And that makes it even worse!
Most of the boys wanted Trump to win. Should they mope around and pretend to be sad, as a way to cheer-up the girls? Would the girls pretend to be sad if Harris won, to cheer-up the boys?
If this was a fancy East coast private school, maybe a majority of the boys <i>wanted Harris to win</i> and were also disappointed. This would give them even less reason to performatively comfort the girls. They've got their own crosses to bear.
November 13, 2024
Dear Liberals,
I want to start by extending my condolences to you, from the bottom of my heart, and with all the sincerity that I have. You have lost in a profound way, and moreover, most of you are very confused about why that happened. I am writing this letter now to explain it to you in the most sympathetic way that I can, without any gloating and without any snark, because as much animosity, as I might feel towards the left or the liberals in the abstract, what I really believe is that the majority of Harris voters are victims of a deception, which has been going on since before you were born. It often feels, in daily life, as if there is nothing in the world upon which we can agree: but let’s start with the most obvious: in the past three elections, the polls leading up to November 5 dramatically underestimated the turnout for Trump, and they overestimated the enthusiasm for the Democrat candidate. You can spin a million theories about methodology and the science of polling and so on, but at the end of the day, the reason the polls were off is that the people doing the polling are all “respectable” people. They are members of society in good standing. They maintain the standing by going along with what appears to be the public consensus. They suffer from a systemic bias, which tells them that the blue team is good and the red team is bad. In every way, it is possible to be good or bad, the blue team is better than the red team. The blue team is smarter, the blue team is more moral, the blue team has the best economic policies, they care more about other people, they are the most competent and on and on and on. And as we all know—I think this is something else we can agree on—if Coca-Cola sponsors a scientific study to determine if Coca-Cola is bad for you, they find that it isn’t. And if the blue team sponsors a study to find out if the blue team is the best, they find that it is. For the most part, the people doing the study—whether it’s an electoral poll or an investigation into the trade-offs of an mRNA vaccine—the people doing the study are good people; they are sincere and they are honest and they really want to find the truth. But although sincerity and honesty are among their motivations, they are also inevitably, part of the blue team, and their money comes from the blue team, but more importantly, their prestige and their moral legitimacy come from the blue team. As a result, they engage in motivated reasoning. If they come up with a conclusion that goes against the blue team consensus, they run the risk of losing their standing, their jobs, and their reputations. Every researcher and every information-gatherer, from the most decorated scientist, all the way down to the lowliest election poller, has some form of this bias, and it bends all their conclusions toward the socially correct answer: “the blue team is the best.” The blue team is the team of the public sphere: most university professors, most technology professionals, most everyone working in media, and almost every single person in the sprawling bureaucracy of the US government is on the blue team. There are a few noteworthy exceptions, and they are constantly vilified and excoriated by the blue team: Fox News, X dot com, the Joe Rogan podcast, etc. I don’t want to put words in your mouth but you probably believe that those media sources are all wrong about basically everything, and that this is due to a “right wing bias” which is maybe connected to racism and sexism and homophobia. And perhaps you are correct. I am not asking you to believe all those awful people are correct. All I am asking is that you consider, with an open heart, that all of your blue team media is also deeply biased, in a different direction, and in many important ways. I think many of you are searching for answers right now and trying to understand. Instead of asking your own blue team media (anything not vilified as red team, no matter how it presents itself, is blue team), I am here, a right winger, and I am offering to explain it. I am a straight white man. If you were to meet me in person, you would probably guess that I am one of you. It’s entirely possible that you know me. I might be your coworker. I might be an old friend, perhaps I’ve even cooked dinner for you. But despite the fact that you know me, you really don’t know me at all, and the truth is you never cared to. It’s a funny little irony, but if I don’t “come out” as a right winger to you, you assume I am on the blue team. And I know from experience that you will treat me very badly if you start to suspect I’m on the red team, which is why I keep my head down. You may think the things I am about to say are delusional or that I am misinformed. Maybe that is so, but these are my perceptions, and it behooves you at this moment to try to understand them. For all of my life, from some of my earliest memories, I have been told that I am uniquely dangerous or deficient in some way because of my race and my sex. When I was a little boy, I remember going to a department store with my mother, and there was a wall full of clothing for little girls, and all of the shirts had cutesy anti-male slogans on them. They said “the future is female” and “boys are icky, throw rocks at them.” And I’m not trying to sit here and tell you that I’m processing some lifelong trauma over that, but as much as it is a cliché on the red team, I invite you to imagine how a little girl would feel if she saw a giant display of anti-female slogans, which said to throw rocks at little girls. To be honest, if you voted for Kamala, I don’t really think you can imagine it, but I’m asking you to try. You are tempted to retort here that’s society implicitly gives these kinds of anti-female messages to girls. Perhaps you wish to quote some statistics to me about the wage gap or about gendered violence or about rape. I contend that all of the