Saviors
A brief history of trusting the wrong guy, from Bill Cosbyâs sweater to a spray tan.
I got called a âRINOâ this week.
Also a libtard. Also was told (several times) I am suffering from âTDS.â I got all three in the same comment section, which I think is a new personal record, and which raises some interesting questions about how a person can be both a Republican In Name Only AND a liberal simultaneouslyâŠ
But I have learned not to expect logical consistency from people whose entire political philosophy was formed by memes they saw on Facebook while sitting on the toilet.
And you want to know the punchline to the joke nobody wanted to hear? I am a Republican. I VOTED for Trump. The man stood up and said he would not get the United States into any new wars and I believed him. I trusted him. And now we are in another war. I am sick of being lied to, and when I wrote an article saying so, when I pointed this out to my fellow Republicans, some of them went for my throat like rabid attack dogs protecting a junkyard. I included a paragraph in that article that said, basically, âThe people who comment negatively on this are going to say one of the following four things.â I listed those four things. I put the paragraph right there where anyone reading it would see it, specifically to demonstrate that these responses are not thoughts. They are scripts. They are pre-loaded phrases that fire automatically, like a reflex, like when a doctor hits your knee with that little rubber hammer except in this case the hammer is a Fox News chyron and the reflex is typing âTDSâ in a comment section.
They said those exact four things!
They didnât see me calling them out because they didnât read the article, because reading is apparently optional when youâre defending your favorite spray-tanned septuagenarian. They just showed up and performed exactly the script I said they would perform, which, if you think about it, is EXACTLY the point I was making, which they would know if they had read the article, which they did not.
This got me thinking about something. Not about Trump specifically. About something bigger and older and more dangerous than any one politician, which is the extremely human tendency to find somebody who looks like a hero and then refuse to hear anything bad about them even if the bad things are true and the heroâs spray tan is leaving marks on the Constitution.
We are all, every last one of us, scanning the horizon for someone bigger and smarter and braver to show up and fix the stuff we canât fix ourselves. This is a beautiful impulse. It is also the oldest exploit in the book, and every con man, televangelist, and Ponzi schemer in history has known it.
How to Build a Hero in Six Easy Steps (Just Add Money)
There is a profession called spin doctoring. I am going to define this because a surprising number of Americans have never heard the term, which is EXACTLY how the spin doctors want it.
Spin doctoring is the art of making a person appear to be something they are not.
It is public relations with the ethics removed. It works like this. A very wealthy person, or a corporation, or a government (or all three wearing each otherâs clothes, which happens more often than you would be comfortable knowing) decides the public needs to believe something. They hire professionals. These professionals develop slogans. They test the slogans. They buy airtime on television. They buy ad placement online. They pay podcasters. They pay YouTubers. They pay thousands of people whose entire job is to show up in your comment section and argue with you until youâre too exhausted to think straight. They spend MILLIONS of dollars building a public image that has roughly the same relationship to the actual person as the photo on the Taco Bell menu has to the thing they hand you at the drive-through window.
If youâve ever seen a politician eating a corn dog at a state fair, that corn dog was tested with a focus group. If youâve ever seen a campaign ad where a billionaire is wearing blue jeans and leaning on a fence, a consultant was paid $40,000 to pick those jeans. None of it is real. It is a product. It is designed, tested, refined, and sold to you the same way they sell you laundry detergent, except laundry detergent doesnât have access to nuclear weapons.
The public face is a production. The private face is usually something considerably less inspiring.
The Mask Always Slips
Bill Cosby was Americaâs Dad. He wore sweaters. He ate Jell-O pudding on television. He did a bit about going to the dentist that was so funny your actual father would laugh until beer came out of his nose. He was a MORAL AUTHORITY. He lectured young people about personal responsibility. He was wholesome. He was safe. He was the guy you trusted.
He was drugging women and raping them for decades.
Speaking of convincing performances.
O.J. Simpson. Heisman Trophy winner. NFL legend. Hertz rental car spokesman (he sprinted through airports in the commercials, which in retrospect was excellent preparation for what came later). He was Nordberg in the Naked Gun movies. He was charming and funny and beloved. Then his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman turned up murdered and Americaâs favorite running back was leading police on the most famous low-speed chase in the history of American television in a white Ford Bronco.
