The Media, White People, and “Trump the Tyrant:” A TRP Analysis

The TRP crossover into the realm of politics and social awareness is something we frequently allude to but don’t often focus on. I now intend to focus on it. This post is going to be a serious political analysis. Nothing about game or lifting here. Proceed at your own risk.

A Perfect Storm

The current election has been fantastically entertaining to watch because at this historical moment we are watching a perfect storm of shit all come together at the same time. If you have any interest in politics or culture you really have to just watch in amazement.

We have Hillary Clinton, who everyone appears to be in agreement is an opportunist and a liar – there are plenty of videos on Youtube of her just contradicting herself constantly. And all the media told us, from day 1, was that she was the inevitable candidate. She had to win! Even Obama said this – that as to who the next president will be, “it’s anyone’s guess who she will be.” And it’s very little surprise that everyone in the media is kissing Clinton’s ass, when she’s openly in bed with the media and then bought The Onion to blatantly publish propaganda about herself

We have Bernie Sanders openly explaining how the fundamentals of our political process are completely fucked, how dirty money in politics means politicians aren’t representing the people, and he’s right. Yet for some reason, Sanders calls himself a socialist, calls his campaign a revolution, and blatantly lies about the pay gap with women as a part of his campaign. And for yet another reason, people are more interested in calling his supporters "cucks," a criticism more suitable for illiterate idiots arguing in a middle school cafeteria, and plugging their ears about the fact that he is 100% absolutely correct about the fact that money has corrupted our political system.

And we have Trump, the Republican that’s hated by the Republicans, and hated by the media, that no one can stop talking about.

I can’t emphasize enough hated by the media. It’s been a fantastic exercise in the Streisand Effect – the media hates trump so much and can’t tell you enough times that they hate him, but they also can’t stop talking about him because he’s good for ratings, so the harder they hate him the more popular he got.

Media Bias

It’s been very entertaining, for sure, but the common thread of this election I’ve noticed is that people are realizing that the whole system is fucked. People realize that the media is full of shit. Trump went out there and called the media scumbags, and people cheered. He didn’t invent that sentiment, it existed and he tapped into it. Sanders went out and said that the whole political system is rotten to the core, and everybody agreed with him. He didn’t invent that sentiment – it existed and he tapped into it. The media narrative crafting has gotten, for me personally, so obvious that it’s painful to even watch. I remember when gay marriage and abortions were the things the media was telling me I should care about. Remember that? At the time I kept asking myself, why the fuck are gay marriage and abortion the only things we are meant to talk about? At least then in my naivete I still thought there might be SOME objectivity going on in the news media.
Gay marriage and abortion are old news. Now the media narrative-crafting machine has moved on. But it doesn’t seem to be working anymore. Trump is fucking it all up. The more the media tells people to hate him, the more popular he became.

An Explanation of Trump’s Popularity

I came across and article recently which I found was absolutely the best I’ve ever read which explains Trump’s popularity in historical terms. I also noticed that it engaged in the usual media narrative-crafting of painting Trump as evil. It was so interesting, in fact, that I felt it worth a TRP analysis.

I must point out that I’m politically neutral and I strive to be as objective as I can, whenever I can. I didn’t vote, and I’m not registered with any party. I am truly and genuinely impartial. This means I tend to piss off people on both the left and right. This includes here on TRP. I’ve noticed that quite a few visitors to TRP have little stomach for objective or neutral political discussion. So I’ll begin with a caveat – if you really love Trump, or you really hate Trump, and I’ve offended you by not sharing your views from either direction, you can suck it. This is TRP, we don’t care about your feelings here. I’m here to look at the facts and to learn something.

The article can be found here but I’m not going to look at the whole article with you. I want to look at certain pieces.

The first is a very poignant observation about the nature of peoples’ frustration in our society today:

In Eric Hoffer’s classic 1951 tract, The True Believer, he sketches the dynamics of a genuine mass movement. He was thinking of the upheavals in Europe in the first half of the century, but the book remains sobering, especially now. Hoffer’s core insight was to locate the source of all truly mass movements in a collective sense of acute frustration. Not despair, or revolt, or resignation — but frustration simmering with rage. Mass movements, he notes (as did Tocqueville centuries before him), rarely arise when oppression or misery is at its worst (say, 2009); they tend to appear when the worst is behind us but the future seems not so much better (say, 2016). It is when a recovery finally gathers speed and some improvement is tangible but not yet widespread that the anger begins to rise. After the suffering of recession or unemployment, and despite hard work with stagnant or dwindling pay, the future stretches ahead with relief just out of reach. When those who helped create the last recession face no consequences but renewed fabulous wealth, the anger reaches a crescendo.

