Why Trump Won

The left is culpable

Darren Halstead

If you want to go back through my articles—lord knows I don’t—you’ll see I predicted this.

Once I saw Trump complaining about the price of groceries—which everyone can relate to except for Trump, who’s probably never been grocery shopping in his life—I knew he would win.

Despite the rhetoric, both parties are beholden to the same corporate masters. Life has been getting worse for the poor and the middle class since I was a child in the 1980s, while the wealthy have slowly chipped away at everything.

I lean liberal, and used to get death threats for advocating for nuclear power, particularly from liberals who claimed to accept science. Still, at least liberals were arguing over solutions instead of denying there’s a problem at all, and conservatives were more likely to deny any realities they didn’t agree with.

Slowly, this has shifted. Loud liberals on the fringe increasingly deny biological realities to the point that research on the transgender population was effectively halted while I was in graduate school. It became off limits to even talk about, and how do you best serve a community when you’re no longer allowed to even discuss them? You can’t even point out the flaws in the methodology of the research that has survived, which is almost exclusively pro-transitioning.

I reminded myself that the right poisoned the well. They stated that psychologists had “proven” that being transgender is a psychological disorder, and the left countered by pointing out we did the same thing with homosexuals.

Most of graduate school consisted of running experiments, doing data analyses, and as I got closer to graduating, re-rerunning old experiments, most of which did not replicate. These experiments were originally done on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) people, and had no external validity, or did not apply to the population at large.

After the deserved embarrassment psychology received, it became more mathematically and methodologically rigorous. There’s a separate master’s degree for Mental Health Counseling, and if that’s what you want to do, it’s an easier path. A PhD, or an additional two to four years of school, is not required.

We still had to learn about counseling and cognitive biases, and strongly recommended that doctors, researchers, and people in general should be aware of these biases, too. Unfortunately, while people can recognize these biases in others, most can’t see that they have them, too.

While I dislike both parties, I thought the right was clearly worse, but in the last few years, the left has become increasingly detached from the majority and reality, and too concerned with offending anyone to really say anything, while the minority they cater to has become larger, louder, and more vague and hypocritical.

Shaming people is wrong, unless the person is male, white, or you disagree with them.

Scientific American has published several articles stating that men and women are only different because of discrimination against women, and one of these articles included sports.

So it’s okay to acknowledge our differences and accept other cultures, as long as they’re the “correct” differences and cultures.

If you took the worst NBA player and put him on a WNBA team, that team would win the championship, and female athletes agree this would be unfair.

When Rhonda Rousey was still an MMA champion and some people thought she should fight Floyd Mayweather, I thought they were crazy. She might have been killed, and shortly afterwards, she lost to Holly Holm, who concentrated on striking, but also wouldn’t stand a chance against Mayweather.

First the parties stopped working with each other. Now, on several key issues, they’ve switched places. It used to be Republicans fighting to censor music and movies, and to be fair, they’re still fighting to ban books that disagree with their ideology, but several on the left have doxxed me and called me sick, and have told me it didn’t matter what I wrote, they “knew” what I was thinking.

They’re now the ones deciding what’s acceptable to include in movies and TV shows.

They call John Hughes racist without realizing that in the 1980s, most schools in suburbia were almost exclusively white. I was the one of the only three non-white kids in our entire high school until my junior year.

There’s a horseshoe theory about extremists. The further they stray from reason, the more they start to resemble each other.

This is why Trump won.

I think he’s a scumbag, but if you consistently tell young men—especially white ones—that you don’t give a fuck about them and diminish men in general, where do you think they’ll go?

Trump belongs in prison, but the color that matters the most in this country is green. If I had committed any one of Trump’s crimes, I’d already be in prison, and that’s not how the system should work.

This world has a lot of major problems, and the willingness to insult, threaten, and demean people is not how we solve anything.