Coyote Gravity – by Christopher M. Chupik

You know the moment. Wile E. Coyote (Super-Genius) has ordered his high-tech equipment from Acme and is busy creating his elaborate trap which will catch the Roadrunner. But while he’s doing this, the Roadrunner sneaks up behind him and beep-beeps loudly, startling Coyote right off the cliff he’s standing on. For a moment the Coyote hangs suspended in the air. Then he looks down. Gravity reasserts itself with a vengeance and he plummets helplessly earthwards, hitting the ground with a puff of dust.

The modern Left is having that moment right now.

The 2016 Election was supposed to be the triumphant of the as-yet-unmade Hillary Clinton biopic, where the heroine defeats the designated woman-hating he-man villain and claims her rightful place as the First Female POTUS . . .

And then there’s what actually happened.

Now we’ve got witches casting anti-Trump spells, minor celebrities chanting like cultists on street corners, journalists destroying what little remains of their credibility, all in a vain effort to undo what has been done.

Witchcraft seems strangely appropriate. For too long, the Left believed in a form of political sympathetic magic: if they controlled how the world was portrayed in news and fiction, they could reshape reality to their whims. Therefore, it came as a brutal shock to their system when the end result of all their years of plotting and manipulating was the rise of Donald Trump, the one result they absolutely did not want.

The spate of silly comparisons between Trump and the Mule from Asimov’s Foundation series are right in one respect. Trump is an element that our social planners did not foresee. Not because of mutant mind-powers, but because of an intellectual blindspot on the part of those who thought they were charting the destiny of the nation. He couldn’t possibly win, they thought. Our media propaganda machine is just too strong, they thought. Now they’re scrambling to figure out how they got it so completely wrong.

Or they should be. Instead, too many on the Left are doubling-down on the same kind of clueless snobbery and basket-full-of-deplorables rhetoric that cost them the election to begin with. The problem can’t be with them, oh no. It must The People who let them down. Instead of behaving like the good little Marxist automatons that they’re supposed to, they went and elected the Worst Candidate Ever, seeming embodiment of everything the Left despises capped off with an obvious toupee. Now after eight years of Hope and Change and post-racial utopias, it’s back to Amerikkka being the source of all evil in the world, with rich white male Christian Republicans at the root of it all.

A friend of mine was telling me that she thinks a big part of the problem is that modern technology has made it possible for people to get away with creating their own little realities. They can just prune their social media to keep other viewpoints from intruding on theirs. You could go for days and never hear anyone’s dissenting opinion, unless it’s been filtered through the biases of your political peers.

There are consequences to this. We’ve already seen violence inspired by the Left’s reckless “punching Nazis” rhetoric. Look, the National Socialist Party of Germany has been dead for decades. The only real Nazis left are a handful of aging war-criminals and some dumb thugs with shaved heads. Therefore, you’re likely not punching a literal fascist. You’re assaulting someone with different politics for the sole reason that they’re different. That’s what happens when your view of reality isn’t based on what’s real anymore.

You can’t simply reject reality and substitute your own. If anything that arguing with idiots online has taught me (apart from the fact that its usually a waste of time) is that I can’t insulate myself from other viewpoints. If I did, how could I argue effectively against them? As much as it sometimes annoys/pains/disgusts me, I have to know what the other side thinks. If that means wading through sub-clickbait drivel full of SJW buzzwords written by people who think that libertarians want to turn the world into the Trumpian Third Reich of Somalia, then that is the price I pay. And I pay it gladly.

So you can try to hide, if you choose. Unleash your blockbots on Twitter to keep your political opposites out of sight and out of mind. Pretend that everybody who disagrees with you is Literally Hitler. Chant your slogans and cast your spells.

But reality can’t be ignored forever. It has a gravity all its own. And sooner or later, you gotta look down.