In The End We Win
MAGA and the Great Inversion
1. Eclipse
We’re one week out from the 2024 Presidential Election, and I continue to monitor what I have termed “The Great Inversion.” Some have called this period a “re-alignment,” many are calling this “the most important election of our lifetime” though for different reasons, and no matter what your inclination is, it seems clear to most that these are strange and treacherous times.
I’ve only experienced one total eclipse, in the Fall of 2017 in Central Oregon. I had crash landed in Bend, Oregon after a tumultuous year and my apartment was at the base of an extinct cinder cone volcano. The day of the eclipse I climbed to the top of the volcano with hundreds of others. When the Eclipse began, the world inverted: day became night and night became day, the Cascade Mountains in the distance seemed closer but strange, the air cooled, faces drained of color, birds sang and rushed to their nests. A moment before the world seemed so certain and sure; now, inverted and unrecognizable. That's exactly how this political era feels to many of us – an eerie, unrecognizable inversion of what we thought we knew.
It’s 2024, Liz and Dick ‘War Criminal’ Cheney now back the Democrat candidate for President and rally with her as crowds cheer. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were soooo long ago and does anyone even miss those one million dead Iraqis anyway? So Sadam didn’t have Weapons of Mass Destruction but bored now! RFK Jr. (that crazy loon with his woo-woo ideas like not putting industrial waste products in children’s food), Tulsi Gabbard (G.I Jane who actually spent her 20s fighting Cheney’s corrupt war), and Elon Musk (what has he ever done? He has, like, opinions and stuff that are not very nice) rally for the Republican.
The Billionaire chooses a hillbilly as his running mate and becomes a voice of the working man; the democrat child of parents with Phds who attended private school and was raised in Canada chooses a running mate with stolen valor who mandates tampons in boys’ locker rooms. They pretend to be of the working class, but deep down we know that their claim, like so much we’ve been fed through corrupted media over the last four years, is fake.
The DNC elders make speeches about censoring the internet saying we need to "rethink" free speech. They brand critics of open borders racists and discount testimony about the streets those critics live on and what they see–they refuse to say the names of young women murdered by criminals who crossed the border illegally. They lecture you endlessly about the slave trade of centuries past, but refuse to look at the human trafficking happening on our borders today.
The Best Biden Ever is “totally competent” but bows out of the race, and no one who covered for him has been held accountable for their years of lying to the press and to the people. Biden’s unpopular VP Harris who earned fewer electors in the 2020 Presidential race than Tulsi Gabbard--SHE was elected, fair and square despite no one voting for her ever. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t have a plan, she’s BRAT, she’s got vibes, she’s here to turn the page and wasn’t at all the Vice President or the Border Czar for the last four years. Like, seriously.
The culture is inverted, and in these times we do the best that we can to see clearly. I stand firmly where I am, where I’ve always been, a believer in hard work and fairness and the American Dream, a lover of our national parks and our national character and our big beautiful imperfect country. I’m a lifelong liberal democrat voting for Donald Trump, and I feel fine about it.
2. Unfriended
For 27 years, I have been a registered Democrat who voted left of the Party many times. With the rise of social media, I’ve never shied away from posting my opinions online. I’ve made countless posts over the years advancing progressive or liberal ideas. I was adamantly against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I thought Citizens United was the end of our Democracy, I wanted to kill the Keystone Pipeline, I supported Occupy Wall Street, I voted for Jill Stein, I prattled on endlessly about the Sixth Great Extinction and Climate Change. On and on for years I wrote online, never hesitating to express my view of the world as I saw it then. The inevitable arguments with my conservative friends and family (and I grew up in Eastern Kentucky, so I have many) would break out from time to time, but the disagreements were almost always civil and not once did anyone conservative or Christian unfriended me for holding a view they disagree with.
On the night of the first Presidential Debate I posted for the first time that I am voting for Donald Trump—but let me be very clear on what I said. I said, “If these are my choices—I'm voting for Trump.”
I knew when I wrote this that there would be some backlash, but I couldn’t anticipate the fury that was about to hit me. Through text and private messages, many argued with me. They said things like “I used to respect you” and “I thought you were intelligent” as though it isn’t my intelligence and integrity, filtered through the totality of my lived experience, that has brought me to this juncture. I have eyes and ears, I see the open border, I see the homeless and hard drug epidemics on our streets as the left push their failed Defund the Police policies, I see the escalation of foreign wars, I see the weaponization of the media and the judicial system to silence and demonize political opponents, I see the clamp down on free speech and dissent, I see the constant and divisive pandering of identity politics, I see it all with the current President’s clear cognitive decline as a big old cherry on top, and I just simply can’t do it anymore. I still don’t know if I can vote for Trump, but that I will vote against the ‘democratic’ party of the elites is beyond question.
