Fisking a risible argument that Leftists, not conservatives, are reality-based

After explaining how the Left invented a detachment from reality, Kurt Andersen makes the laughable argument that the Left, not the Right, is reality-based.

Kurt Andersen Reality-Based
A shining example of Andersen’s Leftist “reality-based” community.

A Leftist friend of mine told me that novelist Kurt Andersen’s article in The Atlantic, entitled How America Lost Its Mind : The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history, is a “must read.” Although the article is ostensibly about a movement that began in the 1960s, one that saw America abandon facts in favor of emotions and magical thinking, the article is really a very, very, very, very long effort to say that Trump voters are credulous and irrational.

Because I am a nice person, I will not ask you to read the article — unless, of course, you are a glutton for punishment and have endless amounts of time. Instead, I’ve worked my way through this magnum opus to distill the essential points in each paragraph. To save you the time of even reading my summation — which, while long, is still shorter than Andersen’s article — here’s a quick summing up of what he says:

During the 1960s and 1970s, America went crazy. It was mostly the Left that went crazy, especially in academia, where our colleges abandoned truth and, instead, settled for moral and cultural relativism, navel gazing, and Foucault’s “everybody makes it up as they go along” theory. This madness swept the land.

Fortunately, by the 1980s, the Left managed to distill only the purest and truest thought from this insanity. Conservatives, meanwhile, embraced the crazy because they believed in God and distrusted both Big Government and the media. They were aided by the end of the Fairness Doctrine, which allowed the crazies to hit the airwaves. First Rush and then the internet convinced conservatives that there is a God, and that both Big Government and the media deserve to be distrusted.

And that’s how we got Trump.

Andersen’s turgid, long, frequently ignorant, invariably condescending, and very nasty essay boils down to a variation of the saying that “Fascism is always descending on America, but landing on Europe.” According to Andersen, “An unprincipled retreat from reality is always bubbling and burgeoning on the Left, but only reveals itself on amongst conservatives.”

That’s really what Andersen takes 117 paragraphs to say. I know, because I read all of them and, as noted above, I’ve set out below a precis of his wordiness, along with my interlineated comments:

¶1: America is untethered from reality. [True, although Andersen and I disagree about the identity of the untethered segment.]

¶2: Karl Rove invented the phrase “reality-based community” to say that studying reality is not necessary. He was serious. Stephen Colbert was witty and insightful when, a year later, he invented the word “truthiness.” [The phrase “reality-based community” goes back to 1998 and was first adopted by the Left, to describe itself. Rove’s point, assuming he was quoted correctly, was that people with power had the ability to affect reality, something that is completely correct.]

¶3: People in the 1960s, when Andersen was young, were reality-based, but that same decade saw Americans’ retreat from reality. [Agreed — and it behooves all of us to remember that it was the Left that retreated from reality, as Andersen goes on to explain, without ever explicitly calling out the Left.]

¶4: We’re all irrational about some things, but it’s dangerous to go overboard with our irrationalities. Americans are taking the Enlightenment’s concept of free thought as carte blanche to destroy other Enlightenment ideas. [Correct. Again, he and I differ about culprits.]

¶5: Americans believe in the supernatural and in religion. Sometimes the latter challenges the Big Bang theory. [This is the first of Andersen’s implicit and explicit attacks against Christianity.]

¶6: People believe that the government is keeping secrets. [Anderson names the crazy alleged secrets (AIDS, 9/11 attacks, vaccines, etc.), but is remarkably quiet about secrets such as Obama hiding the fact that North Korea had miniature nukes years ago or that Loretta Lynch, aka Elizabeth Carlisle, had a secret meeting with a presidential candidate’s husband — when that candidate had been very, very careless with America’s national security secrets.]

¶7: Americans were credulous and whacked out even before Lying Trump came along. [Again, he’s got a point. He’s just targeted the wrong Americans. For example, I don’t see evidence that Andersen ever spoke up during Obama’s years of lies.]

¶8: Americans live in fantasy land. [See my comment, above.]

