice President, he was part of an administration that deported more immigrants in its first term than Trump did.
While Donald Trump used immigration as a hot button issue to win in 2016, his administration actually mellowed out some on deportations. In his first three years, Trump’s ICE deported some 800,000 non-citizens. During that time Obama had deported 1.18 million immigrants.
Not until he was running for president again did Joe Biden speak out against the mass deportations. In Feb 2020 he called the policy “a big mistake. Since taking office, Biden has sent mixed signals on his resolve and ability to liberalize immigration policy as promised. Conditions for minors at overcrowded migrant detention facilities remain dire. One told a lawyer for the National Center for Youth Law that they were only allowed to shower once in a week, and only ever saw the sun through a window in the shower facilities.
4. Greedy Capitalist - Pro-Rich, Anti-Poor People
When the Republicans nominated Donald Trump to run for president, it was for sure the funniest presidential nomination in living memory.
Maybe Republicans believed they had no way of beating Hillary, the way George Bush demoralized Democratic hopefuls with absolutely soaring approval ratings after the Gulf War. That left the field open for Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton to take some chances and put up an unexpected and charming loyal opposition. Like Trump, Clinton was a Washington outsider. And like Trump, he had been preparing for this moment of opportunity his entire career.
With the help of others, like Tennessee U.S. Sen. Al Gore, he had secured the support of New York financiers. Taking the opposite approach of Ralph Nader, who labored to get money out of elections (and saved a lot of lives with his automobile safety lobbying), Clinton got the backbone of American capitalism’s big corporations to invest in the Democratic Party.
A better-tooled, savvier, more agile, and more centralized news media with innovative new entrants like Ted Turner’s Cable News Network in Atlanta, was undeterred by the apparent might of the incumbent, as leading party Democrats were. They may not have understood the changes underway, or counted on the fierce media war against Bush in the ‘92 election over the stupidest recession since 1980.
Democratic Party leaders who sat out ‘92 also failed to notice or properly account for the growing popular discontent with the Washington establishment. So they were unable to predict the impact on the presidential vote tally of Ross Perot’s run at the top of the Reform Party ticket.
In 1992 (like today) there were at least as many independent voters as there were registered Democrats, and as there were Republicans. Perot was a Texas billionaire critic of Washington’s flagrant corruption. He was a proto-Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump rolled into one:
Just like 1992, Donald Trump entered politics in earnest at a moment when the Grand Old Party had lost the will to even bother trying to win. And he charmed voters into a campaign to make America’s living meme of the guy on the Monopoly box the face of the US federal government. I don't care who you are, that's funny right there.
After the Clintons and Obama absolutely rolled in Wall Street money for their presidential campaigns, mainstream Democrats weren’t too vocal about Trump’s connections with the financial elite. But the usual criticisms abounded. Newspapers repeated the decades-old spurious claim that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer under an administration labeled conservative. The word “billionaire” became so dirty while Trump was president that even someone with the steely constitution of Elon Musk flinched and sold most of his worldly possessions.
But two of Joe Biden’s three top non-PAC contributors in 2020 were Wall Street mega-finance firms Bloomberg LP, Paloma Partners, and Euclidean Capital. Indeed, it was his assurances to big finance firms during the primary that nothing would fundamentally change, that brought Wall Street into the Biden fold. After taking office, he moved predictably to stack his administration with corporate MIC war hawks and Wall Street bank doves. The lifelong Senator for America’s corporate filing cabinet has always been cozy with corporate America, not the little guys.
5. Aggressive - Disrespectful, Undignified, Downright Dastardly!
Did MAGA country know they were being funny when they elected Donald Trump?
It’s readily apparent that most of them did.
But they were also dead serious about waging the culture war through US elections to thwart the advance of leftist ideology through the same means. Team Trump was willing to fight something that establishment Republicans were resigned to accepting. The RNC flinched when Democrats nominated a woman for president for the first time in history. Like it would prove they were woman-haters or something if they even tried to win, much more if they actually did.
They seemed amazed and daunted by the forces at work behind the flame of post-modern inquisition that has burned for decades in America’s universities, and recently spread through the news and entertainment industries into mainstream thinking. Leaders of some foreign countries are beginning to view this high-octane political correctness as infectious and corrosive. (Yes, the French think American “woke” progressivism is too far-left.)
