On NeverTrump and Gaslighting: An Open Letter to Frank W. Fox, former American History Professor at BYU
Dear Mr. Fox,
I’ve just read your “Letter to Arizona Mormons” at saveourelection.org. With deference, I note your personal achievements, especially your years of teaching American History at a major university and authoring important books. You’ve clearly lived a life of accomplishment!
Of particular interest here, though, I also note your declaration that you will not be voting for Donald Trump in November. Since I, too, am a conservative Republican, I was most interested to read through your points and logic, and I braced myself for all the facts and figures and examples and data you’d be sharing, and then I soldiered on.
I was thus surprised when, in spite of your academic training and experience, which presumably called for rigorous research, reliance on evidence, application of the scientific method (if sometimes anecdotally), and taking all relevant data into account, it turned out you listed five reasons for which you would not be voting for Mr. Trump…and in not even one of them did you provide evidence or examples to support your claims. In fact, the central commentary of your thesis seemed familiar, and was similar to talking points espoused by Never Trumpers like Jeff Flake (or Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol, or Max Boot, etc.). Those self-professed conservatives have made a living over the past four years of gaslighting President Trump and his accomplishments, and then assuming their pronouncements were sufficiently obvious as to require no actual inspection or analysis…especially now, when contrasted against the electoral alternative, Joe Biden.
So, in the interest of providing a counter-point, I’ve decided to write a rebuttal, including evidences and examples. I suspect you won’t agree with the result, but that’s okay. Why would I go to the trouble of sharing my thoughts if not to expand the conversation? Here we go, point by point.
Your Point #1: You claim that Mr. Trump makes “falsehood a common, daily practice.” You also strongly imply that he’s doing this not just to deceive, but to, no less, “enslave” the American people. Yet nowhere in your letter do you present evidence that the president is lying, or that he’s trying to enslave anyone. It’s gaslighting at its finest, a familiar misdirection and not a hint of fact. Never Trumpers and Democrats this cycle, especially Joe Biden, excel at this, and they go much further, themselves lying prolifically about President Trump from dawn to dusk and far into the night with no respite. ‘Trump supports white supremacy,’ they shout, even though he’s denounced white supremacy in the strongest possible terms over and over and over, all on the record (and often on tape), stretching back to the Republican presidential debates in 2016 and on into the first Trump/Biden debate this week (with the same moderator, Chris Wallace, trying and failing to box in Mr. Trump with the same false accusation both times. Call it a lie, Mr. Fox, for this is an example of one.) Or how about this one, Biden claiming that there’s not one shred of evidence that mail-in voting results in voter fraud, when there have been many thousands of examples of fraudulent ballots and ballot-handling, even in this year’s primary cycle alone, and in the past couple of weeks of general election ballots being sent to voters. Or when Biden keeps saying that Trump killed Americans on purpose through his COVID-19 response (see below). And the lies just keep on coming from Biden, nearly every time he speaks. And yet, you posit that “truth telling” is a problem, particularly and exclusively, owned by Mr. Trump.
With some research, you’ll readily uncover hundreds of examples of lying by Biden, the Democrats, the Never Trumpers, and their compliant mainstream media (MSM), and that the number of those lies grows daily. Indeed, if these parties ever happen to tell the truth, it’s worse than coincidental, it’s accidental, because they wouldn’t be caught dead saying anything good about Mr. Trump and his accomplishments in office. CNN has even altered a key segment of this week’s debate transcript to falsely make it look like the president supports white supremacy, even while the whole world looks on!
