If you have put your ear to U.S. media, it has been impossible to escape the nearly daily drama of all things Trump. The problem for me has been the shallowness of the coverage and the low quality of the discourse. It’s been this way on all sides.
One of the problems to my mind has been the blind side on the part of liberals to fully understand how it was that Trump won the campaign for President of the United States. What liberals have not been able to face is the reality of what put Trump in office to begin with. If you watch MSNBC you might believe it was because of the Russians, but you would be wrong. Despite the Mueller Report revealing that the troll farm believed to have been responsible for tipping the election had spent less than $50,000.00 on ads on Facebook during the election, most people haven’t bothered to look at this metric that the Establishment media heralds as proof positive that Russia meddled in our election.
To put this into perspective, Trump spent 9 billion dollars on internet ads for his campaign. $50,000.00 is a drop in the bucket, a laughable number, really, when speaking of influencing any election. Maybe it’s a good number for a local sheriff or the county Treasurer, but President? I say this as a lifelong liberal in case you thought I am an apologist for Trump. I’m not. I just want the truth regardless of where it takes me.
If you dig deeper, you will find that the claim of a Russian hack of the DNC server to be even more specious. This claim comes from the head of the DNC except that the FBI was never allowed to examine the server. The data which was then leaked to Wikileaks was described by Julian Assange as not coming from an agent of any government. When Bill Binney, once the head crypto expert for the NSA examined the email “hack” he saw that the data had not been transferred over a network, but had instead been transferred as a “FAT” file, which is how text is converted when being written to a CD, jump or thumb drive. This means that the “hack” was performed within the DNC and not over a network, as has been suggested by the DNC. Additionally, Binney and his associates who form a group of recently retired intelligence experts from CIA and NSA to act as an informal ombudsmen for all intelligence claims, found that the data transfer rate for the Wikileaks leak could not have been transferred over any internet network. The speeds were too fast.
Binney and his group tested transfer rates all across the world, including Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and the United States. The transfer rate for the data, which Binney points out is included in the Wikileaks metadata, shows time stamps consistent with time stamps from a computer to a thumb drive, not transfer rates over a network of any kind. You would think that this alone would be enough for mainstream media to change its narrative, but sadly no.
Part of the “Trump problem” is that Trump isn’t really the problem. He is a symptom of the problem.
Trump didn’t sell out American workers and industry, Bill Clinton did that with NAFTA. This act completely changed employment in the U.S. Gone were the high paying blue collar jobs in just a few decades. He exploded the prison population after gutting welfare. Trump didn’t lie usinto a war in Iraq and he didn’t bail out the banks leaving Americans with foreclosures and a health care bill that favored the insurance companies. Obama did that.
The hardest thing for any of us to do is to critically examine our own back yard. I include our chosen ” side” politically. If you don’t look at the corruption taking place within the Democratic party and its members, then the real problems will never get dealt with. Defensiveness will rule the day and you can park a ton of corruption under it because of how big it is.
What is lacking is a clear-eyed assessment of what went wrong. If all you think is Trump is what went wrong, you are unknowingly becoming part of the problem. To make matters worse, Dems could have impeached Trump on a broad array of issues two years ago, but chose not to. Instead we get theater and that is a giant distraction.
I think that Trump represents an elephant in the room, and this time the elephant isn’t a Republican, but is instead Democrats’ own inability to face their collective demons head-on. Yes Trump is bad, but there is something much bigger than Trump at the root of all of this.
To help illuminate this, Aaron Maté interviews his father, a noted psychologist and researchee and author to dig into what happened to Democrats who hadn’t voted for Trump and who have been able to be at peace ever since he got elected. The video is worth watching for its great insight offered by Gabor Maté. I think it will help all of us to understand what happened in the last Presidential election cycle.
Waking The Infinite 
Well, that’s a pretty brave move, to write something about the political world on the site devoted primarily to kundalini and energy. It’s a good way to lose friends! Though it depends what you are saying, and what you are getting at….