A jury found him not guilty. I am CERTAIN this had nothing to do with the fact that O.J.âs legal team cost more than the jurorsâ houses. OBVIOUSLY nobody was influenced by anything other than the pure unvarnished evidence. Then, a few years later, this same innocent man turned up broke and robbing a guy in a Las Vegas hotel room over sports memorabilia, because that is what innocent people do.
Speaking of men whose public image was constructed in a different dimension from their private life.
Bob Crane. Star of Hoganâs Heroes. Colonel Hogan. Beloved sitcom dad. Wholesome all-American entertainer. Six seasons on CBS. Behind the curtain, he was secretly filming his sexual encounters with women, many of whom HAD NO IDEA THEY WERE BEING RECORDED. We found this out because he was bludgeoned to death in his apartment in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1978. That murder is STILL unsolved forty-eight years later. Americaâs favorite POW camp comedian was beaten to death surrounded by his own sex tapes and nobody has ever spent a single day in prison for it.
Or, for those of you who think this is ancient history, Jared Fogle. The Subway guy. He lost 245 pounds eating sandwiches and became the most trusted pitchman in America. He was in EVERY commercial. Parents liked him. Kids recognized his face. He was the wholesome face of healthy eating for an entire generation of Americans.
He went to federal prison for child pornography and paying for sex with minors.
The man who sold you a $5 footlong was a predator, and Subway had him on television selling sandwiches to families for over a decade.
(I am honestly shocked this guyâs name didnât turn up in the Epstein files. Maybe he wasnât rich enough to get invited.)
I want you to notice something. These were not fringe weirdos. These were people you LOVED. People your parents loved. People the ENTIRE COUNTRY loved. In each case the mask was professionally built, nationally distributed, and maintained for years (sometimes decades) before reality kicked the door in. The public image was a product. You bought it. So did everybody else.
Here is my question and I want you to sit with it for a second before you answer.
What makes you so sure youâre not buying one right now?
Speaking of MasksâŠ
Donald Trump is a smart man.
I am saying this first because what comes next is going to make a certain type of person very angry, and that certain type of person is going to stop reading and start typing the moment their feelings get hurt, and I want the credit on the record before they rage-quit into my comment section with one of the four pre-loaded scripts I already called out at the top of this article (which they will not have read).
Trump is smart. He is a gifted speaker. He reads a room better than almost anyone in modern American politics. He made the calculated and correct decision that his personality and brand had a better shot at winning the presidency as a Republican than as a Democrat, and he was right.
The man is a GREAT television personality. People like him. People like him the way they like a charismatic bookie who always knows the spread, or the neighborhood organized crime boss who shouldnât be trusted but buys the kids ice cream every summer (if youâre Italian and grew up in a major metropolitan area on the eastern seaboard you know EXACTLY what Iâm talking about), or a used car salesman who is somehow so entertaining that you almost donât mind driving off the lot in a car thatâs leaking transmission fluid. He is likeable. I am not denying this.
He is also a spray-tanned 78-year-old in a bad toupee whose wife got into this country on an EB-1A âEinstein visa,â a category normally reserved for people who do MAJOR things like cure cancer or invent time travel. She qualified by posing nude on the cover of British GQ. Only FIVE people from Slovenia got that visa the year she received hers. He is not the outsider he plays on television.
Donald Trump was a real estate developer for DECADES. Hotels. Casinos. Golf courses. Buildings with his name in gold letters. Then he entered politics. And very quickly his entire family ended up holding millions of dollars in stocks in weapons and defense companies.
A man who spent forty years building hotels suddenly became VERY interested in things that blow hotels up. He is now escalating conflicts around the globe and positioning the United States on the edge of a war that he and his family are financially positioned to profit from.
If you think thatâs a coincidence, you need to learn how finance works. And I mean that literally. Look at the word.
Finance.
âFinâ comes from Latin finis. It means âend.â That is not my interpretation. That is the dictionary. The word entered English around 1400 from Old French and its original meaning was âan end.â Settlement. Retribution. The ending of something. Now look at the suffix. âAnce.â Say it out loud. Now say âankh.â The Egyptian word for life. You canât tell me those arenât related. I am not an etymologist. But I am a guy who spent a decade in the tech finance industry and when you look at that word from a different angle, the business of making money suddenly reads like a warning label.
Fin. Ankh. End. Life. END LIFE.
