You Can't Polish a Turd

Terminating Trump

The origin of the word “politics,” according to one of my favorite authors, comes from the word “poly” (meaning “many”) and “ticks” (meaning “blood-sucking vermin”). If he is correct (and Terry Pratchett was seldom wrong) then trying to vote for a politician is like trying to select which clan of blood-sucking vampires you would prefer to have feeding on you. Do you want to be used as a bloodbag by the rebellious Brujah Antifa clan? The arrogant Ventrue Neoliberal clan? The nature loving Gangrel Greens? Or the depraved and hedonistic Toreador Libertarians? There are so many choices, and all of them suck. Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not trying to discourage you from voting. Voting is one of the few ways that American citizens can exercise power, and if you don’t exercise your power whenever possible then you are effectively signaling to our psychopathic leadership caste that they can do whatever they want to you.

The reason I bring this up is because I’d like to explain why I supported Trump so strongly in 2016, but switched my support away from Trump in 2020. In our modern society, tribalism and factionalism are both very much on the rise, and nowhere is that more clear than in politics. I live in Boston (a very liberal city) and when people here first learn that I supported Trump in 2016, they often assume that I’m a flag-waving racist (or whatever the stereotype of MAGA voters is nowadays). Then when they learn that I no longer support Trump, they assume that I’m some hardcore RINO (Republican In Name Only) who wants to go back to the “old-school” conservative values of big business tax-breaks, or that I’m a hardcore Christian fundamentalist. Neither of these opinions is accurate. To understand my perspective on Trump, I’d like to take you on a historical journey. Let’s go back to 2012.

2012 is where it all started for me: the year when I first began to notice the early onset of terminal wokeness in America. At the time, I was on a left-wing website named Metafilter. I normally don’t seek out these types of websites, but at the time I was dating a really hot redhead who happened to use their website, and the lure of sex frequently gets men to do all sorts of uncharacteristic things. While Metafilter is indeed a worthless website full of insane left-wing extremists, in hindsight my participation there may have been a blessing in disguise because being on that website meant that I was one of the first people to notice the deplatforming and smear tactics which would become fundamental characteristics of the Democratic Party. I was an old-school liberal at the time: the kind of Bill Maher viewer who believed in free speech, equal rights, and a colorblind society. But the people on Metafilter were the core of what would eventually become the regressive Left’s Identity Politics movement. No matter what progress we made, no matter how much we tried to accommodate them, it was never enough. When Obama was elected president, to these crazed extremists it was not proof that America’s racist period had truly ended: instead it was “too little, too late.” When gay people were given the right to marry, instead of celebrating the victory they immediately moved on to complaining that trans women weren’t given the right to compete in dangerous sports like boxing against biological women. Essentially, almost every Metafilter user was a whiny crybully and malcontent: no matter what you did to try and appease them, it was never good enough, and they would always find something new to get outraged about, so it was not even worth trying to compromise with them. And of course if you were a straight white male like me, you were not even allowed to disagree with them: you were expected to be “a good ally” and “listen and learn” rather than “talking over” the LGBTQs and BIPOC and all the other alphabet people who hold privileged roles in today’s Western societies. No matter how illogical or stupid their opinions were, they were supposedly a “victim class” so it was taboo to question their factual mistakes and deliberate lies.

That’s not what made me angry, however. As a mature adult, I can agree to disagree with people without labelling them the enemy. What made me angry (and what also made me realize the insidiousness of their IdPol politics) is the fact that frequently they would deliberately misrepresent me on their website in an attempt to smear me and make me look bad. When I tried to have a civil debate with the NPCs on that platform, their admins would frequently delete some of my comments in a thread or even edit them so that without context, they appeared much worse than they actually were. To me, this is unforgivable. It’s OK to honestly disagree with somebody else, but when you deliberately misrepresent their argument, that changes the debate from a political disagreement into something much more personal and ugly. In fact, I would say that I was one of the earliest victims of “deplatforming” by the woke movement, and it really opened my eyes to how fanatical and full of hate these people were. I realized then that wokeness was a serious threat to free speech, and that this ideological movement would need to be utterly exterminated if patriotic Americans were ever to live free.

Over the course of the next few years, wokeness insinuated itself deeper and deeper into our society, particularly in academia and the technology sphere, which I work in. It was frustrating and harrowing to see conservatives like myself getting harassed and fired simply for asking questions or holding relatively commonplace opinions which simply did not match the narrative that our authoritarian tech oligarchs wanted to push. Me and my conservative friends in the tech industry learned to keep our heads down and remain silent about our beliefs, even while our left-wing colleagues prattled on openly in the workplace about nonsense like being “dragon-gendered” or bragged about their polyamorous sexual escapades in front of their colleagues. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with different sexualities, but I don’t think that the workplace is a appropriate place for that nonsense - yet HR departments were openly endorsing this kind of aggressive sexual harassment in an effort to show how “progressive” they were. It was a bad time to be a tech-chud: hunted and persecuted by intolerant left-wing witch hunters for the most terrible thoughtcrime of all - being skeptical of their delusional ideology. I knew that if we were ever going to turn the tide against the regressive left, we couldn’t just keep our heads down and play defense: we would need to go on the offense against these intolerant communists. That’s what got me involved with Gamergate. To me, Gamergate was never about “ethics in videogame journalism”: it was an experiment to see if an anonymous decentralized online movement could fight back against the evil left-wing identitarians. The experiment worked beautifully: better than I could ever have dreamed. It was a complete success. And then Trump came along.

