Max's Musings
In fact, the Olympics not only exposed how deep our divisions run, but also how irreconcilable they’ve become.
Now that the Winter Olympics are over, I guess we can all go back to being angry and divided, right?
Oh wait - we never stopped being angry and divided. In fact, the Olympics not only exposed how deep our divisions run, but also how irreconcilable they’ve become.
Let’s go over it.
Speak For Yourself, Hunter
I regret to report we have arguably the most embarrassing, most immature group of Olympic athletes in history:
Boy, what are you doing? But first, let’s take a step back: Hunter Hess is just one athlete, and most Olympians have elected to keep their mouths shut about politics, and have honorably and proudly represented their country. So I don’t want Hess to be representative of American Olympians at large.
Let me also say President Trump’s conduct has been inexcusable. I’ve grown tired of defending him, even as I continue to do so from the more ridiculous, Trump Derangement Syndrome-type criticisms. He creates his own controversies and scandals, never knowing when to just leave it alone. Is this what it means to be an alpha male these days?
Still, Hess nor any other Olympian who spoke out should be surprised going after the president or commenting on political affairs didn’t come cost-free. As the saying goes, if you aim for the king, you best not miss. It’s not a question of whether Olympians have a right to speak up. It’s a question of whether they’re entitled to our deference.
The fact is, delving into politics is always a high-risk proposition. For Hess and other left-wing Olympians, it’s comparatively low-risk, since they’re expressing politically correct, socially acceptable views held by most Americans, but the risk is still there. These privileged folks may live in echo chambers, but the U.S. as a whole isn’t one. We’re a diverse country, remember? Everyone seems to understand this except for liberals themselves.
What it all says to me is that America’s indoctrination regime has been so successful, people like Hunter Hess, Amber Glenn, and other leftist Olympians believe that to express their personal political views is to speak for an entire nation. You’re not hearing from right-wing athletes because it’s not as safe for them to speak openly and also because they understand their views are not representative of the population at large. Given that, who’s a better representative of America, do you think? The one who thinks they speak for everyone? Or the one who recognizes that they don’t?
The Importance of Authority Figures
We can’t enjoy anything anymore, can we? Outrage erupted after President Trump made the following joke during his congratulatory phone call with the U.S. Men’s national ice hockey team after they won gold at the Winter Olympics:
“I’ve got to tell you I have to also invite [to the White House] the women’s team as well…or I’d be impeached”
It’s an outrage that refuses to go away. What do I think about it? One, blaming the men’s team, as so many liberals are doing, is ridiculous. This isn’t a controversy they courted. As for going to the White House and attending the State of the Union, well, guess what: this is what Olympians do. Do we want to make this sort of thing an entirely partisan affair? Because that’s precisely what liberals seem to want.
Second, I said before that I’ve grown tired of defending Trump, and this is a perfect example of why. Is everything really a big joke to the guy? I’m (not) sorry, but I didn’t vote for Trump to be “one of the boys” and neither did millions of other Americans. I’m old enough to remember when George W. Bush’s supporters lauded him for being the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with, and how nobody else cared, because a president isn’t supposed to be a guy you share brews with. A president is an authority figure. Authority figures shouldn’t be despised, but they cannot be viewed as comical, either.
The women’s team absolutely didn’t deserve this. They won the gold medal, for Christ’s sake. Where was their phone call? Regardless who the joke was on, it doesn’t matter, because the women’s team deserved better than to be little more than part of a punchline. I respect them immensely for the way they handled a shameful, ugly episode they had no part in creating. This is a controversy Trump created, through and through. Meanwhile, the men’s team is basically having to bear the brunt of outrage.
And no, the Left cannot be allowed to be part of the solution, because they’re very much the problem. Here’s far-left former soccer player and wannabe elder stateswoman Megan Rapinoe blessing us all with her wisdom:
Former U.S Soccer player Megan Rapinoe encourages Olympic players to reject Trump’s White House invitations:
“Trump's using you to do something else, he's always going to co-opt your moment... why don't you respect you enough to not be used in this moment.”
The same way she tried to co-opt the entire game of soccer, the entire U.S. Women’s National Team, for her personal political agenda? The hypocrisy, lack of self-awareness, and narcissism is so mind-blowing, you wonder if she has a soul. You can’t even see these people as human because they work so hard to pretend as though they’re not.
But this isn’t about Rapinoe, because she’s not a leader, she can never be a leader, and she lacks authority even in the game she made a career of playing. One of the surest signs the U.S. is in an unrecoverable crisis is that the people who are supposed to be leaders, like the president, lack a sense of authority. Even if a truly authoritative figure, like George Washington, emerged in our current moment, it wouldn’t matter, because the situation hasn’t reached the level of existential emergency, and because the whole concept of authority has lost credence.