¶9: The only true “reality-based” Americans are atheists who believe in anthropogenic climate change, evolution, vaccination, and government probity (at least under Obama), and who think the Bible is nonsense. They’re a small group, heavily outweighed by insane Americans who believe in God and angels, but not in climate change, and who don’t trust government. [Andersen seems unfazed by the fact that the reality-based people have bought into a “scientific” theory about climate that has just a couple of problems: massively falsified data and completely wrong theoretical predictions.]

¶10: The crazies are all over the population and they feed on each other.

¶11: Why is this so?

¶12: Americans can believe anything and everything want. So there.

¶13: All of America’s institutions — TV, academia, etc. — are responsible for this intellectual decline. [Especially academia, although I doubt Andersen and I view the problems with academia in the same light.]

¶14: Respected physicians hawk miracle cures; cable TV has “documentaries” about the supernatural [not to be confused with my beloved, tongue-in- cheekSupernatural, of course]; crazy people are getting tenure. [Again, I don’t think Andersen and I are thinking of the same crazy people.]

¶15: The whole world has gone crazy and that’s how you get Trump.

¶16: Americans have historically combined crazy moxie and genuine virtue. In the past, those tendencies have balanced each other out.

¶17: The first thing that changed this balance was the relativistic 1960s. [As the rest of the essay shows, Andersen believes the 1960s’ retreat from fixed principles started with the Leftist Baby Boomers, but somehow finished with the conservative Trump voters.]

¶18: The second thing that changed the American balance was the technological revolution, which enabled crazy people to find supportive websites.

¶19: Thanks to the second factor, we can all create our own reality. [Just witness the mainstream media’s complete inability to cope with Trump.]

¶20: Other countries have their crazy, but we in America do it better.

¶21: People who don’t know that we do crazy better are shocked that we elected Trump. They shouldn’t be.

¶22: America was created by dreamers and hucksters, from the Salem Witch Trials, to Joseph Smith, to Barnum, to Disney, to Billy Graham, to Reagan, to Oprah, to Trump. These people made America crazy.

¶23: The 1960s created good things and bad.

¶24: The early 1960s gave birth to hippies, the Beatles, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and Esalen, with the latter (started by Stanford grads) being the coming together of all crazy 1960s thinking.

¶25: The boast by Esalen that it reshaped America’s thinking is not idle. It invented “New Age” thinking for those who don’t want that old time religion, but still believe in the supernatural. It created “a new religion of no religion, and . . . ‘science’ containing next to no science.” It also looked to cultures other than the West for treatments and answers. [Andersen is correct here. Once again, though, he’s wrong in thinking the fallout from this landed on conservatives. You have only to look at the Women’s March, the March for Science, not to mention the claim that you can actually change your gender through magical thinking to realize that the crazy started on the Left and has ended on the Left. It’s the Left’s insanity that brought us Trump, as normal Americans reacted to the Left’s flight from reality.]

¶26: One of Esalen’s founders had suffered a mental breakdown and spent a year in a psychiatric hospital before Esalen. He believed that mental illness diagnoses were power conspiracies meant to destroy visionaries. [And right there, with that belief, we see how we now live in a world in which people of the Left — Esalen’s heirs — believe you can magically change gender or that making up numbers proves climate change is real. The crazy is so entrenched that the same psychiatric movement that once recognized actual mental illness is also on board with the transgender and climate change magical thinking.]

¶27: Esalen made science seem like a government conspiracy against the creative and helpless. Mental illness diagnoses are part of that conspiracy. [Again, transgenderism.]

¶28: The 1960s fed into young people’s belief that the universe revolves around them.

¶29: 1969 saw the final end of reason, when “grown-ups” [read: Leftists] joined into the fantasies of the young folks [read: Leftists]. The Counterculture [i.e., Leftism] was now the dominant culture, complete with moral relativism and a retreat from rational thought. [Andersen obviously didn’t realize that this attempt to indict Trump voters instead spells out perfectly how Leftists went crazy, resulting in conservatives taking the self-correcting step of voting for Trump.]

