Election day has passed, and the results are as fearful and ignominious as the political pundits predicted it would be if Trump were reelected. While I was surprised at the results, I wasn’t really shocked. I had already written an article recently about how we live in a world of stupid people. My opinion was corroborated by an interesting exit poll that was performed during the election. The results are quite easy to understand.
“According to the final NBC News poll of the 2024 race, 76% of registered voters said they follow public affairs and politics closely. The poll showed Harris winning among that group by 5 points over Donald Trump, 52%-47%.
But among the remaining quarter of voters who said they don’t follow politics closely, Trump was ahead by a much greater margin — 14 points, 54%-40%.”
What this exit poll indicates is that those who were engaged and followed public affairs voted to elect Harris as president, and not Donald Trump. While this an aggregate poll, it is likely to have helped Harris to win the battle-ground states and to be the president-elect. The other group couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to what was happening, and they didn’t seem to be disturbed by Trump and the fact that he was a convicted felon, attributed rapist, twice impeached, and attempted to overthrow the last election, as well as held and misused classified documents, jeopardizing our national security. This is a candidate who declared that he would order to set up detention camps for illegal aliens, sneered at the idea of upholding the constitution, and promised to function as a dictator on the first day of his presidency if elected. All of these items would have killed anyone else’s candidacy, and even the factor that he will soon be 80 years old and is obviously suffering from the beginnings of dementia did nothing to deter these low information voters from voting for him. The fact that Biden was pressured to drop out because of his age demonstrates how Trump always gets a pass for his speeches and weird behavior.
I am not questioning the intelligence of those who voted for him, but I am calling to attention their obvious lack of civic responsibility. Some of them ardently belong to the Trump cult of personality, and some of them are hardened right-wing aficionados or Christian Nationalists, but that would be only be around 30% of the electorate, so the rest are just plain too busy living their lives to really engage with their civic duty to be informed. Yes, in a word, these people are ignorant, and they are selfishly motivated to be this way. I can only hope that they rue the day they voted for Trump as president, and then, maybe if it's not too late, get more involved in knowing what is really happening to their country.
We are all going to be victimized by an angry, aggrieved Trump and his cadre of lick-spittle lackeys, but as for those who unwittingly voted for Trump, they bought it and they now own it. Hopefully, they will actually realize their folly so that things can be rectified in the next two election cycles. I won’t hold my breath expecting that to happen anytime soon, but I can at least hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
As you can no doubt see, I belong to the first group of people who are engaged and follow public affairs and politics closely. I live in a media world where I get my information from a number of different news sources including ones from Europe. Yet it seems that I live in a different country and hold ideas and beliefs that represent a stark contrast to what the average American believes.
My fellow Americans have always lionized the country hick, the urban troglodyte, and the hosts of average although stupid people as the “common man” over the intellectual, the academic, or the expert. In American culture, common sense was always considered to be of greater value than what was believed or expressed by scientists, academics, and experts, who have been classified as elitists. Uneducated folks were seen to possess common sense in greater amounts than those who were highly educated, and that being average and ill informed was a badge of honor. I believe that it is now revealed as our Achilles heel, and being ill informed in the advent of the cyber age is likely suicidal.
Americans seem to mistrust mainstream news outlets, and although they are all biased to some degree, using critical thinking skills can extract the truth from the bias. News that is based on conspiracy theories, deliberate misinformation, inexpert opinions, hearsay or propaganda is not so easily parsed, especially if one possesses a woefully inadequate base of knowledge. In fact, it appears that most Americans are getting their news these days from news influencers instead of accredited news sources. Here is an interesting study of that phenomenon by Pew Research.
“A unique Pew Research Center study provides a deeper understanding of both the makeup of the news influencer universe and its audience. The project includes an in-depth examination of a sample of 500 popular news influencers and the content they produce, derived from a review of more than 28,000 social media accounts. We also conducted a nationally representative survey of Americans to better understand who regularly gets news from news influencers.
Key findings about news influencers
• About one-in-five Americans – including a much higher share of adults under 30 (37%) – say they regularly get news from influencers on social media.
• News influencers are most likely to be found on the social media site X, where 85% have a presence. But many also are on other social media sites, such as Instagram (where 50% have an account) and YouTube (44%).
