How's it going, America,
Check out our latest episode of The Pod Millennial!
New episodes drop every Tuesday! Listen, rate (5 stars, of course!), and subscribe! I talk to Andy Ngo about his new book, The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult, a secretive extremist group linked to multiple deaths and criminal investigations across the United States. We get into their origins in Silicon Valley's rationalist and effective altruist communities, their radical beliefs about AI, veganism, and the violence surrounding its members.
Let's get into it:
Obama stepped out onto the rally stage in Ohio on Saturday and aimed at Donald Trump from the vantage point of an elitist aesthete who just won't truck with the gaudy, common, low-class folks. It's impossible to forget when Obama disparaged so many Americans when he said that Midwestern Americans in flyover states "cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them... as a way to explain their frustrations." And this comment about Trump's White House was more of the same.
"I don't know if you've noticed," Obama said on Saturday, "but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV. The guy's building a ballroom that's bigger than the White House. He's paved over the Rose Garden. Put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn, and there's gold everywhere.
"What's up with the gold?" Obama went on. "He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Just gold everywhere." Yes, Mr. Obama, we all know what our betters think of the President's taste. We all know you and your cadre look down on him and his plebeian aesthetic of showing off wealth.
Maybe it seems like a small comment, but just like the "cling to their guns or religion" remark during his campaign, it's a window into how Obama and Democrats view themselves and how they view the rest of us. To this crowd of effete snobs, guns, God, and gold are just so déclassé.
Those peons, you can almost hear Obama saying, wanting to ensure their ability to protect themselves, their families, and their land, believing in a divine creator who made all mankind in his image and sent his only son to die for us, wanting to splash around a little luxury when they can instead of living in beige Millennial austerity. How dare they!
This very attitude made me abandon the Democrat Party. When it became clear that the Dem leaders thought so little of their constituents, the poor, those who didn't consume college degrees and come out after four years with very specific aesthetic and social standards, I realized that I loved my countrymen too much to stand with a party that despised them.
But this is also an attitude that inspires people to think they are on the side of the moral good, the smart side, the side that can look down their noses at the God, guns and gold crowd. Obama belittled the "scary ads" being run by the GOP "to make you think Democrats are radicals or communists or jihadists or the woke police that will come arrest you and force feed you tofu instead of hamburgers." He claimed El-Sayed is "fighting for real change" on the war in Iran and for healthcare, and doesn't get into details because he doesn't think the public is deserving of details.
El-Sayed wants to end the war by ending Israel and "wants everyone to have free healthcare." Obama and El-Sayed figure "the billionaires" can pay for it. "Wanting everybody to have health care, how is that radical?" Obama asks incredulously, as though he doesn't know at all that someone will have to pay and, in the end it will be the American taxpayers both with their own dollars and, when the socialized healthcare system comes to fruition, with their own health.
First they talk down to Americans who love their God, their guns, and don't mind a little gold adornment here and there just to spruce up the place, and then he talks down to his own supporters by being entirely dishonest about what the plans for "real change" really are. It's one thing to make broad proclamations about utopian visions, it's quite another to obfuscate entirely how we would get there. The first step is to take away our God, our guns, and our gold. And then whatever happens next, we won't be able to do anything about it.
Libby