Partisan Politics And The Left-Right Paradigm – You’re Not As Different As You Think

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – It just makes me think this whole right vs. left, liberal vs. conservative, this whole thing is an enormous game.  It’s been played by men who have benefited so mightily from it that they can’t even count their riches.  The hoi polloi has fallen for this hook, line and sinker.  I just got an email from a Tea Party group, “Those liberals are at it again.”  Let me tell you something.  Liberals have been at it since the dawn of time.  Let me tell you something else.  Conservatives have been at it since the dawn of time.  They’ve just operated under different labels.  Get over yourselves.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Hello, Ben, how you doing?

Caller Ben:  Good, Mike, how are you?

Mike:  I am well, sir, thank you.

Caller Ben:  Good.  I just wanted to call you and tell you — I’ve been thinking about calling you for a long time — I used to be a Republican for many, many years, practically a warmonger.  I thought Hannity had it going on and he was the smartest guy out there.  After listening to you for a while and taking the red pill, I realized how wrong I was.  I’m trying to tell all my friends and everyone I know, my family members who probably still think the same way I used to, that they need to be converted and get on here and start listening to you and learning the true way of what being a [r]epublican is all about.  I just wanted to thank you for that.  I’m sure you hear it often.

Mike:  Your life is ruined now.  You know that, right?

Caller Ben:  I probably get more strange looks now in conversations.  As you grow up, you hang out with people who think likewise as you do for the most part.  When you start evolving into this and start talking about it, people — just like I was when I first started listening to you, I thought: Man, I’d never really thought of it that way.  I remember listening to you and thinking: That’s just crazy.  I can’t believe how wrong he is.  After a while, you start going: He’s exactly right.  I think hopefully at some point I’ll be able to convert some people, too.

Mike:  I think it rubs off on people.  We as humans like being challenged; most of us like being challenged.  When someone confronts you with something where you go: That’s not right; that’s wrong, you might set out on a quest: I’m going to prove that idiot wrong.  I’m going to embarrass him in front of all his little buddies.  Then you start trying to embarrass me or you in front of all your little buddies or their little buddies or my little buddies and you discover he was right about that one but that’s only one.  Then you continue your quest and: All right, he’s right about two of them but it was only two.  Then you continue on and find that it’s not that I’m correct or I’m doing any kind of spectacular or special work here, it’s just that I have humbled myself to believe that in our modern existence, we’re not as smart as we arrogantly assign ourselves to be.  Men and women that have gone before us were far wiser and more educated than we are.  We’re walking the education part of our existence backwards.  We’re not becoming smarter.

I’m going to stick with my contention, and maybe in 200 years they’ll quote me on this: the internet does not make people smarter, it makes people less smart.  It deprives them and robs them of the need and of the imperative to actually discover things for themselves.  A day will not go by, Ben, when I will not receive an email or hundreds of them from someone who forwards me something.  If I look in the header, there are 640,000 email addresses in there because it’s been forwarded around since CompuServe back in 1994.  It’ll just have an absolute mythological statement of something that people believe to be true so they want everyone to know.  I’ll read it and just go: Do I want to rain on these people’s parade and Snopes this and then reply to all and risk getting a wrath of angry emails back, [mocking] “You don’t know.  So what Snopes says it’s incorrect?” or do I just want to say: If they haven’t discovered it yet, let them think it?

This is dangerous stuff.  Some of the stuff that is forwarded around as gospel is just sickening.  Some of the things that are said about President Obama, where I once may have said some of these things — President Obama is not my choice for president, twice now.  President Obama would not be my choice to run my city council, let me just say that.  President Obama would not be my choice to be school president.   He wouldn’t be my choice to be anything.  However, he is the president.  He did attain the office.  The fixation on disproving how he attained the office and somehow after the fact proving to all of mankind that as the President of the United States, that he never should have had the office, to me, is just counterproductive.  He did have the office.  He did achieve the office.  Deal with it.  If you don’t like that, make a better class of people who will not elect someone like President Obama.  The caricature of the president that is forwarded around willy-nilly is just startling.  The total lack of any decorum or respect for the office that he holds is alarming.

It just makes me think this whole right vs. left, liberal vs. conservative, this whole thing is an enormous game.  It’s been played by men who have benefited so mightily from it that they can’t even count their riches.  The hoi polloi has fallen for this hook, line and sinker.  I just got an email from a Tea Party group, [mocking] “Those liberals are at it again.”  Let me tell you something.  Liberals have been at it since the dawn of time.  Let me tell you something else.  Conservatives have been at it since the dawn of time.  They’ve just operated under different labels.  Get over yourselves.  You’re not that extraordinary, you’re not.  None of us are that extraordinary.  The differences of what you think are the differences between libs and conservatives are not as great as you think they are.  If they are so great, then how come you don’t have the intellectual capacity, or bravery I might say, to then explore the question of separation from them?  Not acquiescence, not amity, separation.  If it’s so bad and they’re so evil and they need to be vanquished so desperately, then isolate them so they can only harm themselves.  But if Mike talks about secession or rethinking the American Union, check my Twitter and Facebook.  [mocking] “I used to listen to that a-hole until he became a rabid secessionist.  That’s all he ever talked about.”

Be encouraged that your friends look at you weird when you challenge them to critically think about something, Ben.  That is a badge that you ought to put on your lapel and make it out of solid 24-karat gold.  You ought to take whatever it takes to polish that joker every day and make it shine as brightly as anything in the room, my friend.

End Mike Church Show Transcript