Your Point #2: You state that “Mr. Trump has preached fear and divisiveness among the American people.” That’s false. And it’s inarguably a form a Democrat projection. From the 2016 campaign to this very day, the Democrats have sewn the discord and then blamed it on the president, starting with fights orchestrated (and bragged about) by Democrat operatives at Trump rallies, followed by the MSM breathlessly shouting how awful Trump followers were, people who were rubes and rednecks — “deplorables” no less — and unfit to vote. Then came the outgoing Obama administration’s attempted coup of Mr. Trump, carried forward under the auspices of the Mueller investigation, which ultimately concluded that Trump neither colluded with Russia nor obstructed the interminable, heinously expensive exercise in intimidation and deception…but it did achieve one crucial Democrat objective — further dividing the country. (But more on this in a moment as well). And now, since May, the Democrat foot soldiers, Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM), have run wild through the streets of many of our cities, looting, rioting, burning, and bringing terror and fear and discord and maliciousness and even death along with them, intentionally doing all they could to destroy trust in law enforcement along the way. And this extreme and intentional lawlessness and divisiveness has only slowed (and just a little), in late August and September, when Democrats discovered that this behavior was starting to have a negative impact on polls and focus groups. (And, in keeping with the spirit of the rally fights in 2016, Joe Biden and the Democrats take zero responsibility for all the hatred they’ve engendered, gaslighting this issue as well by screeching that it’s all happened on Trump’s watch.)
Your Point #3: You claim that President Trump considers himself above the law and that he routinely violates US laws in large and small ways. You imply here that he colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign, a claim that was utterly refuted by the Mueller Report. Not only that, it turns out — according to internal DOJ and FBI documentation that has been released between May 2020 and now — that the whole charade was actually Democratic Party collusion with Russia, aided and abetted by a willing FBI (where agents and analysts bought professional liability insurance against the day their deeds might be brought to light) and a neutered DOJ (with Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusing himself), and fully started and orchestrated by President Obama and Vice President Biden during their last weeks in office. Their criminality makes Nixon’s Watergate escapade look like childs play. Talk about hubris and politicians seeing themselves as being above the law, it is the Democrats and their FBI and DOJ (and probably the CIA, as well) accomplices who fit every jot and tittle of this description, not Donald Trump.
Your Point #4: Here, you essentially accuse President Trump of treason, and you state “there is overwhelming evidence that our President does in fact have a [dependent] relationship on Vladimir Putin.” We now know this is a preposterous lie supported by exactly zero evidence. I mean, for something as despicable as treason, one would think the president’s accusers would present actual evidence or examples; and, yet again, you provide nothing in your letter— zip, zero, zilch. All the lies put forward in the sensationalistic and thoroughly discredited Steele Dossier — a document sourced by Russians, commissioned and paid for by Democrats, relied on by a corrupt and complicit FBI to obtain FISA warrants, and largely and despicably pushed by Never Trumpers like the late Senator John McCain to discredit Mr. Trump and destroy his presidency and him personally — were dumped all over this great land with wanton disregard to the utter divisiveness and harm it would bring to the United States, its citizens, and its institutions. And still, no evidence that the president has even the remotest subordinate or any other harmful relationship with Putin.
Your Point #5: In the last point on your checklist, you claim that President Trump shirked his “most important responsibility — that of protecting the people.” You go on to ascribe a motive to his actions, claiming he showed a “callous disregard for the safety of the American people in the sole interest of furthering his own political advantage.” You then claim that you actually “studied his every move in this regard, and…have listened to his every excuse,” and that “none of them works.” Pray, what does that even mean? What would you have done differently, Mr. Fox? Should President Trump not have closed travel to and from China very early on? Should he have then not done the same with Europe? Should he not have invoked the Defense Production Act (which he did on more than 30 occasions) to make sure supplies of all kinds — from PPE to ventilators — were made available? Should he not have worked with his team to provide solid guidance on social distancing, etc., and temporarily closed down much of the economy, a move that he knew would violently sidetrack his superb record of economic growth and employment nationwide and hurt his re-election prospects? Should he not have had the two military hospital ships sail to New York and Los Angeles to provide profound relief when and if needed? Should he not have provided daily updates, personally attended by himself and his team for weeks on end, to share information, progress, and warnings? Should he not have directed HUD Secretary Carson to pay particular attention to minority and underserved communities during COVID-19? Etc., etc., etc., all this from a much, much longer list. Honest people may disagree with some of his actions, but what you’re saying is that President Trump did ALL of these things, every last one of them, for his own political advantage and to the intentional detriment of everyone else in the US. To draw that conclusion about him or any other human being, I fear, makes you, the accuser, worse than the accused. Sticking to this accusation requires you to render completely void both the integrity and all the work done by everyone on the administration’s response team (some of whom have had disagreements over these past difficult months, but, as a whole, have remained remarkably united and on task, repeatedly stating under withering MSM scrutiny and innuendo that the president was NOT at odds with the health care professionals or the science). In short, whether or not you agree with every COVID-19-related action President Trump has taken, it is a massive stretch to claim that he’s shirked his responsibility to protect the American people. He acted decisively, early, and quickly to aid us, including avoiding what must have been a severe temptation to throw the panic switch. Biden, the Democrats, and the Never Trumpers are all now saying the president should have been screaming from the rooftops that we were all doomed and all was lost…but he didn’t. He instead acted like an adult, shared the facts, and dove headfirst into finding and providing solutions. Looking at the facts and evidence, I find little that provides proof to the contrary, or that the president shunned reality and intentionally killed even one person, let alone tens of thousands of us.
