We live in Reverse World, where black is white and good is evil

By David McElroy · May 25, 2019

When I moved to the small town of Clanton, Ala., many years ago, I knew it would be different from what I had been accustomed to. The small city of about 8,000 is about halfway between Birmingham and Montgomery. It felt very rural and provincial. I felt out of place.

A newspaper chain had hired me to be general manager of the larger of the town’s two newspapers. Shortly after arriving, my ex-wife and I dubbed the place Reverse World. Everything which we knew to be good was considered horrible by the people of this newspaper. Everything which we knew to be bad was praised and valued there. The culture was broken.

Very quickly, we realized everything about the city felt that way to us. The people were generally nice folks — and I don’t hold any ill will toward them — but we felt as though up was down, in was out, black was white, and good was evil. Everything in this place felt backwards. It was disorienting, because I had to constantly question everything I knew to be true.

If I had discovered that frogs were dissecting students at the local high school, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I feel as though more and more of the world I’ve known is now part of Reverse World. It’s not the small-town mentality which I encountered in that city, but it’s a wide variety of things which seem to be making the world make less and less sense.

And I’ve discovered that if you don’t join in the delusions of the culture around you, the only alternative is for you to periodically wonder whether you’re the crazy one.

I do feel like questioning my sanity these days, because I see things in the world and in people and in relationships that make it seem that there’s an unspoken agreement for everybody not to notice.

I feel like the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I feel as though almost everybody is pretending not to notice things which seem painfully obvious to me. But then I start wondering whether I really see what I think I see.

I feel as though I’m the only one who still knows that two times two is four. It seems as though the world is screaming at me that two times two is five — and it seems as though I’m the socially undesirable outcast for noticing something which is still painfully obvious to me.

Am I the one who’s imagining things? When I try to tell others, there’s mostly a shrug of indifference or else they look away as though I’ve mentioned something that’s impolite to talk about. And that lack of interest from almost everyone else makes me certain that I’m an alien.

There’s something about this place — and these people — that I don’t understand. Or maybe we’re just wired to see different things. But it makes me doubt myself and doubt the things I see clearly and want to shout about — and it makes me desperate to find other people who clearly see reality as I see it, because it makes me feel alone.

I see things which I believe are mediocre being praised and getting attention online, but things which I believe are stunningly good or even insightfully important are ignored or else greeted with collective yawns. That confuses me and makes me want to start screaming.

Unless my way of looking at the world is simply objectively different from that of almost everybody else in the public sphere — which is possible — I have no explanation for this frustrating and confusing pattern.

My frustration is about the entire media and political landscape — social media, news media, politics, pop culture, academia — not just any one person or problem. Everything is obviously insane and obviously heading toward breakdown, but nobody with any power is doing anything sane to try to change the collapse which seems so clearly coming.

Republicans support a crazy man and Democrats want only to exploit his insanity to retake power to do more of their own brand of insanity. We are hading toward social, political and economic breakdown, but the political players argue only about who ought to be in the captain’s chair on the sinking Titanic.

I get frustrated because I can’t force anybody to listen or to question the insanity of where the world is going. And I constantly remember something which Ray Bradbury said. I believe Bradbury saw a lot of what’s going on in the world today back in the 1950s when he wrote “Fahrenheit 451,” so what he said carries a lot of weight with me.

“You can’t make people listen,” Bradbury said. “They have to come around in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them.”

The world is already starting to blow up. Because you get accustomed to the insanity and you’re focused on your own life, you might not even notice what’s really happening. But despite our standard of living getting better and despite amazing technological advances, our inner development — spiritual, emotional, psychological, intellectual — is regressing.

Even though it breaks my heart to see where we’re going, I can’t make anybody listen. But I keep hoping that some small number of people might hear my shouting and at least reconsider their relationship with the world around them.

At times, I feel like a mad prophet. In the Hebrew scriptures, the prophets looked and sounded like raving lunatics to the people who they were trying to warn. I’m certainly not a prophet, but I understand I run the risk of being seen as a wild-eyed mad man as well. But I can’t help it.

There are things the world needs to hear. I believe I can help point the way to parts of where some of the answers lie, not because I’m great or wise or brilliant. Just because I’m a little kid who clearly sees that the emperor has no clothes.

For now, I’ll go right on shouting into the void, hoping that the right curious people might hear and help find a way to turn the world around — to finally make Reverse World into the sane and loving and peaceful place it ought to be.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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