This Article By CNN Represents The Epitome of Leftist Thinking

Photo: Screengrab from CNN

At the risk of diagnosing someone I’ve never met, I don’t think CNN’s Richard Eldredge suffers from a lack of confidence or self-esteem. At least outwardly.

In the days following the 2020 presidential election, Eldredge reflected on his openly hostile and, ultimately, non-existent familial relationships. To be more accurate, it wasn’t so much a reflection as it was an accusation against every family member for choosing Trump and hate over love and family. Note to Eldredge: Not a strong start in the healing process to double down on your animus. 

The piece is framed around the idea that Eldredge expects the family that has been shutting him out to do some serious thinking now that America is healed (from, you know, a legitimate voting process). He is asking his family if it was worth it. More precisely, he asks members of his family if their “blind loyalty to President Donald Trump, a person you've never met, [was] worth burning our family to the ground?” 

Eek.

Aside from the egregious fallacy that his family has anything to apologize for, I noticed he doesn’t require any introspection of himself. Just like he has his qualms with them, it probably doesn’t sit well with other members of his family that he blindly supported a candidate in 2016 that called half of America deplorable and very likely profited immensely by selling access to our government. Nor does it sit well with them - I’m guessing - that he supports a political party that now accuses good and decent people on a daily basis of being privileged, racist, and white supremacists, and who voting base feels vindicated in terrorizing communities through rioting and looting.

B-b-but Trump supporters are ruining America!

The hardest thing about reading this piece is that I know Eldredge believes everything he is writing. That understanding makes it doubly difficult not to shake my head reading this logorrheic diatribe and not come away with a sense that his family members got tired of his self-righteous lectures. I was tired of him after only four-minute minutes.

From the beginning, the entire premise of the article is a scam. It assumes that everything about Trump is wrong and everything against Trump is noble. It’s such an exhausting conversation to point out that politics, like life, is a little more nuanced than Trump Bad. Seriously, these people talk and think like cavemen. Oops, cavepeople (because women have TDS, too).

Framing the question as if he were innocent from any divisive and rancorous conversations is disingenuity at its finest. Trump might have had character flaws, but those flaws were not the reason for the left’s endless hatred of him or his supporters. Indeed, prior to being lionized by the New York Times posthumously, John McCain was just a racist old white man running against the history-making Barack Obama. And before he was marching with Black Lives Matter, Mitt Romney was going to be putting American blacks back in chains. Let’s not forget that Donald Trump was feted by the NAACP and Al Sharpton in the 1990s. 

Can Eldredge just admit that? Look, c’mon man, this article is not a defense of Trump or your Trump-voting family, it’s just a rebuttal to his ignorance. 

With no apparent concern for outing himself as a grown child, Eldredge reveals that a no-politics-at-dinner rule was implemented in his family as the result of another legitimate conservative holding office (“my mom first had to institute this during the Ronald Reagan administration”). This is the first clue that Eldredge has probably never been one to ask insightful questions and listen inquisitively about why a certain conservative position might make sense. 

One paragraph in particular exposes Eldredge for the political and moral ignoramus he must aspire to present as. Trump is described as this: “A man under seemingly constant investigation while in office. A man who brags about grabbing women by their genitals. A man who -- though he denies it -- others say calls members of our military "losers" and "suckers." A morally bankrupt, impeached and now lame duck President....A man who mocks the disabled."

It is worth taking this apart piece by piece, as there are easy and factual retorts. 

He writes that Trump was constantly under investigation. This occurred only because everyone on the left - including CNN - constantly manufactured reasons to investigate him, such as the lie about Russian collusion, General Flynn violating the Logan Act, and obstruction of justice charges that led to an insane impeachment with regard to Ukraine. Amazingly, each of these investigations yielded the exact opposite; namely, they found that Democrats were the guilty party everytime. CNN never bothered to pursue these inconvenient facts with much purpose after they were able to move onto the next Trump scandal. The Russian collusion episode petered out without merit and actually pointed to Hillary being involved (through the Steele Dossier and Fusion GPS), Biden is more violative of the Logan Act (since Flynn was acting as a liaison to the transitional government and Biden he is still a citizen), and Biden actually declared on camera that he forced Ukraine to take certain actions. Claiming Trump was constantly under investigation is analogous to when an older sibling takes their younger sibling’s hand, makes them slap themself, and blames the younger one for always getting hit in the face. 

He writes that Trump made a comment in a Hollywood Access tape decades ago. Ugh, this incident has been culturally litigated for far too long. Democrats have championed themselves as the advocates for sexual freedom, starting all the way back in the 1960s with their summers of love, forcing American society to recognize gay marriage (which itself is not bad, for the record), and most recently decriminalizing homosexual acts with minors. But Trump doing his thing with women (that give him permission!) is awful. Plus, CNN’s own Jeffrey Toobin grabs himself in meetings and no one cares. Save the sexual highground for someone else.

