Friends, just when you thought you'd heard everything, the Dems start raving about how the post office is plotting against them! Eek. To think that a once proud nation has been reduced to...this.
The post office imbroglio, and the lefty lunacy behind it, are the subjects of my most recent article. Check it out:
It's Official: The Dems Have Gone Postal, and They May Never Recover
“Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a malady that Republicans and conservatives often speak of these days. The obsessive, venomous quality of the Left's Trump-hatred is indeed remarkable, and for some “progressives” genuinely psychologically destabilizing, but often, let's face it, references to TDS are made in jest. Conservatives, understandably, are reluctant to admit that they are vehemently hated, just as we are reluctant to admit that the “loyal opposition” to President Trump may have lost its grip on reality and become captive to its myopia and its rancor. Recent developments, though, require us to take these notions with the utmost seriousness — otherwise we may become guilty of the same willful blindness we rightly condemn on the other side.
The liberals' and the media's current fixation on the postal service is a case in point. The Left claims that recent changes at post offices, slowing down some forms of mail delivery to achieve cost savings, are in point of fact an advanced form of Trumpian/fascist election fraud. They claim that postal delays are an intentional form of voter suppression, and that the appointment of a Trump supporter to lead the USPS validates their theory.
This is nonsense on countless levels.
First, the changes at the post office are long overdue and are necessitated by the collapse of its business model over several generations, not just in the last few months. They are also changes that began to unfold during the Obama administration, and therefore did not materialize overnight on Trump's whim. In fact, the program of reform at the USPS reflects its independence from political meddling, not its servile Trumpism.
Second, the leadership at the USPS did not try to conceal the changes to its service delivery. On the contrary, it warned various states that, in effect, they would need to change the dates by which they advised voters to mail in their ballots, to ensure that they would be delivered on time and would be duly counted. This was not an attempt by the USPS to “sabotage” anyone's vote, but to protect the democratic rights of us all.
Third, the Left's current argument flies in the face of its own master narrative about elections: that we don't need to worry about “fraud”, because it simply doesn't exist. According to Democrats, concerns about the integrity of mail-in votes are silly and baseless. But somehow it is not silly or baseless to imagine that the post office is now a vehicle for the imposition of a fascist dictatorship on the American people.
Fourth, liberals and media pundits ignore the mounting evidence of problems in the tabulation and verification of mail-in votes in previous elections held this year. In some contests, final results took weeks to materialize, and in others a shockingly high percentage of ballots were rejected. Is this not a more legitimate source of worry than slight reductions in the speed of postal delivery?
Fifth, any problems some voters experience with the voting process are anomalies, insofar as voting has never been simpler in U.S. or world history. Recent changes making it easier for people to vote by absentee ballot and/or by mail or online, expanding the availability of early voting, and streamlining the process for voter registration, have led to large increases in voting, especially among minorities. The idea that the right to vote is “under threat” flies in the face of all this clear evidence of increased voter participation.
What's most distressing about the Left's claims of postal “sabotage” are not their sheer emptiness and absurdity, however. It is the fact that leftists advance them not with a conscious sense of irony or out of disingenuous opportunism. On the contrary, they make such wild and inaccurate claims without the slightest doubt entering into their (diseased) minds that they true. They believe, implicitly, that Trump plans to “steal” the 2020 election, and that recent changes at the post office are a manifestation of his evil stratagem.
The fact is, therefore, that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” has ceased to be an amusing catchphrase. It has become, rather, the religion of the Left.
To be a member in good standing of the “progressive” movement, you now need to check your rational, critical faculties at the door and forsake them evermore. It is necessary instead for you to believe, without questioning, any smear, no matter how fanciful, directed at people on the Left's extensive enemies list. As conservatives, our guilt, after all, can be assumed, based on our ideology, our party identification, our faith, our race and/or our sex, the company we keep, or some combination of these. Any investigation into the facts is secondary, at best, and irrelevant, at worst. Just ask Brett Kavanaugh.
We conservatives need, therefore, to start grappling with these awful truths: our political opponents no longer like us, to be sure. They no longer respect us either. They no longer believe, in all too many cases, that we are entitled to the rights of American citizenship, and some don't even regard us as worthy of life itself.
All that is bad enough, but what's worse is that leftists have burrowed themselves so deeply in the black hole of their “progressive” and profoundly negative monoculture that they are not even vaguely capable of discerning fact from fiction, and nor are they able to perceive when their own beliefs are contradictory.
Non sequitur? “No problem,” says the modern leftist. “I'll have a second helping, if you please.”
There are few things more dangerous in this world than a crazy person who thinks that he is sane — or, to put it another way, an irrational person who thinks that he is rational. And yet we conservatives must come to terms with the fact that we live in a country where at least 40% of the voting population has lost its collective marbles and may, unless the media environment changes massively, never recover them.
Meanwhile, a considerable portion of the electorate, perhaps 10-15%, is caught in the middle — not ideologically committed to the full slate of leftist fantasies, but nonetheless heavily influenced by toxic and maniacal left-leaning reportage (recently shown to be 150 times harsher vis-a-vis President Trump versus Joe Biden). We had better find a way of reaching this American center, of inoculating it against the insane ramblings of the Left, or America and its democracy will be lost forever.
I realize it is beyond scary — in fact, it is horrifying — to face the harsh reality that our political opponents have hectored and self-isolated their way into collective derangement, but it is necessary all the same.
The first step to curing America of the blight of leftist lunacy is to admit that we have, as a country, contracted a mental illness. Only then can we begin to devise an effective course of treatment.
Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears weekly on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480/106.9.
