OPINION –
If there’s a rare point where the left and right can agree, it’s the seismic shift of President Donald Trump assuming office Monday.
Both sides acknowledge the reality of a hard-right pivot in America’s trajectory; from there we fracture like a fissure.
Social media has been especially jarring post-inauguration, feeds thickly polarized with gleeful notes of congratulations against solemn condolences and resistance-centered marching orders.
While slightly more than half the country experiences relief and euphoria, the under-half are incensed and fear-stricken. One group celebrates a joyous holiday (we popped champagne at my friends’ D.C. apartment) as the other mourns (some Bay-area Liberals gathered to scream).
Of course, this juxtaposition is nothing new. Contrary to what DEI initiatives and mammoth mass media would have us believe, woke ideology has proven not to be the mainstream school of thought. Though the illusory grip of Liberal social power still leads many Republicans to support their party from the shadows.
Following a lengthy period (especially under Barack Obama’s elongated reign—IYKYK) of subtle coaxing to disseminate divisive black-and-white thinking and tribalistic ‘cancel culture,’ many Americans are left rightly fearful of political retaliation from employers, colleagues, friends, and peers.
Even from the presumed comfort of our private watch party, Monday was underscored with battle wounds that many victim-accustomed Democrats experientially wouldn’t relate.
Take, for example, an unassuming French journalist who was granted access to our six-person fête to profile one of the hosts Madison Campbell in the context of the momentous day. The young reporter threw a curve ball early on.
“Do you feel vindicated?” she asked.
“I think the people spoke, and that’s what truly matters,” Campbell eloquently skirted with a polite smile. The two women faced one another on the L-shaped couch in plain clothes, the journalist with only a voice recorder in hand.
Our other host Nicholas Iacono keenly listened to his partner’s interview from the adjoining galley kitchen where we quietly nibbled from his curated charcuterie board. A lawyer with a bevy of litigation and congressional experience, Iacono could appreciate Campbell’s equally thoughtful responses that challenge even the skew of a writer with a Bluesky profile.
The persecution problem
Ironically Campbell is one of many Conservatives who probably deserve vindication, an obvious target of government weaponization. So much so that guest Lucian Wintrich eventually interjected her decorum.
“She was persecuted!” he offered. The journalist visibly perked up as we all turned to look at Wintrich.
CEO of Leda Health, a private provider of at-home rape kits and other sexual health services, Campbell has faced a flurry of legal hurdles and lawsuits for developing products that take a slice of medical complex and government profits.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 founder’s work to innovate beyond invasive and ineffective hospital testing procedures and improve historically bleak assault report rates has been met with pushback from state-affiliated legislators. For instance, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James insisted that Leda Health’s kits “will never be admissible in court” despite the company’s goal to accomplish just that.
Like Campbell, Wintrich is not unfamiliar with persecution, having faced retaliation for his right-wing leanings and work as a journalist and White House correspondent for the Gateway Pundit.
Party lines
Where the Republican Party empowers capitalism, private ownership, and innovation, the Democrats thrive on big government, state ownership, and censorship.
Independent entities like the Gateway Pundit and Leda Health are systematically denigrated while state-influenced behemoths like the medical and legacy media complexes are propped up.
Entrepreneurs and free-thinkers, unless kissing the boots of government, have been increasingly subject to lawfare simply for existing as competition.
Just look at the Pennsylvania Amish who registered to vote for the first time through Scott Presler’s Early Vote Action. This was possibly the key to winning the 2024 election, a reaction spurred by a corrupt government leveraging increased regulation to harass and control the most self-sufficient among us.
I also have friends who have been debanked, and financially scorned for creating right-leaning media that was lucky enough to catch the spotlight. Many more have battled discriminatory press, such as the New York Young Republican Club which journalists have developed a severe allergy to positive coverage of any kind.
These examples and countless more feed into one of President Trump’s first executive orders on January 20 to end the weaponization of the federal government against the people:
The American people have witnessed the previous administration engage in a systematic campaign against its perceived political opponents, weaponizing the legal force of numerous Federal law enforcement agencies and the Intelligence Community against those perceived political opponents in the form of investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related actions. These actions appear oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives.”