From far away in the United Kingdom, one thing that has struck me is how much so many people hate Trump. Like, really hate him, as if he’s the most evil guy on the planet. It happens here, too. A few months ago a friend of mine stayed for a couple of days. He’s normally such an easy-going kind of guy, but he started bringing up Trump at regular intervals. “Trump this, Trump that,” and so on. In the end I lost my patience. “What’s your problem with Trump? Why do you hate him like this? You live in Scotland – what has he done to you?” My friend was unable to come up with any good answer.
‘Shadow projection’ is almost a bit of an old-fashioned term, but it describes well a certain phenomenon. Although there are more modern interpreters, I feel that Jung is very good on this, very clear, on both the personal and the collective shadow. When people get irrationally mad about someone or something, go crazy, then I think you can look to see if the shadow is manifesting. I think it can be very dangerous for a society, and that’s one thing I see about the Trump, or rather anti-Trump, phenomenon. People just want to get him, and that’s not healthy at all.
The political world strikes me as generally a very primitive one, in the sense that opposites or polarities run riot unconsciously in battle with each other. It is precisely the contrary to what our spiritual or energetic life is wanting to bring about, which is conscious union of and harmony between opposites.
It occasionally happens that someone asks me if I am right-wing, or left wing, for example. I steadfastly refuse to be put into any of these boxes! I am not right wing nor left wing nor orange wing nor up wing nor anything! I am me, attempting to be authentic. As soon as I am put into a box, the other half of the world automatically gets closed off. Which I cannot afford to allow to happen.
‘Self determination’, ‘self realisation’ have become increasingly key notions to me as the kundalini energy has unfolded. Self-realisation seems to require the freedom to consider any idea, feel as valid any feeling or intuition. So freedom of communication on the internet, free of censorious action by social media big tech for example, has become very important for me. The accusation of ‘hate speech’ or some -ism or -phobia is easily done, but is often just a way to try and shut up somebody you don’t like. I find this a disturbing development for a society, and not conducive to conditions that encourage people to really find themselves spiritually.
These are a few thoughts around and about the Trump issues that you’ve described. From a few thousand miles away….
I’m not an apologist for Trump…I think when he got elected realized there was so much more involved with why a gameshow host and noted mysogynist had made it to the Presidency. It was something none of my liberal friends were looking at, which had to do with (1)how globalism had pulled the rug out from under millions of blue collar workers and (2)how bad Clinton was in being sensitive to their needs, and (3) how mysogyny was being outed (finally) in broad strokes, but still had a few elements within it that really had to be looked at, which Trump being Trump, was shoving in our faces daily. The Democrat party was corrupted and had drifted right so enough Democrats said “to heck with this” and voted for Trump, handing him the win.
Hillary herself helped bring the subject of mysogyny front and center during her campaign except that last week she appeared on Howard Stern, who is an even worse mysogynist than Trump was and began calling Bernie Sanders an agent of Russia jyst as she had Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein *who isn’t even in the race—totally bizarre). So then the whole misogyny trope loses any respectability as does what is left of Hillary’s relevance as she tries to make herself out to be the victim. Bear in mibd that reports coming out of the DNC show Hillary WANTED Trump as the opposition because she thought it would be a slam dunk. Sadly, this is emblematic of how out of touch she and other “Progressives” are.
I’m not happy with Trump. He is an upsetting character, but he isn’t wrong on half that is said about him. Globalism has been a big problem for all if us and has only gotten worse. Too much power in too few hands. We are mired in costly wars that are completely unbecessary and wasteful of treasure we need back home. He ran on this stuff. I am mot sure that he was just pulling a bait and switch as much as being under steady pressure from a system that is now in the hands of those friendly to globalist interests.
I could be wrong, but from what I know, Trump was never ever groomed for this by anyone. He was the quintessential curve ball politically. The fact he got in told me that our electofial process actually does work because why would the globalist have allowed this had they gotten control over our voting machines (as some have expressed concerns about)?