The social media timelines of the past several years contain an epic record of the results of this thinking put into dialectical practice by a mostly volunteer intellectual army of millions of people thinking out loud together, in real time, on the record. The extreme absurdities produced by the furious work of channeling human feeling through these logical channels have been the source of never-ending comedy and consternation. The chilling effect of 21st Century American university-style thought policing was so profound leading up to the 2016 election, that just enough voters found Donald Trump’s inability to filter his thoughts incredibly refreshing.
But if so many voters found Trump’s rough way with words an unacceptable means of political discourse, then why did they nominate and elect Joe Biden? The self-described “gaffe machine” has been famous his entire career in Washington for having no filter, and saying both incredibly stupid and incredibly mean things.
6. Total Liar - Lives In A Post Truth World
As if Barack Obama, both George Bushes, and the Clintons had been scrupulously honest, the Washington Post wasted no time to declare Trump’s administration a “post-truth presidency.” The Oxford Dictionaries made “post-truth” 2016’s “Word of the Year.” By the time it was over, the Post claimed that fact-checkers have catalogued over 30,000 lies during his term in office.
Here’s Joe Biden dropping out of his first race in 1987 after admitting to plagiarism in school:
Joe Biden’s own list of lies is absolutely legendary, as befits the office he rose to under the stranglehold of our decadent two-party system. His is a record of pathological, compulsive lying. Biden has lied repeatedly about major life events (all bizarre and self-glorifying). He lied about the Obama Administration’s record as he ran for president against Trump. He also told several lies about the Trump Administration’s coronavirus response.
7. Egomaniac / Total Narcissist
Who needs a robust public policy debate when you have an expert-for-hire telling The Atlantic why Donald Trump is a narcissist in his professional psycho-analytic opinion? There’s no sensible way of even documenting here the copious outpouring of social media posts over four years expressing disdain for Trump’s ego and narcissism.
Narcissism or zeal are essentially prerequisites to be interested in running for president. The words and deeds of candidates like Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sanders could pass muster for zeal. But Joe Biden? The guy who’s so sure everyone literally wants his hands on them that he’s shockingly oblivious to the personal space of others? As Rich Lowry put it for an article in The Politico:
“Joe Biden wants us to believe that all his touching speaks to how deeply he cares about other people. It’s really a testament to how much regard he has for himself. As everyone has always known, Biden is prone to weird and wildly over-familiar interactions with women, which are extensively on the record and have been the subject of jocular commentary over the years.”
The current sitting president of the United States is so self-absorbed in grandiosity, he told voters last year that he was arrested in South Africa while trying to see Nelson Mandela. It was a lie. Andrew Young, then-US ambassador to the UN, travelled with Joe Biden to South Africa, and rebuffed his claim. Then previous Biden statements about the trip were found to contradict his new claims. His campaign had to admit the arrest story was all made up. That’s an ego bigger than the Lone Star state that Biden didn’t flip blue in 2020.
8. Anti-Science - Made Covid Worse, Or Failed to Save Us
Like the charges of racism and sexism, this is another warmed over and served again criticism of politicians branded “(R)” so that it’s easy for the RNCDNC bots to follow along. Over understandable and vital disagreements regarding some of the most complex problems in some of the world’s biggest and most sophisticated systems of human coordination at scale–– in the corporate press Republicans have always been the “anti-science” party.
These stereotypes are getting old. While the young love to embrace them for their plug-and-play ease of use (which feels to them like they’re getting something for nothing, because it lends them the sound of authority to gullible others and the aura of moral ascendancy, all without the effort and pains of critical thinking), these are outdated Boomer memes, and they made a mess when the Boomers traded them. That the policy agenda and methods of culture-making unique to the left as instituted in the actions of the Democratic Party, are somehow free of moralizing or uncompromised by resistance to inconvenient truths is patently ridiculous.
If it really is, then no one has to tell you that science is on their side, as so many pro-lockdown and mask mandate vocalists brashly trumpeted for the entire last year–– source: Facebook.com and Twitter.com. They could just use the facts that support their argument. People who say that are really saying something like, "God is on my side," in the same way, and with the same conviction as Pope Urban II or Osama bin Laden would have said it. Technocratic experts who are almost certainly not free of their own conscious policy and partisan biases and leanings, have joined with corporate media and blue America to claim Trump has 400,000 American deaths on his hands after the events of 2020. That's an editorial, not a scientific discovery.
