A blog post I wrote on election night 2016. I’m likely preaching to the choir on some of this, but thought it worth sharing. Even better, however, is that it now looks prescient for 2020, so I’ve slightly re-purposed it for that, too.

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While I was watching the election results come in last night – and I was as surprised as anyone – I couldn’t help but enjoy a laugh at the expense of, well, about 60 million people who have been crying, pissing their pants, and otherwise engaging in exactly the behavior that produced this election result. It’s not simply that I’m a fan of what the Germans gleefully have a name for – schadenfreude, that incomparable feeling of enjoying someone else’s misery, especially when they deserve it, good and hard – although that’s certainly part of it.

Let me set the stage for this. I voted in my first Presidential election this most recent Presidential election… and I was 47 at the time. It’s possible I voted in ’92 for Perot – I seem to recall wanting to – but I was also in naval flight training at the time, and it’s more likely I didn’t at all. While it might seem like an excuse, I was a bit busy at the time, as a new officer, a new flight student, a new husband, and a new father. (Kiss my ass, I was really busy, there was no internet, nor easy registration, nor electronic voting.)

Bubba Clinton was running. For those of us in the military, Bill looked like the AntiChrist. He was a philandering, dope-smoking hippie from the 60’s, who participated in a flag-burning when he was in London during the Vietnam war, and he was obviously the furthest thing from “military” one could have put forth in that election. In my defense, even if I didn’t vote Bush I, Perot had at least been a Navy surface warfare officer and a self-made man.

Bill didn’t seem to have any appreciation for our values and what the military represented… but the rest of the country elected him. I distinctly remember a good number of my friends: devout Christians, some from the south, some from the north, some black, some white – all were aghast. We couldn’t believe the United States citizenry picked him over either George H.W. Bush, who was the youngest naval aviator in US history, had been shot down in World War II in the Pacific, and otherwise, at least on the surface, seemed to be a decent man. What in the actual fuck just happened? We all wondered. Guys were talking about getting out, about how they wouldn’t take orders from some huckster from Arkansas, who had more than earned the sobriquet “Slick Willie…”

…and yet…

The Republic endured. The military didn’t get shut down. We still had missions to fly, troops to lead, challenges to the Nation’s security. I never even noticed he was the President really.

So, point number to democrats and Team Blue hacks would be: quit acting like a bunch of pussies. You’re publicly embarrassing yourselves…and your kids. No matter how you try to indoctrinate them, and convince yourself otherwise, they know when you’re acting like a hypocrite and a pussy. The rest of us do, too.

A valid question for me might be what finally got me to vote (after all of these years) for either of these two historically bad candidates, Trump and Clinton? And the answer is…. Nothing. I “threw away my vote” to support a third party candidate. (Psych!) Now before you start wailing about how I wasted my vote and – particularly if you were on the losing TEAM in this election – lecturing me in your own head about how I could have prohibited The TRUMPOCALYPSE “if only” I and all of my third-party heathen friends had voted for Herself, let me first ask you to go f*** yourself.

This is point #2.

My vote is MY vote. It is not YOUR SHITTY CANDIDATE’S VOTE IN A CLOSE ELECTION. Because if we’re being real with each other, if your candidate had won, you wouldn’t give two flying shits about my vote for Gary Johnson. You would be cackling and gloating over the people who voted for Trump and treating third party voters with only slightly less derision. By the way, Team Blue may be the best current example of this logically indefensible position, but Team Red voters were saying the same. exact. thing. just a few months ago with Trump down in the polls by less than the margin predicted to vote third-party. So, I’ve really had enough of both groups of assholes telling me about how my vote really isn’t my vote, but it’s yours if it’s “a close election ‘cuz third party candidate’s don’t win, so don’t throw your vote away, mmkay?” Please eat shit. Thank you.

That your preferred shitty candidate (of either party) failed to capture the necessary votes to win is not my problem. I voted my conscience; I hope you did the same. I respect if you didn’t vote at all, too. That’s an option I exercised for years because I was likely in the middle of moving from one place across the country to another (’96), overseas (’00), in a war zone (’04), or disinterested in the options being offered (’08, ’12). I’m one of those people who, if I’m hungry but the food options being offered are peas or collared greens, I’ll just go hungry for a little while. I’m not going to die of starvation – and believe it or not, the same is generally true for election consequences. If I don’t find an appealing candidate who is worthy of my vote, then I won’t vote. That’s a right I have, as well.

Now, let’s turn to all of the sturm and drang in the immediate aftermath by the Progressive Left, Hollywood elites, and Media, all of whom told us that Cankles was the ONLY, POSSIBLE, RESPONSIBLE, MORAL, GOODTHINK vote over the Orange Blowhard! Your virtue-signalling about how you were “with Her” does not make you morally superior to anyone. It makes you a “completely-unaware-of-the-irony” moron, of the worst kind – the idiot who actually thinks they know more than other people and doesn’t understand second and third order consequences. You have been lecturing everyone about the “proper” way to conduct one’s self – in voting, in what people can say, what they can wear, what’s “woke” and what isn’t, and how anyone who didn’t vote the way you said is a racist…

Which brings me to the most important point of this article: this is exactly why you lost.