This is where I think the Right cannot continue dismissing these “off-the-cuff” moments by Trump, why they cannot keep defending every little mistake he makes. It all adds up. More important, Trump’s presidency hasn’t been anywhere close to successful for him to deserve the benefit of the doubt. Every time a new controversy erupts, regardless of the facts on the ground, Americans have every right to ask: What do you do all day exactly, Mr. President? What’s really going on in that head of yours?
Obama The Snake
With President Trump’s favorability continuing to decline to depths previously unknown, former President Barack Obama is being lauded as our last decent president. It led to some bizarre takes, almost as bizarre as the way they also act like they never hated George W. Bush or John McCain.
What makes it bizarre? I’ll begin by saying Obama was far from the worst we’ve ever had. That’s just not factually true. But I also think that Obama being the unanimous favorite among elites and having such high favorability ratings with the public should make anyone skeptical, given that all U.S. presidents, especially in our collective lifetimes, have been controversial figures. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
Yes, it’s true that Obama wasn’t as bluntly divisive as Trump is. I think I’ve made the point clearly that Trump’s behavior is quite unbecoming for the most part, and I do blame the Right and the MAGA movement for indulging it the way they have and continue to do. I don’t expect Trump to have the class of some mid-20th century president, but I do expect him not to act like a vulgar insult-comedian every waking minute of the day, then wonder why nobody takes him seriously.
However, one need not be openly vulgar to be divisive. In some ways, Obama was a more divisive figure because he was a serious person. He clearly meant everything he said, even if he was more measured in rhetoric. The message still came through loud and clear.
David Harsanyi writes in the Washington Examiner:
Virtually every poll taken on the issue finds Democrats are far less inclined to accept Republicans as friends or family members. This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s witnessed the screeching moralistic anger of the average leftist activist — a disposition popularized during the Obama era.
Obama’s entire scandal-ridden supercilious presidency was focused on coercing, browbeating and, ultimately, slandering the bitter clingers. In the former president’s vernacular, “coming together” simply meant accepting Obama’s worldview as incontrovertible truth.
And one of the most grating habits in this regard was Obama’s turning every tragedy and political event into a sermon about our collective failings.
I remember it well - Obama was called the “Lecturer-in-Chief” by his political opponents. They weren’t wrong. Every time Obama spoke, he was either being a college professor telling you what to think, or a wannabe national parent telling you everything you’re doing wrong. Liberals loved it, of course, since Americans are all a bunch of children who can’t do anything right. Both Obama’s campaign and presidency were motivated less by pride in America and more by antipathy towards it.
As for Obama being a “post-racial” president, that delusion evaporated in a hurry:
There seemingly wasn’t a single “racial” incident anywhere in the country that Obama wouldn’t exacerbate and exploit for political purposes.
It began with his contention that “Cambridge police acted stupidly” after local police arrested historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was seen breaking into his own house, and continued with the killing of Trayvon Martin in an altercation with a neighborhood watch volunteer. Obama implored 350 million Americans, none of whom had anything to do with the case, to do “soul-searching.”
The arrest of Henry Louis Gates occurred just a half-year into Obama’s first term. It was a significant moment in his presidency. For one, White favorability towards Obama fell, though not to a degree that it ruined his future political prospects. For two, it was a “mask-off” moment, where the reality of Obama was laid bare, where it became blatantly obvious that he wasn’t going to be the uniter he’d fashioned himself as during the campaign.
What should Obama have done? I don’t want to turn this into a retrospective on that one moment from 2009, but I’ve maintained, for years, that all Obama had to say was something to the effect of:
I’ve known my friend Henry for many years. If he broke the law, this would be the first I’ve heard of him doing so. I don’t have all the facts, so I can’t say much, but whatever happened, I hope it’s all just a misunderstanding and it gets cleared up soon.
That’s it. That’s all that needed to be said. He would’ve defended his friend’s honor while also not appearing to take sides. For someone lauded for being articulate, you think he could’ve managed that, no? Even Obama later confessed that he “could’ve chosen my words more carefully.” I’m sure some would’ve still criticized him, but it wouldn’t have triggered anything close to the firestorm of controversy Obama’s actual remarks did. A “beer summit” would’ve have been unnecessary, as nice a gesture as it was.
Then there was the infamous If I Had A Son moment:
“If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” Obama said. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” The implication, of course, was that young black men were being killed solely due to their color. Martin’s shooter, George Zimmerman, was found not guilty by a jury, and Obama’s Justice Department did not file civil rights charges.