¶30: Father Andrew Greeley warned readers of The New York Times Magazine that the Baby Boomers were abandoning reason. [These are the same Baby Boomers who populate academia and the media, and who keep producing new generations of young snowflake monsters.]

¶31: In 1970, Charles Reich, a 41-year-old Yale Law School professor caught the kids’ crazy and wrote The Greening of America, which was a massive New York Times best seller.

¶32: Reich was unapologetic in his support for the whole crazy Baby Boomer ethos, which saw each person creating his or her own reality. He defined three types of consciousness: Consciousness I was old-fashioned, hard-working individuals (obsolete, according to Reich), Consciousness II was hard-working corporate drones (evil), and

¶33: Consciousness III was the new anti-war youth culture, which made reality up as it went along.

¶34: Reich loved the way the hippies dressed, but saw them in a serious light as a necessary army to fight Consciousness II (evil corporations and their drones). [Again, in the 21st century, it’s Bernie and his followers spouting this nonsense, not Trump voters.]

¶35: Reich didn’t get the revolution he wanted, because we still have corporations, but Consciousness III led the way to an America that is free of reason and reality.

¶36: 1970s saw the hippie’s craziness go mainstream, leading the way with bestselling books about sentient plants and agribusiness; Uri Geller; and non-religious proof of an afterlife. [Can I say again that all of this craziness still lives on amongst Progressives, not conservatives?

¶37: In the 1960s, academia abandoned reason and reality. [Definitely.]

¶38: Academia’s abandonment of reason and reality infiltrated other fields, including psychology, which did away with the concept of mental illness, believing instead that the so-called mentally ill were being imposed upon by societal drones imposing their will on creative or different thinking. [Let me just say again that this is perfectly in keeping with Progressives who today embrace the fallacious thinking behind transgenderism, while conservatives prefer biological reality.]

¶39: In 1966, two academics published The Social Construction of Reality, which said nothing is real. Everything is cultural, societal, and individual perception.

¶40: Andersen, among others, found the paper profound when it was published.

¶41: UC Berkeley philosophy professor Paul Feyerabend, in 1975, went one further: Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Rationalism, he claimed, is secularized religion, and therefore just as bad as actual religion. Science is just another form of belief. [Again, considering the magical thinker that accompanies climate change “science” and transgenderism, Feyerabend accurately predicted the modern Left.]

¶42: In anthropology, moral relativism became the new paradigm. The thinking and beliefs of other cultures, especially those America had wronged (i.e., every culture except for Western Enlightenment culture), shouldn’t be questioned but must be accepted as the equal of (perhaps something even better than) Western beliefs and practices. [This view, of course, is still the prevailing view in Leftist institutions.]

¶43: In 1968, and for the rest of his career, UC Davis psychologist Charles Tart insisted that drug trips were real experiences that had scientific validity. By the 1970s, his phrase “consensus reality” — a neologism for reality intended to frame his concept of drug-induced reality — became common currency in academia.

¶44: By 1969, social critic Paul Goodman, who had thrilled the young with his work back in the early 1960s, was shocked by those same young people abandoning knowledge and reality less than a decade later. The Baby Boomer cohort “did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”

¶45: Since then, conservatives have consistent railed against relativism. Even while they were complaining about it, though, the relativism they hated supported conservative craziness such as gun rights [a craziness the Founders supported two centuries before the Left birthed relativism] and anti-climate change positions [a craziness that seems ever less crazy when compared to the fraud, lies, and failures of the whole climate change movement, not to mention AlGore’s unseemly profiteering]. The Left birthed relativism and the retreat from reality; conservatives perfected it.

[I’d like to remind you at this point that anything that’s not in square brackets is just me summarizing Andersen’s blowsy prose. And if you’re getting weary, we only have 69 of his paragraphs left to dissect.]

¶46: Lefties went crazy by the late 1960s when they protested the Vietnam War in paranoid terms.

