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Left-leaning Americans, do you want to know why erstwhile good people are flocking to support Donald Trump? Do you really want to understand it and actually grapple with the reasons why people who you once saw as decent fellow Americans are supporting the man you believe to be a lecherous, grifting, egomaniacal political opportunist and convicted felon for president?
If you’re serious about wanting to understand why, I could point you to my article from 2022 on “Why I am Voting Republican”—because it all still holds true. But there is perhaps another reason that is pushing people to cast their 2024 vote for Trump: leftist gaslighting.
Let’s take a brief stroll down the news headlines of the past five years. Which of these “right-wing conspiracy theories” would you like to discuss?
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- The Covid virus origination from a Wuhan lab leak?
- The legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop?
- Hunter Biden’s business dealings involving Joe Biden’s influence-peddling?
- The domestic terrorist organization Antifa’s violent protests?
- The seizing and holding of sections of Portland, Oregon, by leftist demonstrators?
- Leftist prosecutors ignoring real criminals and prosecuting conservatives instead?
- President Biden’s worsening dementia and debilitation?
- The ineffectiveness of regular (non-N95) masks to stop transmission of a virus?
- The U.S. government telling private media platforms to censor certain opinions/content in order to enforce the state’s preferred narrative (shadow banning)?
- The Covid vaccines having harmful side effects and not being “perfectly safe”?
- The potential use of Covid lockdowns and monitoring to usher in a new surveillance state?
Every single one of these was roundly derided and belittled by the Left as a “right-wing conspiracy theory.” Every single one was accordingly denigrated and disparaged by the mainstream media because they do whatever the Left says. And every single one of them was subsequently vindicated.
Of course, the pedigree of accusing a “right-wing conspiracy” of being behind everything goes all the way back to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s claim regarding the charges that her husband, then-president Bill Clinton, had sex with a subordinate intern in the White House. She knowingly lied about it then, and many on the Left continue to knowingly make the same kind of slanderous accusations today.
And that’s the awful truth of where we’re at in America today. There have been so many examples like the above list that most people can no longer handle the gaslighting and they just fall into tribalism because it’s easier than trying to know the truth.
Those who fall into the Leftist Democrat camp either stand with the lies, knowing they are lies, or they uncritically believe everything said by the media, as gullible as the MAGA Trump-believers they deride. They do this because they’ve been fed on a steady diet of unhinged accusations and lies from the media they trust, telling them that Donald Trump is the modern version of Adolf Hitler. They don’t question whether all the accusations are true because they have accepted the proposition that Donald Trump is the most awful person ever. [Leftist Democrats] don’t question whether all the accusations are true because they have accepted the proposition that Donald Trump is the most awful person ever.Tweet This
And because of this, people on the Left can’t understand why people support a person as unsavory as Donald Trump. Maybe it’s because he represents the biggest middle finger to the woke establishment we can think of. Supporting him is the best way conservatives have of striking back against the lies and gaslighting we’ve been forced to endure.
For myself, I cannot believe I’m at this point. I do not like Donald Trump. I’m on record as publicly opposing him and urging my fellow conservatives to vote for other candidates, including the relatively unknown ASP candidate, Peter Sonski. But I don’t like leftist gaslighting even more. Reread the list I enumerated above. Remember the public controversies and the outright lies spread by a media who fell lockstep into denigrating every single one of them?
Maybe, just maybe, you can understand why I, an intelligent, conservative-leaning person, would doubt your claims of climate change threats to our environment. Why I didn’t believe you when you said that I had to wear a mask to prevent people from dying of a coronavirus. Why I resist your efforts to normalize gender dysphoria at the risk of contributing to the suicide rate of LGBTQ+ youth. Why I abhor DEI initiatives that undermine merit and foment racial strife. And why I have misgivings about the felony conviction of former-president Donald Trump, whose prosecution at the hands of an avowed leftist seems all too politically convenient to be legitimate.
You don’t deserve my trust. I have become skeptical of everything I read and hear in the media because you have lied over and over and over again, and I want more than anything else to stick it to you. We can’t come together, we can’t “dialogue,” we can’t reason together because your side is either lying or supporting the liars without apology. And you still, somehow, maintain that you occupy the moral high ground because “Trump is the threat to democracy.”
Some medieval theologians posited that all lying was a sin, not just the bearing of false witness against one’s neighbor. Why? Perhaps because this is where it leads us—to a society where envy is exploited and we no longer see each other as fellow Americans but as enemies. And anything is permissible to defeat an enemy, right? I learned the bitter truth of this the hard way.
