9 min to read

When Supporters Become Enablers

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DIFFERENT

and now for something completely different.

Duh Magazine readers have no doubt grown tired of trying to read our posts lately, I know I have! But today, I have good news: "the worm has turned" at last!

☰ PUBLIC NOTICE ☰

Everyone is welcome here, within the broad definition and specific exclusion criteria provided below:

Regardless of the position you have taken with regard to President Trump and his "Transition to Greatness" campaign and strategic pivot, if you wish to remain here for long you should know right now that you are expected to be freely able to acknowledge those things which are objective fact, even if those things involve attributing something "sub-great" to DJT.


If you can’t do that, then you are already deemed ＝INVALIDATED＝ in terms of any contribution you might think you can make to a sober and honest, and truly serious (if sometimes silly) conversation regarding our President. Furthermore, Duh! Magazine would like to make this clear to such persons: You are not welcome here. This is not a place for you, and you do not belong here. Go away, you are wasting everyone’s time not to mention your own life. Maybe go dig out your old G.I. Joe or that big yellow Tonka Truck so that you can entertain yourself in the meantime.

☰ SUMMARY NOTICE: This is a forum for American adults who have reached a reasonable state of maturity, lack of personal dysfunction, and who are secure enough in themselves that they do not feel the need to cling to ridiculous notions, or abject falsehoods. Everyone who fails to meet this criteria already knows this about themselves and will kindly step off.

THE PREMISE

It is no longer interesting or even noteworthy to repeat your media source(s) to tell everyone who will listen that Trump did something shocking and perhaps even worthy of either Impeachment, the 25th or a collective worldwide sigh again today.

Post Outfitters (What to pack before reading this post):
  1. Trump may have started his Presidency with “Supporters”, but all he has left now are “Enablers”, and they should be referred to as such.
    • Enabler
      a person who encourages or enables negative or self-destructive behavior in another.
  2. Christians consider Donald “The Chosen One”, as if we’re all living in the Matrix (?)
  3. The far-right considers “take the red pill” to mean “stay loyal to the only reality that matters” - missing the point entirely, but hey, that’s kinda their thing.
  4. The Donald is the Oligarchys’ Presiding Executioner. Hey, what do you know, that forms a handy acronym, “The DOPE”. Let us use that to refer to him in short, and how about that for an unlikely happenstance!

With it now at least provisionally established that our President is a DOPE, please bear with me for just these few bullet points, because I need to set the stage in order to make my larger point:

It is NO LONGER INTERESTING or noteworthy to remark, “I just can’t believe Trump has any supporters left!”

First of all, he doesn’t, we covered this. He has only Enablers. Try to keep up.

The point is, it’s time for something new, something deeper, and yet still accessible and comfortable for everyone to read and ponder. The things most of us know, but for whatever reason find hard to say, or feel a strong resistance to even consider.

=-=-=-=-=-=-= Trump has an evil plan to take over the world. A lot of people have been saying this! These are people I know, some of these people. Beautiful people. They say it!

Some people say they have seen the cover of his secret plan, and that the title is: “Mein Donald’s Beautiful Secret Kampf Plan for Greatness”.

We need to understand, that for Trump’s evil plan to work, America must first be cast as a “wasteland”, a nation in such a terrible state that “only I can fix it”. This implied short of just having to say it, that he sees the U.S. is =NOT the greatest=. These are the very words he used to introduce himself as President on “really big crowd day”, aka his Inauguration.

That speech was a comparatively dark and foreboding preview of coming attractions, and a speech far different than anything we’ve heard from a new President for as long as anyone alive can remember.

Meanwhile, here is what I’ve learned over the past several years, and which built on what I had already learned about Republicans and the Conservative Right movement in the U.S. in the years before and leading directly up to the election of Trump:

☰ ▸▸ As we are constantly reminded, there are essentially just two political blocs (two categories of voters): Democrat and Republican. Yet many of us, on both sides, do not want or accept the label of either “Republican” or “Democrat”, either because we are super special and so much more complicated than that, or because we see the labels as absurd and meaningless, or both. But this only scratches the surface of what is a much more serious and long-standing concern regarding this binary system. More on that later in this post. ☰

Either way, we need to come up with a word to describe each of these two “Major Types” of people in the U.S. today. Remember as you read this, that these are deliberate stereotypes, not necessary an attempt to describe you or exclude you, either, in terms of describing the typical Republican and Democrat:

  1. One side, and the clear majority in our country today, “Believe Evil Surrounds Trump,” and so we will call these the “BEST” people; The BEST are naturally at odds with the other kind;

  2. The other sort, and current minority, are those who “Believe In Great, Omnipotent Trump” and so we’ll call them “BIGOTS”.

Although these acronyms are completely random and only coincidentally form words with a meaning unto themselves, they fortunately also happen to well describe the other’s stereotypical view of those individuals who subscribe to the “other side”. They are also two diametrically opposed yet predominant views of the DOPE. What the… how about that, it happened again!

I dare say most of us have experienced a certain type of phenomena, whereby we see signs everywhere that the universe seems aligned to a certain way of thinking about a given thing, whether or not we agree. In this case, so far anyway, I agree, and lo and behold completely by chance, that brings me to my first point.

Perhaps you’ve noticed this too. That, when one considers a given problem of any real size that we as a species or as a society face, there is almost without exception, one way of looking at that is easy, and almost impossibly not to, associate directly with Trump, and then there is the other, entirely contrary view on the matter. Know what I mean?

Why, regardless of what issue or problem one wishes to bring up, do the BIGOTS choose the worst possible choice? It is remarkable how they choose to describe and interpret a given problem in a manner that is among the most destructive, or pursue a solution that is backward, insert evidence which is false, and generally promote only the malevolent or “meanest”, least humanitarian choice for a solution.

Not only that, but they claim to do so objectively, yet on the basis of almost no evidence, or manufactured fiction that stems from what is already known to be a factually identified falsehoods. They are even enthusiastic about their typically unfair, unjust, plainly greedy and selfish thoughts.

When it is a question of generosity or kindness, individual freedom or the safety of our loved ones, they are stingy, mean, duplicitous and grossly hypocritical. When they fail to put together a cohesive or compelling argument (much more often than not), then they turn to leveraging the opinion of people who are bigots, openly and willingly either chronically dysfunctional, in denial, or just playing a role to enrich themselves (Rush).

Even their own thought leaders hold decidedly base opinions, make inflammatory remarks and are continually hell-bent on division, never common-ground or reasonable or rationale conversation or debate. They are the categorical choice of BIGOTS when it comes to their Heroes, News & even their idea of “part of God’s work”.

They are pervasively misinformed or chronically ignorant by choice.

Because meanwhile, the opposite is most often true. That is, the clearly constructive, pro-active, preventative and overtly beneficial, and also generally the most sustainable and positive in terms of long-term impacts and implications, wherein the preponderance of evidence or indeed on the basis of being factually true and therefore most clearly smart, wise and legitimate —or even what we would consider to be the only reasonable and “good” choice, is objectively and on the basis of that evidence, the most humanitarian, ethically preferred and/or most morally sound choice, it far and away the BEST approach.

This might be all well and good, because it simplifies matters so, in the sense that if I ask someone whether they consider themselves a progressive and they say “yes”, I feel immediately confident that they understand and practice at least some degree of empathy and compassion. A person doesn’t last long in progressive circles without such an ability to be in close touch with our “humanness”, and so it is largely a self-sorting mechanism.