This is absolutely true. Back in 2007 when the shit was hitting the fan, people weren’t half as angry as they are today. The reality of the situation has settled and we’re starting to see the reality that something is very wrong with our society and we are pissed about it.

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of MILLIONS of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

This isn’t just the author’s opinion, it’s a fact that Americans are more isolated than they’ve ever been, and are becoming moreso and it’s no surprise to anybody here on TRP that the traditional markers of our social structure have decayed. What’s especially surprising to me is that this author recognizes the impact this has on white people (who, in case you couldn’t tell where this was going, make up the bulk of Trump supporters).

“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,” Hoffer argues. Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded.

The seething frustration, however, is now far beyond just the religious right. This isn’t a fundamentalist thing anymore. These next three paragraphs I’m leaving together because of the absolute beautiful eloquence of how they describe one of the biggest problems with our society today:

This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.”

I am astonished to see a semi-mainstream writer acknowledging this. The message of Social Justice has been internalized by society so deeply that most people don’t even realize that they’ve internalized it. The idea that white people and men, especially white men, are so privileged that their interests are not only less important, but that they need to be actively suppressed. Our culture has become so SJW that when critics of Donald Trump say that his supporters are “white,” they say this with the implicit understanding that the listeners will know that this is an insult. That it will be understood that he is bad or wrong because his supporters are white, and that conversely, those white people should be understood as stupid and bad for supporting trump. A symbiotic relationship of evil white and male privilege.

And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was part of the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never intended this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural marginalization. The Black Lives Matter left stoked the fires still further; so did the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems unknown, even in the wake of stunning successes. And as the tea party swept through Washington in 2010, as its representatives repeatedly held the government budget hostage, threatened the very credit of the U.S., and refused to hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee, the American political and media Establishment mostly chose to interpret such behavior as something other than unprecedented. But Trump saw what others didn’t, just as Hoffer noted: “The frustrated individual and the true believer make better prognosticators than those who have reason to want the preservation of the status quo.”

Again – absolute 100% gospel truth. I especially liked the part about Black Lives Matter. Nobody talks about the implicit converse of this logic. Black Lives Matter started after riots from cops killing a black man. But people aren’t stupid. We realize that black on white violent crime is exponentially higher, than the inverse and even police killings of white people are per-capita higher than police killings of blacks. But that’s not the point. It’s not that innocent lives matter, it’s that black ones do. And women. [But not yours!]

Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a GLOBAL TRADE war? In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.

This is where I start to disagree with the author. I half agree. The bit about not letting Muslims in is not really actionable as an idea. Even if you like the idea, you have to admit that the execution of the idea doesn't really have a clear path forward. A lot of Trump's ideas about economics are wrong, and many of his statements are at odds with the facts. They just are. Some of his ideas in general sound like something he made up on the spot without putting a lot of thought into it. Which SHOULD be the reason people criticize him. He should be criticized when he makes up nonsensical shit. Every candidate should. But the criticisms should have to be legitimate.

I don’t know what I think about the idea of the wall because I’m not sure how feasible it would be to construct. I think that there might be more logistically feasible methods of securing the border, while agreeing that securing the border is a worthwhile goal. Peoples’ opposition to this is that it is “racist.” If a Mexican-American had said we should secure the border, would it still be racist? If Trump was a transgendered black lesbian, making the same remarks in the same way, would ANYONE call him a racist or a [whatever]-ist? I suspect not, and this is the problem that I have with peoples’ criticism of Trump. It’s based on bullshit. Mind you there are very many legitimate criticisms of Trump. One of them are that he clearly makes a lot of unscripted comments which is inspiring in a brash, bold way. But it’s unpredictable, and sometimes alarming (like dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. If you want to see what life without the EPA would look like, go to China and live next to a factory. Let me know how it goes).

And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual. Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper-democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.

And while a critical element of 20th-century fascism — its organized street violence — is missing, you can begin to see it in embryonic form. The phalanx of bodyguards around Trump grows daily; plainclothes bouncers in the crowds have emerged as pseudo-cops to contain the incipient unrest his candidacy will only continue to provoke; supporters have attacked hecklers with sometimes stunning ferocity. Every time Trump legitimizes potential violence by his supporters by saying it comes from a love of country, he sows the seeds for serious civil unrest.

Here’s the interesting thing I’ve noticed about this stuff: I don’t think that Trump actually condones violence, I think he was just trying to talk tough. The footage of rallies I’ve seen show the protestors as being more belligerent than the Trump supporters. And it appears to me that the media tries to spin it in the other direction.

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.

