Whew!
Despite what turned out to be a historic Trump comeback victory, some of us wonder how the election could ever have previously been such an uncertain nail-biter with polls indicating a dead-heat race.
While admittedly no licensed psychiatric expert and generally disinclined to play one on this column, I’m going to make an exception and hazard a guess why so many Democrats voted for Kamala whose performance record and stated campaign policies are broadly unpopular with most of the public.
Do some of you older folks recall references to the term “Stockholm syndrome” used back in 1974 to explain why Patty Hurst, the granddaughter of famous publisher William Randolph Hearst, later joined in bank robberies with the Symbionese Liberation Army, an urban guerrilla group that had kidnapped her, changed her name to “Tania,” and publicly denounced her family?
Her defense lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, argued unsuccessfully that Patty was innocent because she had been brainwashed by her captives, and although her seven-year prison sentence was later commuted, President Bill Clinton eventually pardoned her for not having acted according to free-will judgment due to brainwashing.
The basis for that defense was a case in Stockholm, Sweden the year before when four employees of a bank were held hostage in a vault for six days following a failed robbery not only refused to testify against their two captors in court, but even raised money in their defense out of sympathy.
Captives against their free will through brainwashing propaganda?
Maybe like gaslighting us to believe that one of the most unpopular vice presidents in modern U.S. history — the first 2020 presidential candidate to be eliminated by her party and has never since earned a single electoral vote — has suddenly become transformed as a vision of joy through a political coup that dumped her boss to rescue democracy from his opponent?
This after the same Kamala had assured us that Joe was cognitively on top of his game — brilliant in fact — until his debate from hell with Trump proved otherwise, and that despite a more than 20% inflation rise, “Bidenomics” was working just swell.
In that flipped upside-down logic we were told that whereas proof of identification is required to fly on a commercial airline, it is somehow racist to require for voting.
Meanwhile, Kamala has argued that police protection and border control should be “reimagined,” having also supported get-out-of-jail free cashless bonds for those who looted and burned down buildings during “peaceful” 2020 summer of love protests and whose legislation as former California DA invites shoplifters to steal up to $950 without penalty.
Designated “border czar” Harris has also invited more than 10 million unvetted illegal migrants into our country, presumably opening the very concept of national sovereignty to dispute.
She now proposes that all should be eligible for free health care and education, along with “pathways” to citizenship — with her home state California already refusing to require any such proof of citizenship to vote.
Equal opportunity guaranteed in the Constitution became conflated with “equity” of outcomes, where biological males should be allowed to compete in female sports, and feminine hygiene products are dispensed in boy’s bathrooms according to legislation signed by V.P. candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Patriotism became regarded as an outmoded ideal supplanted in K-12 schools by divisive Critical Race Theory and a revisionist 1619 Project as parents objecting to indoctrination and sexual mutilation of their children were investigated by the FBI as suspected white supremacists and terrorists.
Then there’s that new crusade for “climate equity,” where forcing all of us to forsake reliable and abundant fossil energy that fuels more than 80% of U.S. and global needs in favor of dependence on intermittent sunbeams and windmills that supply about 3% will somehow help end millions of years of climate change.
And speaking of gaslighting, how does Biden-Harris administration termination of the U.S. -Canada Keystone XL natural gas pipeline while approving the Russian Nord Stream II pipeline supply chokehold on Western Europe benefit either the climate, the environment, or America’s national security?
Add to this, mandating that we all switch from petroleum to electric vehicles with large batteries that rely on rare earth materials mined and processed by slave labor in China which is building the equivalence of about one coal-fired plant weekly.
Kamala’s incongruous campaign narrative has pledged to “turn the page” to the future while simultaneously stating that there is nothing she would change from past Biden-Harris administration failures of those recent previous pages where she was “the last person in the room” on key decisions.
Include catastrophic consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and weak appeasement policies including the termination of Trump’s oil embargo and disastrous “Iran Nuclear Deal” that have enabled Tehran to finance proxy wars throughout the Middle East and threaten Israel’s survival.
So yes, perhaps much of this can be attributed to Stockholm syndrome brainwashing intended to persuade us to distrust our lyin’ eyes.
Others might argue that this insanity is more directly attributable to a root cause of Trump derangement syndrome, wherein Democrats project their own terrifyingly hallucinatory motives and lawfare agendas upon their orange-haired adversary.
In either case — whichever syndrome or both — the presidential final electoral and popular vote tally is even more than victory for mental health.
It’s a momentous win against an ethically corrupt gaslighting legacy media set upon driving us all nuts.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.