Balancing the scales
While one faction of the country now grapples with feeling unsafe, justice is at last being restored to those whose safety was never a mainstream concern.
Even the worst of the left’s doomsday “Trump is Hitler,” “The Handmaid’s Tale is real” rhetoric cannot match in actuality what the right has already endured in private.
As Democrats have almost singlehandedly relied on the notion of victimhood to fuel the ideology of their leftward party, Republicans have, through the pressurized refinement of social ostracization, legal struggle sessions, and cancel culture that would make Mao proud, developed a diamond-strength resiliency.
Maybe that’s why some ~15,000 of us had the resolve Monday evening to push through a sub-freezing climate, heavily locked down streets, and hours-long wait times to queue outdoors for the historical Liberty Ball.
Later, when performer Jason Aldean told us he would be expanding to a full set as we waited for President Trump to finish his Day One work, a palpable hope surged through the patient crowd that our country was once again in good hands. How could you rush the guy?
It was that same evening when 1,500 J6 political prisoners were ordered for release. Trump’s pardon came hours after an exiting President Biden offered the same clemency to the J6 committee thought to be implicated. Biden only “forgot” to pardon one significant person on his way out: Nancy Pelosi, who coincidentally aided in Biden’s forced replacement.
The J6 hostages understand American political persecution at the highest level. Many were sentenced to years in prison simply for walking through the Capital that day. Video footage shows swaths of people being ushered in by Capital police with no apparent presumption of wrongdoing.
Freed J6er Jessica Watkins describes being unable to sleep beyond 30-minute increments during her four-year imprisonment:
I slept to a blackout level I never thought possible. In prison the bunk is steel and only covered by a tiny mat – so your back hurts like crazy all night. The noise level is a constant 40-60 decibles; more if the inmates are tweaking out on meth or smoking K2. Because it’s prison, everything is concrete so the acoustics make everything louder and echo. There’s a thing I call “KeyTSD”, the stress of the jingling of key rings on officers, who walk around every 30 minutes and shine a freaking flashlight in your face. The temperature is always just one level above the subarctic, but they give you ineffective blanketing. I am always frozen to the bone. Because I wake up so frequently, I usually get up to pee like 2-3 times per night. In the 4 years I spent as Joe Biden’s Hostage, I slept 0 Nights thoroughly. Not one night.”
Converging the divide
My intention isn’t to diminish the experience of the left while I play Victim Olympics for the right. I want to honor the left’s concerns and be a pillar of support where I can, and my inbox is open for rational discussion.
The hard truth I’m exploring here is that the objective discrimination, lawfare, and hardships faced by civilians on the right will not be inflicted on the left.
Why? Because this incoming administration and its supporters are people who know what it is to suffer for their political affiliation or opposition to the regime. Defeating this persecution is core to their shared mission.
Even Donald Trump.
A prime example of politically charged persecution, the Deep State acted as a puppet master to create a nationwide loathing of Trump through smear campaigns, lies, fraudulent allegations, false flag events, and election fraud. They even tried to assassinate him.
The brainwashing that emerges from this programming is what we call Trump Derangement Syndrome. The unfortunate thing about TDS is it’s quite contagious and often rubs off on those who choose to associate with or support Trump.
A new era
Under the burgeoning Golden Age, we’ve entered a time of reckoning, when long-buried truths will finally come to light.
In his first week in office, President Trump signed executive orders that protect free speech from federal censorship, address the border crisis, prioritize disaster relief, mandate declassification of several assassinations, restore consumer choice (make lightbulbs incandescent again), withdraw the US from the corrupt World Health Organization, Paris Agreement, and Green New Deal, and end harmful climate policies that lead to disaster (see: the recent Los Angeles fires).
Trump has also discussed abolishing the federal income tax, returning power and equal rule of law to the American people, and publicly asked Bank of America’s CEO to restore unjustly revoked service to Conservatives.
This isn’t the work of some “orange bogeyman” ushering in fascism, no matter how many times the media complex cries wolf and perverts gestures from the heart as “Nazi salutes.”
Donald Trump’s actions this week prove he’s a Patriot fighting to protect the American people from the enemy within, to restore the abundance many of us once knew, refined by trial into the brilliant and resilient President who stands before us now.
May our country heal.
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