This is my grandfather. His name was Victor. He was an auto mechanic, a gardener, and a fiddler who won Smithsonian awards for folk music. He was also a proud American and a World War II veteran. A devout fundamentalist Christian, he applied to be a medic during the war because he didn’t want to kill anyone. I have always remembered a phone conversation I had with him in which he told me that the most important thing in life is to have a relationship with God.
Over the weekend, I early voted at my local library for the American Solidarity Party, which I had been planning to do for months. I appreciate their consistent life ethic — their embrace of anti-abortion policies, plus their pro-worker stance. They have tried to craft a platform that does not require anyone to go against the Gospel. I am in Twelve Step recovery, so every morning I’m supposed to sit down and say the Eleventh Step prayer, asking “only for knowledge of His will for [me] and the power to carry that out.” I had begun to feel conflicted about my vote in the weeks preceding the election, as some part of me wanted very much to vote for Trump, but when I sat down and said this prayer, after a few moments I received God’s guidance to vote ASP.
I have to say that voting third party, for the first time in my life, felt great. It was liberating to do away once and for all with the brainwashing voices of liberals who insist that voting third party is an immoral act, a cop out, or a waste. This is America, and we have freedom of conscience. As long as there is the option to write in my support for a platform that honors almost exactly what I truly believe, I am going to take advantage of it. And proudly.
That being said, I am extremely relieved that Trump has won this election. The joy and happiness I have felt since the result became clear have been exactly like waking up on Christmas morning. I feel deep gratitude for every single American who voted for Trump, everyone who voted third party, every real populist who was part of the Bernie movement, and every voice who has contributed even slightly to bringing down the cultural hegemony of the past forty years. I feel like I have been waiting for this moment my whole life.
The people have spoken and won. And something writers do, or pundits, or whatever we are, is point out our own prescience in the days following a victory. I am not immune to the desire to flex, so to speak, so please allow me to resurrect some of my hits from the past few years.
Garbage
Before Trump drove by in a giant white sanitation truck, trolling Biden’s October Surprise Zoom call in which he called the former president’s supporters trash, I wrote in 2021 about my experience as a child moving from a red rural county to a blue academic bubble. On our first day in town, I went with my father to throw away leftover stuff from our move. “Is this the dump?” He asked a lady. She looked him up and down with withered lips and barely concealed disdain. “No, sir, this is the landfill,” she stressed. That’s when I knew we weren’t in upstate New York anymore. It was my first experience of upper class euphemisms, the way in which educated people say bullshit words to conceal normal everyday things. Riots Mostly peaceful protests. Women Birthing people. Latino Latinx. This is why so many of them can’t write for shit. Even in that moment, at six years old, I knew I didn’t want to be whatever that lady thought I should be. That attitude has lasted.
So screw the “landfill.” I am essentially white trash, and the dump is good enough for me.
Tim Walz is a fool
FOH with this hat. You can sell them on eBay. You can all take off your backwoods drag now. The ruse didn’t work.
I highly doubt that sincere, Bible-believing social conservatives who have traditional ideas about gender (Male and female He created them — Genesis 5:2) are going to be fooled by a man in a Carhartt costume.
When I wrote this in September, I didn’t realize that not only would socially conservative freaks like me reject Tim Walz, but many normal Americans would also. And thank God. Think of how many children will be protected by the refutation of gender surgery for minors. Goodbye, “Coach.” Man am I glad I don’t have to look at his flapping gums for the next four years.
Working class people deserve to make a living
If you work 40 hours a week, and do your best to contribute to society, you should be able to afford groceries. End of. You should also be able to afford medicine, a house, and a car. And to be able to live your life with economic stability. And if this isn’t happening — if the social and economic contract dissolves — you have the right to raise your voice about it and the people who run your country’s institutions should believe you.
When I ask my cousin’s husband what he thinks of any given politician, he has a stock answer: “He’s crooked-er than a dog’s back leg.” And as for his thoughts on former President Trump? “He’s a jackass, but I’d vote for him again,” he says. “We need someone who’s willing to change the economy.”
I wrote this piece in April, in part to defend my evangelical family members. Now I see that it was about money in addition to the wrongheaded depictions of their kind in the mainstream media, and that all along, they understood the situation in America better than anyone else I know. May God bless all sincere people of faith and shield them from every evil attack.
I follow this guy on YouTube called Blue Collar Catholic. And he was spot-on with this. I’ve been blessed in my life to mostly have the things I needed. But there have been a few days since I decided to devote myself to writing five years ago when I literally haven’t had food. On those days, I always thought to myself that any problem I thought I had on a day when I had food wasn’t a problem at all. If you have food, almost anything else can be solved. So many distractions vanish when these primal elements of life aren’t working. And there are millions of Americans going through this.
Artists don’t have to be liberal
Say it again for the administrators, nonprofit directors, and editors in the back. NOT ALL ARTISTS ARE LIBERAL. NOT ALL ART HAS TO BE POLITICAL. Not all fashion people have to be social justice warriors. Art has to remain free. Expression should be unfettered. And if the institutions fail us, then fuck the institutions. We’ll figure it out ourselves.
It is perfectly possible to enjoy both “Hillbilly Elegy” and “Sons and Lovers.”
I was writing here about books by J.D. Vance and D.H. Lawrence, but many combinations are possible. I was raised by a father who toggled between Rush Limbaugh and Richard Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration” on the car radio. If you want to experience a highly successful art form that also has conservative values, try listening to commercial country. You are free. Never forget it.
