By Steven Yates
November 5, 2024
[Author’s note: this article expressed the opinion of its author, and should not be attributed to NewsWithViews.com, its editorial staff, or any other NewsWithViews.com writers]
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” —Søren Kierkegaard
Is Donald Trump trying to lose this election?
The question surfaced in my mind Monday morning as I perused the fallout from Trump’s appearance following several others at Madison Square Garden in New York City Sunday night.
This rally wasn’t something he had to do. Yes, it proved he can fill the house and then some, in a notoriously left-leaning city. I don’t know of any head count made that would indicate how many attendees were New Yorkers and how many were from outside the city, or even outside the state.
Trump’s not going to win New York, though.
I cannot tell the extent to which this event has harmed his prospects, but almost assuredly it hasn’t helped him. I would have advised against it. But no one’s asking me. (To the best of my knowledge, my open letter went unread.)
The rally was a bad idea, in my humble opinion. There was just too much danger of someone saying something grade-A stupid.
And sure enough, someone did! In spades!
Murphy’s Law, you know. What can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment! I’m a firm believer in Murphy’s Law!
Whether Trump personally invited the speakers who would appear that night or not, I’m wondering if he vetted the list.
Where did this Tony Hinchcliffe come from, anyway? I’d never heard of him before last weekend. Maybe it’s because we don’t exactly move in the same circles. Since George Carlin passed away, I’ve not followed stand-up comedy. A little homework told me Hinchcliffe hosts a podcast called Kill Tony and that he does “roasts,” i.e., comedy that purposefully pokes fun at someone, usually a celebrity or other prominent figure. I’ve never enjoyed that sort of thing. I guess that’s just me.
Here’s a portion of what Hinchcliffe said (yes, I checked the video; no, I’m not linking to it):
“These Latinos, they love making babies…. Just know that, they do, they do, there’s no pulling out. They don’t do that, they come inside, just like they did to our country. There’s a lot going on, I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Yeah, Hinchcliffe has free speech rights, the same as you and me.
That said, there’s such a thing as discernment!
I hope I don’t need to say it: what happens in this election will determine the future direction of the U.S. We either begin to turn this mess around, or we don’t turn it around at all. It may already be too late.
Trump needs to repudiate this clown. Otherwise, he risks this being his Hillary Clinton baskets-of-deplorables moment. Remember that? Hillary, exhibiting breathtaking stupidity back in 2016, wrote off an entire bloc of voters in states she needed to win. Naturally that bloc went to Trump.
As blunders go, that was a lulu … but the important thing was to learn from it and not repeat it.
As everyone paying attention knows, leftists are having a field day with this, and with a few other careless remarks made at that rally.
Note, I said careless. I didn’t say racist. I’ll let the leftists do that. Probably with the hiss in their voices.
True: Biden referred to Trump supporters as “garbage” in a retort:
“The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters…”
He’ll get a pass. My response: Let leftists and their dementia-addled stand-ins put their hypocrisy on display.
Note also the sexual innuendo in the remark above. This sort of thing, made publicly before a national audience, also indicates a civilization unraveling in its age of decadence.
Focusing on the Puerto Rico remark, Hinchcliff insulted the ancestral home of a people most of whom are in the U.S. legally (some of them born here), who play by the rules, have jobs and families, and whose overall values don’t differ significantly from yours or mine. Most middle class Hispanic people work very hard!
I’m told they did very well economically during what we’re hoping will be the first Trump presidency. Having lived in a Latin American country for a while, I have a few acquaintances in that community. Without exception, they’ve been planning to vote for Donald Trump.
Now, though, some who might still have been fence-straddlers, could be having second thoughts.
This matters, because here we are, six days before Election Day, and I still have no predictions about who’s going to win. One poll says Trump has a slight lead. Another poll says it’s Harris, who may have ticked back up since Sunday night.
I have friends telling me not to worry about it, that a lot of Trump people don’t respond to polls out of distrust and exist in sufficient numbers to ensure Trump a landslide win. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Some of these same people told me Trump would succeed in reversing the disaster of November 3-4, 2020.
