Here it is, what we have always suspected about Trump supporters. The article doesn't emphasize their stupidity enough, though.



The Times finally gets to the bottom of Trump supporters: It turns out they're garbage human beings


In the New York Times' quest to get to the bottom of what makes every last Trump supporter in America tick, we have been treated to endless interviews, loving tributes to downtrodden towns in which nary a non-white person is ever seen, and one particular day when the op-ed pages were turned over to Trump supporters to argue for Trump's genius directly. But this is still not enough, and so Sunday's paper included a zoological analysis from a journalist who grew up among them.

It is meant to be flattering, or at least neutral, but the short version is that the people who have been bleating about "family values" for the last half-century do not actually give a flying damn about family values and never did. It was all garbage from the get-go. While people from "college" or "in New York" or "religiously conservative" or "liberal" or take-your pick all had harsh words for the crooked, lying, adulterous, misogynist trash-heap of a human being, the salt-of-the-earth Trump supporters back in Nebraska could not possibly care less about the bullshit-laden values attributed to them in fawning tributes to the heartland's common clay.

To hell with it all: Go team adulter-crook!

In contrast, almost all of the people I know in my hometown in Nebraska proudly supported him. They glossed over his infidelities and stressed that he seemed to be a good father. They were impressed by his “respectful” sons and admired the success of his daughters.
“Glossed over” is a fine phrase. “Good father” is quite the phrase itself. And this new notion of “respectful,” which apparently consists of “glossing over” his sons’ histories of charity fraud, public attacks on black politicians, and that whole ‘met Russian agents in Trump Tower’ thing, is doing quite the heavy lift.

Reading between the lines, what we have here is a group of people who practice what is known in the rest of the world as aggressive ignorance. You can’t say that Trump’s behavior bothers you if you drive wooden stakes into both ears and swear you didn’t hear about any of it.

The author goes through some trouble and many paragraphs to explain this phenomenon of Trump support despite Trump’s grotesque family-values-averse behaviors via a mix of sociology and class, because we are not allowed to point out that these people are simply dishonest bullshitters. When you grow up in Nebraska, you are apparently expected to bleat about family values and the corruption of the elites, to be sure—but, socioeconomically speaking, it is apparently all a ruse meant for the children and whatever gullible reporters wander through town. In reality, when it comes to the churches and the voting booths, you can be as adulterous as you want, cheat your neighbor eagerly and gleefully, lie to everyone about everything and—if you are in the right tribe, and only if you are in the right tribe—it is expected.

We're not supposed to say it, but that is what the sociological modal boils down to. I think all of us have ample experience with these sorts of human beings, and it is not necessarily political. I believe I have pointed out multiple times that in my own experiences, for example, if any business owner mentions Jesus within the first 10 minutes of meeting you you can be absolutely, 100 percent assured they are out to scam you, good and hard, which is an interesting metric of what so-called Christianity has been reduced to in many subsets of the American psyche. But in general, journalists and other neutral observers are not supposed to notice that wide swaths of society are, in fact, Not Good People. Even if there are entire churches or towns filled with them.

And so we instead get it explained to us in very neutral, analytical terms. Can't very well take to the pages of the New York Times to explain that Trump voters are wife-beating fascists who admire Trump's ability to build a golden tower for himself by cheating other people out of their money, but even in its most anodyne formulation the message is clear: Trump's version of "family values" plays well to people who themselves have none.

Baffling as it may be to elites, Mr. Trump embodies a real if imperfect model of family values. People familiar with the purple family model tend to view his alienation from his children’s mother as normal and his closeness to his children as exceptional and admirable. I saw this among my acquaintances in Nebraska. Even those from red families were more likely than my acquaintances in New York to know someone who has had a child out of wedlock or is subject to a restraining order.
See there? By God, being a do-nothing father with no apparent love for his kids is the downright admirable way to raise a family. And who, among Trump's base, has not had a restraining order slapped on them at some point in their lives? Oopsies have been made.

