QED

Gloriously Unhinged by President Trump

trump baldie babeIn the July, 2016, edition of Quadrant I agreed with the notion that for many Americans their country now felt like an express train speeding toward the abyss. Donald J. Trump was the fellow bold enough to propose pushing the Emergency Stop button in a carriage full of frightened and cowed passengers. Trump was the anti-PC candidate in a nation ruled over by a P.C. Establishment.

The concept of Political Correctness is something weightier than mere annoyance or absurdity. It is the ideology of a Left Power Elite (LPE) – to echo sociologist C. Wright Mills’ 1956 critique of the United States – and has long held sway over the American people. The LPE itself is a caste of notable families, CEOs, celebrities, mainstream media operators, state mandarins, “progressive” lobby groups, academics, key members of the federal government and so on. PC ideology reflects the worldview and self-interest of members of the LPE and also serves to obscure or disguise their positions of advantage relative to ordinary people (or “the deplorables” as Hillary Clinton would say).

The 2016 US election cycle exposed the LPE as never before. The case of the pop music celebrity Beyoncé might seem trivial and yet it is far from that. During the 2016 NFL Super Bowl halftime show, for instance, the 36-year-old African-American singer-songwriter celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party. Beyoncé, perhaps the highest profile celebrity – amongst a plethora of high profile celebrities – to lend their glamour to the Clinton campaign, later claimed her halftime show had not been “political” (and against NFL guidelines) but instead “cultural”. In a year that would see the rise and rise of the Malcolm X-inspired Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, not to mention the New Black Panther Party, Beyoncé’s rationalisation should be considered disingenuous at best.

Hillary Clinton and Beyoncé share more than an antipathy to Donald Trump. PC Identarianism allows Beyoncé, one of the more dazzling and venerated celebrities on the planet, to play the victim card. This no-expense-spared woman, who inhabits the rarefied air of global superstardom, might have been listed by Time magazine in 2013 and 2014 as one of the most influential women in the world and by Forbes in 2015 as the most powerful female in entertainment, she might even possess a net wealth of as much as $US450 million, and yet Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter self-identifies as a victim. The melanin in her skin allows this revered idol to pose as a member of the modern-day Left’s rainbow of discontents. It is not so much a matter of “white skin privilege” holding Beyoncé back as “black skin privilege” shielding her from accusations of extreme privilege.

The story of Hillary Clinton is a parallel one. She, too, enjoys a privileged life. Politics and public life have been rewarding – in every sense of that word – for Hillary and Bill Clinton. Public financial disclosure reports put her net worth at $31.3 million and Bill’s at $80 million, not bad for a couple in serious debt at the conclusion of their time in White House. Much of that debt, we should mention, was the cost of the legal team – organised by Hillary – to keep Bill at arm’s length from the law during the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the latter stages of his presidency. Hillary Clinton was subsequently rewarded with a seat in the Senate (2001-09) and the role of secretary of state in the Obama administration (2009-03).

According to WikiLeaks, the DNC subsequently colluded with the Clinton campaign to undermine Democratic rival Bernie Sander and ensure that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential candidate, after failing to secure it in 2008 when inexperienced Congressman Barack Obama outmanoeuvred her with his version of identity politics. Undeterred, Hillary Clinton pushed her take on PC rectitude to the forefront of the 2015-16 campaign. Jillian Gutowitz, writing for the Huffington Post in December, 2015, summed it up perfectly with this line: “I’m voting for Hillary Clinton because she is a woman.” Beyoncé, an Obama campaigner in 2008 and 2012 and now, in 2016, spruiking for Hillary Clinton, encapsulated the twenty-first century PC Identarianism of the Democratic Party with these four words: “Let’s make history again!”

From a progressive point-of-view, at least, Clinton’s failure to “make history” might be explained in terms of sexism. If Hillary Clinton had been a man – or so the logic goes – she would have won the election. The fact she lost, in this Alice-in-Wonderland narrative, is proof that America remains a sexist nation in the grip of the omnipresent patriarchy. For this to possess any meaningful explanatory power requires discounting all the other aspects of Hillary Clinton’s character, not the least being her non-record as New York senator, catastrophic decisions as secretary of state, Emailgate, the accusations of corruption in Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash (2015) and the evidence of systematic duplicity as revealed by WikiLeaks in the months leading up to Decision Day on November 8. Hillary Clinton’s gender, in other words, ought to have erased from the mind of the American voter her deeply problematic candidature.

