Former President Donald Trump recently sat down for an interview with Theo Von, a comedian who hosts the “This Past Weekend” podcast, among other ventures. Von is well known for his Louisiana charm, his deadpan, almost unintentional humor, and his meandering conversational style, which leads to a sometimes funny/sometimes deep dichotomy popular among younger listeners. But beneath the humor and zigzagging conversation is an earnestness that can’t be faked, making Trump a natural guest for such a show.
When Trump first rose to political prominence during the lead-up to the 2016 election, the prevailing narrative was that he was an outlandish firebrand, a performance artist playing a role on television who was only in the race for his own benefit. But with each new interview and debate, his authenticity proved those assumptions wrong and drew voters to him in droves. His victory over the narrative machine cemented him as a true American hero, a man who’d had enough of parasitic politics and was willing to risk everything he had to save his country.
Nearly a decade later, with our social fabric torn to shreds by the left’s perpetual cultural revolution, Trump has become a grandfatherly figure of stability and nostalgia for many, embodying the hope of millions who just wish we could go back to a simpler time when America made sense. Trump’s resolute demeanor in the wake of the assassination attempt at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, just over a month ago has only made this genuine appeal of his even stronger.
Von’s podcast isn’t the only high-profile conversation Trump has recently had. He also sat for a lengthy two-hour conversation with Elon Musk on X. Trump has continually proved to listeners of these conversations that, despite the lavishness of his unique life, he is still just a citizen who is sick of seeing his fellow Americans trod upon by the Regime and its liberal supporters. His goal has always been simple: to protect the interests of the forgotten men and women of this country and to save them from the depraved death cult of leftism. In this simple way, he embodies the spirit of the founders more than any other leader in recent memory. Or, in his own words: “I just want to stop the world from killing itself!”
But this Regime is simply too proud to admit any wrongdoing. They refuse to allow anyone else the chance to turn back their bioleninist revolution. In their desperate haste to stave off the demands of the voters they despise, represented by Trump, they have destroyed our institutions and melted the framework of behavioral norms upon which our society was so carefully constructed. They’ve burned it all in their lust for power, the consequences of which we are seeing play out in a rapid behavioral spiral descending into chaos, stagnation, hopelessness, depravity, and cruelty.
It would take thousands of pages to recount the numerous ways in which the left has destroyed any semblance of normalcy in our culture. But the conclusion is that this long process of degradation has led to a potent strain of nihilism and degeneracy in our culture, where the traditional view of individual rights has been subverted beyond recognition into a perversion of what it means to be “normal.” Things we all considered normal 10 years ago, such as having a family or going to church, are suddenly reviled as “extreme” or “weird.” Time Magazine even wrote that flying the American flag was a “threat.” In fact, calling normal things and normal people “weird” seems to be the only argument the Harris campaign cares to make for why people should vote for her.
This attitude was highlighted by leftists’ reaction to the Von/Trump interview, which was predictably skewed by the media. Trump and Von had a very interesting conversation about Trump’s brother Fred and his problems with alcohol (which ultimately led to his untimely death). This sparked a deeper conversation about the dangers of substance abuse and health in the country. Trump has steadfastly refused to partake in drugs or alcohol throughout his life as a result of this formative experience with his brother, counseling all of his children and anyone else who will listen to avoid substances to keep their minds clear and their bodies healthy.
Von also spoke earnestly about his struggles in recovery, with Trump serving almost as a mentor in the conversation, attentively listening and asking questions, providing snippets of advice throughout the discussion in his affable style. In speaking about the sensitive subject of his brother, Trump said, “The reason it’s good talking about it is it might help other people. If it helps one other person, it’s worth the conversation.”
Trump’s abstinence and his desire to warn others about the dangers of substance abuse should be an admirable trait, not something to be reviled or jeered at. Von certainly respected it in the interview, but our society’s perception of normal has been so corrupted by the left that many people are incapable of even conceptualizing healthy human behavior. In this case, Trump’s grandfatherly wisdom is anathema to the left and their dysgenic interpretation of the world.
We saw a similarly strange reaction to the assassination attempt in July. Many lefties were happy to spread conspiracy theories that it had been “staged.” They didn’t believe it because they couldn’t recognize his courageous response in the moment. Trump’s defiance in the face of death simply didn’t make sense to leftists. For this inverted society, many aren’t even able to conceptualize something as fundamental as a leader’s courage anymore. “Why would he stand and raise his fist? I would never do that. Must be fake!” Their minds are too small to understand basic human traits that merely a generation ago were universally admired.