Just let that sink in slowly for a moment. Yes, you – YOU – are the reason she lost. Now, do I mean “you” in the absolute sense? No. But if you are reading this and you have been calling every Trump voter a racist, deriding “Berniebros” as idiots, and otherwise being a douchebag to anyone who didn’t jump on board the Clinton, Inc. corruption bandwagon, you ARE the reason she lost. Yep. You deserved exactly what you got.

Let me explain.

Point-o Numero Tres –

I didn’t vote for Hillary; I am also not a racist. Now, I know that will be news to the Amy Schumers, Lebron Jameses, and other pustulant celebrities, talking heads, and flaming assholes who think it’s their God-given right to tell me how I should vote and what I am if I don’t vote the way you like, but again, why do you think the polls were so wrong for so long? Yes, there were a lot of people – millions, in fact – who didn’t talk to pollsters, or did but didn’t reveal their true preferences. I wonder why that could be… given how uncomfortable nearly everyone in popular culture made it to admit you weren’t “with her”?

This will continue happening so long as the Progs on the left continue to shriek at the top of their lungs to win the culture wars and dictate what is “racist” and not. Even one of the better known talking heads of the left (Bill Maher) had to admit he helped make this happen.

I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it. Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation: it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists cheered him—it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation.

Robby Soave, in this meh article from Reason.com’s blog, while adding to the lie about Trump being a racist, at least had enough self-awareness to acknowledge that perhaps the standard democrat tactic of calling every (R) a racist had finally bitten them in the ass. I don’t agree that Trump or his supporters are racists, but the “boy who cried wolf” point is well made. Moreover, where were all of you Team Blue hacks when Hillary was kissing Robert Byrd’s ass – a no-kidding, hood-wearing fucking Klansman who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964?!

Point Four – there are LOTS of non-racist reasons to be unwilling to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton.

I do not believe I am alone in being the only non-racist who didn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton. Additionally, I know Amy Schumer and Samantha Bee (and others) have assured us that they “read all of those emails” and there’s “nothing to see here!” I can only take this as proof those people either can’t read or are lying because they didn’t understand a word of of them.

  • Some of us take national security rather seriously. Some of us have had TS/SCI clearances. Some of us have actually had to defend people charged with significantly less than Mrs. Clinton did – good people, people who were simply dumb and whose “crimes” included de minimus violations of Classified handling protocols. I was required for many years, every time I answered a telephone in squadron spaces, to start my answer with: “Good morning. HML/A-269 Ready Room, sir or ma’am, please be advised this is an unsecured line.” Every. Fucking. Time. Some of us also have a law degree, just like the one James Comey has on his wall, bar certified and everything, and we might arrive at very different conclusions than he did about whether or not she should have been prosecuted. I’ve been a criminal defense attorney and a prosecutor, my opinion on her actions being criminal is not a “racist” decision. She got away with more than any client I’ve ever defended. Period.
  • To add to the list of non-racist reasons to NOT have voted for your preferred candidate, the trail of corruption around the Clinton Foundation is so significant that it veritably begs for a RICO prosecution. Some of us also take public service very seriously and believe that being on the taxpayers’ dime is a sacred trust… and personally enriching one’s self while on the public dime is generally considered a pretty big fucking no-no. So, Hillary and Bill’s little “you speak over here” and “I’ll approve the Russians’ getting 1/5th of the United States’ uranium over there” deal was – and is – in and of itself a sufficiently non-racist-y reason to never, ever allow either of those self-aggrandizing pieces of shit to ever hold so much as a job in a post office – but you’re mileage may vary.
  • Some of us think that Hillary’s “I landed under sniper fire,” stolen-valor LIE that she trotted out to burnish her foreign policy creds while running for Senate in NY is – all alone, in and of itself  – more than enough justification to not vote for her. This doesn’t even begin to address the whole slew of other lies that are too numerous to detail, including the lies about how she set up her server, her blatant lies to the American public about it, her lawyers dragging their feet over FOIA production, the Wikileaks emails where her Chief of Staff and campaign essentially ran the DNC and rigged it against another candidate… do I need to go on here? See, perfectly non-racists reasons why my vote might go elsewhere – and not even for Trump, either!
  • Then there’s the personal. A lot of US servicemen and women are dead because of Hillary Clinton’s complete shitshow of a foreign policy and seeming war-hawk mentality, in which she never sees a place where she wouldn’t use the lives of me and my friends to enforce some boneheaded decision to intervene. I realize for all of the really smahhht people who attend the really cool parties on either coast that we’re all viewed in that same basket of deplorables because we’re willing to use violence on behalf of this Nation, but maybe, just maybe… some of us know a thing or two and have some ideas about what sound foreign policy looks like and… with all due respect to Amy Schumer’s analysis, we don’t think the former SecState measures up? Maybe?