And here we arrive at the civilisation-destroying aspect of PC ideology. Martin Luther King put the case for liberal empathy as well as anyone: “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.” PC dogma subtly – but with critical consequences – altered King’s enlightened humanist creed into judging people not in spite of their colour, gender, religion, ethnicity and sexual preference but because of their colour, gender, religion, ethnicity and sexual preference. This successfully served as the redemptive aspect of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and the not so successful legitimising feature of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 ill-fated quest. Voting for a candidate on the basis of colour or gender is what Beyoncé would call “making history”. Should we be surprised, then, that she chose the most public space possible to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party?

After all, PC ideology is the radicalism of the 1960’s New Left reconfigured as progressive politics for our new millennium. The most effective agent in its resurgence has been the presidency of Barack Obama. Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-in-Chief (2008) was one of the investigative works to warn of Obama’s radical roots in the lead up to the 2008 election. Few listened. It seemed impolite to question the agenda of an African-American candidate who had come to heal America and not divide it – even though the 44th President has made an art form of promoting racial haters, such as BLM. For an African-American to support the GOP, let alone Donald Trump, is to risk the condemnation of the Thought Police and stand accused of being an identity traitor. Nonetheless, a post-election report in the New York Times appears to suggest that an increased number (relative to 2012) of African-Americans – as well as Hispanics, women and the poor – liberated themselves from the constraints of political correctness to vote for Donald J. Trump. Deplorables, apparently, are not just white and male but come in all shapes, sizes – and colours.

PC rectitude not only stipulates how designated victim groups should think and vote, it also cordons off from serious outside scrutiny the leadership of those same groups. The most notorious example, throughout President’s Obama’s tenure in the White House, has been the hands-off approach to Islamic activists and serial apologists, such as Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Not all Muslims, of course, are intent on advancing the course of sharia in the United States. Not all Muslims associate themselves with CAIR. Nobody in a free country, of course, should be singled out because of their religion, as no one should be victimised on account of colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference and so on. However, such a philosophy echoes the creed of Martin Luther King’s enlightened humanism – and, let’s face it, the American constitution – but not, as has been argued the dogma of the PC brigade.

Most of the organisations and programs of Islamic revivalism in the United States, including CAIR, are not only associated with the conspiratorial and totalitarian-minded Muslim Brotherhood as “brothers in doctrine”, they are sub-units of the Muslim Brotherhood. For eight long years, by all accounts, President Obama has ordered the Department of Justice and other instruments of the state to ignore the subversive activities of groups such as CAIR. A combination of PC sensitivity and the absurd belief that activist Salafism (civilisation jihadism) could serve as a corrective. Salafi jihadism (violent jihadism) has placed America – and the world – in great peril. Donald Trump, for all his flaws, called Barack on it. Meanwhile, we learned from WikiLeaks the Muslim Brotherhood-supporting government of Qatar donated $1 million dollars to the Clinton Foundation as a celebration of Bill Clinton’s birthday.

American law professor Khaled A Beydoun, writing for Al Jazeera, the Muslim Brotherhood-loving media company owned by the Emir of Qatar, declared that Donald Trump’s “Islamophobia” mobilised not only “a fringe or rabid demographic” to his cause but a “sizeable segment of the American polity”. We might point out that in Qatar apostasy is a crime punished by death, as is homosexuality. Stoning and flogging are all legal in the oil-rich emirate, while blasphemy will get you seven years in jail, a woman’s testimony in court is worth half a man’s, and so on and so forth. We might further point out that Qatar and Saudi Arabia not only support “moderate terrorists” in the Syrian civil war but also pump untold millions into the global expansion of their respective militant anti-Western interpretations of Islam. Law-abiding and patriotic Muslims living in the United State have every right to be embraced by the American mainstream and judged, as Martin Luther King would insist, “by the content of their character”. At the same time, the pernicious influence of Salafism and Sharia in the West must be thwarted at every turn. The previous two sentences, contraire Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, are far from incompatible.

A Trump presidency was not how most conservatives imagined we would escape the soft-totalitarianism of our PC jail. I imagined the liberation movement as an eagle soaring over prison walls. Trump’s populist insurrection, as it happens, is a dump truck that has smashed our prison gate off its hinges. It might be a Second American Revolution. From a modern-day leftist point of view it is a xenophobic fascist counter-revolution. From an anti-PC perspective, conversely, we can only hope it turns out to be a revolution in the spirit of 1776.