The only way Trump could connect with these fine upstanding voters any deeper than he has, I tell you, is to start a meth lab in his basement.

Yes, yes, this is all very rude—but strip the roundabout talk of religious denominations and average family incomes and the rest of the ancillary smoke tossed into the piece and you are left with the blunt notion that Trump's supporters absolutely Do Not Care about his adultery, his misogyny, his lies, his crookedness, his racism, or the possibility that he committed treason against his nation in order to sit at the desk he now sits at. That is what they, themselves, will eagerly tell you.

And from a moral point of view, rather than a socioeconomic one, there's no "but economic status" or "but particular sub-denomination of Jesus" that justifies that.

Plainly put: These are the hallmarks of terrible human beings. People who you would not trust with your children. People you would go out of your way to avoid, if you did care about honesty or family values. These are the people who press their mistresses for abortions but who also are not vexed by abortion-providing doctors being murdered in their Kansas churches; they are confederate flag-wavers in Union states, miffed that new civil rights laws a half century ago slighted their own ne’er-do-well families in some never-quite-describable way; these are people who are so obsessed with the thought that someone better is looking down on them that they are willing to punch whatever kittens need punching in order to prove they're at least better at kitten-punching than the rest of you. The opioid epidemic is centered in Trump-supporting counties. The demand that brown-looking children be placed in detention camps for fear that a terrified 8-year-old might be a hardened gang leader is a phenomenon of Trump-Supporting counties. The insistence that Treason Might Be Good Now is peddled by Fox News celebrities to die-hard Trump supporters who will repeat and retweet it willing and eagerly; it was Trump supporters, Jesus-punchers every one, who gave Alabama crapsack Roy Moore their votes even after his exposure as a child molester—complete with Bible citations from “conservative” pastors arguing that Roy Moore trolling the malls for a child bride was, in fact, in fine Old Testament tradition.

There is an obsessive need, in our journalistic culture, to explain bad behavior away. Donald Trump is not an amoral cesspool of lies, he is merely engaging in a particular brand of political rhetoric that seeks to persuade via the creative denial of the world everyone else can see with their own two eyes—and it's not for we keepers of the truth to judge. Donald Trump's supporters are not themselves dismal human beings who have open contempt for anyone not in their own small tribe, people who are forever obsessed with harming every other tribe in every other way, regardless of how it is done or how many family values rules need to be broken to do it, but are waving their little rebel flags and demanding child internment camps because their economic anxiety has gotten their stomachs all a-knotted of late.

But the acts speak for themselves. Trump's supporters do not care about his values, his lies, the means by which he achieves his ends, or whether or not he burns the Constitution in a barbecue pit so long as he can make them feel better about their own lot in life. This is not our construction, but their own; you need not look very far in any interview to find it. They are not good people. They are not good Americans, and their so-called morals are reptilian at best. We are allowed to say it.

You want to find good people, look for the people who are just as poor but care for others anyway, or who are under just as much economic stress but do not use it as excuse for cheating and stealing their way through it—or offering up eager praise for those that do. Good people don't claim to have family values and then discard those values at the drop of a hat when a rich, shouting hatebag they saw on their television set tells them to ignore all that. Good people don't soak themselves in transparent lies about immigrants or minorities, then declare everyone else to be “elites” arrayed against them in “elite”-minded conspiracy when some newspaper, somewhere, points out that those things were, in fact, cheap and tawdry lies.

The more we hear from Trump defenders, the more transparent it is that they are indeed, well, bad. It's terribly rude to say, and the press cannot say it, but the rest of us can. If you still support Trump at this late date, you are a terrible human being. You should, in fact, feel bad about yourself.

Yes, the rest of us do indeed look down on these people. Those of us with actual family values do; those of us who care about honesty in government do; those of us who are not furious bulging-eyed racists do; those of us who believe thousands of years of scientific discoveries are worth more than the dribbling pronouncements of a street-corner charlatan do; those of us with actual religious convictions do; those of us who are actual patriots do.

