I am Jewish. I am a businessman, writer and activist, and a former liberal east coast Democrat. I have five children (I am not even orthodox), and I just found out that I am deplorable, or at least I hang out with deplorables.
To be fair, it is not the first time that I have been called deplorable. One of my teenage girls said that I was the worst dad ever. My answer was that there had to be a dad somewhere who was worse than I am.
When I was in the third grade, my teacher, who didn’t use the word “deplorable,” mumbled something like that about me. I probably was. I didn’t like her, and I am sure that I likely did something that hastened her retirement as a teacher (she was 28).
In 2008, I was called a racist because I didn’t join the crowd and vote for Barack Obama.
In 2012, I was supposedly part of the war on women.
Now I am deplorable.
It is really rough being a Republican.
Growing up in Long Island and then moving to the Midwest clearly gave me a different insight into our country. New Yorkers thought of us eastern Long Islanders as hicks, and we eastern Long Islanders thought that the country was made up of New York, a desert (probably filled with “deplorables”), and then California.
Let’s put it this way. My vision of the “desert” people was something like a cross between the movie “Deliverance” and the shootout at the O.K. corral.
So when I moved to Columbus, Ohio as a 17-year-old there was quite a culture shock. Yes there were humans here. There were Jews with accents. The Midwest was filled with … Midwesterners. We didn’t have rampant racism, homophobia, or Islamophobia, whatever that is. I will discuss that in a future column. There were no shootouts at the local saloon carried out by people who were clinging to their guns and to their religion.
In fact, the major cause of death in Columbus, and I would assume most of the Midwest, was probably boredom.
What I did notice in Columbus, however, was that people generally valued family, American traditions such as barbecuing, Friday night football ( they are crazy about that here), soccer moms , more sports, and the usual things that people do as Americans.
Our fair city had no major race issues, except for when some white supremacists (real deplorables) wanted to bomb an elementary school in our mostly Jewish neighborhood.
There were no real riots, except after Ohio State vs. Michigan games.
There are fringe groups, which are extremely small, that is why they are known as fringe groups of anti-Semites, racists and creeps. They get publicity precisely because the community doesn’t support them; they are aberrations to us.
I met people who were gun enthusiasts; they hunted (I don’t like hunting, never did it, never will) and went fishing. I don’t’ mind fishing because when you fish, you are often using a smaller fish to get the larger fish. Personally, I don’t feel sorry for a fish that is eating its cousin.
So when I heard Hillary give her famous one-half-of-Trump-supporters-are-deplorable speech, I laughed knowingly because that is how I might have felt had I not moved to the Midwest.
I would suspect that Midwesterners probably have no more prejudices or animus towards Jews Christians, blacks, or others than members of the Democratic National Committee.
U.S. Republican nominee Donald Trump (AP/Ross D. Franklin)
So Hillary supporters, please stop bringing up the KKK and other assorted creeps who may or may not be supporting Trump, and we will not bring up the autocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia who gave your foundation 10-to-25 million dollars. You know, the same Saudi Arabia where the big women’s issue is whether or not they are allowed to drive. The same Saudi Arabia that considers homosexuality to be a crime punishable by whipping or even death.
We won’t bring up the criminal African looting dictators, warlords and assorted world-class creepos, (many whom would make perfect Bond film villains), who have given billions to support you and your “foundation.”
I could go on, but you get the point.
Perhaps as a Arkansan /New Yorker/ member of the ultra-liberal left elite, Hillary has forgotten about what regular folk do, but I can assure you that real deplorables are on both sides of this fight and they are small minorities, except for the dictators, war lords and assorted bad guys that Hillary associates with.
We deplorables -or deplorable enablers, as the left sees us – support Trump for some very important reasons.
After seven years of the Obama administration, many of us are fed up. The media often says that Trump has tapped into that anger. However, they frame it differently than it really is.
Our government constantly lies to us – health insurance, Iran, too many to even list.
Our president doesn’t seem to respect the rule of law, the Constitution.
The IRS has been targeting conservative groups and getting away with it.
Our president and Hillary Clinton love our country so much … that they want to fundamentally change it.
Why are soccer moms, Friday night football and American values so bad that they have to “fundamentally” change it?
Most of us Deplorables assumed that the rule of law, justice and the FBI are the same for everyone. We have discovered that the insiders have a different set of rules than we “subjects.”
We are tired of our elected leader and his “disciples” who supposedly love our country and its way of life so much that every chance they get they apologize for us, belittle us, demean us and our way of life around the world.
We are tired of the hypocrisy.
Donald Trump understands this. He is not perfect, but one thing that we do know is that he loves our country and its way of life.
We know that he will be our advocate – the leader of the United States, not the unelected leader of the world.
So I can only speak for Deplorable me. As chairman of the Ohio branch of Jews Choose Trump, I am proudly supporting Donald Trump for President.
