RAMESH PONNURU: Dear America, This Is Important — Trump Did Not Win Because of Racism.

The exit polls are remarkable. Would you believe that Mitt Romney won a greater percentage of the white vote than Donald Trump? Mitt took 59 percent while Trump won 58 percent. Would you believe that Trump improved the GOP’s position with black and Hispanic voters? Obama won 93 percent of the black vote. Hillary won 88 percent. Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. Hillary won 65 percent.

Critically, millions of minority voters apparently stayed home. Trump’s total vote is likely to land somewhere between John McCain’s and Romney’s (and well short of George W. Bush’s 2004 total), while the Democrats have lost almost 10 million voters since 2008. And all this happened even as Democrats doubled-down on their own identity politics. Black Lives Matter went from a fringe movement to the Democratic mainstream in the blink of an eye. Radical sexual politics were mainstreamed even faster. White voters responded mainly by voting in the same or lesser numbers as the last three presidential elections. That’s not a “whitelash,” it’s consistency.

Related: Given Hillary’s collapse in lower-income support, maybe America’s poor citizens want better policies more than they want gay wedding cakes.

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I’M SO OLD I CAN REMEMBER WHEN “TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY” WAS A RACIST PHRASE: Anti-Trump Protesters March In Downtown Boston. “Chants of ‘My Body My Choice,’ ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Love Trumps Hate’ reverberated around the park. Protesters, many of who said they feel unsafe now, argued they want to take back the country.”

UPDATE: Twitter Erupts With Calls For Donald Trump To Be Assassinated.

Plus: Rioting Snowflakes: Hillary Fanatics Burn Flag, Threaten To Kill “Not My President” Trump.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot:

—“We Are All Socialists Now,” Newsweek, then-owned by the Washington Post, February 16, 2009.

—“White Won. We are still the country that produced George Wallace. We are still the country that killed Emmett Till,” Slate’s headline today. Slate is owned by the Graham family, who also owned the Washington Post until 2013.

Found via Jazz Shaw of Hot Air, who tweets, “So I take it we’re all done with that ‘America’s already great’ thing, huh?” Those modified limited hangouts sure are limited these days.

FLASHBACK: Why Trump Should Pick Peter Thiel For The Supreme Court.

THIS WILL HELP WITH THE HEALING: US flag defaced with expletive at UT Baker Center. “University of Tennessee Chancellor Jimmy Cheek urged civility Wednesday evening, after an American flag on campus was defaced with an expletive in the wake of the U.S. presidential election. The flag at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy has since been replaced after the original was found by the UT Police Department at 6:16 a.m. with the expletive ‘F*** you’ written on it, said UT spokeswoman Karen Simsen. UT police found the vandalized flag on the ground while on patrol, she said.”

The Baker Center was UT’s polling place this election.

HE HAS NO CLUE THAT HE HELPED MAKE IT POSSIBLE, DOES HE? Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz Is ‘Stunned’ by Donald Trump’s Win:

CEO Howard Schultz has made no secret of his disdain for Donald Trump.

In a letter to staff on Wednesday, Schultz said he was gobsmacked by the president-elect’s victory but said Americans had to respect the results.

“Like so many of our fellow Americans—both Democrats and Republicans—I am stunned,” Schultz wrote. “We cannot know what the precise impact will be on our country and the rest of the world. I am hopeful that we will overcome the vitriol and division of this unprecedented election season.”

I know, Howard. I too was shocked by Hillary’s divisive “deplorable” and “irredeemable” references and the equally guttural language of her closest supporters. Almost as shocked as I was last year when a CEO thought he knew more about American race relations than his customers, and was free to hector them with an evangelic fervor. So I’m sure we’ll overcome the vitriolic division of Hillary and the media’s crude tribal politics as well.

True fact, @Starbucks: Liberals once believed people shouldn’t be valued for the color of their skin. #RaceTogether pic.twitter.com/6qAl4sPWjg

— Jeff Jacoby (@Jeff_Jacoby) March 22, 2015

UPDATE: “When you give yourself and your political party over entirely to left-wing identity politics, issues of class become invisible to you, and you end up forgetting that you ever knew people like the white working-class and rural people of the Rust Belt. You lose elections that way. I do not like identity politics. I believe it is dangerous, especially in a pluralistic democracy like ours. But look, if that’s how the left is going to rig the system, then it should not be surprised when white people get tired of it, and decide to play by the same hardball rules.”

A SAFE PREDICTION:

MICHELLE MALKIN WRITES THE POST-MORTEM ON IDENTITY POLITICS IN AMERICA:

“Remember, Jay memorably said: ‘Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk, and Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run, and Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly.’”

This would be comical if not for the noxious cynicism of it all. Clinton may not remember (if she was ever aware in the first place), but the original version of “My President is Black” is a brazen middle finger to nonblack America. Just a few lines after the verse Hillary quoted, the song taunts:

Hello Miss America, hey pretty lady
Red, white, and blue flag, wave for me baby
Never thought I’d say this s—, baby I’m good
You can keep your p—, I don’t want no more Bush
No more war, no more Iraq
No more white lies, the President is black

So the poster granny for liberal white privilege, groveling for black votes, kissed the rings of celebrity Obama BFFs Jay-Z and Beyonce by parroting an inflammatory anthem laced with profanities and radical racialized gloating.

Could there have been a more perfect beclownment to cap Clinton’s phony-baloney “Stronger Together” campaign?

After denigrating millions of Trump supporters as “deplorable” and “irredeemable” earlier this year, Clinton then unctuously confessed on election eve: “I regret deeply how angry the tone of the campaign became.”