Of my 400 Facebook friends, 20 that I’m aware of unfriended me. It took some digging, but I figured out who they all were and sharing their demographics tells a story. Of those 20 people, 15 were men and 5 were women. Of those 15 men, 10 of them that I know of are gay. Of the 20 people, 19 are college educated and those same 19 are, to the best of my knowledge, Democrats.
I had expected my liberal friends, those higher in openness, with college educations, more versed in the broader world, to hold themselves to a higher standard. In the end, I came to find out that these things didn’t really matter, that it was a deeper question of character that cuts across all party lines that matters (and I thank my liberal friend who argued with me respectfully in an honest attempt to understand my perspective).
I have to remember that I learned this lesson a decade ago in my community college classrooms where many times it was the working class students with the greatest deficits in their education and the military veterans who were the most open minded, the most open to talk out their ideas, who were the least likely to engage in group hysterics when they were challenged.
Next June when the month long vanity fest known as “Pride” rears its ugly head again and these same folks paint their “progress pride flag” on every flat surface in the country and lecture us about the importance of "diversity", I’ll remember my direct experience and I'll be ready. Because these people don’t want diversity, in fact they hate it. "Diversity" is an empty virtue signal to many on the left. What they actually want are ideological conformists of different shapes, shades, and genders–boot lickers who agree with every new idiotic gender identity and radical, failed policy. Step out of line for even a moment, and you will be derided, blocked, and excommunicated–just like members of a cult will do.
I don’t care who you vote for, but I do care about how you treat others. I care about having people in my life who think for themselves, who don’t see our differences as deficits, who will consider that each of us make our own decisions based on what we’ve read, what we’ve seen with our eyes, and what we’ve experienced.
We think we see the world through our own eyes, but we only ever see the smallest slice of the world that we engage with. The world is, and will alway be, bigger than what any one human can know–which is why true diversity is our strength. People who disagree with you keep you honest. More importantly, they form half of the country’s population, and if we have any hope of continuing as a nation we have to learn to disagree vociferously, shake hands, and go about our day as friends, family, and countrymen.
3. Hillbilly
It’s been the summer of the broken AC in Phoenix, Arizona—nine calls with a technician to figure out why a brand new unit isn’t working properly in 115 degree heat. They still don’t know, and I don’t either, but tonight the AC is working, it’s finally 89 degrees inside my house which feels downright breezy after the last six weeks, I am three beers deep as I write this, and I just spent three hours watching the RNC convention. I tell you this so you know a bit about my state of mind.
I watched tonight as a crowd chanted “Mamaw! Mamaw! Mamaw!” at the RNC Convention and I cried, because I thought about two extraordinary women in my own life who I called Mamaw. They were Dora Belle O’neil Kelly and Nervie Ellen Smith Wright. They were both simple women, proud but humble, uneducated by the standards of the outside world, but deep in the knowledge of what it took to be a thriving woman in Appalachia. I still have quilts that both of them made for me by hand when I was a kid. All of these decades later, I run my hands over those quilts from time to time and think about how lucky I am to have known such women.
JD Vance is four years younger than I am, and he’s achieved a lot more than I have in life. The opening scene of the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy takes place in a county adjacent to where I grew up, the summer I left home (July 1997). In the opening scenes of that film, I watched but my mind wasn’t there—I was thinking of where I was at that time, loading my first car with all of my belongings, hugging my family and following my uncle to Lexington—all just a few miles from where “Hillbilly Elegy” begins. All I had ever thought about for the last years at home was leaving, and I was excited to leave that day. But what I’ve never shared publicly is that from Winchester to Lexington I cried so hard I could barely drive. But then, just as we crossed into Fayette County, a place that seemed so urban and different than what I had known (despite being barely over an hour away), the song “It’s a Beautiful Life” by Ace of Base came on the radio and I turned it all the way up and shouted along to the lyrics. I wiped the tears from my eyes and knew I had a life to get to.
