31 Jan Why the GameStop Message Resonates
Maybe the GameStop saga will do for Biden voters what a zillion postings could not: explain Americans’ embrace of the MAGA agenda. Americans chose Trump because he stood up for them, against anti-American ruling class intellectual elitism. Those voters did not line up to embrace Trump’s personality. They saw in Trump a fighter who would take on this ruling class that is a genuine existential threat to America and Americans today.
A rebellion against that elitism is what stirred the huge turnout for Donald Trump in 2016 and the even larger turnout for him in 2020. It is the same rebellion that is the essence of what has Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports sounding off for the little guy about a rigged Wall Street.
It’s the spirit of America, reasserting itself—and then getting smacked down by an arrogant, defiant ruling class determined to put the masses back in their place. Playing by the rules with honesty of purpose is for the little people; the ruling class can run roughshod any way they want, but accountability will never be imposed because they own and control the means of administering ‘justice’.
The American people have had instilled in them for generations an instinctive revulsion to such attitudes. The GameStop buying brigades are probably all over the map politically; many may well be completely apolitical; and some probably hate Trump—but they know a screw job when they are in the middle of it, and they are not pacified with non-answers and untruths-as-answers from their betters.
The GameStop saga may prove to be an unexpected but helpful curveball in a broader awakening of Americans to what is really going on in 2021.
Trump is the lightning rod who sucks up all the fire and fury as if all the unrest in the country were all about him, but it’s not. It’s about whether ‘we the people’ retain power over our lives and our country, or whether a distant ruling elite (as Ronald Reagan described them) control—or rig—everything in defiance of our freedom and our individual rights from God.
Consider these words from our predecessor blog, Brushfires of Freedom (discontinued in 2017), from September 2016, in a post titled “Trump Will Not End or Transform Conservatism”:
We’ve long thought Donald Trump was headed for a landslide victory in November [2016]…Americans’ anger and frustration with the ruling class is off the charts, however, and Trump, as the non-office holding ‘outsider’, is the only candidate who could harness that anger toward winning levels of support for him…
Trump doesn’t pretend to have an articulable philosophy of government. He’s not an ideologue…
He wants immigration to be better controlled; he wants a stronger economy for the US; and he wants a stronger military for a more dangerous world. And he communicates directly and indirectly a very traditional and heartfelt love of America.
He is a breath of fresh air to Americans who feel suffocated by the relentless anti-Americanism of the last eight years of radical leftism. These Americans don’t care about philosophy or policy nuance; they want a patriot champion as their President.
The radical left is striving mightily to keep the noise at DefCon 1 around Orange Man Bad and to justify all of their tyrannical initiatives around the need to rid the world of the evil of Trump. But what they are really trying to tamp down is the renewed expectation among the American people, based on the American founding, that government is supposed to be responsive to the people and look out for their interests.
Few of the GameStop buying brigades may be thinking in these terms, but whether they know it or not, the reason they are livid at a ruling class-controlled system that is rigged against them is ultimately the same reason America was founded. ‘We the people’ have individual rights from God that demand a system of government that is governed by respect for truth and the rule of law—for everyone. No one in America gets to pull class rank on anyone else.
That’s the fight that is going on in America in 2021; it’s the fight that has been going on since before 1776: who decides what governs?