The
Biden Inauguration is in three days. Are
we really supposed to believe we need miles of barricades and razor wire, and
six thousand National Guard troops, to protect federal buildings in D.C.? Do we really need to shut down dozens of state
capitols and surround them with troops?
Are you sure there are vast
armies of yahoos and white supremacists massing to take down the U.S.
government?
Over
the years, I have found that the best way of addressing these bogeymen, when
they are presented by the left-wing media, is to bring them down to ground
level and look for them in the real world. The armies of evil incarnate are
always “out there” somewhere, and you never get told exactly where. You also never get any sort of estimate of
how many of these devils actually exist.
Often we are presented with an exemplar or two (in the Capitol attack,
we are offered the buffalo-hat guy and Baked Alaska and a couple others), and
then encouraged to believe there are tens of thousands of others who are just
as crazy and violent.
In this
case, every article about the bloodthirsty hordes links them to QAnon, implying
that everyone who stormed the Capitol, and anyone who marched to the Capitol,
and indeed anyone who went to Washington to protest the election in any way,
believes there is a cabal of Democratic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles who rule
the world. They must be white
supremacists too because, we are also told, all 75 million people who voted for
Trump are white supremacists, but that charge seems to be secondary. It’s just assumed.
When
confronted with the terrifying specter of a mob of QAnon white-supremacist
insurrectionists who are determined to kill politicians and bring down America,
what I ask myself is: do I know anybody like this?
I mean,
I know a lot of people. I live in a city
and I have a job where I interact with hundreds of people and I’m on the
Internet a lot, so I communicate with all sorts. I know communists. I know liberals. I know white supremacists. I know anti-vaxxers and Zionists and
Jew-haters and people who wonder why we all can’t just get along and people who
will not wear a mask under any circumstance and people who wear a mask when
they are alone in their own home and people who ONLY care about recycling and bike
paths and people convinced that the election was totally kosher and people who
are incensed that the election was stolen.
What I
don’t know is anybody who wants to fight a shooting war across America in order
to bring down our constitutional republic and install Donald Trump as Il
Duce. I’m not saying they don’t
exist. In a nation of 330,000,000
people, there are undoubtedly a few people like that, and maybe the guy in the
buffalo hat is one of them. And maybe he
thinks Nancy Pelosi drinks human blood under the full moon while she is
sodomizing altar boys with her broomstick.
If he
does, it’s a distinctly minority opinion.
And there are not enough people who share his views to justify miles of
concrete barriers and razor wire and thousands of troops. In fact, there were already supposed to be
violent insurrections in state capitols this past weekend, and what
happened? More journalists showed up
than protesters, and the four or five protesters were carrying cardboard signs
rather than AR-15s.
All of
which took me back to the 2008 election, when I was repeatedly told by my Democratic friends that Obama couldn’t be
elected because there were too many white people who wouldn’t vote for a black
man. I was told this so many times that
I started asking myself: WHO? Who, under
normal circumstances, would vote for a guy like Obama but wouldn’t do it because
he is black? Did I know any such people? And I didn’t.
I couldn’t think of a one.
Of
course, there were plenty of Americans who wouldn’t vote for Obama. There was me, for example, though it had
nothing to do with his skin color. I
didn’t vote for Dukakis or Clinton or Gore or Kerry either and they were all
nice white boys just like myself. No. I vote for political reasons, as most people
do. In order for this racism theory to
manifest itself in the 2008 election, to make a difference in the election,
there would have to be a bunch of people who were solid Democrats and who had voted for Dukakis and Clinton and
Gore and Kerry but would shun Barack Obama because he was the wrong color. Such people had to exist, I guess, but it had
to be a distinctly minority view because not only was I unacquainted with such
a person, my leftist friends couldn’t name one either. And in fact, I knew people who voted for
Obama because he was black. They had never voted before and didn’t pay
any attention to politics whatsoever, but they were prepared to run through a
wall in order to vote for the first black president.
It’s
now my standard response to the news that there is suddenly a huge cohort of some
kind of people I never heard of before and can’t quite picture. Name some.
Name a few. Name five, and I’ll give you Baked Alaska and the
buffalo-hat guy.
Copyright2021MichaelKubacki
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