“Irredeemable”
Hillary Clinton is the gift that keeps on giving and just like a disliked white elephant gift, she refuses to go away. She was back in the news the other day, making more outlandish comments. In an October 5th, CNN interview, Clinton claimed Trump supporters are part of a MAGA cult and should be deprogrammed, stating “that at some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen.” My first thought was that media-deprived Hillary just needs some attention or perhaps she’s being dusted-off for a third time by the Democrat Party elite should they need her to replace Joe Biden next year. Here she goes again, I thought, as if Trump were a modern-day pied piper charming the masses into following him to perdition. For anything remotely resembling that, she need look no further than her own Barack Obama and his Rasputin-like cult-a-personality status among democrat voters and the media.
What Hillary may never understand is that Trump did not form the MAGA movement, as Rush would often say, it found him. Trump is the product of 40 years of failed ruling class statism courtesy of both Democrat and Republican policies to grow government, e.g., no spending bill too large to pass, no foreign war too small to fight. Like Reagan, who tapped into the “southern democrats” to win in 1980, Trump tapped into the unheard angst of the working-man middle class and spoke directly, unequivocally, to it. Overnight, he became the champion of the forgotten man in America. The people who make the country “work” had found a voice directly at the top of government, leapfrogging the entire entrenched establishment.
Had it not been for the genocide perpetrated in Israel by Hamas, I suspect Hillary’s comments would (still be resonating on the national stage) have received even more national attention. But, then again, it may be appropriate that she was upstaged by genocidal maniacs, she has so much in common with them. Both demonize entire population groups to justify their own shortcomings. Both would readily deny their opposition the right to exist. Finally, both advocate the state take extremist measures in dealing with their opposition.
Too extreme you think?
Well, unfortunately, this is not the first time Clinton has disparaged a large voting block of her political opposition. Back in September of 2016 she made her infamous basket of deplorables speech in New York City, “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” she stated whimsically along with other invectives, then adding, “The people in this basket, emboldened by Trump’s tweets, were “irredeemable. When confronted the next day about her comments, she clarified, “I regret using the word ‘half.’”
Since then, most on the political right have seized upon the deplorables term, either to express outrage that a presidential candidate would so demonize (insult) half of the electorate or else to mock it with T-shirts and hats bearing the word Deplorable as a badge of honor. But as crass Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does. as the word deplorable may have been in referring to 50% of the electorate in the United States of America, the more insidious and chilling choice of words was her term irredeemable.
Red MAGA baseball caps on a table for sale.
Irredeemable is an historically dangerous term and an even more deadly concept. If something is irredeemable it, by definition, cannot be redeemed. It cannot be changed, re-purposed, or re-educated. Like a coupon past its redemption date, it has no value and just needs to be discarded or eliminated. Spending additional resources on correcting, adjusting or modifying its purpose would be a waste.
Either knowingly or not, Clinton tipped her hand by branding Trump voters as irredeemable. There are no coincidences in politics when it comes to pre-planned television appearances on left-wing media channels with high-profile leftist Presidential politicians. The Clintons are synonymous with Democrat Party messaging over the past 30 years, and I am inclined to believe that her word selection was quite intentional. Irredeemable is a word someone uses who is already on the far end of the “Dislike to Hate” spectrum, with “disdain for,“ “contempt for” and “fed-up with” somewhere in the middle. Knowingly or not, deeming someone as irredeemable bears a close resemblance to complete disdain, perhaps outright hatred, of that person.
Redemption is a religious concept, best exemplified, I believe, in the Bible, whose overarching message is the redemption of a fallen human race unable to save itself. God is in the business of redeeming a fallen mankind, and by extension, planet. The earth was formless and void. God redeemed it by planting a garden. Ruth was left destitute in Moab, the land of her ancestors. She was redeemed by Boaz and line of David in Bethlehem. Unwilling and stubborn Jonah was sent to deliver a message of God’s judgment to the Ninevites so that they could repent and be redeemed. They did and they were. But Sodom and Gomorrah had gone too far in the eyes of God. There were not even ten uncorrupted souls amongst them. For the irredeemable, there is only one solution. (obliteration).
In 1945 after the end of the WWII in Europe, several thousand Croatian military personnel (combatants) and scared civilians attempted desperately to surrender to Allied forces in Klagenfurt, Austria. To one degree or another, each of them had served in or supported the pro-German Independent State of Croatia. Much like the Lienz Cossacks who had hoped to cut a better deal with the Germans in opposition to an oppressive Russian communist state, their predicament was this: either surrender to Tito and his newly formed communist government in Yugoslavia, where they would surely be slaughtered, or march hundreds of miles on foot to the Austrian border and surrender to the Allied forces. As did the Cossacks, the Croatians chose the latter. But the Allied commanders washed their hands of them once they arrived and turned them back over to the Yugoslavian government. To Tito these soldiers and civilians were the enemy and were too much of a liability. They were irredeemable. Tito forced them to return on foot to prison camps inside Yugoslavia. Many did not survive the death march back. Almost none were ever heard from again.
