The War on Donald Trump: Embracing the Post Objective-Reality World
This article was completed just before the latest turn in the Russian collusion saga regarding Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with the Russian lawyer. I fear that the coherence of the article will be the least of the fallout from what is perhaps the strangest turn yet in this matter. Ultimately, I still maintain that there was no collusion with Russia; however, one has to question Donald Trump Jr’s intelligence in attending a meeting advertised (quite possibly falsely) as connected to the Russian government. Regardless, we can be sure that the phenomenon of divergent objective realities between our side and the Cultural Marxists will continue….
We are living in a time with no agreed upon objective reality. Often one hears leftists lament this, longing for the days of three television networks and the consequent stranglehold on information. Staid, venerable journalists lament that we no longer have a “shared set of facts.” Alas, those were never “the facts.”
This post-objective reality world—isn’t it thrilling? Unmoored by tradition, the world has no static reference points, and therefore boundless opportunities. In this “anything goes” environment, Alt-Right ideology is poised to take off. It is simply a matter of embracing the absurdity of the situation.
Yet despite the lack of all agreed upon reference points, we continue to use the vocabulary of an objective reality in order to persuade others to our point of view. We talk about “evidence” and “reason” and “facts,” and then lay them out in a heavy-handed manner which betrays the lack of all three. This is echoed in the left, with their insistence on having all of the facts, and raining down contempt on any who would dare contradict them.
Of course, to discuss evidence in terms of a realistic view on race or gender, all the data are on our side. But that isn’t “evidence,” you see, because the elite establishment is the entity which confers the status of “evidence”; and conversely, non-welcome data and arguments are simply labeled “hate,” and they get no funding from the universities or the government. The response to us from mainstream America is, ‘Why do you even want to know that?’ And perhaps the best answer to that question is, ‘I want to know because you don’t want me to know.’
Indeed, something has gone wrong in the way that we discuss “evidence,” to the point where as soon as a journalist or researcher references “evidence,” I become more, not less skeptical of his arguments. The framing of the debate has become perverse: it’s “heads we win, tails you lose” when engaging with the Cultural Marxists in the battlefield of ideology and politics.
Richard Spencer has advocated that it is not necessarily the laying out of statistics, crime stats, IQ charts, and so on with which we should propagate our ideas; but rather the more intangible aspects of identity and culture which speak most directly to the human soul. As President Trump put it, “We write symphonies.” Yet no matter how gently we put this, it would seem we have broken the most forbidden taboo.
Specifically to the point of evidence, there is one example which vividly illustrates our failure as a culture to use the concept constructively in order to establish an agreed upon objective reality; namely, the Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy theory.
A Forbes editorial touched upon this:
Where there is smoke, there may be fire. So, investigate, investigate, investigate until you find something. The smoke-justifies-the-investigation argument is inconsistent with centuries of common law and the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of “probable cause supported by oath or affirmation.”
This article, “There Remains no Evidence of Trump-Russia Collusion,” was written back in May. This is not a new revelation; sources well within the mainstream have been noting what a bizarre charade this has been for months.
President Trump himself sent out a whimsical tweet a few weeks ago in which he wondered why, if there was so much nefarious activity coming from Russia during the election, Obama didn’t do anything about it. Obama “colluded or obstructed,” Trump playfully asserted. Trump was satirizing the rush to accuse him of colluding or obstructing with no evidence; and showing that these allegations could just as easily be thrown at Obama, who also was obviously not colluding with Russia. This is colloquially known as a “troll,” which often intersects with satire.
But our lying press does not understand humor (in a selective way, of course), and therefore gravely noted that Trump “did not provide evidence” (according to Reuters) for his claim that Obama colluded with Russians. Trump uses satire, but hasn’t the ability nor the inclination to explain his satire; therefore, these deliberate misrepresentations in the media go unanswered.
A “troll” is similar to irony or satire in that it bridges the gap between objective reality and a hypocritical stance we use to paper over inconvenient or uncomfortable truths. Because mainstream journalists themselves are constantly battling cognitive dissonance in their effort to paper over this gap, they especially resent these “trolls” from Trump and his supporters, particularly when they themselves are the subject of such satire, as we see with the notorious Trump v. CNN wrestling GIF.
As to the “Russian collusion” case, we see again and again that the concept of “evidence” is ever elastic, sometimes rigorously applied, sometimes omitted completely, depending on the cultural/political context.
When it comes to voter fraud, however, a phenomenon which on the face of it seems plausible at least to some degree, a lack of evidence is cited as a reason to call off any investigation. The claim that there is no evidence is seized upon to preclude the matter from being investigated at all. By that logic, nothing would ever be investigated because the results do not exist yet in the present, and therefore all further research is futile!
