Psychiatric facilities across the United States are at breaking point after the number of people claiming to be sent from the future to stop Donald Trump reached epidemic proportions, a semi-serious News Thump article trending on Facebook reports. But I have an alternative theory.
“They all say the same thing, they come from a future of riots, war, famine, the collapse of civilised society, and then being sent back to ‘make it all right'” says an alleged source. “The future is getting increasingly desperate to stop the rise of Donald Trump and the end of the world he will inevitably bring about.”
In “12 Monkeys,” Bruce Willis is sent back in time to save the world from a catastrophe, but things go wrong and he ends up in a mental hospital. Is that what’s happening? Why does the future want to kill Donald Trump?
“He can’t be that bad, can he?”
Perhaps a better question is, how to explain Trump’s appeal? Two recent articles provide good answers.
In a Wall Street Journal article titled “Trump’s America,” Charles Murray notes that there’s nothing irrational about Donald Trump’s appeal to the white working class. They have every reason to be angry.
“By the beginning of the 1980s, Democratic elites overwhelmingly subscribed to an ideology in open conflict with liberty and individualism as traditionally understood. This consolidated the Democratic Party’s longtime popularity with ethnic minorities, single women and low-income women, but it alienated another key Democratic constituency: the white working class… [T]he central truth of Trumpism as a phenomenon is that the entire American working class has legitimate reasons to be angry at the ruling class.”
I recommend reading Murray’s entire article. One of my favorite passages notes that the passion of Trumpism against the threat to America’s national identity from an influx of immigrants doesn’t make much sense, because most immigrants “come across as classically American – cheerful, hardworking, optimistic, ambitious.” The immigrants are the true Americans – it’s the natives who have abandoned “the bedrock that has made us unique in the history of the world.”
In another thoughtful article titled “How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump,” published in The Daily Beast, Tom Nichols notes that the thought-policing and mobbing practices of politically correct (PC) “liberals” created Donald Trump.
“To understand Trump’s seemingly effortless seizure of the public spotlight, forget about programs, and instead zero in on the one complaint that seems to unite all of the disparate angry factions gravitating to him: political correctness… There is a huge vacuum left by this leftist attack on speech, and Trump is filling it.”
Nichols observes that Trump’s supporters are not fighting for any particular political outcome. They just want to send a loud FUCK YOU to “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and liberal mobs. While the “intellectuals elites” are brainwashed by the PC mobs, the white / male / straight / religious unwashed masses feel under deadly SJW attack and turn to Trump because they have nowhere else to go.
“What they want, more than any one policy, is someone to turn to the chanting mobs and say, without hesitation: ‘No, I will not shut up.'”
Those are powerful gut feelings much stronger than rational analysis. Robin Hanson notes that lecturing unhappy voters that Trump is bad boy is as effective as lecturing your rebel daughter not to date bad boys.
Therefore, I think Trump will get lots of votes. But I think he will lose to Clinton, so why do future black ops masters send undercover agents to kill Trump if, from their vantage point, he has already lost the elections? I don’t find the Time Travelers Against Trump conspiracy theory believable.
But I like time travel because it’s unPC. Time travel isn’t incompatible with modern theoretical models of fundamental physics. On the contrary, Einstein’s general relativity seems to permit time travel, and Everett’s MWI quantum model nicely solves apparent time travel paradoxes. But the SJWs in mainstream scientific circles – I call them “Scientific Justice Warriors” – are waging a mobbing crusade against scientific imagination, and time travel research is one of their favorite witch hunts. Social and Scientific JWs focus on different topics, but they peddle one and the same toxic (un)cultural package, as shown by the observable fact that Social JWs tend to be also Scientific JWs and vice versa.
So I’m entertaining a different time travel conspiracy theory:
DONALD TRUMP IS A TIME TRAVELER SENT FROM THE FUTURE TO SAVE AMERICA FROM THE POLITICALLY CORRECT THOUGHT POLICE
See my article “Rabid unthinking atheists, SJW mobs, and fake-liberal thought cops.” Trigger warning: the article is intentionally provocative. Before calling me names, please note that I support all sorts of liberal positions: equal opportunity for everyone, women rights, minority rights, LGBT rights, gay marriage, anti-racism, liberal immigration laws, welfare, wealth redistribution, public health care, basic income, separation of church and state… I am essentially in favor of all that. But I think the SJW version of liberalism is a sad and pathetic caricature of real liberalism. And dangerous. If the trend continues, sooner or later the thought cops will come for you.
So the story goes like this: future history books show that America started to go seriously down the drain in the 2010s – followed by Europe and the rest of the so-called “Western World” that never copies the good things from America but always copies the bad things. Some very bad things happened as a result. When time travel tech was achieved (not by Westerners of course) an agent was sent to the past to correct things. He landed in the 70s, made a lot of money, became a controversial media icon, and came so close to winning the 2016 elections to give a much needed wake-up call to sleeping America.
I wanted to wrap up this post and write more about “some very bad things happened,” and perhaps more about super-magic future time travel technology, but that will have to wait because I just found a gem: a totally idiotic scientific paper (yes, they call it a scientific paper – A SCIENTIFIC PAPER) on “a feminist glaciology framework,” the post-colonial gender dynamics of glaciers (yes, icebergs with genitals), and the need for “more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.”
Of course I assumed the “scientific paper” was a Sokal hoax, but it appears that the authors and the University of Oregon consider it as a real scientific paper. A REAL SCIENTIFIC PAPER. When I first saw this unbelievable story on Facebook I wrote this very heartfelt comment: “I am assuming it’s a joke like that Sokal thing. If it isn’t a joke, I’ll add a Trump badge to my profile picture.”
Powerline’s Steven Hayward notes that
“This is why you get Trump.”
“He’s not wrong,” notes Reason. “Disaffected college students are rebelling against the hegemonies of leftist dogma and political correctness that rule their campuses – and “Trump!” is, sadly, their rallying cry.”
“In a country where working class people are being forced to fund research on the postcolonial gender theory of melting ice caps, is it any wonder some of them are rooting for a charismatic demagogue who promises to bully their tormentors?”
Before you ask, no I wouldn’t vote for Trump. But I think we need a very loud wake-up call, and the success of Trump’s campaign will provide one. Or so I hope. I hope Trump will lose, but come close enough to winning to highlight the fact that also Trump voters have legitimate concerns. They can’t be all that bad, can they?
Perhaps the time-masters from the future agree with me.
Image: Screenshot from 12 Monkeys.