¶47: By the end of the 1960s, there was a lot of magical thinking on the Left. What a change, says Andersen, from 1962, when Tom Hayden drafted the founding document for Students for a Democratic Society (aka the “Port Huron statement”). This manifesto, says Andersen, “is sweet and reasonable” and claims a “basic opposition to the communist system.” [It’s sweet and reasonable if you believe a bombastic, wordy document stating that America is a greedy, hypocritical country and if you think salvation lies in a dreamy, gauzy, soft socialism that isn’t soft at all. Looking at it, Andersen’s writing style dovetails perfectly with Hayden’s style. No wonder Andersen characterizes the Port Huron statement as “sweet and reasonable.”]

¶48: And then, in 1969, the horror happened: The Weatherman group split from the SDS group [that is, an SDS subset stripped the gauze and waffle from the Port Huron manifesto, and revealed the hardcore socialism beneath it]. Then, as Andersen says, “kaboom,” because the Weatherman group liked bombs, a sort of muscular socialism, as opposed to Hayden’s delicate reverence.

¶49: But around the same time conservatives went crazy too, because they believed that the screaming campus protesters were dangerous. Also, the government started spying on anti-war groups and Lefties. [Andersen seems genuinely ignorant of the fact that, after WWI, the government was already spying on Lefties; there were just more Lefties on which to spy in the late 1960s.] The CIA and Army Intelligence, proving that the 1960s were a generally whacked-out decade, investigated using ESP for spy-craft.

¶50: The John Birch society was just as crazy as the Left. [The John Birch society, which trafficked in racism and antisemitism, was indeed a nasty bit of work. It also peaked in 1964, when it claimed 100,000 members. After that, unlike Leftism on college campuses, in the media, and everywhere else, it was a fringe group, which conservative thought leader William F. Buckley rightly denounced.]

¶50: American paranoia was helped by JFK’s assassination.

¶51: The John Bircher people were the original paranoiacs, but the Left caught up by 1964, when they came out with a bunch of conspiracy theories, including Jim Garrison’s, about the way the Right killed Kennedy. [Oliver Stone, a hardcore Leftist managed to put together a whole big-budget movie based on Garrison’s theory. These theories still have resonance on the Left, which refuses to acknowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Russia-trained communist when he raised that rifle to his shoulder and fired.]

¶52: Thanks to JFK’s death, Americans are “reflexive conspiracy theorists.” This is shown in novels and movies that trade in conspiracy theory plots. The FBI’s infiltration in anti-war groups, plus Nixon’s machinations, didn’t help. [Again, although he blames all Americans, Andersen is really describing the Left.]

¶53: Eventually, conspiracy theorists on the Left and the Right each went so far around their own bends that they met in the middle on the other side. [But just remember, according to Andersen, conservatives are the real conspiracy theorists.]

¶54: Andersen again says Americans will believe anything, which explains UFO sightings in the 1970s. [I suspect that readily available counterculture drugs also explain lots of those sightings, but that’s just me.] These sightings led to claims about government cover-ups.

¶55: The same sightings led to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as well as the claim by future president Jimmy Carter (Dem.) that he saw a UFO.

¶56: People started claiming that they had been the victim of alien abductions. [To my way of thinking, contrary to Andersen’s thesis, these claims were nothing new in the American psyche. In the old days, the same people would have claimed satanic possession. Crazy people always match their craziness to the prevailing social paradigms.]

¶57: In the 1960s and 1970s, Chariots of the Gods? made a lot of money riffing off the idea of extraterrestrials. No wonder Carter got elected.

¶58: The 1980s seemed to calm down, with traditional values of patriotism, work, and family returning. [Funny how Andersen doesn’t note that this more normal decade occurred when conservatives were politically ascendant.]

¶59: The 1980s’ seeming normalcy hid the fact that America was now completely delusional, thanks to conservatives.

¶60: Strange religions — Christianity and New Age stuff — grew in size.

¶61: Relativism became the academic norm. There was no truth. [Andersen got that one right.]

¶62: Academia just reflected the outer world, the hazy, crazy America.

¶63: Conspiracy theories became mainstream.

¶64: People claimed imaginary traumas, from Satanists to extraterrestrials, and the establishment put its imprimatur on this. [This was the time when law enforcement and psychiatry teamed together to destroy lives with claims that pre-schools were hotbeds of Satanism. It turned out that psychiatrists and psychologists were hotbeds of weird people promoting toddlers to say horrible things.]