In 2008 I was approached by an influential literary agent with a fancy office overlooking Central Park in New York City. He had read the first piece of writing I ever published, an essay I wrote as a young man about my complicated relationship with my father called “Stripping the Splintered Stalks” that I am still proud of. The agent wanted me to write a memoir and asked me if I could send him pages. I, of course, didn’t have a memoir but I got to work. I wasn’t ready. I sent him pages of a fractured autobiography called “No Straight Line.” I put so many hours into it, but I was also fighting something I didn’t know how to name at the time. What the agent wanted was “Hillbilly Elegy” but I sent him “No Straight Line.” He sent me a warm rejection and told me to send him the next thing I wrote, and then I froze for over a decade. Life happened, I kept writing, but none of it has seen the light of day.
I think about that moment often. I once heard someone say, “When God opens a door, you better be ready to walk through it.” I wasn’t ready, but JD Vance was.
Tonight I watched JD Vance take the stage and for the first time in my life, I felt seen on the public stage. JD is standing there—proud, Appalachian, referencing a family grave in Breathitt County not more than a couple dozen miles from where my own grandparents and great grandparents are laid to rest. I was at that cemetery in January for the first time in over a decade, and standing on that hill on what used to be my great grandfather’s farm I felt something stir in me that had been dormant for so many years.
I have spent my whole adult life running away from home because I didn’t feel that I belonged there, but on that January day with my mother beside me I was reminded by the spirit of the dead that I will always have a home to come back to when the world out here stops making sense—and that home is Eastern Kentucky.
Tonight, I am proud for the first time of a political movement. The world has turned upside down and a movement that just a few years ago I thought was evil, has turned into a populist movement that makes me proud. We have all been told an endless number of lies about that imperfect movement, and I—like you—have believed them. I don’t know if Trump and Vance will live up to their promise, but after last Saturday I too believe that there is some strange sort of providence at play. Tonight I watched, for the first time, as a son from Eastern Kentucky took the political main stage and a crowd shouted “Mamaw, Mamaw, Mamaw.”
I am proud to be an American tonight, and I am proud to be a hillbilly, and I am proud to be from a place where sons know that we will never live up to the expectations of our fathers, but we will never be able to let down our mothers.
It’s time to heal. It’s time to unite. It’s time to make a place at the table for everyone in this country to come in and thrive. I believe in that vision of America. I believe we have been great (though flawed) and I believe we will be great again.
4. Fight! Fight! Fight!
It was supposed to be a weekend free of politics. I had spent the week trying to convince my friends that I hadn’t lost my mind after publicly declaring that I was considering voting for Trump in the 2024 election, and many of them had not taken it well. I started coming out as Gay in 1997 as a high school student in Eastern Kentucky; this was worse. So, for the weekend, I needed to touch grass, care for my dogs, and let the political world be what it was without me, but I made the mistake of logging on to X and seeing “Assassination Attempt at Trump Rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.” My politics-free weekend ended.
We know the story but here’s a quick refresher: On July 13, 2024 at approximately 6:15 PM local time, a 20 year old man climbed onto a building with a ladder and 50 rounds of ammunition he had brought to the venue earlier that day an in broad daylight a few hundred yards from where former President Trump was speaking fired several rounds that grazed the President’s ear and killed local firefighter Corey Comperatore and severely wounded two others. The assassin was killed, the President had his most iconic moment, and the media would work quickly to minimize and memory-hole the incident within the week. Democrats and their media goons would call for “cooling the rhetoric” in the immediate aftermath, but within days they would resume calling the President a threat to democracy, labeling him “Hillter,” and using the power of their bully pulpit to persuade their followers that the moderate Republican who already held power for four years was an “Existential threat to our Democracy.” Many very intelligent people fell for it.
It’s easy to be virtuous when times are easy, but the true test of a person’s character is how they respond when they are under fire. I had been wrestling with my decision about who to vote for up to that point. I liked RFKJ, but too many times I have voted for a third party only to see my candidate fail to break even close to double digits on election night. This wasn’t a problem in most years, but this year having moved from the solidly blue Oregon to purple Arizona I knew I couldn’t throw my vote away, or worse–be complicit in the election of a dangerous deep state puppet.
