So much for the Democrats’ holier-than-thou convention

The Democratic National Convention, where elite party bosses, their lackeys, and their overlords — the big donors and corporations — spent four days trying to make us forget the past four years of misery they caused, is mercifully over. They spun folksy tales to sell us on their new figurehead, Kamala Harris, who’s attempting to shift her deep-blue image to a middle-of-the-road people’s purple.

But that’s almost beside the point. Like her doddering predecessor, if she’s elevated to the Oval Office, she clearly won’t be making any consequential decisions. Instead, her handlers will trot her out on stage with a script to read whenever it’s time to put on a good show for the rubes in the cheap seats. She might even do a better job than bumbling Biden at reading the words off the screen.

Given the many significant signs of progress in countering creeping authoritarianism, it’s no wonder the Harris-Walz campaign hesitates to further overwhelm undecided voters.

If we want to know what a Kamala Harris regime would really look like, the past four years provide a far better guide than the empty promises of universal freedom, unbridled joy, unbounded prosperity, and unmatched safety we heard last week.

Here’s another way to figure out what we’d actually be getting from those power-brokers while Harris laughs at us from the head of the table: Ignore the figureheads and listen to the true voices of power — the ones who, more than likely, have already been running the nation into the ground, either directly or through their operatives in prominent political offices and the deep state.

With that in mind, let’s examine two key passages from the DNC speeches delivered by their royal highnesses, Barack and Michelle Obama.

In his Tuesday night keynote address, former President Obama, displaying his and his wife’s trademark arrogance thinly veiled in a superficial veneer of eloquence, uttered these lines:

To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices; and that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidate, we need to listen to their concerns — and maybe learn something in the process.

After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize the world is moving fast, and that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up.

On a purely cosmetic level, the verbiage is much better than Hillary Clinton’s infamous 2016 reference to “half” of Trump’s supporters as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” and in a “basket of deplorables.” Unlike Clinton, who lacks the eloquence to cloak her arrogance, the Obamas’ sentiments are the same. Obama’s and Clinton’s remarks convey that those who support Donald Trump are the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and ultimately unenlightened” parents or grandparents who inevitably “say something that makes us cringe.” And though we shouldn’t “automatically assume they’re bad people” — because, after all, “the world is moving fast,” so they might “need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up” — if we listen to them and try reasoning with them, but they still fail to catch up, the conclusion that they’re bad people, temporarily withheld, was probably right all along.

Michelle Obama — always just a bit cruder in her condescension than her more professorial husband — made the point more directly in her own primetime remarks, labeling Trump, and by extension his supporters, as having a “narrow view of the world [that] made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happen to be black” and, thus, “doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”

In pro wrestling, a far better gauge of public sensibilities than anything from the DNC, a self-aware wrestler branding himself as “highly educated” would almost certainly get booed by the crowd. But not at the DNC, where Michelle Obama, implying she’s holier-than-thou, was met with wild applause. The applause came from both those who share her sense of smug superiority and those who enjoy being put in their place, eagerly agreeing, Yes! Yes! Rebuke us more!

Ironically, right after touting her credentials and hurling vulgar accusations of racism and misogyny, Obama, clearly missing the irony, declared that Trump’s approach “only makes us small. And let me tell you this: Going small is never the answer. Going small is the opposite of what we teach our kids. Going small is petty, it’s unhealthy, and quite frankly, it’s unpresidential.”

Right ... but reflexively branding those who fundamentally disagree with your worldview as racists and misogynists isn’t remotely “small,” “petty,” “unhealthy,” or “unpresidential,” is it?

And, gosh, it’s perfectly normal to assume, as Barack Obama does, that truth and justice are on your side and that those who haven’t seen the light are just elderly codgers struggling to keep up with progress. They might need time to catch up with the latest additions to the metastasizing LGBTQIA+ lexicon of victimhood, accept developments like letting biological males compete against real women in the Olympics, or get on board with policies that allow dangerous criminals and repeat offenders to go free without bail — while punishing us for defending ourselves against them. Meanwhile, an unending stream of largely uneducated, unskilled illegal aliens floods across the border and gets free room and board in hotels, while our own homeless and addicted citizens are left to fend for themselves on city sidewalks.