¶65: The only reason America seemed normal in the 1980s is because we’d gotten used to the crazy of the 1970s. Plus television.

[The following paragraph is the first in a section of Andersen’s diatribe explaining why, despite the fact that the Left birthed and incubated the crazy, it’s conservatives who are the real crazies.

¶66: Reagan was a combination of Colbert style “truthiness” and pure entertainment. He set the stage for the 1990s.

¶67: Clinton’s popularity in 1998 spiked when America learned about his Oval Office peccadilloes. This was because it was fun, like reality TV.

¶68: The real crazy began because conservatives did away with the “Fairness Doctrine,” which [cough, cough] had operated to “keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided.” Without a Fairness Doctrine, Rush came along. [Anybody who thinks the pre-1988 media was centrist has his own problems with reality. I grew up a Democrat under the pre-1988 media and know precisely how hard it worked to present a certain political world view. There’s also the fact that almost all of the major talking heads were eventually revealed to be Democrats, which is kind of one-sided when you think about it.

¶69: With the ending of the Fairness Doctrine, which made media pretend that there was an actual non-partisan viewpoint, all types of irrational Hell broke loose.

¶70: Rush brought an alternative reality to a national audience. For three hours a day, he brainwashed people, paving the way for Fox. [As I’ve pointed out in a post Rush read on air, by carefully analyzing data, rather than presenting neatly-packaged Leftism, Rush de-programs those brainwashed by the mainstream media.]

¶71: Fox News used Rush’s techniques to immerse viewers in “unending . . . propaganda.” [Again, there’s that stunning lack of insight into the “unending . . . propaganda” that was the traditional media before the un-Fairness Act got axed.]

¶72: With the un-Fairness Act gone, Americans, for the first time, got different facts. [Again, a historically ignorant claim. Before TV came along, complete with its heavy-handed, Left-leaning government oversight, America’s print media had vigorously brought a multitude of views to the American people. That’s kind of how our Revolutionary War started, not to mention our Civil War.

¶73: The internet further denied the mainstream media control over the narrative. This made Americans more irrational.

¶74: The web allowed falsehoods and crazy ideas to multiply quickly, before they could be quashed. [Unspoken in this paragraph is Andersen’s belief that all conservative thinking is false and crazy, and it’s a shame it can’t be quashed.]

¶75: By the 1980s and 1990s, as a response to the craziness burgeoning out there, Sen. Moynihan (Dem.) felt compelled to say, for the first time ever, that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts, something no one had said before. [Andersen keeps revealing his ignorance. It was John Adams, two centuries before, who said “Facts are stubborn things.” Also, Andersen doesn’t seem to acknowledge that Moynihan might have said what he did because he was concerned that Democrat hegemony over the media was vanishing.] As far as Andersen is concerned, we’re suffering from too much freedom of speech. It needs to be quashed. I’m not not kidding about Andersen’s view: “However, I think if he and our other Enlightenment forefathers returned, they would see the present state of affairs as too much of a good thing. Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree.” Scratch a Leftist, find a censor.

¶76: The internet, in theory, allows for a democratic free flow of information. Billions of individual preferences in searches will drive truth to the top. [That is, unless Google decides to game the system to drive Leftism to the top, something I doubt Andersen would acknowledge.]

¶78: The internet validates exciting falsehoods. [Kind of like J.K. Rowling’s tweet falsely accusing President Trump of ignoring a handicapped child, something for which she refused to apologize.] Andersen was able to prove this little thesis to his own satisfaction by following up on chemtrail conspiracy theories. [Does anyone really care about chemtrail conspiracy theories?]

¶79: The web makes it easy to get to crazy or false information.

¶80: Religious Americans will believe anything, especially conspiracy theories. [Presumably Andersen exempts from this argument those who believe in the unfalsifiable Religion of Climate Change. Or the equally unfalsifiable claim that Hillary Clinton, a woman who accomplished nothing other than propping up a man, and who jettisoned national security for her own convenience, was the most qualified presidential candidate in American history.]

