Wednesday 20 January 2021

Why people love or hate Trump - it's abortion, stupid

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'...25 per cent of American voters say that abortion is the most important issue for them; that equates to tens of millions of people who will have put an X by Trump’s name because on that one issue he was aligned with them.

 

'This is the key to understanding the Trump phenomenon and also the hostility of the media; because the US media elite, like our own media class, overwhelmingly supports the pro-choice position, itself a central tenet of intersectional feminism. Trump’s other attributes – his uncouthness, his flagrant narcissism, his erratic outbursts – were certainly irritants but it was Trump as an obstacle to the final triumph of progressive thinking which made him such a hate-figure for American journalists.

 

'This will have long-term consequences, for while many Americans will be yearning today for normal politics to resume, many others will be harbouring a dark resentment against a media which stacked the deck against their man. Trump’s charge that the election was ‘stolen’ has not been substantiated in any legal sense but in another way the charge has force. When a media campaign is so one-sided, when the media coverage is so very partisan, those on the losing side are bound to feel it was unfair. And that bodes ill for the future because, for America to recover its equilibrium, it will need a media that is trusted to be fair; and we’re a million miles from that point right now.'
Robin Aitken in today's Daily Telegraph

8 comments:

  1. In the end they stole the election to regain control and doing so set the stage for a wholesale rejection of their authority.

    Too many conservatives still believed in the Myth of America. That should stop today.

    Today is the day Trump supporters can finally grow up. He wasn’t Orange Jesus sent to save America from itself. There was never a plan.

    Trump was just a guy in over his head doing something no President did since Calvin Coolidge, giving a shit about what America means for Americans.

    That’s why he had to be destroyed and that’s why we ultimately have to put him behind us.

    As the U.S. sinks and what’s left of the legal protections we’ve enjoyed are taken away under the guise of ‘domestic terrorism’ we are also, strangely, free.

    That’s why I’m ecstatic a man more fit for Andrew Cuomo’s COVID Death Parlors is president today rather than Trump.

    Everyone’s eyes are now open. A fungus is president.

    Tom Luongo
    https://tomluongo.me/2021/01/20/epitaph-for-a-post-trump-america/

    This is a picture that encapsulates everything wrong with post-Trump America. Symbols of America but no Americans:

    https://i2.wp.com/tomluongo.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/inauguration-flags.jpeg?resize=768%2C512&ssl=1

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  2. "but it was Trump as an obstacle to the final triumph of progressive thinking which made him such a hate-figure for American journalists."

    Trump did more than any president in history to ensure the final triumph of progressive thinking. Trump's election in 2016 was the best thing that ever happened from the point of view of American progressives.

    Trump has effectively neutralised any kind of conservative or traditionalist opposition to the progressive agenda.

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    Replies
    1. We shall see - you might well be right. It depends, doesn't it? Millions of American Republicans have been "radicalised".

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  3. This is where UK commentators reveal an incomplete understanding of how US politics work.

    Hard-core opponents of abortion, a tenacious minority, have been able to enact near bans on abortion in US multiple states. State legislatures and governors have passed stringent laws and the anti-regulatory GOP has regulated clinics to the point of extinction.

    Anti-abortion forces have been on a winning streak, but moan that they are victims. They are currently feeling foolish for their unwise reliance on Donald Trump -- neither a symbol or man for smart money to bet on, as it turns out -- but they are winning all the same.

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  4. What choice did they or conservative evangelicals have?

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  5. And speaking of harmonizing visions, what about Joe Biden’s calls for ‘unity’ and ‘tolerance’? I think they are like the demands for ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ we’ve been hearing on college campuses for decades. That is, what they mean is tolerance only for ideas that are completely consonant with the left-liberal agenda. This is the natural end of that spirit that William F. Buckley Jr guyed when he observed that ‘liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are offended to discover that there are other views.’

    That’s amusingly put. What is not so amusing is the realization that the intolerant left, for which Joe Biden is a shill, is now dedicated not simply to promoting its views but is also determined to stamp out any other views. I see that among the new federal initiatives is a requirement that all government forms inquire about one’s ‘preferred pronouns’. One wit suggested that Joe Biden preferred pronoun was ‘Xi’, as in the autocrat of China and conspicuous benefactor of the Biden family fortunes. I have no doubt that Joe’s minions will pick up many pointers from President Xi — the Big Tech censors and surveillants already have. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their efforts at imposing ‘unity’ and ‘harmony’ have as much a Germanic as a Chinese flavor. Beginning in 1933 in Europe, there was a concerted effort to ‘harmonize’ not only the laws but also all of social life with the new regime. The German word for the process was Gleichschaltung. That time the effort came out of Berlin. It almost worked. It took the combined military might of Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union to stop that earlier push for ‘harmony’.

    It is anyone’s guess what it will take to stop the new race-based Gleischaltung emanating from Washington DC and Silicon Valley.

    Roger Kimball
    Joe Biden’s ‘harmony’ is curiously divisive
    Spectator USA

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  6. It won’t matter if Trump is around as an object of fixation. For all the wailing the 25 percent do, they’ve won most of the war on abortion.

    What are your views on contraception? To me it would make sense if opponents of abortion supported informed preventive measures.

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  7. 'it would make sense if opponents of abortion supported informed preventive measures'

    Like... abstain?

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