What can I say about Trump? In 2016, I thought of him as a hero. He was one of the only politicians at that time who was willing to stand up to the scourge of wokeness, to say the kind of politically incorrect things that were absolutely true but would get you fired if you said them in the intolerant left-wing technology industry. To me, Trump was the hero of the day: a billionaire who was willing to stand up for the little guy: to publicly say the things that we secretly believed but could never say because the evil oligarch class would get us fired or socially blacklisted if we dared to disagree with their narrative. Everything that Trump did back then only endeared him to me more. For example, when Democrats tried to use Trump’s “grab her by the pussy” comments as evidence of his “misogyny,” it only made me angry at them because everybody who is famous knows that there are plenty of attention-whore groupies out there who will cheerfully let you have sex with them so that they can bask in your reflected glory. In fact, if I was really famous, many of you would probably want me to grab you by the pussy! The fact that the Left was trying to deny such an obvious fact about basic human nature only proved to me what liars they were, and when they later tried to smear Supreme Court nominee Brett Cavenaugh as a rapist based on the testimony of three unstable women (some of whom received a substantial payoff in return for making their accusations) it proved to me that they were not just liars but absolute monsters, willing to destroy an innocent man simply to try and get a little extra political leverage. Trump went to bat for Cavenaugh and I saw that as vindication of my support for Trump. If he was willing to go to bat for Justice Cavenaugh, surely he would go to bat for his supporters like me.

But time passed, and this didn’t happen. In fact, the more time Trump spent in office, the more it became clear that the only person he truly cared about was himself. For example, conservatives like me spent years getting censored on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook. I had assumed that when Trump came to power, he would immediately work on legislation to stop the corporate censorship of Republicans on social media, especially since the threat of being fired for expressing a right-wing view is one of the biggest problems facing Republican supporters today.  Aren’t politicians supposed to help their constituents? But Trump did absolutely nothing about this problem, and acted as though it didn’t even exist.  It wasn’t until he got deplatformed on Twitter that Trump started to beat the drum loudly about social media censorship, when it was near the very end of his term and already much too late to do anything about it.

This attitude Donald Trump had – that a political issue didn’t matter until it impacted him personally – would be repeated time and time again throughout his presidency.  For example, on the fateful day of January 6^th, Trump told his protesters “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.  We’re going to the Capitol.”  But when the time came to march, so that the protesters could make their physical voices heard, Trump was not there.  He stayed behind so that he wouldn’t be arrested, leaving his followers holding the bag.  It was that consistent selfishness in Trump’s leadership that bothered me the most.  If I were president and I genuinely thought that the election had been stolen and our democracy was at risk, I wouldn’t be watching the protest on TV in a dimly lit room somewhere. I’d be walking right at the front of the crowd with an axe in my hand, so that I could symbolically “axe some questions” about the electoral process.  But at that critical moment, Trump was not there.  What kind of leader sends his followers into a conflict that he’s not willing to fight himself?

Another thing that really disillusioned me about Trump was his bizarre and suspicious behavior during the Jeffrey Epstein arrest.  As many of my readers already know from my past involvement with QAnon, I’ve always been willing to state on the record that I believe many of our wealthy elites are depraved pedophiles who are being blackmailed by foreign intelligence agents like Epstein.  When Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, it seemed at first that me and other like-minded thinkers were finally about to get the vindication we deserved.  But instead of declassifying the information about Epstein and throwing his files open to public scrutiny, Trump swept it under the rug.  He could have made all of that information public: in fact at that moment, he was probably the only person in the world with the full authority to do so.  But instead, Trump let those files be sealed, making them all confidential.  And almost immediately thereafter, Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in prison – again, something that happened entirely on Trump’s watch.  Doesn’t that seem a little odd to you?  If Trump genuinely wanted to expose the pedophile elites in our society, why did all of his actions during his presidency have the exact opposite effect?

Some dedicated Trump supporters make excuses for this weird and suspicious behavior.  “Trump didn’t have the authority to declassify the Epstein files!” they say.  Bullshit.  He was the president.  The president has the authority to declassify anything.  Others say that Trump buckled under to external pressure.  “The Deep State got to him: they must have threatened his family!” they say.  OK, let’s assume that’s true.  If that were really the case, and Trump was forced to yield to threats from wealthy pedophiles, why would we vote for him again?  Has anything changed since then?  If Trump was willing to cover up for a pedophile ring once during his first term as president, why would he behave any differently during his second term?  Isn’t doing the same thing that we already tried and expecting it to have different results the definition of insanity?