¶81: Andersen was raised in a Republican household and has occasionally voted for Republican candidates. He disagrees with conservative politics, but concedes that conservatives essentially agree with him “on the essential contours of reality” [whatever that means].

¶82: Lefties can be crazy on occasions, but it’s the right that’s really crazy, because there’s no one on the Left like Sean Hannity or Alex Jones. [Nobody except the panoply of MSNBC hosts, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Sean King, the earnest and dishonest 60 Minutes’ hosts, Michael Mann, Maxine Waters, Harry Reid, every tweeting Hollywood moonbat, etc, etc, etc.]

¶83: Why are Leftists the grown-ups and conservatives the crazy ones? [Yes, that’s really what Andersen offers as a rhetorical question.]

¶84: Religion. Those damn conservatives believe in God. That’s enough to make anyone crazy and delusional. [And yes, that’s really what Andersen offers. Andersen again exempts from this argument those who believe in the unfalsifiable Religion of Climate Change, not to mention the current members of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a malady even more extreme than Bush Derangement Syndrome. ]

¶85: The GOP probably didn’t bring religion and economics together on purpose. It’s just because middle-class and working-class people got poor and Republicans refused to acknowledge this. This turned conservatives into bitter, delusional clingers. [Yes, Andersen really makes this argument, although he doesn’t quote Obama.]

¶86: And just speaking objectively [at least, what counts for “objective” in Andersen’s world], conservatives are just more into conspiracy theories. [Yup, give conservatives an inch and you get . . . GMOs, Monsanto, Russia, Koch Brothers, the vast right-wing conspiracy, etc. Oh, wait, that’s not conservatives, is it? My bad. And Andersen thinks it’s bad when 34% of Republicans believe the elite have a globalist agenda. Apparently Andersen missed news stories showing that Brexit fully exposed the elite EU agenda that’s counter to so many on-the-ground Europeans, or that America’s bureaucracy has declared open war on President Trump (and to Hell with national security, the economy, and all sorts of other necessities for a strong, secure country).]

¶87: Andersen with a straight face says that the Left ended up with the reality high ground after the 1960s and 1970s: That high ground consists of “retreat from Vietnam, civil-rights and environmental-protection laws, increasing legal and cultural equality for women, legal abortion, Keynesian economics.” [Let me count the ways in which he’s embarrassingly wrong: We’d won on the ground in Vietnam when the Left forced a retreat, causing death and suffering to millions; it was Republicans who spearheaded civil rights and the racist Left that turned it into generations of blacks dependent on welfare, along with a political movement that inverted MLK to become obsessed with race, not character; the Left has abandoned anti-pollution and turned it into Gaia worship; the women’s movement, which was once about equity feminism, has morphed into man-hating madness; abortion has turned the Democrats into a death cult, and made life a lot easier for pedophiles; and Keynesian economics are practiced in a way even Keynes wouldn’t recognize and have created a government so big we can’t afford it, putting the whole economy at risk.]

¶87: Conservatives envied Leftists their rational victories. Conservatives accepted gender equality and big government, but reluctantly. But they just weren’t that crazy yet in the 1980s and 1990s. Andersen seems mystified by the fact that, under the conservative aegis Soviet Communism collapsed, violent crime dropped, and law and order prevailed.

¶88: Andersen concludes that the center right was “good.” But the far-Right was still out there and crazy. These crazy, stupid far-Right people actually bought into Reagan’s rhetoric, ignoring the fact that he’d sell out his values in a minute and and didn’t believe what he was saying.

¶89: The GOP also went crazy by embracing libertarianism. Andersen doesn’t like conservative libertarianism. He blames it all on Ayn Rand and says only teenage boys have an excuse for embracing this principle. To him, libertarianism isn’t about small government, it’s about selfishness. [Because, as you know, there is nothing less selfish than using the power of government to take away other people’s money and then to spend it on your pet Progressive projects.]

¶90: Republican leaders are cynical exploiters of the people’s naivete and credulousness. Oh, and Karl Rove is evil.