This, we’re told, is progress.But the hallmarks of such “progress” don’t end there. Rolling back free speech protections through censorship, deplatforming, and demonetization campaigns orchestrated by Big Tech, coordinating with the federal government to do its dirty work, is also “progress.”

Mandating experimental COVID vaccines for a rapidly mutating virus that constantly outpaces those vaccines was “progress,” as were lengthy lockdowns that kept schools and small businesses closed. This led to kids at the lowest risk of serious infection suffering massive learning loss, while their parents lost their livelihoods and struggled to make ends meet — even as tech giants like Amazon profited from small business closures in a suddenly under-supplied market.

Then, those same people, prevented from earning their keep during the lockdowns, needed government handouts to compensate them. So, further “progress” meant driving inflation by pumping over $1 trillion in public benefits into an economy already heating up after the pandemic. Additionally, funneling over $100 billion into the black hole of Ukraine to sustain a war that the Biden administration intentionally provoked (if you’re willing to break free of the media’s propaganda bubble, you can learn the actual facts about that war in Tucker Carlson’s eye-opening podcast with the eminent Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs).

Cutting people’s real wages even further through the domino effect of illegal aliens oversupplying labor at the bottom rungs of the economy while absorbing taxpayer-funded benefits that drive further inflation — yeah, you guessed it: That’s also “progress.”

All of this — especially preventing people from earning a living, making them more dependent on the government, raising their costs of living, bringing in cheap, illegal labor that drains public benefits, transferring wealth to large corporations, and wasting money on foreign wars — was, of course, so wildly popular that electoral victory for those responsible for such “pro-working class” policies seemed all but assured. But as the wise Obama cautioned, “The world is moving fast,” and the old folks who can’t keep up with the pace of progress might need “maybe a little encouragement to catch up.”

To give them that much-needed nudge, we had to mobilize an all-hands-on-deck effort to shore up democracy against certain backward elements in the electorate. That meant:

1. Engaging in blatant lawfare to distract the other party’s candidate, tar him as a felon, and sap his finances.
2. Engaging in more legal chicanery to try to kick him — and, for good measure, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — off the ballots.
3. Running media cover to conceal the dementia-addled state of the guy supposedly in charge of the most powerful nation on Earth and branding those who dared to challenge the media consensus as guilty of propagating misinformation and “cheap fakes.”
4. When the ruse could no longer be maintained after an unavoidable public outing in the presidential debate, having the wealthy donors, celebrities, and elite politicos coordinate to push the sitting president off the ballot, proclaim him a national hero for having no choice but to bow to the pressure campaign, and then replace him with a vacuous cypher no one ever voted for — all, again, in the name of defending “democracy.”

Given the many significant signs of progress in countering creeping authoritarianism, it’s no wonder the Harris-Walz campaign hesitates to further overwhelm undecided voters. They avoid unscripted interviews and in-depth policy discussions, fearing that such direct intellectual engagement might lose the election, which, as a recent article in the Atlantic warns, could threaten democracy.

It’s no surprise, then, that with white supremacy identified as the greatest terrorist threat in America today, and rural white Americans labeled as a general threat to democracy, the campaign avoids engaging in “difficult conversations.” Instead, it sticks to the proven strategy of labeling dissenters as racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, Islamophobes, or any other names until they are shamed into compliance.

The problem, after all, could not possibly be their policies. The problem must be us. If we set aside our lingering doubts and ignore every instinct, from our rational minds to our intuitive Spidey sense, warning us that this election is not a battle between the future and its stubborn enemies, but rather between our last breath of civilization and their advancing barbarism, we will witness such rapid “progress” that the older generation Obama referred to will no longer need to be reasoned with and can be permanently sidelined. Then, freed from this burden, we can spend the next four years — to borrow the title of Michelle Obama’s memoir — “becoming.”

We will become ever-more “educated” about and ashamed of our backward biases and prejudices. We will become less obligated to fend for ourselves and more happily dependent on the good graces of government bureaucrats. We will become less responsible for raising our own children and thrilled, instead, to have them taught a proper sense of generational complicity for the eternal, unvanquishable Western sins of slavery and colonialism and to have their genders and sexualities assigned to them by coach Tim Walz and the U.S. Department of Education.

We will become all this and more, becoming not just what we are but what we deserve to be, even as we soak in a stupor-inducing, four-year-long bath of endless, infectious “joy,” listening to Kamala cackle while America burns.