I ran for state office in 2022. (I didn’t win.) During the primary, a “poll” was circulated to thousands of voters in my district that lied about me. It contained enough truth to survive a lawsuit challenge, but it accused me of highly unethical behavior and implied I was an awful person. I pointed this out to a small circle of friends, and one of them sent me a very consoling email. In it, he commented:
[Trump’s] 2016 Republican primary contenders could never match his brazenness, his name-calling, his disregard for respect, his indifference to the truth. And the effect on the Republican Party, on America, even on many Catholics is devastating. In a world of liars, people committed to truth and reason are always disadvantaged. Calumny and detraction are valued commodities to some. Dissembling and obfuscation are the coin of the realm for others. Those of us who believe that truth is its own reward can appear handicapped.
This friend went on to say that lies “torpedo the moral underpinnings of our common life,” and when I reflect on both my situation from 2022 and the lies spread by the media over the past years, I believe my friend was completely correct. Our entire polity is at risk because of the widespread untruths being thrown about. If we accept lying about “our enemy” in pursuit of a putative greater good, we harm everything.
I can’t even talk with some of my extended family anymore because they believe “different truths” and our sources of information are mutually exclusive. We have lost common ground, and the problem goes beyond just my family—we are all losing our nation because of it. As Rod Dreher makes clear in his fantastic book Live Not by Lies, if you allow yourself to tell a lie to take down “the enemy,” you take down a little bit of our society with it.
My friends, resist the temptation to lie, even about bad people, even in service to the Good. We’ve heard this admonishment in our most-beloved stories, from the Jedi warning about using the power of the Dark Side to overcome an enemy, to Faramir’s* “I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood.” Fight them, and fight hard, but don’t use lies and deceit. Not only because it violates the Commandment against bearing false witness against others, but because doing so hurts us all. Which is, ostensibly, the reason for the Commandment’s proscription in the first place. If we can only win by lying about our enemy, we don’t deserve to win.
[Photo Credit: Getty Images]
*Editor’s Note: This has been updated since the article was originally published.
Yes It’s true that the entire democratic establishment and the entire mainstream media have lied constantly. But that is not the main reason to vote against the Democratic ticket. We are supposed to vote for policies, not personalities. People die, resign, & get impeached but Policies last for decades. And Biden-Harris have Brought us to abortions through the ninth month, abortions to be paid for by taxpayers, at least 600,000 illegal immigrants with criminal histories, a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that doomed 20 million women back to Burkas & no jobs & Is teaching young men to hate us, a weakened military, & passive approaches to Meeting aggressors like Russia, Iran, and China. Another 911 is approaching us and it will be far worse the next time. As former defense secretary Gates said in his 2015 memoir, Joe Biden never made a good foreign policy decision his entire career. The world cannot afford more far left leadership from America.
Nice article! If you don’t mind nitpicking, it was Faramir who said “I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood.”
I can’t believe I did that. Gonna have to turn in my Tolkien Nerd card now. Thanks for catching!
You never said if/why you will vote for Trump or the Solidarity Party. I have a friend who is voting for Sonski (even if as a write-in) and I have tried to convince her that all she is accomplishing is saying she voted her conscience. One of the two major party candidates WILL win and all a vote for the minor party accomplishes is taking votes away. I have listened to several priests who say it is correct to vote for “the lesser of two evils”. Another priest said it is better to vote for a party that will “kill the less amount of babies in the womb” as it is better than voting to kill millions.
Also you mentioned your parish in Brighton. I am unfamiliar with it as I go to St. Patrick’s. There is also a Mary Magdalyn but I found it very liberal.
My feeling is that if you don’t vote for Trump and you end up voting for a 3rd party candidate that has zero chance of winning, you’re actually voting for Kamala, a wasted vote. Do I agree with everything Trump stands for, no. His views on abortion are too liberal for me, but 100% better then his opponent. His personality can get on my nerves, but Kamala gets on my nerves all the time. Trump loves America and Kamala hates this country and only loves herself. Remember we vote for sinful, imperfect people like ourselves, and the only candidate who is perfect died for our sins 2,000 years ago and he’s not running for office. We’re voting for the very survival of this country, if Kamala cheats and wins, this country is finished and we’ll never have a normal election again.
When virtually one’s entire platform is atheistic in intent and purpose then lies are justified as the means and efficiencies to promote the City of Man to the dismissal of the City of God. The Father of Lies enjoys a stranglehold on the progressive City of Man.