¶91: Poor, credulous Americans came to believe Rove’s lies. Even though they think they’re conservative, they’re not really. Instead, they’re puppets led around by evil people who say the media is dishonest and that they should take umbrage when called names. [Well, Andersen doesn’t actually admit that Progressives call people with whom they disagree names such as “deplorable,” “bigoted,” “racist,” “homophobic,” “bitter clingers,” “Islamophobic,” “hate-filled,” etc. He just makes it plain that, when called names, conservatives shouldn’t answer back in like terms but, instead, should be polite. You know who also holds to this one-sided, self-theory theory? A narcissist, that’s who. He gets to insult you, but you’re the one picking a fight if you disagree with his characterization.] And what’s really scary to a realist such as Andersen is that these weird, angry people want to do away with the EPA [which is stealing their land and livelihoods], the IRS [which has used its vast power to specifically target conservatives], and the Federal Reserve [which has manipulated money to benefit Democratic cronies].

¶92: And now the truth comes out: Andersen’s parents were conservatives who objected to the Kennedys, unions, and to a “confiscatory” [his quotation marks, not mine] 91% income tax. [Get the feeling he has mommy and daddy issues?] Thankfully for Andersen, his parents balanced their unreasoning objections to Kennedys, unions, and a 91% tax rate by supporting abortion and environmentalism. [I’m also an environmentalist, but that’s not the same as being a religious Climate Changista in the Church of Gaia.] His parents also didn’t believe the government is out to get people. [The Obama and Trump administrations have shown that the government is indeed out to get people, with the Obama administration targeting conservatives and journalists and the bureaucracy targeting Trump with endless illegal leaks.] Oh, and Andersen’s parents, God bless ’em, were atheists, so that must mean they were smart.

¶92: It’s Christians who have done all this craziness. And Christians are evil and want to take over government. Also [unlike the Left, which believes in the Church of Climate Change and, as part of its doctrine, wants to return us to a pre-industrial era and redistribute all of our wealth to Third World countries], these darn Christians refuse to believe in evolution [never mind that Creationism is a belief system that makes no demands on government or tax payers ].

¶93: Christians force presidential candidates to announce that they have a faith — even though the Constitution doesn’t require it. [The Horror!!]

¶94: Indeed, Andersen believes that the fact that conservatives like to elect religious candidates who share their values to all levels of federal government amounts to a violation of the 1st Amendment. [Yes, as you’ve figured out, Andersen really is that stupid. The Constitution says government cannot mandate religion. It says nothing about voters whose values are informed by faith electing politicians with similar values.]

¶95: [After this attack on religion, you knew that Andersen would get to the Scopes Monkey trial, didn’t you?] “Civilized” Tennessee people, according to H.L. Mencken, were hypocrites pretending to believe in religion and creationism to keep their standing amongst the yokels. [Andersen has obviously not grasped that we got Trump, not because conservatives are ignorant, hypocritical yokels, but because Progressives are nasty, condescending, scientifically irrational, greedy, pigs..]

¶96: Andersen has watched Trump since the 1990s and is certain he’s a grifter and a brat, who thinks he’s smarter than other people. [After all, it was Trump who said “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” Oh, wait. No, it wasn’t. That was Obama who never earned an honest penny in his life, going from mysterious college funding to “community organizing.” I guess Andersen missed all that about Obama.]

¶96: Trump is a creature of other people’s fantasies. His businesses are meaningless and he hasn’t done anything worthwhile. [Again, coming from an Obama supporter, this is laughable. Obama entered the White House having allegedly written a book.]

¶97: What sustained Trump is that the conservatives caught the crazy and will believe anything.

¶98: RINOs hate Trump.

¶99: Trump believes vaccines cause autism. [Andersen’s entire political party once believed this. Now it’s a mortal sin. Incidentally, I’m pro-vaccine. I’m just saying, again, that people who espouse nonsense for decades are not in a position to throw stones.]

