The US Election & The Strange Case Of Malaysian Voters

Why do people still believe in Tony Pua despite the tons of disproven garbage that he spewed before GE14? Why do people still think that certain former or current PN leaders are clean or holy and can do no wrong and that Guan Eng‘s tunnel case is baseless and without merit? Why do the worst chauvinists and the most inept incompetent unintelligent fools still make it as Members of Parliament? Jae Senn is baffled at the behaviour of Malaysian voters and the dichotomy of their support beliefs.

Now that the 2020 US Presidential Election seems set to be won by Joe Biden, there’s still one thing that confounds me.

How is it that most of the conservatives in Malaysia are against Trump, and would like to see Biden win? The reason they usually give is because he’s a racist, an allegation that keeps cropping up from various soundbites that were taken out of context. They hear a report on CNN and watch a 30-second video of Trump’s speech, and they’ve made up their minds and call him Hitler, racist, fascist and so on.

However, they support Biden and the Democrats, although they despise their Malaysian counterpart – DAP and the political Left.

Think about it.

Remember when we had issues with illegal Myanmar immigrants causing spikes in crime, and openly challenging locals, and so forth? When we had gangs of illegal immigrants committing armed crimes? What happened? We called for our government to be tough on border security. We called for weeding out the illegal immigrants that contribute towards crime. “We” as in the Conservatives, that is.

The Liberals, the political Left, on the other hand started spinning tales about how once upon a time, we were all immigrants too. Or that clamping down on illegal immigrants is against human rights. Malaysia has not turned down immigrants that seek to move here through legal means, but not illegal immigrants and especially not those who engage in crime and endanger others. Nonetheless, the Liberals will disregard the ills of illegal immigration and accuse the Conservatives of being racist and xenophobic.

That’s exactly the narrative in the United States as well. The Republicans want stronger borders and an end to illegal immigration, but they do not stop legal immigration. The Democrats on the other hand portray efforts against illegal immigration to be an inhumane act.

And yet our Conservatives here, including UMNO and Najib supporters, mostly rally behind Biden and want Trump to lose.

The Democrats have their fair share of racism and discrimination hidden behind a veneer of good intentions, too. They tell the minorities in the United States that they’re oppressed, that they’re second-class citizens, that they do not have equal rights, that they’re more likely to be killed by cops at random, so on and so forth. They keep fanning the flames of identity politics and offer a promise that when they come into power, the reach and privileges of the majority will be kept in check while the minorities will be given preferential treatment. They want to dilute the predominantly Christian identity of the United States despite the fact that a majority of the population are practicing Christians.

A More Secular Malaysia

What do we see DAP and the Liberals push for in Malaysia? They tell the Indians and Chinese that we’re oppressed, that we’re second-class citizens, that we don’t have equal rights. They promise us that when they get into power, the wrongs of the New Economic Policy will be corrected and there will be more privileges for the minorities and less privileges for the majority. They want Malaysia to be more secular and for Muslim matters to be openly questioned and challenged despite Malaysia being a predominantly Muslim country.

The Democrats are supported and financed by the same Neoliberal globalists and the Soros-linked groups that also support DAP, Bersih 2.0 and other Left-wing entities in Malaysia, which explains the alignment in their agendas.

Yet, our Conservatives, even staunch UMNO supporters, are against Trump and support the Democrats, despite being vehemently against DAP, Bersih 2.0 and their ilk.

When Trump was in office, he gave a picture to DS Najib of both of them together, and signed it with “My favorite Prime Minister”. And yet, DSN’s own supporters are against Trump and would like to see him lose. They would rather support the godfathers and paymasters of our political Left that they happen to hate so much, just because they hate Trump from all the bad media coverage that he has gotten.

That sounds a lot like Malays who voted DAP after they started hating Najib from all the bad press he was getting, doesn’t it?

Remember when the COVID-19 epidemic in China turned into an international pandemic? How did we handle it? Back then, we were calling for our then-government under Mahathir to shut our borders right away to limit the risk. We asked them to impose travel restrictions between Malaysia and China to keep the potential spread in check. What happened then?

They did not close the borders. They said that it’s bad for tourism. They said it makes us racist. They say there’s no evidence that closing our borders will minimise the spread of the pandemic to our shores. Until today, the Mahathir Administration’s handling of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia is still being lambasted and ridiculed by many, especially Conservatives who were against the PH government.

What about the United States? President Trump shut the United States’ borders with China, and barred people with recent travel history to China from coming in, as a precaution. But he was immediately labelled as a xenophobe, a racist, and so on by the Democrats. Sure, his subsequent handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was pretty lousy, but at least he tried to close the country’s borders as the pandemic made its way around the world.

And yet, our Conservatives here support the Democrats, who would have handled the Covid-19 pandemic the same way that the Mahathir Administration would, i.e. in a lackadaisical manner.

Under the Trump Administration, all indicators went up. (Please look at the indicators at the end of this article). Median household income went up. Unemployment went down. Black unemployment was at historic low levels. Jobs went up. By lowering corporate taxes (which Biden intends to undo), many companies started shifting their businesses back to the United States again, creating jobs. By imposing tariffs on China-made goods that are subsidized by the CCP government in order to even out the price manipulation, his brand of trade protectionism opened up more opportunities for Americans to buy American. It even resulted in a Buy American First movement. Trump encouraged consumers to Buy American, and for employers to Hire Americans.