This is but one, albeit less known, genocide of irredeemable peoples. It has been repeated many times in just the past 100 years, Hitler’s extermination of his political opposition in the concentration camps of WWII, Stalin’s in the Siberian gulag’s of the 1950’s and 60’s, and Mao’s during the cultural revolution and great leap forward also in the 50’s and 60’s. Many are not as familiar with Stalin’s wholesale starvation of the Ukrainian people in the 1930’s, the Armenian genocides by Turkey in the early 1900’s, or Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia during the 1970’s. In each of the first three cases, tens of millions of people perished. But in all cases these were fellow citizens deemed irredeemable by the state and in each case their only crime as citizens was to simply resist the cultural and political changes being forced upon them by their dear leader and his new ruling class.
Here in lies the danger of high-profile politicians using words like irredeemable and deprograming. They introduce into the public dialog a dehumanizing concept for political opposition. Trump voters are deplorable AND they are irredeemable. They are the great unwashed, the peasants who should eat cake if they lack enough bread. They are the reason for my aspirational failures, not my own shortcomings and unlikability. They deserve the fate that is waiting for them. Something needs to happen, why, let’s deprogram them.
Perhaps we might overlook Clinton’s latest remark calling for the deprogramming of MAGA cultists, if it was the only such statement. Sadly, it is not. It follows in a much longer line of disparaging remarks from leftist presidential personalities. Obama notoriously said “most republicans are bitter clingers to their guns and their religion” and “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” In the 2020 election, Biden claimed Pennsylvania voters that do not support him are “chumps,” meaning, I suppose, even those who don’t vote at all. In September of 2022 he again attacked opposition voters by stating, “…the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
These are the not the words of mere political pundits trying to promote book sales book or to bask in a moment of media attention. These were ideologies expressed by actual presidents and party front-runners. From such echelons, these words have profound meaning and dire consequences. They signal to an entire generation of democrat voters just how to think of their opposition and, ultimately, how they should be treated in an ideal democrat-run state.
Even still, some may be tempted to dismiss such phrases as just harmless, off-the-cuff political rhetoric. But they are extremely dangerous coming from the leaders of the United States of America. As the left so often lectures us, words matter. Cults and cult members carry a highly negative connotation in the United States. Perhaps the sentiment is something like, “if you’re stupid enough to be in a cult, you deserve what you get.” Hence, when a Jim Jones group commits mass suicide, David Koresh and his followers are torched alive, or a western militia group has its constitutional rights trampled upon by the ATF, we feign outrage for a few news cycles, but our inner voice says, “what did they expect?”
Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and most of the rest of the Islamic world did not come to hate the Jews overnight, their tensions go back thousands of years. What is true about the Islamic world, however, is that their countries are ruled by strongmen, theocrats, and dictators. One way or another, these leaders have all taken power from the people. As such, they are illegitimate. Such autocrats deflect the focus of the masses from their own illegitimacy onto other easy targets of popular distrust. In so doing dictators can distract the masses from the truth: police-state oppression, failed policies, and third-world living standards (while the ruling elite live in opulence). Hitler blamed political opposition, the communists and the Jews, Stalin blamed the intellectuals and the fascists, and the Arabs always blame the Jews.
What causes a group of armed men in military commando fashion to descend on a rock concert and savagely gun down like rats hundreds of defenseless teenagers? What causes them to murder and then desecrate the bodies of babies, rape teenage girls, and pull grandmothers out of their homes and execute them in front of their families? The acts are evil, but the driving emotion is hatred. Like cancer, when something is hated it should not be allowed to exist. It should be eliminated, spare no expense. It is irredeemable.
H. L Mencken wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” Hillary, the Democrat Party elite, and their willing accomplices in the media, academia, and Hollywood, are masters at creating imaginary hobgoblins. Today they are known as Covid, Putin, Russia collusion, January 6 th show-trials, transgenderism and, of course, racist everything. All the while they covertly work to subvert elections, weaponize government agencies and destroy the American middle class. It remains to be seen whether the Leftist elite can also successfully demonize their political opposition with similar success. MAGA deplorables, bitter clingers, chumps, extremists, and cult members who require deprograming have so far proven to be a good start for them. Truth be told, in an ideal Democrat Party run country, MAGA voters would actually be treated as irredeemables. Does the Democrat Party still have its long-term lease at Manzanar?
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