He writes that Trump commented that the military is full of losers. By now, the Atlantic article that propagated this lie has been - let me get my phrasing corect - completely debunked. To that point, though, did he think the military was so full of losers that he decided not to get engaged in any foreign entanglements out of fear we would lose? When Bush lied, people died; now, when Trump negotiates peace in the Middle East and saves our brave men and women in uniform, he’s a chump. Is anyone else feeling a brain bleed coming on?

He writes that Trump was impeached. Yes, the House did impeach Trump on baseless grounds, for doing less than what Joe Biden admitted on tape to actuating (withholding money unless a prosecutor was fired).

He then writes about Trump being a lame duck president. It seems as if he chortled when writing the word lame. I had to laugh at the last comment. Guess what? All presidents enter a lame duck period once they are A) voted out of office or B) complete their second term. Is he actually using this term derogatorily? You earned an LOL in my books, Eldredge. Insightful stuff.

He writes that Trump mocks the disabled. The event he is referring to happened five years ago, and like the Atlantic article or the Charlotesville Lie, found to be another fabricated charge. Seriously, you would think that someone like Eldredge, someone who claims that journalism has been his "chosen profession for the past three decades" would be better at journalizing. Has he ever heard of a fact check before?

I honestly can’t believe he didn’t use the word racist or Nazi once in his middle school diary of hurt feelings. I am starting to question his leftist bonafides - just kidding, the last paragraph in his kindred hit job removes all doubt.

Still, I don’t need this pompous buffon to remind me that people are pretty convinced Trump is a full-blown racist. While we’re at it, let me refute that as well. Trump was successful in lowering black unemployment to historical levels, funding HBCUs more than Obama, signing the First Step Act, pushing for school choice in urban areas to help kids of color avoid failing public schools, and advocating for law and order so that neighborhoods of color don’t have to capitulate to gang violence. Such a racist.

Eldredge’s trite relayal of family problems is tiring because it isn’t accurate. The conversation for the past five years has focused solely on Trump. Not Republicans and not conservatives. Just Trump. For that reason, and to expose their fraud, I have asked my own family a very simple question: Given that Trump is the reason for your anger toward and revulsion, would your voting have changed if Trump had passed from COVID and Mike Pence were the new candidate? Pence is as clean cut as politicians get, right?

The answer is invariably no, which is the point. The left has conveniently reduced their contempt for all things not conforming to their worldview. Trump made it easy to personify, but let’s not delude ourselves that once Trump is out of the picture that their hatred, anger, and contempt for conservative will quietly go away. It was never about Trump. 

There are two great memes that make this point. The first was a Trump quote that said “They’re not after me. They’re after you; I’m just in the way.” Ben Shapiro also tweeted shortly after the legacy media declared Biden the 46th president that “They don’t hate you because they hate Trump. They hate Trump because they hate you.” 

Eldredge faux-laments that his kin “allowed a complete stranger to vaporize our family.” This is quintessential leftist logic. It isn’t Eldredge’s fault that the family connection was vaporized; it was an external factor. In this case, the evil Trump ruined their family, not Eldredge’s self-righteousness and derangement. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure that his family stepped up to the plate and said some nasty things. However, conservatives’ niceness has been taken for granted for far too long, so he likely had it coming. Eldredge incorrectly assumed he could keep battering decent people for wanting basic freedoms and rights preserved and they eventually pushed back. 

Again, the litmus test for equality of intellectual rigor is not difficult. Can you imagine if his relatives asked him the same question? “Richard, was it worth it to label Trump a fascistic, racist, sext totalitarian for five years without any evidence?” When he leaves office, whether this upcoming January or in four more years, not a single person living in America will have ever provided evidence of his fascism, racism, or sexism. There were no concentration camps, no lynch mobs, and no loss of freedoms. I wish I could say the same for Democrats in power; leaders are now calling for lists of names, Black Lives Matter and Antifa regularly victimize or assault free thinkers, and rollbacks are being proposed to the constitutionally guaranteed notion of free speech. That is just off the top of my head in five seconds.

In true Eldredge fashion, though, he saves the pure sanctimony for the final paragraph. In his send off, he remarks:

“I just know this: A resolution and reconciliation can't begin until you can say the words, ‘I hear you and I'm sorry’ and most importantly, ‘that's not who I am.’ Then and only then, will we be able to begin to heal our relationship.”

If I were a family member, I’d tell this guy to shove off forever. In fact, they probably wish they had told him years ago. Are you kidding me? Look in the mirror. Party of unity, indeed. 

The problem with people like Richard Eldredge is that they are too far gone. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, and one of the symptoms is a permanent detachment from reality, truth, and objectivity. Was Trump perfect? No. Has anyone claimed he was perfect? Again, no. Are people fed up with hypocrisies, double standards, one-sided news coverage, and moronic garbage peddled as news? Do we like presidents that love America and put our country first?

A resounding yes.