Enhance Your Calm, America
Editors’ Note: The essay below is penned by Conlan Salgado, a recent college graduate and a contributor to The Prickly Pear. Conlan is an astute political observer and highly informed conservative. His essay deserves careful reading. We recommend reading Mr. Salgado’s excellent articles published in The Prickly Pear.
Pundits are very sure that the current political dynamic is good vs evil. To the Left, Donald Trump is evil. To the Right, the federal bureaucracy and the institutional elite are evil. Of course, Kamala Harris may be evil as well, but her type of evil is very much the type Hannah Arendt identified as banal. Harris is evil because being evil is a convenience in politics. She believes in nothing, not even abortion rights or redistribution of wealth, or banning fracking. She probably did believe in those things as a younger woman, but politics in its postmodern variation has the peculiar effect of destroying even bad principles.
In the book 1984, O’Brien, a member of the Party, re-educator and personal torturer of the book’s protagonist Winston, tells Winston that the party has no particular agenda, no specific policies it wishes to implement. There is only one principle for the Party: acquiring power for the sake of power. NOT acquiring power for the sake of enacting a particular agenda, because agendas change if a particular one lends itself to greater acquisition of power at a certain moment than does another agenda.
There is something of an Orwellian facility to the rapid changes of policy and position displayed by the state in recent years. In 2016, it was a patriotic act to question the integrity of the election. An official FBI, federally funded, special prosecutor-led investigation was undertaken into the question of possible collusion with Russia by then-Candidate and afterwards President Donald Trump.
The more cynical of us always believed this was a 3 year insurrection—a powerful institutional and media method of undermining and perhaps unseating a duly elected President and his administration. Several Democrats objected on the floor of the Congress to the certification of the vote in 2016. 4 years later, objecting to the certification of the vote was labelled a treasonous act. The election system of America, so susceptible to foreign influence when Trump won, was in 2020 the most secure in the world.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, this facility continued. “The threat to the American public remains low”, said Dr. Fauci at first. For two decades, lockdowns were never accepted as pandemic protocol, until they constituted not only protocol, but the only possible option for stopping the spread. Two weeks was a euphemism for two years. Masks would probably not be needed, we were at first told. Until masks were not only a solution, they were THE solution, without which no solution was a solution if ever there were solutions. Vaccines would prevent transmission, until Dr. Walensky admitted on National Television in July 2021, “what we know now, is that the Covid-19 vaccines will not prevent transmission.”
Kamala Harris believed in banning fracking and confiscating guns, but now she believes in shooting home intruders and “drill, baby, drill.” She was, by consensus, incompetent, even amongst her own party members, until she had to be appointed Joe Biden’s replacement. Have we ever witnessed such grace, such poise, such eloquence, such staunch principle, such moderation, such affability, such condescension as is each displayed, in gratuitous but equal measure in the person of Kamala Harris, that middle class, former McDonald’s employee turned totally awesome boss bitch? HAVE WE EVER??????
Naturally, there are many ways to frame the political dynamic. Good vs Evil is certainly adequate. I sometimes prefer stupid vs smart, depending on the situation.
Unless you’re a bureaucrat, a corrupt billionaire, or an illegal alien (yes, they do vote), if you cast your ballot for Kamala Harris, you are stupid. Plainly and simply stupid. We the People, the aristocrats of common sense, the MAGA coalition, should be very comfortable saying so out loud, often. After all, intelligence has a purpose, especially rational intelligence which is supposed to be humanity’s unique quality: to frame it in the context of Genesis, the end, or purpose of intelligence is to name things properly—that is, to grasp the truth in its objectivity and then to articulate the truth through syntax.
For example, naming Kamala Harris properly might involve articulating that she is corrupt, sexually promiscuous, incompetent, power-thirsty, incoherent, belief-fluid, and a terrible, no good, very bad Vice President. If you cannot name Kamala Harris properly, your intelligence is compromised. Which is just a classy way of saying: you’re stupid.
Yet another classification, and I say this with much more caution, is framing the dynamic as male vs female. Or, more responsibly, as traditional masculinity vs contemporary feminism. What I mean is that Trump represents a style of leadership which is essentially masculine in nature – deliberately brash, calculatingly unpredictable, aggressive, performance-based, unsentimental (which is to say practical), and not at all averse to radically altering the status quo, such as in dismantling entire federal agencies.
Kamala Harris represents a style of leadership which is emotional, vibes-based, merit-averse, “caring”, overbearingly matriarchal, and preservative of the status quo. Essentially contemporarily feminine in nature.
Despite her joy campaign, she weaponizes her own sex and sexuality, not only in the way that she whored herself upward to Californian political prominence, but also in how she boomerangs her own identity as a female off Donald Trump’s supposed “sexism” and “misogyny”.
Her pitch for the presidency is deliberately void of commonsense or logic, defense of her own record, or any marker that even approaches a bid for objectivity.
Her only excuse for why you should invest her with the most political power on the face of the earth is that she smiles and has joy, perceptibly disappearing as her campaign muddles on toward election ‘day’. She may not bring your inflation down, or your jobs back. She may not prevent your daughter from being raped or killed by an illegal alien. She certainly won’t have scruples about sending your children’s wealth to Ukraine to fund a masochistic war of attrition. But the point is she’ll bring a good ‘vibe’. Even the Lord loves a cheerful giver.
I, for one, have often thought that what’s missing in the Middle East is good vibes. Have you ever looked at a Hamas terrorist and just thought, gosh, what a child – I mean, what a vibe-killer. Putin? That guy is to good vibes as Donald Trump is to ‘democracy’.
If the United States has a chance to resolve the war between Russia and Ukraine, it will require a vibe dump so large, you might as well call it nuclear. But you know what’s incredible. To paraphrase an inane and diluted Kamala Harris campaign theme – THEY’RE ALL GONNA BE GOOD VIBES!
[P.S. Yes, Donald Trump has my full permission to run an ad using the above paragraph.]