So why does the concept of “evidence” become so cloudy in the matter of voter fraud? Well, now we are dealing with matters of electoral significance, and the demographic implications of preventing recent immigrants from voting illegally. There is a lot at stake.
In a New York Times editorial, written with typical audacity and cunning, voter fraud is described in a manner which it seems could be more accurately applied to the Trump/ Russia collusion conspiracy theory:
For voter fraud ideologues like Kris Kobach, the vice chairmen of the commission, who signed last week’s letter, the absence of evidence serves only as proof that researchers aren’t looking hard enough. In his other job as Kansas Secretary of State, Mr. Kobach has made a career of detecting and prosecuting a supposed national fraud epidemic.
The Times goes on to describe Kobach’s efforts as a “quixotic crusade,” which again, is a phrase more appropriately applied to the “Russian collusion” investigation. But the New York Times has the power to define who is an “ideologue,” and therefore not good-faith seekers of the truth. They also have the power to preemptively declare that Mr. Kobach’s efforts have failed to produce evidence, when in fact the Commission on Election Integrity has just begun!
Suppose Secretary Kobach finds mountains of evidence—what would happen to that proof once the journalists at the New York Times were done with it—assuming they would mention it at all? If we lived in a cultural context in which evidence were relevant, it would be possible to conceive of a scenario in which the Times acknowledged, “Actually, we were surprised to learn that Mr. Kobach did indeed find significant voter fraud.” It is inconceivable that such an event would transpire; therefore, we have no shared objective reality.
According to Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff, one of the main perpetrators of the Russian collusion hoax:
We are far closer to the beginning of the investigation than we are to the end. But it would be the worst form of negligence to our republic for us to say we’re going to close the investigation before we can determine whether there is merit to these allegations.
“No evidence” with regards to Russian collusion means keep checking. Rep. Schiff is brazen in his carrying out of a venomous partisan agenda without regard for ethics or integrity. For him, this ten-month long investigation is “just getting started,” regardless of what you, the voting public, might think about it. It would seem that Schiff and his compatriots in the media have grown accustomed to complete control of the perceptions of the American public through their dominance of the press and other institutions. With that stranglehold now broken thanks to alternative media, we have divergent “objective realities” which bear no relation to each other.
If we are to take our cues from the media/political complex, it is quite simple: there are some things that they want us to know, and there are some things they don’t want us to know; and finally, there are some things they don’t even want us to look at. Every culture has taboos unique to their own quirks and circumstances; so of course we have ours too. The only difference is that we have a veneer of open scientific inquiry that revels in the pretense that our standards are based on rock solid truth, not on mere cultural mores. Au contraire.
These taboos are quite obvious and their strength can be measured by the extent of demonization of anyone who transgresses them. Communist Russia had their taboos, Hitler’s Germany had theirs, Merkel’s Germany has theirs; and alas, we have ours. Is there any moral distinction among them?
Let’s dispense with all talk about “facts” and “evidence”; instead, just look at who’s in power, and who their enforcers in the media are. Perhaps we’re in a peculiar situation in the US in 2017, as we have a real advocate in power, yet he himself is a symbol of taboo. The President himself is persona-non-grata in his own country, whom we must be careful not to “normalize”!
Hence “evidence” is no longer a productive term in a culture so bitterly divided. But however even-handed one tries to be in viewing the matter, it must be said that elite-journalist class is playing fast and loose with the concept of evidence. They’re like Black jurors in the OJ Simpson trial: Any evidence that they perceive to conflict with their racial agenda is dispensed with by a standard of proof so high that no human could ever reach it. When “evidence” is convenient for their agenda, the concept of proof becomes much more elastic, and indeed whimsical; so that if none exists presently, rest-assured it is right around the corner. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, as the poetic former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said. Unless, of course, it is.
So then do we play the game by adhering to the normal terms of debate? Do we try to “prove” our case in the traditional manner of presenting evidence and facts? Or do we embrace the chaos and nihilism, and adopt a kind of Nietzschean will to power?
You could read every newspaper in the country, and still not understand the enmity towards Russia and Trump in any rational terms. Instead we seem to be in a morality play of good and evil, for reasons that are only in the subtext.
The concept of “evidence” has been made completely fungible, and of course we must also allow that our opponents express a similar frustration with the right’s inability to see “the truth.” One can therefore say that we are involved in a type of metaphysical struggle against an adversary who has an almost Satanic desire to oppose us in those matters of most vital concern to our cultural life. Perhaps in these quasi-religious terms we frame the conflict more accurately.
Follow Malcolm Jaggers @malcolmjaggers
Comments are closed.