(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) There is a silly online game called “Tell Me Without Telling Me” (or sometimes #TheTellMeChallenge) that allows sarcastic social-media users to serve up a quick and easy meta-commentary on just about anything.
Tell me you want to get plowed by Trump without telling me you want to get plowed by Trump https://t.co/38YdczsNYy
— Quawzilla (@quawzilla) November 9, 2022
According to the pre-eminent meme archivists at KnowYourMeme.com, the idea has been around since at least 2004. But after 15 years atop the dustbin of internet irrelevance, it surprisingly was resurrected in November 2020 and skyrocketed in use through the following April.
Headline USA also saw a significant surge in traffic over that same span. What might the two things have in common? Perhaps it was the attention being paid to the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath.
Politics is the ultimate “Tell Me Without Telling Me” challenge, as anyone who has ever tried talking to a politician may realize.
Yet, Democrats, in particular, seem to delight in it—both on social media and in the real world.
On one hand, their very survival depends on the ability to gaslight the public, while leveraging their systemic advantages in the media, entertainment, corporate, financial and academic sectors—not to mention their current control of the executive and legislative branches.
First, they spin their failing agenda until it looks nothing like reality. Then, they mindf**k half the American electorate into believing that it would be “dangerous” and “undemocratic” to question it.
On the other hand, their unbelievable hubris demands that they also boast about the commission of their crimes—sometimes in dogwhistle codespeak, and other times with brazen impunity, daring their victims to do something about it.
POLITICAL PATHOLOGY
As much as Democrats love bossing other people around and wasting their money, the ability to lie and get away with it seems to be the ultimate manifestation of the Left’s megalomaniacal disease.
In a recent opening monologue for his Fox News show, Tucker Carlson put his finger on this bizarre phenomenon:
“Normal people lie in a very recognizable way. They’re human beings. They have consciences. They feel guilty about lying. So they don’t go all the way. They shade the truth,” Carlson began.
“‘Did you eat these cookies?’ you’ll ask your 5-year-old.
“‘I had one,’ he’ll say, looking at you nervously.
“He’s lying, but he’s doing it to the minimum extent he feels he has to,” Carlson continued.
“But if you ask a sociopath the same question, you’ll get a very different answer,” he added:
“‘Did you eat these cookies?’ you’ll ask.
“‘No,’ he’ll reply, looking you straight in the face and smiling faintly, ‘you ate them.'”
Carlson listed the hoax surrounding Paul Pelosi’s assault and the cover-up of Sen.-elect John Fetterman’s cognitive impairment as examples of this behavior—and, indeed, both cases saw the Left go to drastic means to deflect and suppress after their obviously false narratives began to show holes.
But with the 2022 midterm election now over, they will not be able to resist taking a victory lap for having pulled a fast one.
Thus, Nancy Pelosi’s recent brag about the San Francisco assault—appearing to celebrate her husband’s brutal beating for its role in helping turn out Democrat voters—was the first tip of the hand.
Meanwhile, an MSNBC host’s recent declaration, with an unmaskable smirk of contempt, that Fetterman should be the party’s 2024 presidential nominee tells us just how certain they are that the leftist media can continue to normalize a ludicrous (and exploitative) situation.
Deranged libs on MSNBC are already salivating over a Fetterman Presidential run:
"It just makes you wonder" pic.twitter.com/flV9sdSytl
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 10, 2022
STEAL-Y DETERMINATION
Perhaps the most notorious of all Democrat victory laps was Molly Ball’s Time magazine piece in February 2021, in which she laid out the entire leftist strategy that involved a cabal of partisan grassroots activists, media, corporate interests, billionaire oligarchs, labor unions, party operatives, intelligence agencies and more, all colluding to swing the election against then-President Donald Trump.
The secret history of the shadow campaign that saved the 2020 electionhttps://t.co/xG3S60cP2L
— TIME (@TIME) February 5, 2021
“[T]he participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information,” Ball wrote.
“They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it,” she continued. “And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.”
In the 20 months since then, life under the Biden administration has introduced us to a new kind of Orwellian push to redefine negative concepts like “election-rigging.”
We’ve been told, for instance, that inflation is not inflation and that, paradoxically, voting against the party in power constitutes a threat to democracy.
So it was no surprise to see President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and many others in the leftist media characterize an election in which they likely lost control of one chamber of Congress as a resounding success.
“This election is a victory—a victory and a vindication for Democrats, our agenda and for the American people,” Schumer said in a recent press conference, according to the National Review.
Biden held his own press conference, suggesting that the political stalemate was a mandate in support of his agenda, and vowing to change absolutely “nothing” in the second half of his presidential term.
Q: “What in the next two years do you intend to do differently to change people’s opinion of the direction of the country?"
BIDEN: “Nothing.” pic.twitter.com/FNyj7TrGcI
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 9, 2022
Given this celebratory spirit, one must ask: What, exactly, are they celebrating?
HURRAY FOR FAILURE!
Admittedly, the pre-election prognostications all called for a red wave that simply never happened, with a few notable exceptions. So the Democrats averted catastrophe, it’s true.
Still, they cannot make the case that their policies achieved this since even they, themselves, were bracing for a massive repudiation.
The notion that they succeeded in any way rests on the assumption that they were avoiding something bad that otherwise appeared to be an inevitability.
Is the idea here that the public looked around and decided they really liked failure and misery? Or was it all pure happenstance? Either way, it involved no agency or skill on the part of the so-called victors.
Of course, there is another alternative. Democrats may be celebrating the fact that they pulled off a successful election strategy in spite of the long odds.
But what are the implications of that? Are they saying they successfully duped or scared the public into complacency?
Was fooling people into electing the virtually brain-dead Fetterman—their lone Senate seat-flip, regardless of the outcome in Georgia’s Dec. 6 runoff—a cause to rejoice?
More likely is that they are celebrating another stolen election, in which the parts of their well-oiled machine all worked perfectly in tandem to undermine democracy in places like Philadelphia, Atlanta, Phoenix and Las Vegas—all of which were among the usual suspects from the prior election.
Through sheer will, they staved off relentless GOP efforts to secure elections and to close legal loopholes exploited during the COVID pandemic. They flouted the surge of volunteer poll-watchers and the extra attention paid to ballot-harvesting.
They did what they always do—cheat—and now reap the rewards of it by declaring their success in avoiding failure a complete and utter vindication of all that they represent.
By moving the goalposts of an election victory, they are telegraphing loud and clear that there is no need for Biden to change a thing, because his policies are irrelevant anyhow.
And they’ve told us everything we need to know without ever truly saying anything.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at truthsocial.com/@bensellers.