And we're not sorry. Get your act together, you losers. You voted for a two-bit conman you saw on a television show, and you did it because you either didn't care, didn’t pay attention, or because you wanted to be conned good and hard. But that was then, this is now, and you are allowed to change your mind and remember all the things you supposedly believed in before this glowing orange lunatic arrived on the scene to Make Sleaze Great Again.

You want to be respected, then do something worthy of respect. It’s as simple as that.

He was supposed to be a key in the imaginary conspiracy Trump’s congressional lackeys and media fantasists have desperately tried to write as history. He was having none of it.

Rick Wilson, 7/12/18

Those who forget the lessons of televised congressional hearings are doomed to repeat them, which is why the morning segment of the Capitol Hill show trial of veteran FBI agent and former head of the Bureau’s Counterespionage division Peter Strzok turned into a disaster for Republicans.

Donald Trump’s congressional enablers, sycophants, and political suck-ups wanted a punching bag, but Strzok instead delivered one of the rarest of moments: the full Joseph N. Welch.

Welch, the chief counsel for the U.S. Army during the infamous McCarthy hearings in 1954, had reached a breaking point. After McCarthy’s tendentious badgering reached a fever pitch, Welch delivered a famous rejoinder that ended the Wisconsin senator’s career. Watched by millions on live television, Welch went full beast-mode.

“If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so,” said Welch. “I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me… You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

This morning, it was Strzok’s turn. After an hour of drama-queen badgering from Trey “Benghazi” Gowdy and Bob Goodlatte, Strzok issued two passionate statements that will be the takeaways from an otherwise disorganized and contentious shit-show of a hearing before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees.

The first was a ringing defense of the FBI, with Strzok showing the kind of real passion that makes for great television. The FBI lifer issued a ringing defense of himself and his agency, punching Gowdy hard in the nose.

“I can assure you, Mr. Chairman, at no time, in any of these texts, did those personal beliefs ever enter into the realm of any action I took. Furthermore, this isn’t just me sitting here telling you you don’t have to take my word for it. At every step, at every investigative decision, there are multiple layers of people above me, the assistant director, executive assistant director, deputy director, and director of the FBI, and multiple layers of people below me, section chiefs, supervisors, unit chiefs, case agents and analysts, all of whom were involved in all of these decisions. They would not tolerate any improper behavior in me any more than I would tolerate it in them.”

He closed with this fastball:

“That is who we are as the FBI. And the suggestion that I in some dark chamber somewhere in the FBI would somehow cast aside all of these procedures, all of these safeguards and somehow be able to do this is astounding to me. It simply couldn’t happen. And the proposition that that is going on, that it might occur anywhere in the FBI, deeply corrodes what the FBI is in American society, the effectiveness of their mission, and it is deeply destructive.”

The second was a shot across Donald Trump’s bow: “I understand we are living in a political era in which insults and insinuation often drown out honesty and integrity. I have the utmost respect for Congress’s oversight role, but I truly believe that today’s hearing is just another victory notch in Putin’s belt and another milestone in our enemies’ campaign to tear America apart.”

This latest spectacle was designed for one purpose only: the destruction of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump’s Russia ties. Republicans like Fredo Nunes who have tried to present a series of dramatic, table-flipping reality TV moments to reach that goal have failed time and again to derail the Mueller investigation. This morning was yet another swing-and-a-miss for the Trump GOP.

Because Trump supporters live in a hermetic media echo chamber, these hearings are part of a predictable, hokey Kabuki dance. They’re a device for generating a new round of hyperbolic base-only stories that will follow the same dumb arc as all the rest. In the coming days, you’ll see Sean Hannity flirt with apoplexy, coating the camera lens with flecks of spittle as he rants over Strzok’s perfidy. You’ll see pro-Trump columnists herniate themselves stretching to turn flippant text messages into a vast conspiracy. Twitter will be a flood of moronic memes, white-hot takes, and promises that Strzok will soon be in Gitmo alongside Hillary, Obama, Podesta, and Soros.