statistics which paint a supposedly sexist or racist picture of the world are cooked in exactly the way that the polls showing a Harris victory were cooked. To be clear, many people did in fact vote for Harris, and plenty of men commit violence against women. Nevertheless, the blue team consensus is that the world is stacked against women, and constructed for the benefit of white men, and no one is permitted to do science which ever contradicts this consensus. Moving on, I am not here to argue about any specific statistic or study. During the BLM riots of 2020, I tried to show a statistic to a liberal woman, an official government statistic, showing that only 14 unarmed blacks were shot by police between 2015 and 2020, and average of less than 3 per year. We can stipulate for the moment that is three too many. When I showed this to my liberal female interlocutor, she said, “how dare you show me statistics, we are talking about my feelings.” That is the level of evidentiary rigor that I am used to in these conversations. I’m telling you how I feel here. I had an Indian boss at a large corporation who told me that he thinks all the English should die. I am a man with Anglo heritage. And again, and as cliché as it is, what do you imagine would happen to a white man who says he thinks all the Indians should die? In high school, there were clubs and social organizations for women, for gays, for blacks, for latinos, for asians, for everyone except whites. And when I asked why that was, I was told that I ought to feel bad for asking, that all of society is somehow a celebration of whites. But this claim doesn’t line up with my perceived reality at all. I don’t even want a white identity club, in fact I have no interest in such a thing, but try to consider, even for a second, the magnitude of the double standard. No matter where you look, every racial identity is something to celebrate except whiteness, every gender identity (I have refrained from putting scare quotes on this phrase, even though I think it doesn’t exist) is something to celebrate except for being a heterosexual male. Where is this supposed celebration of straight white maleness occuring? It certainly isn’t at my office! It certainly isn’t at church! All the churches I see in my neighborhood have pride flags on them and offer wednesday night prayer groups to end the sin of racism. And they sure as hell are not celebrating white males on television! All the TV shows and all the movies and all the commercials and all the video games and all the books in all the bookstores are the same. They are all centering “marginalized voices” — a term which I have come to understand means “celebrating everyone who is not straight, white, or male.” I don’t even care if you want to celebrate those people. Have at it. Celebrate whomever you want. But after a little while, the claim that those people are marginalized no longer stands up to scrutiny. It feels to me as a white male that society is set up to be a celebration of everyone but me, and that I am also supposed to celebrate this. I have been told for as long as I can remember that I am “pale, male, and stale,” that I am supposed to “step aside,” and that every great accomplishment in the history of the world was secretly actually the accomplishment of gays and blacks and women and gay black women, whose accomplishments and brilliance I and my kind have maliciously suppressed since, presumably, the advent of recorded history. As you stumble around trying to figure out what Kamala’s campaign did wrong, what could they have done to reach white men, you need to understand that she started 10 feet underground. The thing I have described just now has been my experience for my entire life, under every president, whether Democrat or Republican. Donald Trump is almost the only person in politics who has ever signaled, in any way, that he actually saw me, a straight white man, as a human being with valid concerns. Kamala’s campaign was decidedly not very woke. I see dems complaining that she tried to appeal to the center. Lord knows she never went so far as to actually talk about her policies, as if she even had any. At one point, the Harris campaign put a video depicting a white man jacking off, and threatened that if Trump won, he’d take away our porn. Can you even begin to fathom how insulting this? “You are a bunch of jack offs, vote for us if you want to keep jacking off.” And yet, in the end, it really had nothing to do with Harris as a person at all. The petty contempt that her campaign had for white men was almost refreshing compared to the vitriol I felt from Hillary or Obama. I actually think Harris could have made up a lot of points with white men if she had just got on camera, candidly, and said something like the following: “Straight white men, my party has unfairly demonized you for the past 60 years, and I am here to admit that, and I’m sorry.” But alas, I suspect would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Kamala to apologize to a white man. No, quite the opposite, the Harris campaign wheeled out Tim Walz, a man we perceive as having no dignity at all, as a lickspittle, as a kind of Uncle Tom with the races reversed, and has the audacity to hold him up as some kind of example for us. The message is plain: we are all equals, except you. You are the last among equals. Do you really think there is some combination of magic propaganda words that can overcome all of this? Go ahead and say what you’re thinking, “oh boo hoo, the white man wants to play a victim, he’s entitled, our poor crybaby” etc etc. When blacks and gays and women cry about their victim status, I’m supposed to celebrate it. But that’s not what I’m doing here, in any case. I’m not crying at all, in fact, I’m dancing, because Donald Trump won. We have the supreme court, the senate, the house, and the presidency. We even won the popular vote. You lost because your blue team biases have steered you so far off course that you are no longer able to think clearly about any of these things. You have lost the minimum viable truth needed to operate in the real world and hold on to power. You can take this rare opportunity to be humbled, and to wonder what else you might be wrong about, or you sneer at me, as history leaves you behind. Love, Zero HP Lovecraft
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