Daryl McCann blogs at darylmccann.blogspot

21 thoughts on “Gloriously Unhinged by President Trump

  • pgang says:

    A good article, although it outlines what is now obvious. I notice however that Daryl is also captured by a PC of sorts – that of secular humanism, which also likes to twist the truth to its own favour (and let’s be honest, is ultimately responsible for postmodern PC). We see here how Daryl takes M.L. King’s Christian worldview and turns it into, ‘King’s enlightened humanist creed’. Well I think that would have been news to him. That’s called co-opting Daryl, and it’s dishonest.

    The Orange by-election has me thinking that Trump is a very American phenomenon. We won’t get a Trump here but our own anti-postmodern revolution, if it eventuates, will be quieter and more subtle in keeping with our nature.

  • gray_rm says:

    We shouldn’t be amazed at how far (or how high) the rot of PC elitism runs.
    Checking LinkedIn shows a number of CEOs from the high-tech industrial complex elites have written company-wide emails to their ‘concerned employees’ about the great wickedness of a Trump presidency, and how they must all be in shock about the foreboding election results.
    Nothing about the riots, the elitism that spawned the Trump win, or their own complicity?
    The vested interests now demand company-wide employee servitude to their political beliefs?
    How appalling – and yet all done under the guise of virtue?
    dreck.

    • Warty says:

      Having neither Facebook nor Linkedin accounts, I wouldn’t have a clue what these CEOs might be emailing their employees, but I know this much: we have our own swamp to drain. The corporate world seems to have rushed to the forefront of political correctness, including their support of SSM. The business world was once the bastion of conservatism, but no longer.

    • gardner.peter.d says:

      A similar phenomenon of CEOs circulating pro-EU emails and news letters was evident in the lead-up to the Brexit vote. I wonder now what the employees think of their bosses now that the predictions of apocalypse following a vote for Brexit have been proven so false.

  • en passant says:

    Darryl,
    Great analysis.

    Has it ever occurred to the god-believing Islamists that as a sniper’s bullet takes the head off their fellow barbarian standing beside them that this is the will of Allah? This must be the will of their god. When the Benbrika plot to detonate bombs at an MCG Grand Final and kill as many people as possible failed, then this too was what their god wanted. When you have a capricious all-seeing, unlimitedly powerful psychopath overseeing everything happening in the world as we march towards the UN-mandated Caliphate then clearly you have a problem when many of your bad works in you god’s name fail. If I were one of them, would that give me pause as I began a life sentence (and that means life) in a supermax in Colorado? In my case, definitely! I might even cry out “My god, why hast thou forsaken me?” And the voice in my head would answer: “because you created me and I only exist in your head.”

    On another cliched point you use: you say the LPE distorted “King’s enlightened humanist creed into judging people not in spite of their colour, gender, religion, ethnicity and sexual preference but because of their colour, gender, religion, ethnicity and sexual preference.”
    To make sense of King’s very profound statement, you have to list dozens of qualifiers:
    Colour:- a person’s colour does not faze me, in fact I find a light tan very appealing, but indigo is not my preferred choice. That is my personal view and equally as valid as any other.
    Gender:- not a big issue as long as you keep it to yourself. However, men who dress as women in public even to make a point as the last {please god make him the last} AOTY did is just pathetically clownish.
    Religion:- religion is a mental illness, but it is treatable if caught early enough. However, there are so many evil religions that we cannot treat them all as equally valid. It is because the LPE tries that we have so-called ‘honour’ killings, FGM, sectarian violence and a deterioration of civilisation. How equally do we treat the human sacrifices of the Druids, the Incas or the fanatic islamists?
    Ethnicity:- a DNA check makes me proud of knowing that I have nine ethnically diverse ancestors. What a promiscuous lot they must have been to create a mongrel like me! Then again, that finally explains why some people have called me a mongrel … Fortunately, this makes me eligible for a vast range of victim payouts.
    Sexual preference:- Anything goes? Do we pardon Rolfe Harris as just having an alternative preference? Necrophilia hurts nobody, so should we consider that as just another option? Sex with animals? Surely we cannot leave those poor hamsters and goats to the protection of the RSPCA alone, or is that just another acceptable option?

    How strange that the ‘GUY of the Moment’ as the last chance to save civilisation is an outsider!

