The Red Pills Cut Both Ways

So, 'red pilling' is a term that is getting thrown around a lot this year. The media's been red-pilling people by standing in front of four-alarm structure fires and insisting that "the protests are mostly peaceful", the public health community and politicians have been doing it too: "Shut down your life. Don't protest that, protest this. You can't go to church, but you can march in this protest which meets with our approval." "No need for a mask," they said in March when they were worried about a PPE shortage, "but for sure wear a mask now."

The overall feeling in the commentariat seems to be that these obvious double standards- whether you agree with them or not, are pissing off people- not people that are plugged into the commentariat and social media more than they should be- but the general mass populace of America that's just struggling to keep their head above water and desperately wanting this pandemic to be over and done with. The feeling seems to be that all this 'red pilling' is going to somehow benefit President Trump. But y'all, the red pills cut both ways.

The debate was unwatchable. President Trump's strategy seemed to be 'bludgeon with a brick to the back of the head' and any semi-coherent or decent points he made were lost in the trainwreck. He made Biden look so goddamn good- and I don't care what anyone says- there's no way on God's Green Earth that Biden was wearing a wire. Kamala Harris could have been working him like Edgar Bergen working Charlie McCarthy and I can't for the life of me see how that could have possibly helped him in any way because the President would not. Shut. Up. (It's worth noting that Biden said some shit that he should have been called on- like Antifa being 'just an idea', for instance, but that too, got lost in the trainwreck.)

So you take the debate. Bad week. Disaster for the President. Incumbents don't traditionally do all that well in their first debates-- and he had two more to come, so it was bad, but not irretrievable. 

Then, the COVID diagnosis. 

On the face of it, NBD. World leaders have caught it- President Trump wasn't the first, probably won't be the last. But combine that with the way his positive test was leaked to the news media. Combine it with the fact that his Rose Garden ceremony announcing ACB for the Supreme Court seemed to be turning into a superspreader event that has, as of now, infected three Senators. Combine that with his trip to Walter Reed (never a good sign) and then his inexplicable joy ride, all caps tweetstorms, and a return to the White House where he rips off his mask, theatrically and then looks like he's straight-up gasping for breath and struggling to breathe. Combine all of that with what could only be described as a messaging disaster for the White House and what are you left with?

Well, the media had hysterics over this. So dial it all back from 11 to about say, an 8. I don't know for sure- but I suspect that if I'm in the general mass populace of the American voter right now, I'm throwing up my hands and screaming at my goddamn TV. Bad enough that politicians have been talking out of both sides of their mouths for months now. Bad enough that the Establishment is willing to bless some activities but not others. But now it looks like the President of the United States doesn't give a flying fuck about this pandemic that is fucking up everyone's life and thinks that the rules- which very much apply to you and your family- don't seem to apply to him.

The red pills cut both ways, y'all. I don't think that many people vote for a guy like that.