This is another one of the criticisms of Trump that, as a neutral observer, piss me off. Islam is a race now? Is Christianity a race too? If thought systems are race, than can we call Capitalism a race? Or Communism? If I disagree with wealth redistribution [hypothetically am I a racist?

Also, I find it very interesting that the position of this author, as is the default position in media in general, is that anti-Trump protesters frothing at the mouth screaming "YOU'RE A FUCKING WHITE MALE" as though this is the worst thing someone could possibly be, is perfectly fine and does nothing to... what was the words the author used? "set up a rubric for racial conflict"? Trump, and his supporters, are responsible for any hypothetical violence that might occur because they are white. Have you noticed this?

For, like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape. Once again, Plato had his temperament down: A tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life ... is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” Sound familiar? Trump is as mercurial and as unpredictable and as emotional as the daily Twitter stream. And we are contemplating giving him access to the nuclear codes.

We’ve come full circle – departing from the objective historical analysis which very poignantly pinpointed people’s frustrations to lead us towards the conclusion that Trump is a tyrant because he’s unpredictable…when very same circumstances that made people frustrated to begin with are also what made departure from usual political scripts (i.e. unpredictability) appealing.

It may be that demographics will save us. America is no longer an overwhelmingly white country, and Trump’s signature issue — illegal immigration — is the source of his strength but also of his weakness. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting how polling models have consistently misread the breadth of his support, especially in these past few weeks; he will likely bend over backward to include minorities in his fall campaign; and those convinced he cannot bring a whole new swath of white voters back into the political process should remember 2004, when Karl Rove helped engineer anti-gay-marriage state constitutional amendments that increased conservative voter turnout. All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crack (especially without Obama). Throughout the West these past few years, from France to Britain and Germany, the polls have kept missing the power of right-wing insurgency.

Ahh, yes. Demographics will save us. In other words: minorities will save us from the white people. Right-wing insurgency must be prevented by more and more non-whites voting to save us from the tyrant. I don’t identify as right-wing, but the way this train of logic connects to other leftist/SJW patterns of thought its almost haunting. I think immediately how in Europe, the leftists want open borders with Africa and Arabia. I guess if white people are made into a minority, there will be no one left to vote for a "right-wing insurgency."

For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

It’s again astonishing to me that the conclusion to the article ISN’T that we need to address these issues that created such alienation and frustration amongst the white working class to begin with… the death of a sense of social order, the death of the family, the death of the father and the role of men in society, the death of femininity and the role of women in the family, and the rise of the SJW culture of victim worship, or even the broken lobbying system and campaign finance system which entirely completely fucks the legitimacy of our political system… These things aren’t the “extinction-level events.” No, it’s Trump’s campaign strategy, which figured out a way to appeal to these people. That’s the real problem. He said something rude about Mexicans and people don't hate him when we tell them to. That's the real problem.

Not the collapse of our society and the rage people feel about it. That's irrelevant and those people are irrelevant. Whatever you do - don't stop talking about how Trump said something rude about Mexicans, and never consider why his aggressive style resonates with so many frustrated people.

Conclusion

Americans love an underdog. Americans love defiance, we love not backing down and not giving in. We love a good last stand. We love when the little guy stands up to the bully. And he's usually not eloquent in doing that, he's usually harsh and rude because fuck you. Fuck y'all if you doubt me, I'm a fucking piece of white trash, I say it proudly, a prophet once said.

Trump, with his aggressive, irreverent confidence is, has filled this role in the minds of his many supporters. He is a reaction to people's anger. The media tries very to point out to us that he is a reaction to anger. But they want very, very badly for you not to notice WHY people are angry. "Because they're white" carries a lot of mileage in dismissing the anger of his supporters, but not quite enough. Our society is deeply imbalanced and people can only tolerate so much indignation before they react. Trump is that reaction.

Do I think he's a savior? Not really, I'm far too cynical to think that anyone is anything more than an opportunist playing the game. But it's very, very interesting how much the establishment doesn't want you to notice WHY he's gotten so popular, WHY frustration with the establishment has reached a critical mass.

In this same way, TRP is a reaction to feminism and our social justice culture. TRP has started entering the mainstream. Our very own /u/redpillschool recently was interviewed about TRP and did a wonderful job of explaining what TRP is all about. And they painted him as evil.

With the exception of this article I have seen no discussion in the mainstream as to WHY TRP has come to exist. Only that it is bad.

I encourage you, as you swallow the pill, to always question every source of information you consume, to take nothing for granted and always be aware that in our society, information is very carefully constructed as a weapon and the battlefield is your mind. Many powerful forces want to tell you what to think about for their own purposes.

Consider what people have to say, but always be critical of what you hear, consider the facts, and always think for yourself.