    • padraic says:

      I agree with the statement by the late Martin Luther King. The progressives who push identity politics are no different to those who used to push apartheid. They are the new racists, the new superior beings. But of course, this new apartheid is the sharing and caring type, so it must be all right. There is nothing more souls destroying than to be typed by your colour or religion etc instead of your basic human qualities as a person.

  • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

    An excellent article.

    However, I do object to one aspect of it, specifically the treatment of Muslims/Islam as just one of the many religions of the world. Although Daryl does not actually say that, it is implied unmistakably. That is unforgivable. Granted, not every Muslim is hell bent on wiping out all the infidels of the world, but only a negligible few ever openly and decisively condemn those who want us annihilated. At the very least, every Muslim who does not disown this evil creed is a foot soldier of the international jihad and remains so until he/she publicly denies that status.

  • Jody says:

    My sister is returning from Democrat Central in NY after “Hillary’s” loss (she always uttered the words Hillary with breathless excitement!). It became HRC and how thrilled she was a meeting “so many Democrats and liberals”. We don’t speak now, so totally polar opposite are our politics. I did sms when HRC lost the election (couldn’t resist) “Corrupt Hillary gone; apparently there IS a god”!! She’ll be appalled but so was I when she said to me (after my son got a job with him) that “heaven help us if Scott Morrison ever becomes PM”. He’s a man, you see!!!

  • brian.doak@bigpond.com says:

    Darryl McCann has so directly detailed the danger from which we have been given a lifeline by Trump. Endorsement is liberally displayed in the comments but some comments divert unproductively to beat an anti-religion drum.
    Reflect and see that Mohammedanism is like no religion, rather it is like communism or socialism or National Socialism and view the just completed SBS series of 3 segments about the invasion of the Indian sub-continent prior and during the Mughal dynasty. The series pointed to the ineffective resistance, against the jihadist Mussalmans, of the Indian religions of Jainism [wouldn’t hurt a fly], Hinduism [wouldn’t eat meat], Buddhism [wouldn’t be possessive].
    Mohammedan revivalism is a great danger. Pakistan had it under dictator General Zia-ul-Haq, Turkey has it under President Erdogan. Was it being facilitated in the US accidently by President Obama?

    • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

      “accidently by President Obama?” “accidentally”?! Are you kidding?

    • gardner.peter.d says:

      I did not see the SBS series but your account reminds me of a conversation I have repeatedly with friends uttering pacifist tendencies. I say to them, ” Although you might not want war, war will find you. Then what do you do, roll over and say yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir – or, depending on the war, madam.” It seems to be very difficult for people these days to grasp the idea that to live in peace and freedom one needs strong defences and that included cultural, legal and political defences as well as armaments.

  • Jody says:

    I didn’t write the foregoing but, by God, I wish I had. Please put your hand up if you disagree with these comments:

    The left is panicking because they realise Hillary’s defeat means people are beginning to break free from the PC prison. This is a victory for those who refuse to feel shame for loving their land and its culture. For those who think that dignity is a person’s birthright, not a gift from the benevolence of the elites. For those who refuse to be treated as a herd, incapable of moral autonomy.
    But it’s also a victory for all the ethnic minorities who refuse to be used as either cultural souvenirs or tools for the moral gratification of the left. And it’s also a victory for women who reject the witness protection life that feminism offers them. A life of perpetual fear and resentment towards men.

    There was never any consensus about the whole eco-feminist-multicultural-PC concoction; it was always an imposition from above that many people accepted because they found no outlet to challenge the official dogma. As society was made to conform and all political parties dutifully caved in to every demand of the new cleresy, it seemed dissent had been eliminated for good. But it was still there and eventually it has come out. Brexit was the watershed moment and now we have the American rejection of the PC project. A refusal to treat the land, the people, the laws and the economy as the plaything of the self-appointed elites.
    The great Stefan Zweig entitled his biography of Erasmus “The right to heresy” and Americans, like Brexiters have exercised their right to heresy and recovered their ancient Saxon yearning for liberty. There is a comprehensive task of demolition ahead: The EU, relativism, multiculturalism, Obamacare, foreign aid, American forces abroad and American meddling in the Middle East or the antagonising of Russia.

    Neither narcissistic celebrities, nor CNN, BBC or the rest of Pravda media have been able to persuade people. Activists, intellectuals and other self-proclaimed moral leaders of society have equally failed in their attempts to shame dissenters into compliance. Their vision belongs in the morgue, right next to the cold corpse of Marxism.