The inadequacy of therapy culture; the omnipotence of God
I noticed while clicking back and forth between CNN and Fox on election night, watching poor old Tapper try to absorb the results, that CNN was sponsored by Calm, a meditation app, while Fox featured ads for Hallow, a Catholic prayer app. How much did those 30-second spots of silence and mindfulness really help stressed CNN viewers? Fox, by contrast, interspersed its commentary with an ad called “Pray for Our Country,” which ends with a guy sitting at his kitchen table, hands clasped, saying “Jesus, we trust in you. Amen.” He turns everything over to God. When the going gets rough, there is really only so far that talk therapy, breathing exercises, and meditation absent divinity are going to get you.
In secular society, the Almighty Therapist is the curer of all ills
I wrote about these divergent sensibilities in an essay from April 2023, in which I compared the experience of calling the suicide hotline to the experience of calling a prayer line. After praying with someone on the phone,
I feel genuinely transformed — when I open my eyes the world seems a bit clearer, my soul more at ease.
Credo
I believe in God and the re-enfranchisement of the middle and working class.
This would probably be my version of a lawn sign. I wrote it in Summer 2023 after a transformative conversation with a monk.
We speak of the sermons of John Donne, the visionary poetry of William Blake, the writings of George Washington, various forms of feminism, his love of D.H. Lawrence and Nietzsche, Bernie Sanders, and the wretched consequences of the economic consensus of the past forty years. I tell him of my interest in the mystics. “If you say you’re interested in the mystics today,” I complain, “people look at you like you’re a nutcase.” “Oh, no,” he says placidly. “It’s the mystics that are going to get us out of this mess.”
We are getting out of the mess, and the Biden years seem more and more to me now like the instance one looks back in the midst of a perilous and bracing journey into the unknown. Faltering for a moment, or perhaps stabilizing ourselves, we continued on the choppy terrain to a new economic reality, and this image came to symbolize the rage of a dying regime.
Our Revolution
In a 2021 Atlantic essay section called “How the Class War Ends,” David Brooks outlines how power is distributed in our society. The creative class has “abundant cultural, political, and economic power; the red one-percenters have economic power, but scant cultural power; the young, educated elites have tons of cultural power and growing political power, but still not much economic power; and the caring class and rural working class, unheard and unseen, have almost no power of any kind at all.” I disagree. The caring class and rural working class have spiritual power.
I wrote this in an essay about rejecting antidepressants, and trusting in my faith and cultural values no matter what the left-liberal establishment was trying to shove down my throat. The class mentioned at the end of the paragraph also has power to vote — and their voices have been heard. A movement that began in the years after the financial crisis, blossomed in the Bernie campaign, had strange flowerings such as the Yang and RFK campaigns, and ultimately found its apotheosis in the re-election of Donald Trump (to Bernie’s chagrin) may be conceived of as one multifaceted attempt to remedy a terrible disease. Sanders represented a homeopathic cure, but sometimes what you really need is a nasty antibiotic.
This is the Bernie I remember and recognize. I see all these strains of populism as something like denominations in a larger faith. And perhaps, almost certainly, what happened Tuesday did not originate in either Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party, but in figures such as Sarah Palin, my favorite moose-hunter.
This pin from 2008 reads, “Change is Coming!” And it has. Seventeenth-century political philosopher John Locke wrote in Book II of his “Two Treatises on Civil Government” that when those who govern fail to protect the righteous interests of citizens, “they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided” — the dissolution of that particular government. When fruit does not follow labor and citizens are placed into positions of subservience that are beneath their human dignity, the ruling class must understand that “by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and by the establishment of a new legislative (such as they shall think fit), provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.”
This election was about the revolt of the American spirit against bureaucracy and censorship. It was about the spirit of the frontier, risk, rebellion, and all the elements of the American character that truly define us. A sickening and curdled elite had settled over us like a cicatrice, but our blood ran fresh underneath.
Without stumbling into awkward and groveling remonstrations against the immorality of those who breached the Capitol on January 6th, I will address what on an aesthetic level in the sartorial and behavioral choices of so-called “Shaman” Jacob Chansley has always seemed to me a kind of return of the repressed. If you take a vital, raucous populace, attempt to starve it of its God-given freedom of speech, pump it full of chemicals and coerce it into injections it may not want, without which it will be robbed even further of the fruits of its labor, and if you attempt to coddle, soothe, and strangulate everything that once made us mighty, and wild, and free, you will fail — and you will find a man in your sacred halls, howling and covered in animal pelts.
We are the people who crossed a continent in search of gold, stopping only to bury our dead before crossing further mountains in our wagons. We are the people who built churches in the wilderness, who foraged for nature’s medicine where no doctors could be found. We are the people who defeated slavery. We can do anything.
And just as the current administration received its retribution for failing the American people, the corporate press and legacy media must receive the same. The American public needs and deserves a writing and reporting force that reflects its interests, values, and priorities.
The Atlantic does not speak for the American people. The Bulwark and The Dispatch do not speak for the vast majority of conservatives. We speak for ourselves.
As Lane Scott, a female homesteader in California, put it in a Substack essay called “The Pioneering Home Companion:”
[Trump] exposes the other side for what it is. He’s not a builder. But he is useful. Because while he distracts, the real conservative movement is happening quietly, in every town and city and state in the union.
I often struggle with what it means to be a Christian and an American. There are some who believe that devout Christians should not be political at all. Compared to the lamb, what do the donkey and the elephant really mean? I am inspired by monastic life and try to incorporate many of its practices. But try as I might, I cannot remain silent. Freedom of conscience must be upheld. I am human, a sinner, and a red-blooded American woman.