But Donald Trump, Trump, that man? How could I even begin to consider voting for that man? The reasons I had never considered voting for that man were manifold, but by that time I had already begun to question much of what I believed I knew about him. As the lies and gaslighting of the DNC accumulated–starting in 2016 and 2020 when the party colluded to elevate establishment candidates over the one true populist in the party for many years—I had begun to question all of the assumptions that I had come to believe about the party. In 2024, if these people engage so openly in lying to us about Biden’s cognitive decline, what else were they lying to us about? I began to investigate all of it–the corrupt lawfare against Donald Trump, the reckless fanning of racial animosity in the summer of 2020, the lawlessness of the Defund the Police movement, the swapping of “equality” for “equity”, and finally even the false narratives spread about January 6th. The more I looked with an open mind, the more I questioned, the more I allowed myself to consider dissenting voices, the more I began to see the complete and total corruption of the party I had been a member of for my entire adult life. I began to unpack their lies and my own complicity in being duped so completely for so long.
And there, on the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, was Donald Trump–blood running down his face, defiant, pushing back against the Secret Service trying to escort him off stage to turn to his audience, pump his fist and shout “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Up was down; down was up; and for the first time I had to admit that I admired Donald Trump. In a historical moment with our borders open and World War brewing on multiple stages, runaway inflation, drug and homeless epidemic wrecking communities across the country, I knew we needed a leader who had courage, instincts, and strength. The Democrats had failed to produce such a candidate, but there was Donald Trump pumping his fist in full defiance of all the forces that came at him relentlessly for years–there was Donald Trump shouting “Fight! Fight! Fight” when lesser men would have fled the stage.
A man who could face down a sniper’s bullets, turn to his supporters, and give them exactly the message they needed in the split second he had–not calculated, not on a teleprompter, not weighed by opinion polls, but pure instinct–that man is a leader, a deeply flawed and imperfect one, but a leader nonetheless. In that moment, he showed more resilience than any democrat has shown in a decade and I admired him for it.
I swallowed the red pill and began to consider what else I had gotten wrong about Donald J. Trump. It would be a deep, all-consuming rabbit hole I was about to fall down, and I would emerge on the other end of it deeply changed. I would come to see all the sides of the man that the corporate media had hidden from me–a generous man, a man who cared deeply for those around him, a man who honors our soldiers and our policemen, a man who raised five healthy and well adjusted children, a man of the people. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real disease–one fueled and fed by a decade of disinformation, the amplification of comments out of context, a one-sided hit job coordinated through the deep state and driven by ideology. I had never allowed myself to see any of the alternative coverage, to get the full picture of the imperfect showman. I came to realize, after a while, that I actually liked what I saw. I was realigned. Inverted.
Donald Trump is the only man, in this moment of history, able to take down the political elites of both parties. He gutted the Republican party of those who profit from War, and he made it a coalition of the working class. In this age of eclipse, the Billionaire became the man of the people: a fighter, and America needs a fighter right now.
Coda: Night before the Election
Last week I found myself in the most surreal setting on Halloween, at a Tucker Carlson interview with President Trump where Kennedy and others also spoke. It was the same week that our sitting President called half the country “garbage.”
I sat there in the stadium and looked around. What I saw was not garbage (though many people were dressed up as sanitation workers equally offended by the sitting President's insult). What I saw, and the conversations I heard revealed only good people. I’ve been to a lot of concerts and shows over the years, but this was one of the most polite crowds I had ever been in. It matched what I have experienced at every step of this journey.
No matter the outcome today, I hope at the end of it we all remember that we are one nation meant to work together for the health and continuity of our nation. MAGA people are the ones who fight your wars, the ones you call when someone breaks into your home, the ones who show up when you have a medical emergency, the ones who mend your car and your AC, the ones who teach your children. They are not Nazis, deplorables, or garbage. They are deeply patriotic people, and I am proud to be one of them.
The difference between MAGA in 2024 and 2016 is that the movement no longer belongs to the Republican Party. You will see in the video below that the majority of Trump’s transition team are former democrats–honorable patriotic people like Tulsi Gabbard and brilliant minds like Elon Musk. This is a movement that is for prosperity, new thinking, the breaking of old alliances, health, security, and a strong working class. This movement is a Unity movement, and I am inspired by it. The Democratic controlled media has not allowed you to see this movement for what it is--they have gaslit you and lied to you and painted us as Nazis. We are not.
This is the vision of what can be and I hope you get out and vote. And once the dust settles, if Kamala has the votes to win fair and square, then I will accept her as our Puppet, er, President, and live to fight another day.
I believe in this country and I believe in this movement, and no matter what happens we are still citizens at the end of the day. If we allow politicians to train us to hate our neighbor, then we all lose.
Embrace all of who you are. No political party owns you. Think for yourself. Be strong. Be independent. Be sovereign. Know your values. And never ever let anyone tell you what you have to think, believe, or say. Thank you America!
