The Upside-Down Man
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Summary
Donald Trump is back where he started, and that s a good thing. I talk about how Trump has been able to bounce back after being denounced by establishment media outlets like National Review and the Weekly Standard, and why he s going to win the 2020 election.
Transcript
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I think the Trump movement from its very inception was one that was through the looking glass,
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or it was a kind of upside down campaign. And let me describe what I mean by that. So
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Trump, when he's getting denounced by National Review, or when all of these Republican
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bigwigs are saying, ah, we got to move past this guy, or worse, he's basically right back where he
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started. We forget because these organs have become so sycophantic that they were all opposed
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to Donald Trump. I mean, Fox News, most especially. Fox News had Megyn Kelly, who was then
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the star of the network. She was the Tucker Carlson of 2015. They had her set Donald Trump up to be
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destroyed. And he fought back with these, you know, crazy comments that I think later said,
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it's like she's bleeding out of her eyes or somewhere else, or some kind of referenced
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administration, I guess. But he counterpunched, he fought back, and he fought that off. But that was
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a setup for a network that is the Murdoch network that was opposed to Donald Trump. The National
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Review editorial saying no, period, about a Trump campaign reminds me again of a 2015 National Review
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cover of Against Trump that had all of these, you know, stalwarts of the conservative movement and
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even Glenn Beck and other people talking about why they would never vote for this man and why he's a
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disgrace and a betrayal of conservatism. J.D. Vance was a very big never-Trumper before he became a Trump
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ass kisser. Michelle Malkin. I could go on and on. I think there's a bit of a kind of
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misunderstanding about the never-Trumpers when you focus on, say, like Bill Kristol or the Lincoln
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project. The fact is, all of these never-Trumpers, National Review, Ben Shapiro, J.D. Vance,
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Michelle Malkin, Kayleigh McEnany. I mean, I could go on and on. They all made their peace with Donald
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Trump in one way or the other and, in fact, became sycophants and minions and underlings and
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foot soldiers and propagandists for Donald Trump. So, one of the reasons why I do think that Trump has a
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very good chance to prevail in this battle is just the fact that we've seen all this before.
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He's been through this. This is back where he started. And so, to go back to what I mean by
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saying that his Trump was always kind of, his, excuse me, his campaign was always through the
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looking glass or it was a kind of upside down campaign. What I mean by that is that from the
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very beginning, people who were mainstream Republicans, leadership figures, they either
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ignored him or denounced him or scoffed at him or said he was a joke. He wasn't getting endorsements.
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But what he was, was the first candidate from the internet, so to speak. So, Donald Trump,
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because he was willing to go there, as I discussed earlier, he had this, he had effectively 100% name
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recognition and he had this built-in fan base, people who knew him from World Wrestling, who knew
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him from The Apprentice, who maybe knew him from Twitter, etc. And so, he, his was the first campaign,
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campaign, at least successful campaign, real big campaign, that was internet first and then
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mainstream second. And you make the mainstream fit the internet. Now, he wasn't exactly the first
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one to do this. He was the first one to successfully win doing this. I do think that Ron Paul's 2008
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campaign was a lot like this. So, Ron Paul is a well-known libertarian for some time.
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But he, he got to people, particularly people who were disaffected with politics and who were very
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online, so mostly younger people, he was able to reach them in a remarkable way. And they kind of
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forced their way into the mainstream. So, the usual way these things go is that,
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you know, the mainstream media will discuss some news story and then there'll be reaction
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on Twitter or something. Or, you know, there'll be a new episode of some show that everyone's
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streaming on Netflix or a popular television show, The Bachelor or something. And then there'll be,
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you know, a pod, a podcast about it or a Facebook group will discuss it. So, that's the direction
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that it goes. With Ron Paul, which again was a small campaign and one that never really could,
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could win. And definitely with Trump in 2016, it went the other way. So, you had this fanatical
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support online, on Facebook, on Twitter, on 4chan, et cetera, that kind of forced its way into the
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mainstream. And so, what the mainstream said about Trump, you know, preemptively or the fact that they
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were ignoring him didn't ultimately matter. You know, if someone in Iowa denounced, you know,
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Donald Trump, Donald Trump could either ignore it and his Facebook readers wouldn't know about it,
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or he could basically say something like, well, you know, this swamp creature,
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he's a secret Democrat, folks. We don't like that. And he has denounced me, but, you know,
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whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche. No, he,
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of course, wouldn't say something like that, but you get the point. He kind of did say something
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like that, though. But anyway. So, it was this upside-down campaign where the whole dynamic
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had shifted. And in some ways, this is expressive of a broader phenomenon, which is the decline of the
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technological society and the rise, you could say, I'm not exactly on board with this idea,
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but you could say the rise of the network society. So, in a technological society, there do need to be
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these organs of control and persuasion, what Jacques Ellul called propaganda. And so, in Ellul's sense,
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it's not just, you know, a poster trying to sell war bonds as propaganda. No. The nightly news is
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propaganda because it tells you what is relevant, all the news that's fit to print. It tells you
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what's up, what's down, what's right, what's left. And these figures, Walter Cronkite being most iconic,
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were on one level a kind of barometer of public opinion, but were really about creating public
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opinion and evolving it and kind of molding it and maybe nudging it here and there.
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So, that was a 20th century society. Most people had, you know, moved out of the countryside. They
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were in cities or suburbs. There needed to be a new cathedral, as it were, or a new church, a new
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religion. And this was largely provided by the mainstream media, which in comparison to what we
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have today, even in comparison to what we had in, say, the 90s with, you know, 500 channels on cable or
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whatever it was, was really small and focused and strict, you could say. Three big networks, PBS,
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three big networks that were all more or less saying the same thing through a mouthpiece that reminded
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you of your father or your grandfather, the Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather mold,