See? Lots of non-racist, non-sexist, rather easily defensible reasons why I would not have cast a vote for Her – at gunpoint. Now, it may be that there is no single other person in all of the electorate who fits that profile, but my existence is enough to falsify all of the current nonsense and whining and crying by folks who really wanted her to win. Stop it. You’re embarrassing yourselves and sending exactly the wrong message to those kids you’re supposedly so concerned about. If you really were, you’d show your kids how to handle adversity with grace and aplomb, vice sniveling and pissing and moaning on social media about how everyone who didn’t vote your way is a racist or misogynist.

Now, rather than simply bitch and moan in a blog post, in an effort to help you understand what really happened and maybe even “why” in more detail, I think this graphic tells a very interesting – and important – story about this election. (Link to the source for the map).

One of the first things I noticed as I was watching election coverage – (after the really important stuff, like watching the Bruins-Canadiens game) – is that just how much of that map is red. I know, I know, “but muh democracy!” but I’ve got a law degree and I understand “one person, one vote” (and unlike you, I’ve actually read that case). We don’t vote based upon acreage, sort of… but it’s hard to escape the obvious conclusion that we are a nation split between big cities and… well, everywhere-the-fuck else. Even where Hillary carried a state – like Colorado, for example – she basically carried a population center or two, and that not by much, and got slaughtered everywhere else. The same is true almost everywhere on this map. If you drill down county by county, it makes the point even more forcefully. As soon as you get outside of the city limits, they start going red.

It also proves the lie of the “racist voters helped put Trump over the top.” Because Trump carried about the same electoral map as Mitt Romney did against Obama… except that districts that just four and eight years ago went to Obama by 22 points (in one case), went to Trump over Hillary by 7 points. Let me let that little factoid sink in… the same exact counties in places like Michigan and Wisconsin, that voted to elect the first black President in US history – and then DID IT A SECOND TIME! – suddenly “went racist” and voted against Hillary, in favor of Trump… by almost a 30 percent swing. To believe the “racist voter” narrative, you have to believe that somehow Wisconsin and Michigan voters, who have voted lockstep democrat for most of my lifetime and who also elected a black man for President not once, but twice, all of the sudden couldn’t resist the clarion call – or should I say the Klan Kall? – and then voted against Hillary for Trump. If you can’t explain or account for that, you probably should shut up about the racist thing.

Back to the map – I grew up on the east coast and I must admit for most of my life I was simply blinded to what impact that had on my view of the world. I used to think guns were icky and unnecessary – after all, wasn’t there always a cop around when I was a kid to seemingly catch me doing something I wasn’t supposed to at exactly the wrong moment? Don’t we have 911 operators? And aren’t all of the really smart people living in these massive population centers, as illustrated by all of our exceedingly wonderful east and west coast universities, teeming with our Nation’s best and brightest, as well as their literati instructors, all unified in agreement that DA TRUMPKIN IS YUUUUGELY BAAADD?!! And didn’t our centers of culture, in liberal leaning metropolises like LA/Hollywood, come out in droves to tell Americans how they just couldn’t possibly be for such a misogynist creep like Trump? And didn’t our political betters in Washington, DC, and our media outlets – all in large metropolitan centers – lecture unceasingly about how Trump’s election would presage a doom so great that the U.S. and its people would instantly crumble, be diminished in the eyes of the world, and viewed as backward, racist, sexist, badthink people for all eternity? Wouldn’t our children and our very way of life be threatened?

Yes. You assholes said all of that and worse. Still are, in fact. I can’t even do the pants-shitting that is going on justice, no matter how much derision and contempt I heap upon it.

Now look at that map again.

You know what I see? For All of those People in Blue who are heaping all of this derision on those People in Red… what I see is that those people in Red counties feed those people in Blue. Look again.

You want to excoriate those “racist” farmers in Kansas who put food on your table, from beef to grains and all of the other things they produce from Iowa to Florida? How about all of that fruit that gets picked in those Red areas? Yes, even in California. You really want to prove how committed you are and how you don’t like racism? If you really believe those people are racists, and you really want to show your solidarity with Her (!) and your devotion to Your Principles (!!), then stop eating the food in your supermarket. Grow your own, you ungrateful, unprincipled piece-of-shit. Go hunt your own food – oh, wait, never mind, you won’t touch a gun, so you’re going to have to sharpen some sticks or learn how to make a deadfall or some kind of lure or trap.