The scientific method is clear and simple enough in nature. Its fruits are statistical composites of replicable results in experiments that control for confounding variables. The epistemic authority of science is so absolute because it is so greedily, exactingly modest in its pronouncements–– the opposite of the supposed moral authority of students of political “science.” The game they play is a sort of Mad Libs, in which the sentences are constructed to support a radical and unconstitutional political agenda, and the scientific evidence is shoe-horned into the blank spaces under the most tenuous of justifications, or less than that. Wild but understandably tempting inferences from headlines rounded off with a little copy are enough for the bots.
The discussion under this sub-heading is so vitally meta-contextual, that despite the headline of this article, I’m going to leave it unsullied with any further discussion of Trump or Biden.
For now, that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
9. Encouraged Terrorism and Violence
The crux of the case against Trump was not merely that his administration would be and was unseemly, indecent, and painfully awkward–– but positively dangerous to human liberty, limb, and life. A Google search for “trump refuses to disavow white supremacists” returns over 100,000 results. Click through to page 10, and you’ll continue to find mainstream news reports piling onto this narrative.
While the reports qualify the specific instances with enough detail, the impression the corporate press has made on voters, wittingly or not (I suspect with the utmost intention), is that Donald Trump has absolutely and entirely refused his entire presidency to condemn white supremacists. This impression is readily apparent from four years of social media timelines. The ocean may as well be pasted into a hyperlink here for reference. But the truth is:
As for Joe Biden, he’s just like Donald Trump in this respect. While he’s disavowed violence from Antifa and BLM protestors, despite partisan claims that he hasn’t, he’s also inflamed and stoked racial and political tensions, ostensibly for electioneering reasons–– the ultimate motivation of most politicians if not the immediately proximate one.
As for encouraging violence, Joe Biden supporters should ask themselves honestly what makes them more sick, the Jan 2020 riot at the Capitol, that they say Trump directly incited with a standard “Go, fight, win” political stump speech–– or the 2003 invasion of Iraq, violence which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and that Joe Biden not only encouraged with speeches on the floor of the Senate, but directly enabled with his vote.
10. Too Franly with Vladimir Putin and Russia
For four years straight American voters were promised the biggest scandal since Watergate on the verge of breaking. We were strung along through this conspiracy theorizing worthy of the likes of Alex Jones, but on corporate MSNBC, not indy Internet media. The money was good for them, but the overblown hysterics, actual post-truth political commentary, and endless distraction has yet to show any progress for public policy or basic humanity and decency.
If Democrats were as careful in scrutinizing Joe Biden’s tangles with foreign heads of state, they’d have to reckon with Ukraine. There was no dearth of words for this affair in 2019-20, as it was for the Russia-Trump collusion investigation. Most of it was boring and hard to follow even for wonky politicos. But USA Today cut through the noise with a succinct summary:
“At the heart of Congress’ probe into the president’s actions is his claim that former Vice President and 2020 Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden strong-armed the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor in order to thwart an investigation into a company tied to his son, Hunter Biden.”
The paper noted:
“Critics of Hunter Biden have questioned how he landed such a lucrative role with no experience in Ukraine or the gas industry.”
There was no smoking gun here in the end, but neither was there from the anti-Trump crowd’s endless fascination with Russia collusion conspiracy theories. And there certainly was blatant nepotism on display for someone to have such a lucrative opportunity in a country where his ranking US politician father had so much clout. So there’s a bonus likeness for anyone who loved to hate Ivanka and Jared, Eric and Donald Jr, for being their father’s children and going with him to Washington.
Conclusion
What anti-Trump howlers thought they looked like for four years:
What they looked like to me:
Somehow Democrats managed to get 81 million voters to vote for a candidate that showed every sign of being as bad as Trump in the very ways that made them say they deplore Trump. So did they really deplore Trump after all? Or was the outrage as phony as Trump would say the news was fake? If it was real, then why did they nominate Joe Biden and elect him president?
The theory that it was a failure by design looks increasingly valid the deeper our polity unfolds into the digital archive. These troubling incongruences appear more and more every month, every year to be a designed failure of the most trusted brand name influencers in two party politics, news journalism, and social media. Biden’s election was merely the latest in the two-party establishment’s intentional, systemic failure to educate voters about candidates and policies.
Most importantly, it was a failure of the individuals who use these sources and platforms to educate and inform themselves about politics. Those who opine about politics have taken upon themselves a moral obligation to be critical thinkers. Few take this seriously.
I didn’t waste your time with exaggerations or spurious arguments–– that is, fake news. Take a look around. There's nothing in Syria looks any different to me. Nor on the border with Mexico. The slogans are replaced, by-the-bye, and the parting on the right is now parting on the left.
2020 was a weird year. But the presidential election was business as usual.
