It was a bizarre proposition from Liz Cheney, after losing in the primary 28.9% to 66%, a massive blowout in Wyoming by any measures, that she compared herself to Lincoln and hinted at running for president. As if she learned nothing from her dramatic fall in coming out against President Trump and being the face of the January 6th Unselect Committee. Just as bizarre was the campaign ad that her dad did for her, wearing a cowboy hat and looking stern into the camera, warning about the destruction of the republic by Donald Trump. Didn’t he watch Mitt Romney do the same thing back in 2016, which did nothing to harm Trump’s brand? The Cheneys are politically savvy; they’ve been around for a long time and served in top offices. Why couldn’t they read the tea leaves? Or was it that they could read the tea leaves but be in denial about what they were saying? Perhaps they are suffering from the same problem that is causing the entire Never-Trumper movement so much consternation, the knowledge that the plan they had for so long in America, to serve the Liberal World Order as they themselves have been calling it, was falling apart and people had rejected it wholesale. Their anger at Trump was really anger at themselves displaced because they couldn’t look in the mirror and apply blame where it belonged.
Every political age has its own unique circumstances. In her concession speech, Liz tried to brand herself as the Lincoln of our time, even though she was just smoked in a very conservative state in an embarrassing election. Like some unthinking drone, she is hell-bent on a course she learned from her father over the years to put her political head to the grindstone and just barrel through it because institutionalism would come to her somewhere out there defense, and her fortunes would change. That is the belief she has been functioning from. When she turned against Trump and put on the massive show trial that benefited only Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden with the name of a Republican denying that election fraud occurred in the 2020 election, it proved to be a terrible strategy. People saw for themselves what happened, there is plenty of evidence of election fraud during that election, and people saw that it gave them Joe Biden, a loser of a president that has raised taxes, destroyed our economy, destroyed our advantage in the world with fossil fuels, and brought a lot of corruption and scandal to our White House. It’s been embarrassing, and Liz Cheney made herself the apologist for all that bad behavior by trying to put all the focus on Trump. And people grew angry with her over it.
People can see the evidence for themselves on election fraud and what was going on over January 6th, 2021. It’s not like President Trump owns the opinions of so many millions of people. But people have chosen to favor his opinions over all others, and that option is what has Liz Cheney and many other anti-Trump forces like her upset. Trump is changing the political landscape away from what they thought were the rules of conduct. Republicans would play a role in Washington politics as the flop, while Democrats would be the people’s party of equal rights. So long as everyone stayed in their lane, everything would work out just fine, which is how it was for her father during the Bush administration. Behind the scenes, there were many forces at work, but there was a code that was established by the Masons who founded Washington D.C. of how politics would run in the new country of America, and the establishment understood what those ground rules were. Republicans played bad cop and represented business. Democrats played good cop and represented minority groups and equal rights. But in the Mason lodges around Washington D.C. and in every community around the country were the understandings of the Three Crafts, regarding equality, dependence on others, fidelity to promises, contemplation of death, and duty to others which was the underlying foundation to everything in politics. Republicans and Democrats who were all Masons or involved with Masons through fundraising activities knew the rules. So long as everything stayed on those value systems, everyone could agree to disagree. The Masons were bringing to the New World starting in 1776 a long contemplated utopia, and people would love them for it.
The crisis came several hundred years later when it all blew up in their face. The more freedom people had, whether in transportation, communication, or education, the less inclined they were to follow the Mason vision for how America would evolve. That rocked the political world, which needed more and more scandals and wars to distract Americans from their information hunger in a free society. When the Masons contemplated how a free society would function, they obviously had not been drawing from successful examples around the world because there was no society previously that had figured it out. But the American Constitution created a truly an unruly maniac that defied the rules of conduct that a polite, “masonic” society would give them. Free will turned out to be problematic, and for political insiders like the Cheney family, it was well beyond their grasp to deal with. That is why they had that lost puppy look in their campaign ads and were tone deaf in the aftermath of the election results. America had rejected them when given a choice by Trump. Never-Trumpers directed their anger at Trump for providing that “non-Masonic” option that everyone in political theater through their mason halls agreed never to breach. But Americans didn’t want to be controlled by the Masons either. And the Masons never planned to control them initially. But Plato never addressed how free people should act; the role in politics was always to have that philosopher-king presence in politics who would rule over people with wisdom and compassion.
Liz Cheney and her father thought that’s what they were, and now people rejected them. They were perplexed, beyond recognition. In the aftermath of her concession speech, it was clear that Liz Cheney wasn’t even close to understanding the MAGA movement, what role Trump played in it, or what would happen next. So, of course, from her perspective and the Mason-driven establishment of America and European political discourse, the world is coming to an end. Thousands of years of planning and manipulating political power behind the curtain were falling apart, and all they knew to do was to be angry at Donald Trump. But all Trump did was offer himself as an option and refused to kiss any political rings. And from there, they hated him. But people loved Trump for it. Trump gave people a choice they hadn’t had before, hadn’t had for thousands of years. And now, all those long-established political forces were unprepared for the blatant rejection. You could see it on Liz Cheney’s face; this was not the political order of the world she had learned from her father. You could see it on Dick’s face, too, during that ridiculous ad he did for his daughter, thinking that the cowboy hat would sell his pitch. We are living in a world where it takes a lot more than that. Political candidates must be much more substantial and freedom-loving, not in token considerations but to their souls. And the establishment is lost as to what to do with this new knowledge. In the Mason’s ideal society of Egypt, there wasn’t a version of Donald Trump, so they didn’t know what to do with populism. And now they are learning the hard lessons history never taught them.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 