None of it will deter the Terminator in the Special Counsel's office. None of it will change the facts of Russia's interference in the 2016 election, and Trump's ass-deep ties to Russian money and influence. Trump's unhinged, shithouse-rat-crazy tweets today should tell you how deeply he fears Mueller.

Strzok was supposed to be a key in the imaginary conspiracy that Trump's congressional lackeys and media fantasists have desperately tried to write as history. The idea that his text messages poison the entire Mueller investigation was a pillar of their defense of the president. This morning they were going for a quick kill. They needed Strzok to flail, and wilt. The Gowdy, Goodlatte, and Gaetz types needed their grandstanding, dick-waving mock outrage to leave Strozk shaking and begging for mercy.

Strzok had none of it. In this morning’s round he left the Trumpists of the House staggered in their corner, cut and shaky, wondering where Strzok learned to hit back that hard.
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Rick Wilson is a Republican political strategist and media consultant based in Florida who has produced televised political commercials for governors, U.S. Senate candidates, super PACs, and corporations. He has written in The Daily Beast, Politico, The New York Daily News, The Federalist, The Independent Journal Review, and Ricochet.

you know she was. way too much bad baggage and a crooked DNC backing her. All I could do was shake my head. People think Liberals are bad people. I want only to see people get a fair shake. I don't think it is so bad to strive for better incomes for workers and find solutions to rising housing prices. Education should be well funded infrastucture should be upgraded and employment opportunitys expanded and healthcare needs to be availiable to every citizen.. These are issues that concern me. I believe in banning lobbyists from influencing our elected officials . We the people have our say taken from us when the leaders we elected can be bought. Ban lobbyists so the people can get what they voted for. Just throwing that in.

Trump's longtime personal driver files lawsuit for backpay after 25 years of unpaid overtime

Noel Cintron spent 25 years working as Donald Trump’s personal driver and now he’s filed a lawsuit against his former employer for years of unpaid overtime. According to Blooomberg, he’s seeking compensation for 3,300 hours of overtime during a six-year period. He’s unable to seek compensation for the other 19 years of unpaid overtime due to the statute of limitations.
Cintron says that in 25 years of working for Trump, he only received two raises and the second wage came with a huge catch, a catch that essentially nullified any wage increase at all.
The wage bump in 2010 came with a catch, Cintron said. He was induced to surrender his health insurance, saving Trump approximately $17,866 per year in premiums, according to the lawsuit.
"President Trump’s further callousness and cupidity is further demonstrated by the fact that while he is purportedly a billionaire, he has not given his personal driver a meaningful raise in over 12 years!" Cintron said.
Cintron joins a long line of of people and businesses to be stiffed by “billionaire” Donald Trump.

Dear America: Who's Driving the Bus? is a philosophy book that offers a universal paradigm for understanding the often confounding and contradictory ways in which people behave.

America has currently embroiled in a second civil war that it is unaware of and that threatens our way of life. The civil war in this country is being fought over the same thing all great wars are fought over: power. But in this war, the adversaries are ourselves. Civil War II is not a race war, an economic war, or a war between states. It is a psychological battle between states of mind that will determine who has the power in our society, who is in control.

The human growth process is twofold; it has a physical component and a psychological component. Chronological age is an uncontested biological accomplishment. Psychological growth is another matter entirely. We struggle with the wish to become powerful, independent adults and the longing to remain powerless, dependent children.

Psychological growth is the universal challenge of childhood. Every society in the world needs its children to grow into physical and psychological adulthood in order to continue the cycle of life. Theoretically, if a society were to remain a society of children that society would necessarily collapse and extinguish itself. The psychological growth process is a difficult struggle, but it always involves a choice. It is impossible to become a responsible adult without choosing to relinquish the irresponsibility of childhood.