Read the whole thing.

Flashback: Rapper Kendrick Lamar to Perform at White House for Semi-Retired President on July Fourth.

Obama also met with Lamar, apparently one of his favorite “artists,” before his final State of the Union address. As Victor Davis Hanson noted at the time, the cover to Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly features a dead judge and his murderers posing in front of the White House.

Curiously, the media seemed remarkably unperturbed by both of the above-mentioned affiliations, despite having called for new national tone of increased civility and a reduction of violent metaphors in early 2011.

TRUMP WINS AND DEMOCRATS ARE ONCE AGAIN TALKING SECESSION: In my USA Today column, I say that secession is for losers.

IN SLATE: The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished.

The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level. Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished. . . .

The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must own that failure herself.

Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008, only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral College. These people didn’t know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media thought they did.

Well, to be fair, most people in the media are only theoretically smart.

THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: No sooner is a Republican elected to the White House than the “antiwar” group A.N.S.W.E.R. is planning protests.

This piece by David Corn is a must-read on that group. Excerpt:

Nor did it speak to Americans who oppose the war but who don‘t consider the United States a force of unequaled imperialist evil and who don’t yearn to smash global capitalism.

This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized by the Workers World Party, a small political sect that years ago split from the Socialist Workers Party to support the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The party advocates socialist revolution and abolishing private property. It is a fan of Fidel Castro‘s regime in Cuba, and it hails North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il for preserving his country’s ”socialist system,“ which, according to the party‘s newspaper, has kept North Korea ”from falling under the sway of the transnational banks and corporations that dictate to most of the world.“ The WWP has campaigned against the war-crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. A recent Workers World editorial declared, ”Iraq has done absolutely nothing wrong.“

Officially, the organizer of the Washington demonstration was International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). But ANSWER is run by WWP activists, to such an extent that it seems fair to dub it a WWP front. Several key ANSWER officials — including spokesperson Brian Becker — are WWP members. Many local offices for ANSWER’s protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists. They were each identified, though, in other ways, including as members of the International Action Center.

Read the whole thing.

AUSTIN BAY:

Obviously, we don’t have a criminal entering the White House. American is also well positioned to get rid of the middle class-killer known as ObamaCare.

Those are the two major payoffs, but there are others.

George Stephanopoulos’ wife, Ali Wentworth, said that she and her husband would leave the U.S. and go to Australia if Trump won.

George, old boy. You’re the Democrat operative with a byline who ginned up the phony Republican “war on women” meme in the 2012 election. You also donated 75 grand to the Clinton Foundation and didn’t mention it to your audience until, you know, it sleazed out.

So, please, you sleazy fraud, you and your bride get the hell out of the States. Go to Australia. Sashay to Down Under and frolic with kangaroos. Kiss a Tasmanian devil.

Aside to Team ABC: George Stephanopoulos was never a journalist and you jerks knew it from the get-go. Stephanopoulos was there to slam Republicans and push Democrats. Yet Team Hilary lost the election. Your scam’s over, Team ABC. You don’t believe it. But it is.

It won’t really be over until the media monoculture experiences some ideological diversity.

THE SECRET WORLD OF MICROWAVE NETWORKS: Has anyone spanned the Atlantic with floating microwave masts yet? We’re not sure…

WELL, YES: “This is a complete repudiation of President Obama, the man who pushed Hillary and deemed Trump a clown.” Amazing to see it in the New York Times, though.

Plus: “The Clintons remind me of the Universal horror movies where you thought the monster was dead and then the monster would show up in a bad sequel. I’m glad now that they’re finally gone.”

JESSE WALKER: Where the Third-Party Candidates Were Strongest.

TRUMP WINS AND DEMOCRATS ARE ONCE AGAIN TALKING SECESSION: In my USA Today column, I say that secession is for losers.

TROLL LEVEL: QUEEN OF THE GALACTIC OVERLORD: Melania Trump’s White Pantsuit Proves She Is A Queen At Fashion Trolling.

Related: How “‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want” became Donald Trump’s bizarre theme song,” including last night as Trump was leaving the stage after announcing Hillary had conceded: “I never figured the Rolling Stones for Trump supporters. They aren’t. Then why did they give him permission to play their music? They didn’t. In fact, the group repeatedly asked him to stop using the song, but he ignored them, and has used the song repeatedly.”

How very punk rock – but then, as Kyle Smith writes, “Donald Trump is the punk-rock president America deserves.”

(Classical allusion in headline.)

ACE OF SPADES: One Anecdote That Helps Explain the “Rage” Our Liberal Masters Don’t Understand:

Read the whole thing.

SPACE: We’re Probably Imagining Aliens Wrong.

CRYING WOLF: The Republic Repeals Itself, claims Andrew Sullivan today.

As opposed to comparing America to the Weimar Republic, which is how a gobsmacked Sullivan Godwinized President Bush without actually invoking the H-word in 2007.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Perhaps we should require reading ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ in journalism schools.”

HE’S GOT A PEN AND A PHONE, AND A RAGING SENSE OF ANGER AT HIS DWINDLING TIME LEFT IN OFFICE, HIS SUCCESSOR, AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE: Executive orders, pardons, ‘midnight’ regulations expected as Obama presidency draws to close.

TEST DRIVE: 2017 Jeep Cherokee 4×4.

HEH:

SO JOHN FUND EMAILS ME THIS “MUST READ” PIECE FROM . . . GLENN GREENWALD? Hey, when he’s right, he’s right. Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit. “The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination. The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. . . . Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently.”