Small businesses flourished. People had more jobs. More people became small business owners and entrepreneurs. Americans bought products made by their fellow Americans first, and boosted the local economy.

The Democrats on the other hand have no qualms about raising corporate taxes, to allow American mega-corporations to continue operating in tax havens, to allow China and others to gain at the US’ expense through trade and currency manipulation.

Our Conservatives here have no problem supporting Buy Muslim First (BMF) but they’ll regard Buy American First to be a “redneck move” in a blink of an eye.

Obvious Manifestation Of Racial Polarisation

When it comes to language. Over here, when we have non-Malay citizens who can’t even speak our National Language, the Conservatives are quick to view them negatively since they’re an obvious manifestation of racial polarization and the lack of unity. What do our Left-wing politicians push for? They’re okay with having a fragmented education system, and they’re okay with citizens not being able to converse in or comprehend Bahasa Malaysia. They say that it’s their right.

In the United States, English is their de-facto national language and legal immigrants who seek a path to being naturalized citizens will have to demonstrate their command of English. The Conservatives are upholding this, but the Democrats are okay with absorbing illegal immigrants as citizens, even if they can only speak Spanish and can hardly understand English. The Democrats are fine with having “Sanctuary Cities” in which asylum-seekers, refugees and illegal immigrants can live by their own rules without oversight by law enforcement and state authorities, and have a path for them to be citizens without naturalization and mastery of English.

And yet, our Conservatives will support the Democrats over the Republicans.

Is Trump a fascist? If he was, Facebook and Twitter would have come under government control. He would have thrown Nancy Pelosi and Hilary Clinton in jail. None of the news outlets would have been able to criticise and slam him every single day from the moment he won the 2016 elections.

If anything, Trump was an outsider and he still remains an outsider. Perhaps the only other American president who has been slammed by the liberal mainstream media and by the Hollywood elites on a daily basis was George W. Bush. CNN, MSNBC, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and practically every single media outlet is against Trump. Almost the entire entertainment industry is against Trump, as is the sports industry. The only mainstream media outlet that is favourable to him is Fox News. He has to resort to social media to spread his views, which would otherwise not be covered fairly by any mainstream news media.

Does that look like fascism to you?

He’s more like the leader of the Rebel Alliance who has seized power from the Empire, but got himself attacked continuously by the Empire every single day for the past four years, and now he and the Rebel Alliance will have to retreat again. The Democrats are not the Rebellion. They are the Empire. That is why Trump has always been the underdog, from before he was the President, throughout the time he was the President, and up till the 2020 US Presidential Elections.

Coming back to this issue at hand that confounds me. Malaysian Conservatives, regardless of race, will curse and spit upon DAP. And yet, they adore the United States’ Democratic Party that is basically DAP’s counterpart. The way Trump handled his policies would be considered excellent for any Conservative administration in Malaysia, and yet, our Conservatives will say that he’s an idiot and he’s incompetent, while supporting the Democrats that would do exactly the same things that Pakatan Harapan would, which our Conservatives loath.

So my question is, why is this so? If you support Biden, then you should support DAP. But you’re against DAP, and yet you support Biden.

The only possible conclusion I can draw from this is because people look at personalities. Media shapes our opinions. Being anti-Trump and pro-Democrat is a mainstream group-think. I’d be surprised if a majority of people don’t end up with this mentality, considering the relentless bombardment of anti-Trump messages in our daily lives. Consequently, it just ends up being a binary choice between good and bad. Orange Man bad, any Blue alternative is good. Results, vision and policy don’t matter as much as we think they do.

Why do people still believe in Tony Pua despite the tons of disproven garbage that he spewed before GE14? Refer to the above.

Why do people still think that certain former or current PN leaders are clean or holy and can do no wrong? Refer to the above.

Why do people still think that Guan Eng’s tunnel case is baseless and without merit? Refer to the above.

Why do the worst chaunivists and the most inept incompetent unintelligent fools still make it as Members of Parliament? Refer to the above.

The phenomenon of “Low Information Voters” has been used as a derisive epithet against Republicans and Trump supporters but the fact is that “low information voters” exist on both sides of the political spectrum.

If you’re playing to win, you have to appeal to the low information voters simply because of the Pareto principle – i.e., we can assume that in an electorate, 80 percent of the voters would be “low information voters” and 20 percent would be “informed voters”.

Unfortunately, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, most low-information voters will believe that they’re smarter than the other half and that they’re making an informed decision despite being played into the manipulations of some engineered narrative.

This 80 percent is the true battleground of any election. Trump used it to good effect to win in 2016. This year, it’s Biden’s turn. And judging from Malaysians’ general sentiment towards Trump and Biden, I’d hazard a guess to say that Pakatan Harapan has a good chance to win big in GE15. They just need to hit the right notes and sing the right tune to the right crowd.

After all, the US elections has given us an indication that many of our Conservatives are closet Liberals, they just don’t know it yet. – New Malaysia Herald