Understanding the silent majority is the key to comprehending many elements of modern politics. This came up recently as antagonists of Darbi Boddy at Lakota schools were poking around, observing that my sites don’t typically have a lot of comments. My readers tend to read, observe, and think about what they engage with. They don’t usually feel that they should write down their thoughts for all to see. This is also true of polling; when a pollster calls members of the silent majority, they are much less likely to answer the phone or interact with the established organization because they are much more guarded about their thoughts and actions to the public. This tendency has given the political left a sense of power that they never had. RINOs, too, have misread the tea leaves over the years, believing that their task has been to appease the noisy minority. And there was a considerable amount of panic when within a week of the pro-union elements of radicalism at my local district of Lakota couldn’t use social pressure to force Darbi Boddy off the Lakota school board, the liberal controls over conservatives were losing their grip. When some of those same elements brought their value system to me, hoping to invoke the same concerns, “you don’t have much engagement in the form of comments,” one of them said to me, looking for a way to invalidate the content by the way they measure. That is because the silent majority stays silent on issues, and the political left never had control over them. It was just an illusion created by the small minority who do care about such things. When I say that liberalism is a mental illness, this is what I mean by it. The Conservative silent majority types do not need the validity of their existence acknowledged by others for their happiness and actions in life. Liberals do need the validation of their peers. They are the epitome of classic philosophy; if a tree falls in the forest and nobody witnesses it, did it fall? Well, for the silent majority, of course, it did. To the liberal, they need acknowledgment of its falling to believe that it fell. They need social validation. 

Just the recent Trump rallies in Nebraska, then the one in the pouring rain in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, will show the evidence that provides some sort of measure on this condition. Back to the Darbi Boddy case at Lakota schools in Butler County, the belief by the radical lunatics is that if 100 to 800 of them make noise on a Facebook page and speak at a school board, then that is enough to observe that she should be removed from the school board and replaced with someone they like as liberals better. But the silent majority lives in Butler County, Ohio, in numbers that are around a half a million. Every officeholder in Butler County is a Republican, and the biggest fight in politics isn’t between Democrats and Republicans but between real conservatives and RINOs. So regarding Darbi, the liberals are grossly outnumbered at the ballot box. Still, they believe they are in the majority because they gauge their reality off peer engagement like-minded insanity. On the same day that Trump went to the Greensburg rally in the rain to a massive crowd that waited all day to see him give the same essential speech he provides every week, Joe Biden came to Butler County to visit a metal plant that specializes in 3D printing to try to affiliate himself in a manufacturing sector in a positive way. Well, I was within feet of that obviously inserted President. Nobody cared; everyone went about their business as if he wasn’t even there. The motorcade on the way in and out was uneventful. If it had been Trump, the traffic would have been backed up for miles. For Biden, it was a few missed traffic lights. He came and went as if he were never there. Without cameras and some CEO cheerleading, nobody would have otherwise known Joe Biden was even the President of the United States. Yet hours later, in Pennsylvania, standing in a steady spring rain covered in mud for over six hours, Trump supporters waited for the former President, who has been gone for 15 months from high office, to talk to them about supporting his next round of endorsements. 

The problem used to be getting the silent majority to engage in politics because they never wanted to support people like George Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. I remember the challenge in 2012 when Kid Rock came to West Chester, Ohio, to do a big rally for the Ohio GOP, including John Kasich. I was supposed to go to it and do my usual behind-the-scenes stuff. But I had better things to do than meet all the Republican celebrities that year, which nobody but the extreme insiders was excited about. If you want to go to the zoo to see RINOs, that was the event. But most people like to see other things in the political zoo, so attendance was light. A few years later, when I was involved in helping secure a location for the future President Trump during the primaries of 2016, we booked him in the Savannah Center just a few feet from where Kid Rock had been playing for the 2012 GOP, and it was a madhouse. Trump wasn’t even the nominee for the Republican Party at the time, and it looked like he never would be. But people were parking everywhere. West Chester turned into a madhouse as no traffic management could have managed people’s desire to see Trump. Most of the people who came to see Trump at the Savannah Center never got into the building. That was the silent majority. They don’t feel they need to validate their existence on message boards like Facebook or engage with pollsters. But when you see they all want to be in the same place to do the same thing, that’s when you can begin to see them and understand the political movement that is upon us. 

We’ve learned a lot about the silent majority over the last ten years since that 2012 event. Back then, the GOP managed to fill the field by the clock tower in West Chester, but it certainly wasn’t close to the madhouse of Trump’s visit to the Savannah Center. And the crowds are much larger now, and he’s not even President. The recent rally in Nebraska was supposed to be on a Friday night, but they had terrible weather, so they canceled and rescheduled for Sunday. People waited all weekend for Trump to arrive at the rescheduled time. And they’d do it again. So why is Trump so popular, whereas Joe Biden is not? Why is Darbi Boddy making so many liberals upset by being on the school board, yet their protests are falling on deaf ears?

Darbi knows what many are just now learning about the silent majority. They are where America has always been, yet they weren’t represented in politics or even the entertainment industry. Every so often, there would be a movie like American Sniper that would catch their interest, and you could see them.   But without a person who represented them in public, evident for all to see, nobody knew they existed who measure these things because the measurement was wrong. Engagement was being used to measure sentiment. But the silent majority was silent for a reason; they were not stimulated by the measures of engagement being presented to them, so their passions went unrecorded.   And they didn’t participate in the measure. The insanity of the political left to feel unchecked and validated while the silent majority disengaged and stayed to themselves. They might talk to each other over grilling in the backyard and ooze about the corruption of politics. But they wouldn’t otherwise interact with the established world. They certainly didn’t go to school board meetings to make themselves seen. But when there is an issue they can get their teeth into or a person they feel represents them, they vote and do so enthusiastically. And they don’t need anybody to acknowledge that they did it, which terrifies the mental depravity of the political left because, without validation, they have nothing in the world. 

Rich Hoffman