One such person scolded me in a text: “Oh ye of little faith.”
In the abstract, I’m as close to being a free speech absolutist as anyone. The only restrictions I would place on it are the obvious ones involving property (you don’t have the right to come onto my property and yell obscenities), or invocations that place others at risk of immediate harm. That old chestnut about shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater qualifies, but so would calls to shoot so-and-so.
For what it’s worth, I think these people calling Trump a fascist are equally irresponsible. For one thing, I can’t see any indication that John Kelly knows what a fascist is. The point is, there are elements in this society that may take such words as a license for violence — perhaps using deadly force to get what they want, which is Donald Trump gone.
After all, none of the lawfare that’s been thrown at him has stuck. His base is laughing off those “34 felony convictions” as the work of a legal system hijacked by hard-left Democrats. They’re laughing at the “sexual assault” court decision whose supposed victim can’t remember what day of the week it was, or in what year it supposedly happened.
Trump has now weathered two assassination attempts. In the first case, had he not moved his head at the right second the bullet would have blown off a portion of his skull. The second attempt was thwarted before the likely shooter could get close … but the question in my mind has always been, how did that guy know Trump would be in that location, as it had not been announced officially on Trump’s calendar for that day? Is there a mole in the Trump organization?
The past four years have been such an across-the-board dumpster fire that in a sense, this really is Trump’s election to lose. Two dangerous foreign wars, the worst inflation since the 1970s, record-high homelessness, the illegal immigrant invasion which I’d warn is not about Latinos but rather Chinese Communist Party operatives and possibly Hezbollah denizens entering the country. Need I continue?
Does Trump want to win? Yes?
Then it is more important than it ever that he be vigilant, and surround himself with people who won’t shoot off their mouths without thinking about the consequences! Or do worse!
Trump himself has made remarks in the past I wouldn’t have made — because they don’t take into account that we peasants are all in the same boat: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, etc.; men and women; straight and gay; Christian or not; and so on.
Unless anyone thinks those at the top care two figs about the “grievances” some of these groups have against others.
We all live under a system that’s rigged to keep as many of us as possible broke, dependent, ignorant, and without hope.
The predators of GloboCorp want us divided and paralyzed with fear: not of them but of one another. GloboCorp is the seamless integration of global corporations ranging from BlackRock to Pfizer with the governments of the world and dozens of NGOs ranging from the Atlantic Council to the World Economic Forum.
This entity has successfully used both identity politics and social media against us. The former emphasizes differences. The latter’s algorithms silo us into echo chambers that take ideological divisions and magnify them. The result is that we’re at each other’s throats and not paying sufficient attention to what’s going on at the pinnacles of power!
If we realize the distinction I’ve been hammering for weeks now — the distinction between those who want people to be controlled and those who just want to be left alone — it all makes sense.
I’m writing for the people who want to be left alone, urging education about what’s really going on, suggesting specific actions, recommending vigilance. That’s been my mission here.
Those who want people to be controlled have a lot of advantages right now. They are better organized; they control all the media empires and the entertainment industry; via Big Intel, they’re embedded in the very structures of Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Above all, they control the financial system and have more than enough money to dictate terms to all of the above, ranging from academia to the medical profession.
The people in GloboCorp’s upper echelons are the ultimate source of the visceral hatred for President Trump. His very presence at the top of the ticket of a major political party in what is still the world’s largest economy and strongest cultural presence is a slap in their faces!
They will do anything, grasp at any straw, to bring him down!
They are using leftist foot soldiers, those who publicly denounce him as a racist and a fascist.
“The buck stops here,” said a sign President Harry Truman kept on his desk.
Right now, the buck stops with Trump. Why on Earth would he allow anyone on his team, or someone speak at one of his rallies, who would give these people further ammunition? Unless he’s subconsciously trying to lose this election, I honestly don’t get it!
© 2024 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. Consider subscribing and receive content not available on NewsWithViews.com.
Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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