Until the 1960s American institutions cooperated in common cause to help American children become responsible adults whose individualism and embrace of the meritocracy produced enormous contributions to society that strengthened the country. The family, the church, and the government including educational curricula were uniformly determined that American children grow into responsible productive psychological adulthood. What happened??

After WWII the enemies of the United States understood that to end American dominance as a super power it was necessary to destroy the infrastructure that supported American exceptionalism. The Culture War was a deliberate attempt to shatter the American infrastructure of god, government, and family. This is how it works.

We all begin as children: helpless, dependent, self-absorbed, and completely lacking boundaries. We exist in a state of fusion unable to distinguish self from other. The universal task of childhood is to emerge from this state of total narcissism; the method is learning. The child slowly learns to become a psychological adult by gradually relinquishing the total self-absorption of infancy. The child learns to identify self by discovering the reality of other.

The degree to which we have emerged from our state of total narcissism is the measure of our mental health. A state of mind is not fixed. It is constantly shifting along the growth continuum, anywhere from total, infantile narcissism to responsible psychological adulthood depending upon the level and stability of the individual's inner development and the strength of the external pressures challenging it.

Let us imagine a single life span as a time line beginning with birth and ending with death. Ideally the chronological development of this life corresponds with its psychological development. Whether an individual's lifetime is ideal or traumatic, his growth patterns and level of functioning can be visualized as points on his growth continuum.

At any given moment in time he can know which state of his mind is functioning along his time line., Is he functioning like a rational adult? If so, which adult? The parent? The sibling? The businessman? The friend? Is he behaving like an adolescent? Or is he behaving like a child? An oppositional adolescent? A frightened child? A happy child?

When the rational adult identifies a child as the state of mind that is in command at the moment, he has identified one of his inner children. An inner child is a psychological entity - one of the historical children who exist within each of us. We must remember that we are each the the whole of our life's experience and that the children we once were continue to exist internally as parts of ourselves. Even after we reach chronological adulthood, the narcissism of childhood exists within our minds. Each inner child is a mobile entity seeking control of the individual's mind. The inner child's struggle for power continues to challenge the individual's rational, adult state of mind.

If we understand the growth process and the complexities of the human mind we can understand how one person can perceive us completely differently than another, and we can make sense of the often confounding and contradictory ways in which people behave. Imagine yourself as a big yellow school bus with many seats to accommodate your inner entities and their different moods, roles, and states of being. The bus travels along the time line that is your lifetime picking up new passengers as you grow and develop. The driver of the bus is always selected from the passengers on your bus. To understand how one person perceives us so differently than another we must ask ourselves the defining question, "Who's driving the bus?"

The power struggle between one's inner children against one's rational adult over who will drive the bus is the source of Civil War II. Civil War II begins as a personal, internal war and eventually finds its way into external society. The current demonstrations of infantile behavior exhibited by angry leftist millennials having temper tantrums, uncontrolled outbursts of profanity, calls for violence, demands for safe spaces, Play-Doh, and service dogs are all symptomatic of a lost internal battle to the demanding angry inner child. How did this happen?

From America's beginnings until the 1960s America's children were encouraged to grow up psychologically and take their rightful place in the adult world of rational thinking and objective reality. American exceptionalism was a product of the physical and psychological growth of its citizens incentivized to excel by opportunities for upward mobility supported by individualism and the meritocracy.

The ongoing leftist Culture War on America is a relentless attack on American psychological adulthood. The pressure to regress Americans back to childhood dependency and the world of subjective reality is a deliberate reversal of traditional American norms designed to collapse America from within. Educational indoctrination, media propaganda, and the drug culture of unproductive apathy, are weapons of the Culture War introduced in the 60s and expanded exponentially under Barack Obama. WHY?

Socialism is a binary political structure with a massive childlike population dependent upon a ruling elite who demand total government control. Socialism is the transitional political system required to internationalize America and impose one world planetary governance. Obama is a globalist puppet whose deceitful promise to transform America was his seditious plan to turn America into a socialist state in preparation for one world government. This is how it works.