    • Warty says:

      Following your prompts how could one possibly disagree? Just kidding.
      The only thing I do disagree with is the implication that it is all over for ‘the left’. As with your sister, her great white mother may have failed to break the glass ceiling, but her (viz your sister’s) utopian ideas would still be intact. The fact that the Republicans have won both the House of Congress and the Senate (the latter largely due to Trump) may count for something. And the fact that Trump will appoint conservative judges to the High Court will indeed count for something, but he will need two terms of office to actually ‘drain the swamp’ and there have been suggestions he may not have the stamina for that, being 70 already.
      For me, though thrilled at a Trump win, I am only interested in the impact it may have here, you know, with regards to our own deplorables. I somehow thought Cory Bernardi, refreshed from his UN observer stint in NY, would be rearing to go, filled with sufficient impetus to get his Australian Conservative Party off the ground, and yet he told Andrew Bolt a couple of days ago “I would always rather work within the Coalition to effect change. That’s the most effective and strongest way in which I can do it”. I don’t know, to me this sounds remarkably like a backflip, and perhaps incorrect too. When one considers Australia, it somehow seems that the political correctness, the ravages of the left and the complacency of the Coalition is simply too deeply entrenched to change any time soon.

  • bts@swiftdsl.com.au says:

    I should like to raise my hand, not in order to indicate dissent from Jody, but in order to indicate wholehearted support for her analysis.

    Whenever I find myself discussing politics here in the USA, I always tell my American friends that it has always seemed to me that it might be desirable, but it is not essential that the President be an academic genius. What is absolutely essential is that the President have two basic qualities: first, the ability to do for the USA what HM The Queen does for us, that is, to provide a central and steady symbol of public duty and service, of what I might call the simple decencies of life, and of the all-important consideration of Constitutional continuity. Ronald Reagan had, no doubt, his fair share of faults, but this characteristic he had and displayed up to the very concluding period of his Presidency, when he became embroiled in the Nicaraguan arms scandal; and secondly, the good judgment to recognise his own deficiencies, coupled with the skill and the humility to choose advisers who can make up for those deficiencies. George W Bush had, no doubt, his fair share of good points, but in this particular respect he proved to have very little of the required sound judgment.

    It is far too soon to forecast how the President-elect will perform in those two respects. It is encouraging that his victory speech was simple, sensible and mercifully free of inappropriate triumphalism. It is as encouraging that his speech to the Al Smith Memorial Dinner, available on Youtube, notwithstanding a couple of questionable one-liners, was in general witty and in the spirit of this well-established New York event. On the other hand, rumours, (although, to be fair, that is all they are at the moment), that Messrs Gingrich, Giuliani and Christie are under comsideration for major Cabinet appointments, is troubling. Old-time political insiders such as those three gentlemen would not seem to me to be ideal collaborators in draining any swamp, let alone the specially noisome Washington swamp.

    Still, and as Mrs Clinton, no less, has admonished us: we owe the President-elect an open mind and the chance to govern.

    • Jody says:

      Well said, and it’s all a sobering warning to Australia if it considers a popularly-elected president – particularly one which has so much concentrated power. I just don’t think it works. The British model is far superior, IMO, but the idea of a republic is constantly trotted out because of the inherent self-loathing of the Left and all that our cultural ties imply, and the over-compliance of certain sections on the Right. It’s true that the new arrivals have no allegiance to the Queen but as new Australians I don’t see them having any choice. It comes with the privilege.

  • gardner.peter.d says:

    There are many malevolent forms of political correctness. Obama was very much in favour of the EU. One can see why. At the entrance to the Visitors Centre of the European Parliament, there is a plaque with these words:
    “National sovereignty is the root cause of the most crying evils of our times….The only final remedy for this evil is the federal union of the peoples.”
    The primary and overriding aim of the EU is to destroy the nation state, freedom and democracy.
    Lesson to the EU: democracy and freedom depend on patriotism. That is the antithesis of National Socialism (Nazism) which is the obverse of Soviet International Socialism as practised by Stalin. The EU’s top-down imposition of technocratic politically correct government and subordination of national parliaments to its rule is closer to Soviet International Socialism than any other recognised form of government. Violence is just about the only real difference but if armed as it currently intends, that will follow. The EU is virulently opposed to democracy and to freedom, as the Eastern European countries, recently freed from Soviet dominance and now swallowing the massive inflow of money from Western European countries, are finding out.
    Federica Mogherini is the current incarnation of Faust as High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission.

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