These are the same people who would watch “The Lord of the Rings” or read about Greek tragedies and go, “Those characters must be gay!” They can’t conceptualize healthy friendships or mutual respect and admiration between fighters. These concepts have been part of our civilizational credo for generations because they provided a basic set of behavioral expectations that we could all agree on, whether or not we agreed to the semantics of government, politics, interests, or lifestyles.
The founders recognized this, choosing to build the government upon those deeper values to ensure greater stability. As John Adams famously said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
It would be nice to ignore the prattling of the insane leftists, but now the inmates run the asylum: Judges regularly release murderers onto the streets, groomers run school districts, and communists wear stars upon their uniforms. At some point, we lost our nerve and started “playing nice” to the ghouls at the fringes. Now a significant proportion of society doesn’t even know what our values are anymore. As left-wing reactions to the Von/Trump interview reveal, we don’t even have an effective way to communicate these concepts to them. Our words float past them uselessly. They occupy a fictional world in their own minds, built upon an obsessive self-worship that leaves no room for growth, introspection, challenge, or reflection.
The subversion of norms has led to a shift of the Overton window regarding “normality” itself, hence why the left sees genuine conversation or abstinence from drugs as “weird.” Perhaps they don’t have any healthy examples of things like this in their own lives, so the concepts have become foreign to them. But it’s clear that leftists no longer have any interest whatsoever in trying to bridge their lack of knowledge or experience with others. They’ve lost their innate human inquisitiveness, trained out by addictive social-status posturing.
Their desire to signal loyalty to the Regime outweighs any need to maintain healthy relationships in their lives, especially when they are told that having healthy relationships is “weird” in the first place. For example, an orphan might wonder what it’s like to have grown up in a healthy household with two parents, but leftists instead will argue that having two parents is a bad thing and then attempt to force the rest of society to conform to their warped view via threats. Eventually, this inverted structure becomes incapable of holding itself together. The abnormal, once relegated to the fringes, use their newfound power to chase normality out of all systems and institutions, actively seeking to eradicate any reminders of their aberrational existence.
This long process of decay has led us to the horizon of the leftist singularity: the spiteful erasure of normal people and normal life through an incessantly combative and aggressively genocidal campaign of demographic replacement, grooming, religious erasure, social regulation, media propaganda, etc. Eventually, the normal people are all coerced by social bayonets to adopt the new, inverted social order, like a forced conversion by a conquering army. Those norms of behavior, which comprise the eternal bonds that once held the structure together, are not only weakened but transformed into explosives. Trust collapses and society begins to fray.
The solution isn’t to try to convince the left of obvious truths, like the fact that it’s normal for Trump, who lost his brother to the scourge of alcoholism, to believe that avoiding drugs is a good practice for a healthy life. We know they won’t interpret that as “normal” because they are no longer capable of doing so. In the case of J.D. Vance, even a simple wish to be buried in the land of your forefathers is never going to seem normal to them. The left’s resentment of normality spirals into a nihilistic coping mechanism, where nothing matters to them except eliminating anything that reminds them of the traditions they’ve come to revile. This is now their only goal: the politics of spite.
The solution instead is to overwhelm the poison of leftism and banish its purveyors from societal power. We can’t convince Narcissus to look away from his own reflection, but we can build a new social structure beyond the grasp of the narcissistic freaks who have decimated our culture.
Ultimately, that’s what Trump is about. Refusal to accept the gravity of this battle has led many to imbibe false narratives about a man who wishes only to save his people and salvage the founders’ dream. Joining his crusade requires a thorough understanding of all those old eternal human behavioral truths that so many Democrats (and many Republicans desperate for their approval) have lost touch with. Make America Great Again also means Making America Normal Again.
The founders recognized when the norms of their day, such as trust and fairness, evaporated from the British Parliament and the court of King George III. They didn’t abandon them nor submit to this forced inversion of their social norms. Instead, they used those eternal behavioral truths as touchstones to build something new without the British Empire’s interference.
We must adopt their courage and honor their legacy by throwing off the albatross of leftist degeneracy, creating something new to ensure the survival of that ancestral gift. We must not yield or submit, but defy and build. Trump ignites this ancestral spirit in all of us. In his own words closing his conversation with Musk on X, “This is so much more important than me or my life. We’re going to save this country.”
Vagrant of Rhodes is an American writer granted anonymity by The Federalist. He can be followed @vagrantwires.
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