Now consider that Mammon is the Hebrew word for money. According to rabbinical studies, Mammon is also the son of Satan. Jesus said you cannot serve both God and Mammon. He wasnât being poetic. He was being LITERAL. And if youâve ever looked at the back of a dollar bill and noticed the giant all-seeing eye floating above an unfinished pyramid and thought âthat seems normal,â I would encourage you to look again. Our financial system is named after ending life, denominated in currency stamped with occult imagery, and presided over by a spiritual entity that rabbinical scholars identified as the direct offspring of the devil.
And the men who sit at the top of this system are doing exactly what it was designed to do. They are building bunkers that cost more than your entire townâs real estate value. They are buying weapons stocks while they position the rest of us for a war that would end millions of lives. If youâre wondering what Satanâs endgame looks like, it looks like this. What better way to say FUCK YOU to God than to destroy every living thing He spent all that time making?
And if youâre sitting there right now thinking âwell thank God MY party is going to fix this,â I have some bad news.
The Grenade in the Elevator
Somebody in my comment section last week asked why the Democrats didnât use the Epstein files to destroy Trump. That person was SO close to figuring it out I could almost hear the answer knocking on the inside of their skull.
They didnât use the files because THEYâRE IN THE FILES TOO.
Billionaires protect billionaires. Power protects power. An eagle needs two wings to fly and both wings are attached to the same bird. That bird does not work for you. Democrats and Republicans are not on opposite teams. They are two shifts working the same job, which is making sure nobody looks too closely at what the people who fund BOTH of them are doing. The Russia investigations, the impeachments, the endless media circus, ALL of it was theater designed to keep you arguing at Easter dinner while the real dirt stayed buried, because the real dirt buries everyone.
The Epstein files are the one grenade in Washington that nobody will ever pull the pin on. Not because itâs a dud. Because every single person in that elevator knows itâs real, and if it goes off, it takes ALL of them with it.
So when you try to explain any of this to people, when you show them the money trail and the weapons stocks and the bunkers and the files, you know what they do? They run the script.
The Script
RINO. TDS. Libtard. âYou just donât get it.â
I started this article by telling you that I predicted exactly what the commenters on my last piece would say, and they said it. Those are not thoughts. Somebody else came up with those. Somebody with a budget and a strategy and a very clear understanding of how to make millions of people say the same words at the same time without any of those people ever stopping to wonder why theyâre all reciting the same script like itâs the pledge of allegiance at a school they didnât choose to attend.
I used to be a tech stock analyst. I sat in a room and told very wealthy people what products were going to change the market before they hit the shelves. I predicted the iPhone a full year before it was released and my boss made tens of millions off the Apple stock explosion. I sat in rooms where the decisions that shape your reality were made by people you have never heard of, and I watched them build public personas the same way a prop department builds a movie set. It looks real from the audience. From backstage itâs plywood and paint. I said something about it and it cost me everything, which you can read about elsewhere because this article is already long enough and my dental bills arenât getting any smaller.
The point is this. When you call me a RINO for questioning a real estate developer who suddenly owns weapons stocks and is starting wars, you are not defending a president. You are running a script that was written for you by people who spent a LOT of money making sure youâd run it, and you are doing it for free, which makes you the only person in this transaction who isnât getting paid.
The Sweater Was Always a Lie
Bill Cosby wore the sweater. O.J. wore the smile. Bob Crane wore the uniform. Jared held up the sandwich. And a real estate developer from Queens put on a red hat and told you he was going to drain the swamp, and the swamp is deeper than it has ever been, and his familyâs weapons portfolio is doing GREAT.
The mask always slips. It slipped on Cosby. It slipped on O.J. It slipped on Crane. It slipped on Jared. It will slip again. It always does. The only question is whether youâll recognize it when it happens or whether youâll be too busy typing âTDSâ in a comment section to notice.
I have been investigating the people who run both parties for over a decade. It cost me my career, my credit, my health, and most of the things normal people take for granted. I warned you. You called me a RINO. You called me a libtard. You recited the script they wrote for you and you didnât even charge them for the performance.
Iâll keep writing anyway. That is what wolves do. We howl even when nobodyâs listening, because the truth doesnât care if youâre paying attention. It just sits there, waiting for you to stop yelling long enough to hear it.
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
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spot on as usual! đŻđŻđŻ
Well written Iâve been saying this for years to people that can only talk about SPORTS information because thatâs the only thing they understand!!!