Mike Rowe recently noted (and I can’t recall where he got the data from) that 1.5% of the country is involved in agriculture and farming/food production…for the other 98.5%. We feed almost 350,000,000 people – with a LOT LEFT OVER for exports – for you to throw away that last piece of pie that you don’t want, and for you to have extra whip cream on your frappa-whappa-look-at-me-I’m-so-Wokeaccino. But by “we” I mean the people who were in the Red Counties because Ag and Dairy farming aren’t happening in Queens or the woke neighborhoods where Nancy Pelosi lives, I assure you.

I have had the fortunate experience, being in the military, of going without. Regularly, in fact. It’s a part of training, because it’s frequently a part of War. I’ve also had to live “off the land” in places where the next resupply isn’t coming, or is likely to be interfered with by shitty weather, or the enemy, and where we STILL ship metric tons of food to our troops at war, because basic sanitation hasn’t even been invented in a lot of those places yet. You, Mister and Missus Average U.S. Citizen, however, live in a land of plenty, of milk and honey, and it comes as a result of a process you don’t understand, as a result of rights that you give no thought to, because of economics that your shitty progressive education programs in secondary school and elite liberal universities don’t even teach anymore. You might want to tamp down your “I’m going to Canada” routine because I’ve been to Canada – it’s where my paternal family all hails from – and you aren’t cut out for it. Trust me: the colder it gets, the tougher it gets. Spend a winter or two in Montreal and then come talk bout how horrible it is that those “deplorables” in Arkansas didn’t vote the way you wanted. Those deplorables put chicken on your plate (Tyson Foods is centered in Arkansas).

I could go on and on and on with examples like this, but those of you on Team Blue in metropolitan centers need to understand something: you have been living off the hard work of people in those places you think are”racist” just by geography… and those people heard you. They heard your contempt and your derision. And this is their way of telling you to go fuck yourself.
It’s not racism… It’s you. That should be the lesson here, but unfortunately, it hasn’t yet been learned.

You continue this kind of divisiveness at your own peril because if the proverbial poop hits the rotating blades and that supply chain is at all interrupted, guess what? The people on the farms will still eat. You? You there in all of those metropolitan centers, where you know so much more about what’s cool and what isn’t? Big swaths of you will fucking starve to death in a scenario in which you feel you have to “do something” about those “racists.”

Now, that’s not a threat on my part. I used to live in and grew up in one of those True Blue metropolitan areas, too. The difference is that my happy ass can fish, hunt, kill, clean, skin, and dress out my dinner if I have to. I don’t do it very often because there are others who do it for me through the wonder of capitalism, free exchange, and specialization. In return, I can offer up some of what I’m specifically good at and exchange value for value. I also know better than to insult people who provide my food because my mother always taught me it was terrible manners. And you? Well, you get to be a painter, artist, engineer, liberal professor, NBA player, or even an asshole actress, or whatever it is that you do to make money that allows you to trade that currency for the same food that comes from those Trump supporters in the rust belt and elsewhere whom you decry as “racists.” Funny how those racists are more than willing to make sure your fat ass is fed, isn’t it?

I would suggest that maybe what’s necessary is for some of you elites on the coasts and in the big cities get in your cars one weekend and start driving. Take a trip to a red state. I’ve had the good fortune – and disposition – to like travel. I have driven across this country more than 10 times from end to end and top to bottom dozens, on both coasts. There is only one state I haven’t been in – and I’m not counting layovers in airports, I’m talking about on the ground, driven through, and made a purchase. I’ve missed only South Dakota, and I’ll get that one eventually. You know what? We do have actual racists (still) in this country…but they’re damn few or they’re in hiding because everywhere I go in this country – when I’m not getting fired up over politics – I meet great people of all races, ethnicities, religions, and beliefs, who have been more than willing to extend their hospitality and good will to me through mutual exchange – and in a pinch, even for free! – simply because I’m an American, just like they are, and we believe in some common precepts, including the right to be free, to be left alone, to vote our conscience, and none of us takes kindly to being called racists simply because we didn’t vote the way people in cities think we should.

Let me close this out by adding a prognostication for 2020: everything I’ve said above has not only been ignored by Team Blue, but magnified! The level of smug, of condescension, of disdain for fellow Americans has gotten orders or magnitude worse in the intervening three years. The Media has been even worse in its treatment of anyone not on board the Progressive train and, in the campaign of the leading (D) contender, even talked about using trains to send opponents to gulags. This has actually happened from a member of a major candidate in the democrat primaries. If someone thinks this is how to “turn out the vote,” they may be right – just not in the way they think. My prediction for this election? An absolute landslide for the incumbent. You can scream “NOT MY PRESIDENT” all you want, but you’d better get some throat lozenges because you’re going to be doing it for another four years. My analysis? When you’ve made even someone like me vote for Trump, you’re in real trouble.