Some Trump supporters – who will doubtless accuse me of being a RINO – would resent me asking these kinds of questions.  But - as you know from the name of this publication - I think that everything and everyone deserves to be questioned.  There are no sacred cows on this farm.  Are we not allowed to question the intentions of a man who flew several times on the Lolita Express, who forced his own daughter to sit on his lap at the Miss Teen America Pageant, and who once said that he would date Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter?  Is this the kind of person whom we are supposed to treat as completely above suspicion?  At the time I voted for Trump, none of this damning evidence about Epstein had come out into the open.  But now that it has, should we not re-evaluate our opinion of the man? After all, almost every one of Trump’s enemies was once a former ally of his. If these people who were closest to Trump could change their views of him, why can’t we? Why is it so taboo to say that Trump’s behavior in regards to Jeffrey Epstein was suspicious as hell, and that all the evidence suggests that he’s a pedophile?

I wonder which party girl he’s pointing at?

Finally (as if Trump’s selfishness and pedophilia were not enough), the third thing that really upset me about Donald Trump was the way he handled the Covid situation. If my criticism of Trump seems mild here, it’s only because I want to be fair to the man. I’m not angry that Trump shut down the entire United States economy for over a year, costing many Americans their jobs. At the time, our intelligence services knew very little about Covid, only that it was a dangerous biological weapon that had leaked from a lab in China. I don’t blame President Trump for being a little overzealous in how he responded to this threat. What I do blame him for is whom he picked to be in charge of his response team: Dr Anthony Fauci. Dr Fauci is indirectly the American most responsible for the creation of Covid, since he funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It’s in part thanks to him that China was able to advance so far in their biowarfare research program. Maybe not deliberately: in fact, probably not deliberately. Fauci thought he was funding the good gain-of-function research, not the bad gain-of-function research. How could he know that things would go horribly wrong? It’s not like the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already been criticized for insufficient biohazard safety protocols!

Put yourself in Dr. Fauci’s shoes for a moment. You’re the man in charge of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. A deadly man-made virus has just escaped from a lab that you funded - whoopsie! One of your analysts has just brought you the news that based on the new virus’s infectiousness and rate of spread - and the fact that China manufactures most of this gear and is hoarding it for themselves - U.S. hospitals will soon be at risk of running out of N95 masks. What do you do?

Choice 1: Keep buying up N95 masks while instructing hospitals to change their protocols and start sterilizing their N95 masks in an autoclave instead of throwing them out after a single use.

Choice 2: Lie to the public and tell them that N95 masks are ineffective against the virus so that you can conserve as much as possible for the hospitals. Then, when you have purchased enough, switch to telling them the truth and when they get angry at you, tell them that “the science evolves” and you can’t always get things right the first time.

I think we can all agree that Choice 1 is better than Choice 2. But Doctor Fauci didn’t pick Choice 1 or Choice 2: instead, he selected Choice 3.

Choice 3: Lie to the public (same as Choice 2) but realize several months in that your strategy is not effective, so you switch to Choice 1 midstream after thousands of people have already died. And instead of just saying relatively normal things like “Hey, science is hard” when people get understandably angry over your mistake, try saying grandiosely narcissistic things like “I am the Science!”

This is the guy whom Donald Trump chose to manage his pandemic response. This guy. Shit, I could manage a pandemic response better than that, and I have almost zero medical knowledge. Now I admit that Doctor Fauci did some solid work - maybe even heroic work - during the HIV pandemic and that perhaps granted him a little more tolerance for his bad judgement than most people would get. But still, he funded the lab that Covid escaped from! And President Trump put him in charge! At some point a more sensible president would have said “Hey, Anthony Fauci did some good work in the past but it’s clear that the man is getting senile and we need somebody different in charge.” But somehow, Donald Trump never figured that out.

My ex-wife had a saying: “You can't polish a turd.” While she turned out to be a horrible human being, I do give credit where credit is due, and I think that this phrase is an excellent way to describe the Donald Trump situation. Was Trump correct about a lot of geopolitical issues, especially regarding NATO and China and illegal immigration? Absolutely, I say he was 100% correct about those things. If I were president at that time instead of Donald Trump, I would not have changed a thing. (OK, maybe one thing - to stop the illegal immigration problem I would have used AI and robotics to build a virtual wall of robotic border sentries rather than a literal wall, but Trump’s intent was good so I’m not going to quibble over details.) In many ways, Donald Trump did good work. But after a certain point, we just can’t overlook all the selfishness and narcissism and pedophilia and just general lack of good judgement that came from President Trump.

That is why I no longer support Donald Trump for president of the United States. There are plenty of great Republican candidates who have an equal or better platform as him, and unlike Trump they actually fight against the social media censorship of all Americans, not just themselves. I supported Trump in 2016, and I am proud of it. Given the information we had at the time (as well as the total shit-candidate choices we had back then) it was a good call. But we have better choices now, and Trump is the turd that I refuse to polish.