• Slightly more news influencers explicitly identify as Republican, conservative or pro-Donald Trump (27% of news influencers) than Democratic, liberal or pro-Kamala Harris (21%).
• A clear majority of news influencers are men (63%).
• Most (77%) have no affiliation or background with a news organization.”
I can tell you with all sincerity that I don’t trust news influencers, and in fact I use a factual and skeptical approach to viewing the news. Still, a large percentage of Americans get their news from You Tube, X, Instagram, Google News, Tiktok, or various other obviously tainted right-wing sources too numerous to list here. It has been suggested that reading and listening to news sources that are misleading or completely spurious can dumb-down a population. People who watch Fox News are so less informed than others who watch other networks and that they seem to be less intelligent over time. This kind of misinformation noise will make a national public less able to perform their civic duty, such as voting as a properly informed public, if one bothers to vote at all.
This is a calamity that is happening right now for all to see. And the biggest victims are young, single men, who are showing themselves as being the most gullible for hard right-wing propaganda. These are a group of people who over-all are less educated and underemployed, but who consume the internet media at a greater level than anyone else. They are also more likely to be single without much chance of finding a partner, and also having the means to buying their own home. What they have going for them is that they are W.A.S.P.s, and so there is a desperate need to maintain and expand their entitlement and white privilege, and Neo Nazi groups are happy to oblige and make them feel valued and important. They also get a nod from Donald Trump who they assume is like them. He has become a role model for what the underemployed white males see as the definition of a rich, entitled, and powerful man. Elon Musk is the same kind of role model for them, even though the very wealthy did not start out as poor folk. They had the benefits of being born into a position and were given financial help that greatly aided their pursuit of wealth and power.
All of these factors played a role in helping to elect Trump to a second term. Biden was poorly represented in the news, and his accomplishments and competent governance were fully ignored. Biden probably should have declared himself a one term president and then allowed the Democrats to vote for his replacement, instead of bowing out after undue pressure and giving his running mate only a hundred days to run for office. So some of the blame goes to Biden for making some poor choices and not promoting his accomplishments. The Democratic Party was also to blame for not promoting all of the things that they did during the last two terms to help the American people.
Exit polls showed that people had made up their mind much earlier about who they were going to vote for in the election, and that the electorate was angry about Covid19, the post pandemic inflation hike, the border crisis caused mostly by the instability in Venezuela and Haiti, and of course, the war in Gaza and Lebanon. It created a perfect storm of bad press for Biden, and dropped his approval levels to the high 30's. While Harris sought to overcome that headwind, she was not successful, largely due to a press that devalued her abilities and contributions. However, the greatest amount of blame goes to the low information and disengaged idiots who voted for Trump. Despite everything that went against Biden, and later Harris, Trump represented a far, far worse choice. And my stupid American brothers and sisters went ahead and voted for him because of various, unsupported and spurious reasons. They were angry, afraid, and blamed the incumbents, especially Democrats, and spitefully voted them out of office in sufficient numbers to give the Republicans a ruling trifecta. What awaits our nation will only truly benefit the oligarchy, the rest of us are going to be screwed royally.
So why am I writing yet another politically inspired diatribe about the latest election that so dismayed me? Does it make any difference to the practice of magic, occultism, and being a Witch and a religiously polytheistic person? As a well-paid IT professional, will I feel the effects of four more years of the nihilistic wing of the Republican Party? The answer to all of those questions is a definitive yes! I am writing because I am concerned about our future nation, one which I love and respect, but also acknowledge as flawed and a work-in-progress. I believe that four years of Trump will be an even greater disaster than the first four years. My only hope is that his inherent incompetence and laziness, and the feckless stupidity of his minions, will attempt a grand scheme to make this country into a one party state, but who will fail in the end. I fervently hope that the incoming regime has only two years to do its worst before the midterms shut them down.
Those are my hopes, but my “hopium” has been severely challenged over the last ten years in a way that I never imagined it would. It is based on my optimistic belief in humanity and my fellow Americans. It is with this in mind that I face a future that is potentially darker and more desperate than I believed it would be, just because of one man and his sick, vindictive, and delusional pursuits, all in the name of making the world a better place just for him.