So those are my thoughts on your five reasons for not voting for Mr. Trump. In your letter, you do add a few final thoughts, and they’re critical. For one, you accuse him of trying to steal the upcoming election. He’s not, and he won’t. And there’s no evidence that he will, try as some might to contort his words to such a meaning. He’s expressed serious, legitimate concerns about Democrat-aided voter fraud (evidences of which have already surfaced, as I’ve noted above), but he’s never said he would not honor the results of a fair and honest election.
Finally, at the end of your letter, you reveal what, by now, was already obvious, that your vote is going to Joe Biden. That’s obviously your right; but, forgive me for admitting that your reasons for doing so leave me shaking my head. “For his wisdom, for his humanity, and more than anything else, for his power to heal,” you say. Here’s why I don’t follow. Joe Biden is a career politician who’s gotten filthy rich off of his political connections, especially those off-shore; he’s a man who has no problem lying all day long about the current occupant of the White House; he’s a man who lied about his position in his graduating class; he’s a man who routinely plagiarizes the work and words of others (including President Trump…does “America First” ring a bell?); he’s a man who lied about where he went to college; he’s a man who recently told African-Americans that if they don’t vote for him, they aren’t Black; he’s a man who refuses to reject Antifa (or even acknowledge its existence); he’s a man who sponsored and vigorously pushed the 1994 crime bill and referred to Black juveniles as “predators” in the process; he’s a man who, as head of the senate judiciary committee, oversaw the personal destruction of SCOTUS nominee Robert Bork in the mid-1980s, and then orchestrated a “high tech lynching” to try and keep an exceptional Black jurist, Clarence Thomas, off the court a few years later. I could go on and on. I do respect your opinion, but in my view Joe Biden has done precious little to earn praise for his wisdom, humanity, and ability to heal.
Well, you may get your wish, professor, and Mr. Biden may become our 46th president. But then, as a conservative Republican, what will you say in your next letter if, as many fear, Biden’s socialist soulmates have re-made our country in their image, having used him as their conveyor belt to power? What will you say when the authors of the 1619 project and the late communist Howard Zinn and his myriad leftist followers throughout academia, are given full and free rein to complete the Marxist indoctrination of our children? How will you explain yourself when this country goes bankrupt and 401ks evaporate after Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and extreme tax increases are made law? And how will you resurrect the lost optimism of millions of innocent black children whose hope and trust in America have been vaporized by BLM’s cynical deceit, or re-build the dismantled psyches of millions of innocent white children emotionally destroyed as hyper-racist “critical race theory” is seared into their brains like a rancher’s brand? How will you explain yourself to those who finally connect all those dots, but do so more slowly than you could and should have done because they trusted you? I urge you to connect them now and follow where they lead.
I also urge you to reconsider what you’ve said in your letter about President Trump, because each of your accusations is demonstrably false. The implications of those falsehoods could not be more profound.
Sincerely,
Kevin Ray Hadlock