Conversely, Obama, to my knowledge, has never regretted saying what he said here. I don’t think most Americans appreciate how problematic his statement was. So blatantly taking sides in a case whose facts were far from certain, based entirely on race, was inflammatory and, dare I say it, un-American. In fact, Obama was the first president to reject the post-Civil Rights consensus on race. Does anyone still want to act all surprised race relations deteriorated during the Obama administration?
From Harsanyi:
By 2016, Gallup found that 46% of Americans believed race relations had worsened during his presidency, compared with 29% who felt they improved. A 2016 New York Times poll found 69% of Americans described race relations as “generally bad.”
Ask yourself - by what standard could this be considered a success? Even if you honestly, though wrongly, believe the decline in race relations is because of the refusal of Whites to play nice, it’d still be considered a failure because it obviously didn’t work.
Harsanyi’s bottom line:
Obviously, Americans are divided because we have deep-seated, legitimate and meaningful disagreements about the future. That’s why politics exists. The political “unity” that Democrats claimed to strive for only exists in dictatorships. The inability to accept this made Obama the most divisive president of the modern age.
Which isn’t to say that subsequent presidents brought us together. Far, far from it. It’s to say that Obama changed the way presidents spoke about and to their constituents. It was Obama’s systematic subversion of norms that made Donald Trump possible.
Obviously, you can’t have a nation, federal republic, any kind of state without some form of political unity. Conservatives understand this better than liberals do, actually. What Obama did was try to establish a new form of political unity right down to how Americans thought. For him, it wasn’t enough to get along with your neighbors and respect each other’s opinions and spaces. You had to see the world exactly through their eyes, be it blacks, LGBTQ+, women, the list goes on. Anything less would be indecent. This was the origin of today’s weaponized empathy on the Left.
I can understand why, in retrospect, Obama seems like the last decent president we ever had. That doesn’t make him one. People like to pretend that someone like Trump comes along to ruin everyone’s good time, when in reality, someone like him comes along because we’re just so tired of hearing we’re not good enough. Obama’s tone may have been positive, but his message was negative. Trump’s tone is negative, but his message was a positive one.
I mentioned John McCain earlier, about how liberals now pretend as though they liked him, comparing him favorably to Trump. This isn’t the first nor last time I’ll say this - I was alive for all of it. McCain, who ran against Obama in 2008, was the Hitler of his time, just as Trump is now. He was a fascist, racist, you name it, he was all of it. Any liberal who says they think McCain was a “decent man” is only proving themselves to be deeply unserious and immature. Even the 2008 moment liberals love to cite as exemplary of McCain’s decency was criticized by some at the time. I remember my far-left professor in college saying, with students agreeing, “So what if he’s an Arab? What’s wrong with that?”
We live in a time when even recent history is being frantically rewritten to support today’s narratives. It’s important we not allow them to gaslight and lie to us about what really happened. The next time a liberal tells you they wish they could have the “Republican Party of McCain” back, just show them that this is what they thought of him at the time:
Proud Of The House We Built
The state of pride among Americans remains troubling:
Things that stand out: first, Republicans are more consistent than Democrats. Even during the Biden administration, Republicans were still more proud to be American than Democrats. This proves that there’s very little that could make liberals happy. We could be living under a far-left totalitarianism, with all their most favored policies in place, and they’d still be miserable.
Second, liberals claim that it’s not easy to be proud of a country that elects someone like Trump twice to become president. Okay, but notice that their pride in America was in steady decline during the Obama years, with the nosedive happening well before Trump’s election. Moreover, if love for country depends on who’s president, doesn’t that prove what the critics are saying? That Democrats are “fair-weather” Americans?
The thing is, if your love for country is contingent on what that country does, then that pride isn’t in the country itself. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying patriotism demands you approve of everything the government does in your name. This is such a tired form of argumentation that I regard anyone who makes it to be of low intellect. Conservatives are as critical as liberals of this country, it’s just that their criticisms differ from that of liberals.
Here’s the thing - if you have more beefs and complaints about something than you do compliments and praise, then how proud are you, really? If I spend all my time badmouthing my spouse in public, would anyone mistakenly characterize me as a proud husband? Of course not. So why are we being forced to confuse Democrats for proud Americans, when they themselves spend most of their time telling us that they’re not?
Democrats would reply, “A country isn’t your family!” Yet another form of low-intellect argumentation. A country isn’t some product, either, that you can give a rating out of five stars to. But even if you think it is, then if you spend more time criticizing a product than praising it, wouldn’t it be natural for people to wonder why you were stupid enough to buy it in the first place?
However, a country is more than just its policies. It’s also history. It’s a place. Memories. Most of all, it’s a home. If you consider yourself to be someone who sympathizes with the homeless, then you know what it means. A home is a safe haven. A home is a place you come back to at the end of the day. It’s a place you know, with people you know, that you feel fully comfortable in. Americans are being denied that by their very own fellow countrymen, no less. Is it any surprise that there’s so much discontent?
