Shamed, Smeared, and Slurred — The real question in this election is simple: do you want leaders who hate you or leaders fighting for you?

Like many of us, David Strom is Tired of 'Leaders' Who Hate Me, He points out that 

the election is really a referendum about whether experts should run things or people. 

"Experts" and the "transnational elite," for my purposes, amount to the same thing. These are the people who create the Narrative™ that can convince people that masks work, that schools should be close, that experimental vaccines should be universally mandated, and that bureaucrats should run the world. 

They are the people who will look a mother who can't afford groceries or pay her rent in the eye and insist that the economy is excellent. They tell us the border is secure, that crime is down, and that the evidence before our eyes is wrong because they have statistics that we should believe instead of experience. 

Those "experts" hate us, because we don't believe them. 

Dissent is not allowed, and if you think for yourself you are a "bitter clinger," or a Deplorable, or a "fascist," a Nazi, or Garbage, or anti-American. 

Americans should comply. We should watch Morning Joe, The View, and listen to moronic celebrities because they have been given the talking points from experts. 

They lie. They commit hoaxes. They engage in brainwashing campaigns. They overtax us, ban things we want, force us to buy things we don't, tell us not to eat meat, that truth is "misinformation," and weaponize our credulous neighbors against us. 

The irony is that the left hates liberal Americans almost as much as they hate us. They pat them on the head, work them up, applaud the temper tantrums, and value their votes. But you don't hoax your friends. You don't dump illegal aliens in their neighborhoods, You don't deny their children a chance at a decent education. If the head of the Chicago Teachers Union sends her kid to a private school, she has contempt for the people she claims to love. 

The root of the problem is that the transnational elite who run things and control the media hate you and me. They say it often enough, although they refrain from admitting that they hate all the proles.

 … The real question in this election is simple: do you want leaders who hate you or leaders fighting for you?

Obama called us Clingers.
Hillary called us Deplorables.
Kamala called us Fascists.
Walz called us Nazis.
Biden called us Garbage.
Mark Cuban called us Weak & Stupid.

Now Kathy Hochul says we’re Un-American.

They want division.
We want unity.
And tomorrow we will UNITE AMERICA. pic.twitter.com/TVL0F1KgLn

— Byron Donalds (@ByronDonalds) November 4, 2024

In From ‘Clingers’ to ‘Garbage’—Why the 16 years of Vilification?, Victor Davis Hanson adds that

The Democratic top dogs are most likely to embrace agendas that never garner 51 percent of public support—vast reductions in gas and oil to lessen “climate change,” open borders to welcome in the world’s needy, the government promotion of a third, transgendered sex, abortion on demand without restrictions, the reifications of various critical (race/legal/penal/modern monetary) “theories,” and radical changes in the current system (ending the Senate filibuster, the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, the 50-state union, etc.).

Two truisms stand out about the elite boutique agenda: one, when these theories are implemented—often by the courts, and the permanent and unelected administrative and bureaucratic state—the architects of such experimentation do not really feel the inevitable deleterious consequences.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Silicon Valley masters of the universe, the professors of law, the corporate CEOs, and the Bill Gates of the world really don’t care much whether gas is at $3 a gallon or $6, or Romex wire is $39 a spool or $150.

Illegal aliens do not go to their children’s schools or crowd the offices of their concierge cardiologists and oncologists, much less dump trash on their streets and curbs.

They are strong supporters of teachers’ unions, despising the very idea of charter schools and homeschooling. And yet they send their children more often to private schools where students are not the lab rats of the public school system.

Their ideology is the fruit of their privilege and so is often more utopian and abstract. Given that if it results in economic, social, and cultural damage to millions, they will certainly avoid the ensuing flotsam and jetsam.

The fallout from defunding the police falls upon the inner city, not the privately patrolled Presidio Heights or the secluded sorts in Martha’s Vineyard.

Given their income and status, the new Democratic credentialed and moneyed classes do not care about the struggle of others to live one more day, clinging to the middle-class vestiges of their parents’ era. Instead, for the anointed who have transcended the fear of not filling up their tank or coming up short on monthly rent and power bills, it is not hard to mandate job-killing EVs or to chuckle over biological boys in girls’ locker rooms and pride flags flying from the abandoned American embassy in Kabul.

 … the struggling middle classes … are conservative in wanting a secure border, legal-only immigration, affordable food and energy, safe streets, and equality of opportunity rather than of result, because they have no margin of error, lacking the wherewithal of secure home zip codes, or the perks of gargantuan grocery bills at Whole Foods, or a new foreign car every two years.

Such conservatism is reflected in the worldview of the clingers and irredeemables. They accept not cosmopolitism but 2,500 years of nationhood that remind them there can be no nation without borders.

There can be no modern comforts and security without access to affordable food and energy. There can be no public society without safe streets—and indeed, not even public places without sanitation and common decency.

 … These chumps, fascists, and garbage people … are deaf to the top-down sermons from an Al Gore, John Kerry, the Clintons, the Obamas, or Joe Biden, which assume the grubby majority is either too ignorant or amoral or both to know what is good for them and so must be shamed, smeared, and slurred rather than won over by argumentations and persuasion. Is not the 2024 election about just that—the haughty who sermonize and those weary of being lectured?

 … Yes, the semi-fascists are lectured that they are racist, sexist, and xenophobic. They are damned by the credentialed as “white privileged” who “rage,” as they dutifully go off to Iraq and Afghanistan to die in combat at double their numbers in our demographics.

 … Finally, the unspoken irony of this divide is that the self-professed elite know that they are not the elite by any definable standard or meritocracy. Yale gives a higher percentage of A’s on spec to its students than do trade schools and junior colleges.