Uniting America? Don't Count on it

[Icarus]

No amount of unity efforts can erase what we've learned about our fellow Americans the past four years.

No, Biden’s rallies weren’t bigger.

No, you didn’t see many Biden flags on houses or Biden bumper stickers on cars.
No, you don’t know a single person on your street or at your church who supports Biden.
But guess what?
We’re here.
Biden’s rallies were small, because people who live in reality don’t want to expose themselves to the virus you continue to downplay or deny.
We don’t fly Biden flags because we don’t want our houses burned down.
We don’t put Biden bumper stickers on our cars because we want to avoid becoming targets for road rage.
We don’t trust you.
We’ve decided to minimize our interactions with people who cannot be reasoned with.
This is for our own safety.
In private groups - where you’re not invited - we share our bewilderment of your descent into madness.
We all have stories about how we’ve cut ties with you, our family and former friends, because we don’t want your hatred poisoning our social media streams.
We can’t stand to listen to you vomiting the lies of your cult, day after day.
You used to be different.
We liked you.
But now that we know what was inside your heart all along, we’ve decided you don’t deserve to know about our lives.
We’ll skip family reunions, even after we get the vaccine.
We’ll make up some excuse just to be polite.
But in reality, we just don’t feel like sitting around eating potato salad and making small talk with people who have such monstrous beliefs.
To all the brothers and aunts and cousins and dads and neighbors out there who just can’t wrap their heads around what this means going forward, know that these scars aren’t going away anytime soon.
We won’t be reaching out, and we won’t be mending fences.
It’s not up to us to apologize for the wounds you have gleefully inflicted upon us and our friends.
You poured the gasoline, you lit the match.
You burned this to the ground.
So if we seem different from now on, I guess we are, in a way.
We’ve seen your truth laid bare, and we’re horrified.
I hope Trump was worth it.

Author unknown

[Dr. Shades]

So, who divided America, again?

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

So, who divided America, again?

You know. You’re not a Socratic Androgogue, and this thing you do is just lazy posting. I’d expect the jenius and Xanax to pull this drive-by ‘talk at us’ style on a DISCUSSION board, but you’ve really phoned it in recently.

Participate in the discussion, Shades.

And now?

Go and sin no more.

- Doc

[dantana]

So, who divided America, again?

Your verbage and use, placement of the second comma makes the sentence read, to me, as; So, who divided America, [a second time]? As opposed to what I believe the question is intended to ask is; [tell me again] who divided America?

[canpakes]

So, who divided America, again?

A clue to one of the factors would be to take a peek at Trump’s Twitter feed, since prior to pitching his hat into the ring, right on through to present day.

[ajax18]

America was divided after the election of 2012.

The Left is now who it said Romney was

In 2012, the Democratic Party and its allies accused then-Republican nominee Mitt Romney of being a retrograde sexist, a McCarthyite, and an uber-elite who disdained half the country as privileged takers.

Now, Democrats embrace as their entire identity the exact things they accused Romney of being.

As Daniel Foster, a consultant and contributing editor to National Review, notes, it’s positively Shakespearian.

In 2012, Romney said of his efforts as governor to address pay equity, “I had the chance to pull together a Cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men. ... I went to a number of women's groups and said, 'Can you help us find folks?' And they brought us whole binders full of women."

The Obama reelection campaign and its loyalists in the press condemned the remarks, claiming the Republican candidate said something terrible. Absent from their criticism, however, was any clear explanation of what, exactly, was so wrong about what Romney said or why it was worse than the fact that the Obama White House paid its female staffers less than its male staffers. The GOP nominee’s critics maintained simply and falsely that he had bragged about tokenizing women.

Now, President-elect Joe Biden is a hero to his party and the press for the fact that he stuck a woman in the VP slot for no other reason than she is a woman. Biden did not need Sen. Kamala Harris’s help tying up the 2020 vote in California. He did not need her help tying up the black vote. Harris herself is not a particularly gifted politician, as her dramatic burnout in the 2020 Democratic primary made clear. Biden committed during the campaign to nominating a woman as his running mate because a woman's place is apparently in "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." More seriously, Harris was chosen for the simple fact that she is a woman. It’s good now to treat women as token hires.