If someone were to ask me if I were proud to be American, my answer would be an unequivocal “yes.” If they ask why, my answer would be simple: because it’s my country. No other justification required. We all take pride in what we deem to be ours, a part of who we are. Countries are no different.
There are those out there who tell you we cannot be proud of something you had no part in creating. Basically, the only thing you can be proud of are your own personal accomplishments. What a ridiculously cynical thing to say. If national pride is stupid, ethnic, racial, and sexual pride are even more so. By that logic, people shouldn’t be proud of their families, since they didn’t choose their family, and they shouldn’t be proud of their homes, since they didn’t build them. Once again, liberals aren’t trying to make sense, nor are they even trying to win the argument. They’re just trying to make it impossible for dialogue to even take place.
But hey, if they don’t want a dialogue, then I don’t need to explain my pride in America beyond the fact that the collective “we” created something enduring, a home, an identity, and that’s worth defending. If you don’t like that, all I can say is to go find something worth defending, and leave America to the Americans.
The chorus of the song “Proud of the House We Built” by country music mega-duo Brooks & Dunn sums up how I feel about my country:
I’m proud of the house we built.
It’s stronger than sticks, stones, and steel.
It’s not a big place sittin’ up high on some hill.
A lot of things will come and go but love never will.
Oh, I’m proud.
I’m proud of the house we built.
State Of Disunion
I didn’t watch the State of the Union and haven’t done so for many years. I don’t think our presidents have anything useful to say at this point, not to mention the year’s address was the longest ever, meaning it was yet another one of Trump’s rambling rants, and we’ve had enough of those, haven’t we?
YouTuber Vanessa Mares thinks this year’s State of the Union was actually quite significant for what it displayed about the literal state of the union. She points to the viral moment where Democrats refused to stand when the president declared that the U.S. should protect Americans first, not illegal immigrants:
A nice thing about living mostly around liberals is that you become familiarized with their arguments and counter-arguments like the back of your hand. I know how they’d respond here: they reject Trump’s premise. That’s why Democrats didn’t stand, because they don’t think they privilege illegal immigrants over Americans.
I mean, that’s kind of true. And that’s exactly the problem. In both word and deed, the Left has made it clear the difference between Americans and illegals is entirely administrative, a matter of paperwork. Hence, their use of the term “undocumented.” I’ve never met a liberal - and I’ve met quite a few - who thinks the distinction between Americans and foreigners, legal and illegal immigration, is a meaningful one. They find it all inconvenient and prejudiced. So yes, they reject the premise of Trump’s statement, because Americans and illegals are all the same, in the end.
Trump did demonstrate some acumen here: forcing Democrats to make a choice between proving their critics right or politically shooting themselves in the foot by agreeing with the president. It appears they decided that proving their critics right was the better move. Maybe it was, too. I disagree with Vanessa Mares that it was a bad look. Most Democrats aren’t going to break with the party over this, because they agree - there’s no difference between Americans and foreigners. We’re all human, so why draw boundaries? Democrats sent the message their constituents wanted them to send.
In that sense, nothing’s really changed. It isn’t cognitive dissonance, either. Liberals are proud, patriotic Americans when they need to be, otherwise, they’re forever ashamed, embarrassed, and inconvenienced to be Americans. It’s all about what serves their purposes in that moment in time. As stated earlier, it’s not even about winning the argument: it’s about ensuring the discussion never takes place. You can’t talk to crazy.
Final Thoughts
As I so often say, we’re whistling past the graveyard here. There’s no solution to any of this. There’s no bridging the divide. That’s not me blackpilling. That’s just history. Societies that become this fractured don’t ever become whole again. The only way it could happen at this point is through some existential war which forces Americans to set aside all their differences and fight together for survival. But not only would that be terrible, it probably wouldn’t work, either. Dysfunctional households typically don’t survive a crisis.
I’ll close by saying this: if the Winter Olympics were any indication of what we have to look forward to in this year’s World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, then I’m not sure there’s anything really to look forward to. Most of all, what comes after? What happens when there’s no need to feign unity any longer?
Your turn - what are your thoughts on anything covered today? What’s your take on any of these controversies? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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Max, if you haven't read Sebastian Junger's book Tribe you should. It's about how the military uses tribal loyalty on a small scale and the ways out society has attempted to foster it on a very large one. Most usefully, it was written before Trump's first presidency.
My favorite quote from the book: "A country is just a very large foxhole. Anyone who doubts this hasn't thought it through."
I agree with everything Max says. Now for the separation, 'intentional communities' first.
Second point, Trump's antics are damaging to Vance by association. Someone needs to speak to him.