Acting Citizen: What about those who know better?

By James Knudsen

While much of the nation was breathing a sigh of relief on January 20, 2021, I was enduring self-inflicted turmoil from the Facebook universe. In fairness, I fired the first shot. Immediately after Joe Biden took the oath of office, I sent a two-word statement via Facebook Messenger. The message was, “It’s OVER.” The recipient was a former classmate who has persisted with his belief in “The Big Lie.” Make no mistake, he’s through the looking glass. Up is down, down is up, Biden lost, Trump won, IN A LANDSLIDE!!!
    Living in the district represented in Congress by Devin Nunes means there is no shortage of pro-Trump, Q’Anon fever dreams in my Facebook feed. And as we have learned from the election results, the numerous polls, and the events of January 6th, there are millions more. We dismiss the views of our fellow citizens with the argument that they are misinformed, or disinformed by a media system designed to promote the conspiracy theories that for four years had the world’s biggest megaphone in the form of Donald Trump. It has been easy to take the stance that we know better, and they who continue to cling to the aforementioned theories just aren’t as smart. So, what about those who are?

Somehow I came across an article in The National Review by David L. Bahnsen. Bahnsen doesn’t strike me as the type that wears a red hat, or drives a lifted 4x4 with a giant Trump flag flying in the bed of the truck. He’s no downtrodden, blue-collar worker from the Rust Belt. Bahnsen runs a wealth-management firm in Newport Beach, California, managing $2.1 billion in assets. And by 2016 he had worked himself into such a lather that the idea of Hillary Clinton becoming President was unthinkable to him. It was worse than unthinkable to him, as he explains in his January 17, 2021, article titled “A Final Assessment of the Trump Presidency.” The section sub-headed “The Good” includes this gem:

For all the other good and bad, I have absolutely no problem rooting this piece in the simple observation that President Donald Trump meant there was no President Hillary Clinton, and that is an unalloyed good. I haven’t compromised a single bit around the case that Hillary Clinton would have been an unfathomable disaster for our country. Her defeat is something I will celebrate forever, regardless of who it was who defeated her.

    Really? No, REALLY – after all this country has been through? After all the norms, traditions, and standards that have been smashed, you still cling to that rationale?
    Please, Mr. Bahnsen, enlighten me, enlighten all of us. Enlighten those who will read your words a hundred years from now. What would a Hillary Rodham-Clinton presidency have done that compares to the horror show that Donald Trump subjected our country to? Your clause “…regardless of who it was who defeated her” makes it clear to me that you would do it all over again. You would – even knowing what you know now – again subject The United States of America to four years of Donald J. Trump if the situation were the same.
    And what exactly was that situation? In 2016, Americans were offered a choice between two candidates for President. Both were known quantities. One was qualified, and one was unqualified. Bahnsen still stands by his choice of the unqualified candidate. And his choice rests on the belief “that Hillary Clinton would have been an unfathomable disaster for our country.”

For the past four years, I have placed much of my focus on how we arrived at this moment of the unwashed masses that filled arenas and purchased Trump merch in all its unfathomable tackiness. I have not given enough consideration to the those who know better. I purposely do not say should have known better. This has not been a case of being forgetful or unaware; it has been deliberate indifference to the obvious flaws of a man deficient of the most basic qualities of a leader.
    We can fathom disaster. It looks like January 6, 2021.

Copyright © 2021 by James Knudsen