OPINION:
In 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said he wasn’t surprised that people from “small towns in Pennsylvania, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, clung to [their] guns or religion.” This wasn’t a compliment. He thought those people were “weird.”
In 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the same group of people Mr. Obama disparaged a “basket of deplorables,” She went on to say we were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic [and] you name it,” just plain “weird.”
In 2019, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden said, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as White kids.” Thus, our future president committed the Freudian slip of implying that all Black Americans are unsuccessful, underachieving, poor and “weird.”
In 2020, Democratic presidential candidate and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said farmers didn’t need much brainpower to do their jobs. “I could teach anybody … to be a farmer,” he said. “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, and up comes the corn. [Anyone] could learn that.” He then added that In today’s economy,” you have to have a different skill set. You have to have a lot more gray matter.”
In 2022, a CNN panel that included then-anchor Don Lemon, New York Times columnist Wajahat Ali and former GOP strategist Rick Wilson laughed as they mocked the “credulous boomer rube demographic” that backed former President Donald Trump.
This past week, you heard essentially the same message. You heard it at least 300 times. Americans who think like, look like and sound like Sen. J.D. Vance, we are told by the media elites, are “weird.”
The Post Millennial reported: “Since Vance has been chosen as Trump’s VP pick … Democrats have pounced on calling the Trump-Vance ticket “weird … MSNBC used the word 179 times in relation to Trump or Vance in different segments. … CNN was not far behind and used the term 170 times during its Monday segments. … Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) [summarized] on CNN, “I don’t think Kamala Harris is going to pick anyone as weird and creepy as JD Vance.”
So there you have it. Democrats and their media machine are not even trying to hide what they think of you. If you believe in the traditional family, you are weird. If you go to work each day in a machine shop, on a ranch, on a farm or in a restaurant, you are weird. If you live in a small town in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania or West Virginia, you’re weird. If you think drag queens should do their thing in private and not in our public parks, if you think children should be taught how to read, write and count rather than how to engage in homosexuality, and if you think women should not have to endure having men in their locker rooms, you’re weird.
This is what it has come to. In the eyes of the Democratic Party, if you go to church, love your family and live what up until yesterday was considered a normal, healthy American life, and if you believe that our country has borders for a reason and that those want to cross them should do so legally, you are absolutely weird. And if you dare to say that a success story like that of Mr. Vance — someone who pulled himself out of poverty through hard work and determination — should be celebrated, you’re the creepy one, you’re the one who’s weird.
It doesn’t matter that those labeling you as such are partying on the White House lawn with transgender women, i.e., topless men with fake breasts whose preferred pronouns are she and her. It doesn’t matter that they now call women and girls with children “birthing persons” and “breastfeeders” rather than mothers. It doesn’t matter that they claim there are 57 genders rather than two. None of this matters. Because in the eyes of these neo-Marxist oligarchs, they’re not the weird ones; you are. You’re the rube. You’re the deplorable. You’re the one lacking gray matter. You’re the one who’s just plain weird.
History is replete with stories of cultural elites looking down like this with disdain on those they deemed to be inferior. In 1215, King John ignored the Magna Carta, which laid out the fundamental principles of democratic governance, because he thought those below him were “weird.” Antebellum slave owners denied Blacks their basic civil rights because they thought African Americans were “weird.” And Marie Antoinette reportedly dismissed the concerns of France’s unsophisticated “deplorables” by saying, “Let them eat cake” because they’ were “weird.”
As Ecclesiastes tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.” We have been here before. The psychological projection of these weirdos upon those they wish to rule is as predictable as the sunrise, and so is the outcome. This November, pray we stop this nonsense at the voting booth rather than having to do so at the Bastille.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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