I suspect that why your friend was affected beyond Trump being Trump is that a similar issue has been at play in the U.K. and Scotland, which is how the EU has taken sovereignty of the nation by stealth for one, and how immigrants from very different cultures have been pushed on EU member states without any ability for theur having any say in the matter, for another. It has been a problem for many within the EU and it has nothing to do with being racist to express concern, but tells how a clash in cultures has been set up, a real piece of Hegelian Dialectic in the making if you ask me.
This would be a way to wash away the old order culturally, politically, and economically in order to install what the globalist agenda desires as an outcome for us all. I can say that it wont go well because like Hillary, these elites are so removed from the common man and woman that their solutions will wind up as disasters. It is already happening in places like Sweeden and I am sure those in the U.K. have seen it as well.
The compassionate path would be to assist places like Yemen, Darfur, and African states to figure it out for themselves instesd of exporting their immigrants. But this is not what the Corporatocracy of the world wants. They seem to want control over the whole shooting match and to heck with sovereignty, too.
All of this may sound like conspiracy nutjob jive, except that I have been watching this carefully now for 40 years almost and during that time, patterns have emerged that have been pretty consistent, and they all point to a supernational “state” made up of corporate interests now wanting all of it.
Hillary is a player in this. Like other politicians, they know a good thing when they see it. Playing into corporate interests means they stand to realize magnificent wealth by making a case for and pulling the “right” levers of legislation to see to it that this agenda continues unabated. The rest can go take a hike because who cares.
I care. I care also why it is that people can’t see why Trump and Brexit were predictable as outcomes with a system that had grown immune to the little people. See how hard it is that they made “leave”?
This was what our framers of our Constitution worked hard to prevent. It took a little over 200 years for it to get to this point. Meanwhile here in the U.S. the Democrat version of Trump, which is Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard (taking no corporate money and pledging to change regime change wars and bring money home for the little people) are being smeared or ignored because media is owned by seven billionaires who are out of touch and benefit from the military industrial complex, big pharma, and the insurance companies. And yet, Sanders showed every sign of being elected if he was the candidate (ge polled as besting Trump in Texas and Arizona, two very conservative states) in the last election cycle. That outcome didn’t happen though because Hillary bankrolled the DNC and demanded superdelegates be used to determine the nominee, something she had gained support from but which took voting out of the hands of voters as is normally the process. This was a corrupting of the system and it has served to build even stronger support for Sanders this time around. Meanwhile the elites are about to drop a log, and xatn’t say I blame them because Bernie plans to change a lot in favor of the little guy and gal. He is talking of a kind of revolution. I am not so wide-eyed to think if elected that it will go perfectly. In fact, I expecr to be disillusioned in a few years if he is elected. I joke. It may be that it could be lije what happened with FDR. He was beloved by the people because he did so much that favored them.
I know. That was too much, right? Yeah…that’s me! Lol!
From my current standpoint on European soil, I’d say that your comments about the situation in Europe are spot-on. There are parallels between the Trump phenomenon and the increasing popularity of non-extreme nationalistic movements in many countries here. Even if they don’t make all the connections, large numbers of people are catching on to the fact that their own interests are not being served by folk following a more ‘globalist’ kind of agenda.
The Gabor Mate interview also says a lot that is relevant about many ‘Remainers’ in the UK. These are the people who, despite their shock at the Brexit vote in the 2016 referendum, could not accept this reality and just try to get on with their lives. Instead, they agitated and presented obstacle upon obstacle, in order to reverse this democratic decision. It was typical trauma-denying behaviour, which had an extremely toxic effect upon society as a whole. In the general election last week, these people were unceremoniously booted out, and I am sure that the collective angst will die down a lot as a result!
‘Identity’ is an issue, isn’t it? I try to adopt an attitude of flexibility to any identity I may feel, but it is in varying degrees necessary for many people, to feel who they are in this complex and sometimes hostile world. It was quite moving to see how all of these thoroughly ‘working class’ people in northern England, with strong Labour-socialist backgrounds and pasts, swallowed this identity and voted Conservative for the first time in their life. They had to for the sake of honesty and integrity, but that so many folk did it was an act of some heroism, I felt.
And that’s it for now.