In 2012, the White House and its allies also mocked Romney as a dusty Cold War holdover after he warned that Russia is the United States’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

Now, Democrats and members of the press see a KGB agent under every doily. Indeed, the left-wing has spent the entirety of the Trump presidency conspiracy-mongering over stolen elections, Russian disinformation, and baseless allegations that the Kremlin itself may have installed Trump and others directly into positions of power in the U.S. It’s good now to act as paranoid as they accused Romney of being.

In 2012, the GOP nominee earned his worst news coverage of the election after a leaked video showed him saying 47% of voters will support Obama “no matter what.”

Romney added:

There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48 — he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people — I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10% in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like.
Now, it is ubiquitous, if not cliché, for Democratic politicians and left-wing commentators to advocate for the destruction of the Electoral College for the explicit purpose of disenfranchising “red” states. It is commonplace also to hear many of these people complain that “blue” states are the real economic producers, while the “red” states, those useless, broke nobodies, suck at the government teat. It’s good now to disparage, write off and even conspire against that percentage of the country that votes differently.

Again, projection is a hell of a thing.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... d=msedgntp

Now we live in an age where one has to speak woke. Going in for a job interview as a mechanical engineer means being subject to questions like, "What will you do to end systemic racism in America?" The politically incorrect Trump populist movement has been the giant pulsating middle finger to this kind of thing. It wasn't just about Trump and it's not going to end when Trump is gone. You're not going to see Mitt Romney or John McCain Republican candidates anymore. You're going to see someone willing to fight. Don't count on uniting is right. That ship sailed long ago.

[Gadianton]

Now we live in an age where one has to speak woke. Going in for a job interview as a mechanical engineer means being subject to questions like, "What will you do to end systemic racism in America?"

Sure, Ajax. Between the two of us, one has worked most of his career in California and interviewed many times in California. Interviews that test at all for political correctness let alone that are geared toward political correctness simply don't happen. And by the way, many CA tech companies build like mad in cheap red states, but when it comes to technical expertise, it's very, very tough to find talent in the south to take over responsibilities from CA staff.

The politically incorrect Trump populist movement has been the giant pulsating middle finger to this.

Well, yes, it's been a giant pulsating middle finger to an imagined enemy. The part you get right is that the movement is essentially a reactive one of no substance.

It wasn't just about Trump and it's not going to end when Trump is gone. You're not going to see Mitt Romney or John McCain Republican candidates anymore. You're going to see someone willing to fight. Don't count on uniting is right. That ship sailed long ago.

yeaaah, mayybe, Ajax. You might be right, but I'm not sure. Trump was certainly, in part, a construction of his insane followers. But he really is one-of-a-kind in that he was a public figure of no substance for decades prior. Trump is an insanely good opportunist and doesn't really believe in any of the stuff he's fighting for. It's really unclear that another personality can drive such a diverse populist movement the way he has. And so, you folks on the right have put all your eggs in one basket, and I'll readily admit that y'all are poised to "continue the fight" with somebody besides Trump, but is there someone besides Trump who can take his place? That's less likely.

[honorentheos]

I don't agree with Steve Schmidt's view as expressed in the OP. Keep in mind that he admitted the Republican party he was part of created a dead trigger trap of liberal hate and distrust of government they sold to the Fox News watchers because it worked but that they never believed any politician would be insane enough to actually set off. Then came Trump.

I appreciate that Schmidt feels like he lost a party he believes in and gave much to and has seen it overrun by insanity. But he helped create the insanity and thought it could be kept under control as the conservative elite would wink wink and nudge nudge each other as they played their base for rubes.

He's wrong if he supports this. And he's doing the left dirty by putting this out there just as he helped do the right dirty for years.

ETA: I am curious if Icarus would source the OP? I couldn't find where Schmidt said this but did find it in a link I shared below.

[honorentheos]

I also don't know if this was Schmidt or he retweeted it? This doesn't cite him as author or post under his name. But it also seems to show up in other locations under other names.

https://www.villages-news.com/2020/12/2 ... -worth-it/

[canpakes]

I also don't know if this was Schmidt or he retweeted it? This doesn't cite him as author or post under his name. But it also seems to show up in other locations under other names.

https://www.villages-news.com/2020/12/2 ... -worth-it/

This doesn’t look like Schmidt’s style nor does the content seem like a good match.

The earliest found appearance that I’ve noticed is December 20, from a Facebook page run by ‘The Red State Rustler’.

https://m.Facebook.com/TheRealRSR/posts ... 7edBhU2n5Y