¶100: Trump ran for president because he knew that [stupid, conservative,] Americans had reached that magical critical mass at which they could no longer distinguish showmanship from reality. [Andersen hasn’t been paying attention to Saleno Zito, who realized that it’s the Left that obsesses about Trump’s showmanship. Conservatives pay attention to, and are pleased with, a substance that involves clamping down on illegal immigration, unleashing a stagnant economy, and correctly identifying America’s friends and enemies.]

¶101: Trump fakes sincerity.

¶102: Trump wouldn’t have won if he’d told the truth. [From someone who obviously supported Hillary Clinton, this may well be the funniest line in this entire turgid, delusional mess. Again, conservatives voters were well able to distinguish showmanship from critical truths about issues as to which the Left has always lied: Unlike Leftists we know that there is a difference between legal and illegal immigration, and a nation should not have to tolerate the latter; that Islam is not a religion of peace; that drilling will help us get back to prosperity; and that every single climate change prediction has been wrong and can be propped up only by fraudulent data manipulation. And then there’s the whole Clinton Foundation mess o’ corruption. Hillary is such a failure she can’t even be dishonest well.]

¶103: Trump promised to make “dreams come true.” [Again, only a Progressive would be stupid enough to think that voters took this literally. Although there are such stupid voters out there. I do remember a lot of people saying that, once the “magic Negro” Obama was elected, there would be free phones and no one would ever have to work again.]

¶104: Trump is a creature of the internet, which allowed voters to bypass the media. [Yes, and thank God for that.]

¶105: Trump rode to victory on a wave of conspiracy theories about Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth, about Ted Cruz’s father and the Kennedy assassination, and about Vince Foster’s death. [Obama’s obsessive secrecy about his records is going to breed speculation. As I’ve said forever, I think he claimed on school transcripts to me Kenyan so that he could benefit from affirmation action after the Supreme Court’s “Bakke” decision closed that door for a few years. The Ted Cruz Daddy thing was plain mean and doesn’t reflect well on Trump. As for Vince Foster, it must be Hell on wheels to move in Clinton circles when one considers the number of close Clinton associates who commit suicide. (Some even using amazing dexterity, such as shooting themselves in the back of the head. You’ve got to admire that.)]

¶106: Trump probably believes some of his own lies. [Maybe Obama did too, although I suspect he was more cynical than that. Same for Harry Reid, the dreaded Wasserman-Schultz, Hillary, etc.]

¶107: Now that truth is optional, Trump gets away with lies.

¶108: Trump’s spokesman struggle to answer media questions. [That’s because the media throws at them stupid questions such as whether Emma Lazarus’s poem trumps U.S. immigration law, while it asked Obama spokespeople cute things like “Is he really dreamy to work for?”]

¶109: Unanchored Americans believe the lies told by Trump’s struggling spokespeople.

¶110: David Muir, of ABC, [instead of asking Trump about his dreaminess], asked if he cared that people might believe that illegal aliens vote in large numbers, threatening our democracy.

¶111: Trump responded accurately enough that he’s not alone in that belief.

¶112: American’s belief in Progress is faith, not reality. Other nations don’t believe in all that stuff. [This is funny coming from the same guy who railed against the relativism and other craziness of the 1960s and 1970s. Now, unwinding his convoluted prose, he seems to say that it’s crazy for Americans to believe in their values and not to believe in other nations’ values. ]

¶113: Andersen is still optimist even though his fellow Americans are stupid, insane, and credulous. He’s really incredulous, but it’s true that, despite growing conservative ascendance, America has done amazing things. [Fox Butterfield, are you there?]

¶114: Leftists have to be part of an intellectual resistance. The reality-based Leftists [who believe you can magically change gender by wishing it so, plus cancer causing hormones and mutilating surgery, and that humans are more powerful than the sun when it comes to the earth’s climate] can prevail by being really, really smart. And insulting conservatives.

¶115: It’s going to be hard to make America once again believe the Leftist version of reality. But Andersen’s readers have to do it . . . for the children. [And George Soros is not evil. Really, says Andersen, he’s not. Now the Koch brothers, on the other hand. . . .]

¶116: We need to protect our kids from conservative information.

¶117: Keep fighting. Fight! Fight! Fight!