Still, millions of people voted for Trump and the Republican party, and the will of the people is now known. Many think that Trump is the lesser evil in our political civil war between the two parties. They see the Democrats as elitists and out of touch with the common folk, even though there are many of us, such as myself, who are not at all elitist who voted for them as the obvious choice. Trump has made his dystopian world view quite plain, and his plans for rectifying the ills of an imaginary failing country that doesn’t even exist will be far worse than the world we have at present. Many think that nothing really bad will happen, and that the Democrats have painted Trump as some kind of vicious and vile autocrat, when he is just an entertaining politician who likes to say crazy shit to shock the liberals. I disagree, it will be as bad or worse for the next two years, and maybe slightly better in the next two years, and maybe we will recover after the Trump presidency has finally ended. Democrats are always having to clean up the mess that Republicans make when attempting to govern. I hope that there is still be some semblance of a representational democracy in this nation when the Democrats get back into power.
So, just in case you still don’t believe that a Trump presidency will impact you and your family very much and you might be thinking that I am being too pessimistic about the future of our nation in the hands of Trump and his minions. Here is something to think about, and it’s coming to us all starting early next year.
“Trump has named three deportation hardliners to key positions in his administration, including Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, Kristi Noem for secretary of Homeland Security and Tom Homan as ‘border czar.’
Miller is likely to be especially influential and especially brutal. [...]
...even ‘documented’ immigrants will not be safe, because Miller has declared that he will pursue the seldom-used process of ‘denaturalization’ to go after people who have been citizens for years or decades, based on suspicions about purported fraud on their naturalization applications. Individuals stripped of citizenship will then be subject to deportation along with Miller’s other targets.”
Everyone knows that immigrants and illegal aliens who work in this country take the jobs that nobody either wants or can manage on the very low wages that they are paid. Agriculture, construction, food processing, cleaning, janitorial and low-level maintenance, and many other jobs are performed by these people who faithfully perform these low paying jobs and don’t represent a threat to anyone. Take them out of the economy and you have some pretty steep inflation, when commodities, construction, cleaning and maintenance become too expensive or non-existent. Add tariffs into this toxic brew and you have a recipe for a very heavily impacted economy, certainly a recession, but maybe even a depression. Angry because of previous inflationary prices? A Trump economy might actually make prices drop after they go sky high, but by then no one will be able to afford the basics except for the rich.
This is just a preview of what is in store for us next year. Trump will have two years of unlimited power before the body politic realizes their mistake and punishes the Republican incumbents and possibly, changes the balance of power in Washington. A blue wave for the mid-terms would likely become a tsunami at the end of Trump’s final term in office. It is doubtful that anyone can replace him, and it is likely that the worst elements of our population will crawl back into the woodwork where they came. I can at least hope that is the outcome we will experience. Yet living with such stupid fellow Americans has taught me that the best possible outcome will likely be diluted or nonexistent as the siege of online disinformation continues without any kind of mitigation, and people become less curious and more ignorant.
Until that time of reckoning, I will live in one world, founded on facts, critical thinking, skepticism, and rational reasoning. It is a world of inclusion, love, unity, diversity, tolerance, and freedom; where my freedoms are guarded and guaranteed by government institutions and the fourth estate. My other fellow Americans will live in world founded on lies, epistemic closure, conspiracy beliefs, fear, loathing the “other,” exclusion, White Supremacy, bigotry, racism, misogyny, and unfounded hatred. It is a tale of two countries, divided by the ideals of light and darkness, compassion and anger. I believe that my concept of America will win over the other, darker and dystopian version; but what is left after four years of Trump, and how readily the damage will be fixed, is the great undecided question.
If this evil that “we the people” have evoked onto ourselves continues after Trump is gone, then those who are not white Christian Nationalists or their religious allies will find themselves in grave jeopardy and may have to either leave this once great country, or suffer unwarranted persecution, imprisonment and even execution. You’ve been warned, the outcome of our future is in the hands of stupid people, so let’s help them to understand that the future could be bright if we unite and give up fear and darkness and embrace the greater good.
Frater Barrabbas
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