The Bookworm Beat 11/20/16 — Life in Trump’s America

3265900078_9828f26d02_American-flagI’m back from my cruise, but not yet home, so this will be a smaller than usual round-up culling some of the best posts I’ve seen since recently about life in Trump’s America. Typing on a teeny keyboard slows me down….

The temperature in the Left’s fever swamps is rising.. I don’t need to repeat here the puerile behavior to which Mike Pence was subjected when he went to see Hamilton, nor do I need to repeat Pence’s classy response. You already know that.

What you might not know is that Pence’s appearance at the show was all part of a deep Trump plot to humiliate the Progressive Left by creating a situation in which the “others” in this new bigoted, racist, misogynistic, transphobic, and homophobic America would be forced to engage in behavior distasteful to the aforementioned bigots, racists, misogynists, etc.

Yup. No fooling.  That dastardly Trump outwitted America’s most elite brains.  I know this because I read it at the GQ website (and didn’t that used to be a snobby men’s fashion magazine?). Why else would a man that the Left believes is on the verge of euthanizing gays to end their evil ways even bother to attend a Broadway show?

Sending Pence to Hamilton, the inner sanctum of the godless liberal mecca that is New York City, seems crazy, but maybe it’s crazy like a fox.

[snip]

This is where a little theater trip can go a long way. If Bannon and company are at all worried about Trump voters seeing any of these stories and having second thoughts, throwing Pence under the bus for a night is a clever, tidy solution. On the off-chance that Pence is received politely, Trump can triumphantly cite it as evidence that reports of national discontent and his movement’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. If the crowd boos lustily, he can simply jump on Twitter and caricature the left as frenzied, petulant, childish aggressors. He gets to draw an outrageous false equivalence between his appointment of terrifying bigots to key policy positions on the one hand, and a guy being booed at a play on the other. Suddenly, any of his supporters who were getting fidgety about this whole “President Trump” thing are freed up to feel the righteous, indignant fury that compelled them to vote for him in the first place.

Pence is a bad man, but he is not stupid. His night on the town wasn’t a well-intentioned (if misguided) olive branch from a presidential administration eager to unite the country and move forward together. It was a shrewd, trolling stunt that leveraged his unpopularity to stoke resentment and foment further division. And just like the other times this year that Donald Trump has sought to do those things, it worked.

In an addendum, the author concludes that Trump’s wicked magic hand is definitely quicker than the public eye because the Pence story cleverly overshadowed the fact that Trump’s advisors finally forced him to settle his Trump U lawsuit.

I think “conspiracy theory” will be a good phrase to remember during the Trump presidency.

Snotty Leftist tries to explain the “little people” to other snotty Leftists. Despite my working class tendencies, I move in “elite” circles. Yes, I do. That’s why three of my Facebook friends posted a link to a Harvard Business School magazine article that purports to explain that the “little people” aren’t racist. Instead, they’re feeling marginalized by a class that governs solely for its own benefit.

Yeah, that last sentence sounds pretty accurate, right? Maybe the Harvard people have emerged long enough from that Ivory Tower to look at the real world with honesty, rather than condescension. Or maybe not. Because no decent article, one that doesn’t deplore the “Deplorables,” would say this:

Manly dignity is a big deal for working-class men, and they’re not feeling that they have it. Trump promises a world free of political correctness and a return to an earlier era, when men were men and women knew their place. It’s comfort food for high-school-educated guys who could have been my father-in-law if they’d been born 30 years earlier. Today they feel like losers — or did until they met Trump. [Emphasis mine.]

As I’ve said repeatedly, for the Left, it’s always the 1950s — where Jim Crow reigns supreme, women have back alley abortions because single motherhood is a sin, and blue collared louts beat up their women. Let me again recommend to you Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift, a book that revealed over twenty years ago that if you want male sexism in a home, look no further than your nearest Progressive household, in which men provide lip service and women provide real services.

One more thing: Considering how bad ivory is (elephant poaching, etc.), isn’t the phrase Ivory Tower kind of apt?

The truth behind the transgender movement. Katherine Kersten has written quite possibly the single best article I’ve seen on the social, political, and medical aspects of the transgender movement. I urge you to read it. It’s terribly sad when one thinks of the young lives irreparably harmed by adults caught up in a frenzy as bad as the Salem Witch Trials and or the Recovered Memory Rape trials.

Unfortunately, because First Things is concerned with religious matters and could be seen as having a conservative slant, my real-me social circle will not give an article such as this one the time of day.

If liberals want guns…. Now that they’ve suddenly realized that a scary president fleshes out the virtues of the Second Amendment, some Progressives are making noises about getting guns. Frankly, that worries me a bit. While no NRA member has ever been involved in a mass shooting, one can’t say the same for registered Democrats. Democrats really, really need gun safety — and Larry Correia, in a wonderfully snarky, informative article, is here to give them the help they need.

Deprogramming hysteric Leftists. Last year, an anti-Trump Progressive wrote a post warning his readers that if the Progressives overused the “racist” and “bigoted” label against Trump, they would be using unbalanced, unsupported claims that would obscure stronger, more valid attacks against Trump. Post-election, in an act of revenge and warning for the next election season, that same Progressive has written an 8,000 word post that uses actually facts, not to decimate, but to destroy completely the “racist” and “bigoted” slanders hurled at Trump. It’s long, but well worth reading.

Something to make you smile. I’ve always liked Chas & Dave, and their music, combined with this charming little story, makes for a lovely video with which to close this post:

Photo by mrkumm