Obama engaged America's angry inner children. Identity politics are based on victimhood. Instead of mobilizing the empowered rational adults able to effect constructive social and political change, Obama's policies are designed to mobilize the angriest entities of childhood who feel marginalized and prefer destruction, temper tantrums, and anarchy. Chronological age is irrelevant. Robert DeNiro is a primetime example of a mobilized angry inner child disguised as a middle-aged adult. DeNiro's outbursts of profanity would be rejected and reviled in a community of rational adults, but Hollywood glitterati are a community of angry inner children. Their behavior is out of control because their inner children who lack impulse control are driving their buses.

"Progressive" left is an oxymoron. The radical left lives in a regressive world that strives for childhood dependence rather than adult independence. Instead of striving for the empowerment of rational adulthood they compete for victimhood and the regressive powerlessness of childhood. Here is the problem. The radical left deceitfully promotes socialism's cradle to grave government care as social justice and income equality. It is the greatest bait and switch of the 21st century.

What the duped inner children do not understand is that free stuff is not free. The price for free stuff is freedom and total surrender to the parental government. Total government control over an infantilized population is the infrastructure of every despotic regime on Earth. There is no social justice or income equality in despotism. Childhood belongs to children - when childhood is advanced into adulthood it is the infrastructure of tyranny.

President Trump is diametrically opposed to the regressive policies of Obama and the radical leftist Democrats. President Trump believes in the Founding Fathers commitment to individualism and the meritocracy. He represents a return to rational thinking and a demand for psychological adulthood. The underdeveloped leftist Democrats that have been indoctrinated toward dependency and childhood cannot bear President Trump's demand to grow up and live in the adult world of objective reality.

Every parent is familiar with the temper tantrums of children being told NO. Effective parents are not intimidated or persuaded by temper tantrums. Effective parents do not reward tantrums, effective parents reward restraint. It is time for the rational adults in America to say NO to the temper tantrums of an increasingly out of control regressed population disguised as adults.

The Obama/Clinton leftist Democrats were told NO when America elected President Donald Trump. Obama's seditious "resistance" movement is a national temper tantrum powered by an army of angry inner children designed to overthrow the sitting President of the United States. President Donald Trump demands objective reality and psychological adulthood to make America great again. He understands the psychodynamics of regression being used in the Culture War against America.

Obama's drive to shatter America from within actively promotes policies that engage our angry inner children and encourage regression. Thought precedes behavior. People who think like children act like children regardless of their chronological age. For America to remain the land of the free and the home of the brave it is necessary for its citizenry to GROW UP psychologically! It is necessary to embrace rational adulthood and reject the bait and switch snare of eternal childhood.

There is no freedom without personal responsibility and rational adulthood. At this moment in history the quality of life in our nation is devolving because our society is being overrun by out of control inner children disguised as adults who are trying to seize power from responsible adults. To reverse the trend and restore the course toward growth and self-sufficiency, the responsible adults in our society need to confront the narcissism that is threatening to overwhelm us. Narcissism must be identified as the enemy of civilized life for individuals, families, societies, and humanity.

Chaos is the antithesis of civilization. The degree to which we emerge from a state of individual narcissism will determine the level of development with which we can relate to our families, society, and humanity. Chaos is the natural environment of the narcissist - no rules, no regulations, no demands, no responsibilities. It is the world that is appropriate only to the infant, a world of unconditional love an acceptance.

If we are to be civilized, we must insist the chaos of childhood remains in childhood. We must distinguish self from other and establish our own boundaries so that we can respect the boundaries of our family members, society, and humanity. We must give up the regressive demand for unconditional love and acceptance and move forward developmentally to a place where rules are respected as the infrastructure of civilized life. We must return to the meritocracy as the standard for advancement. We must ask ourselves, "Who's Driving the Bus?" and be sure that it is our most rational adult self at the wheel.