Archive for 2024

November 7, 2024

WATCH: The Lefty Meltdown Continues Over Trump’s Victory, Including One Woman Who Shaves Her Head in Rage.

Nothing really brings out the crazy quite like Trump does, and once it was announced that he had won the 2024 Election, there was much celebrating and reveling; however, one thing many people looked forward to was the insane meltdown of leftists all over the nation.

And boy, did they not disappoint. We might be getting some of the greatest meltdown moments in history this year, and why not? The corporate media and the Democrat Party spent years painting Trump as a violent, evil, sadistic, and hateful man, and a lot of these people truly believe they’re going to get plunged into some sort of theocratic nightmare or real-life Handmaid’s Tale.

We’ve already covered the initial videos that came out, and you can click on the link to see those if you haven’t already.

(READ: Enjoy Some of the Most Unhinged and Delicious Reactions to Trump’s Victory on Social Media)

But as time went on, things seemed to get even crazier. Let’s begin.

And, as always, LANGUAGE WARNING with these videos.

Let’s kick off with one of the craziest things I’ve seen. This woman is so angry about Trump being elected that she’s decided, in her rage, to cut her hair off.

Related: From Careless to Hairless: Lefty Women Are Saying Goodbye to Shags and Hello to Bald.

French women had their heads shaved forcibly after their nation was liberated from a totalitarian socialistic regime:

I realize that being liberated from the out-of-control authoritarianism of the Biden-Harris regime may feel a bit traumatic, but no reason to cosplay as former socialists who want to spread their ideology nationally, ladies.

Perhaps the most astonishing rebuke to this week’s scream theater has come from Hollywood actress/writer/producer/ Justine Bateman, who has taken to Twitter to humorously critique their bad lighting, camerawork, sound, and compositions. In addition to her cribbing approvingly from Libs of TikTok, Ace of Spades speculates that “she seems to be a fan of Nicole Shanahan and was, I guess, an RFKJr. supporter. I’ll take it! They’re on the team:”

 

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 7th, 2024

LOL: CNN Says Trump Won Because The Left Doesn’t Have a ‘Media Ecosystem.’

The late night comedy shows may not have been very funny after Donald Trump’s election victory, but the Wednesday edition of CNN’s Inside Politics was as PBS News Hour White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez got the panel to agree that one reason Kamala Harris lost is that, unlike Trump, she did not have a “media ecosystem” to help her get across the finish line.

Barron-Lopez desperately wanted to avoid the conclusion that Democrats need a reboot, “One thing that I think stands out also, we can’t have this conversation, a little bit to your point, Dana, is that maybe it’s not so much Democrats’ policies or messaging or the words they used specifically, but there is an entire right-wing media ecosystem that doesn’t exist on the left and it does not exist in the center or mainstream and people are getting their information in very different ways now.”

Here’s the clip of Barron-Lopez of PBS appearing on CNN and arguing that there’s no leftist “media ecosystem:”

Are the media playing the same semantic games that they played in 2008 and 2009 after Barack Obama won the election to pretend that they’re completely objective and centrist? Especially after propping up Kamala as much as they propped up Obama in 2008? After going all-in on Trump is Hitler, Netanyahu is Hitler, the Russian collusion hoax, etc., etc? They are!

Whatever the Journolist is called these days, it must be hopping this week, as Taylor Lorenz makes the identical point to Barron-Lopez on her Substack (say, why isn’t she in the WaPo anymore?): Why Democrats won’t build their own Joe Rogan.

While the right has spent years fostering a symbiotic relationship with alternative media, the left has failed replicate anything like it. There are simply no progressive content creators with Rogan’s cultural impact and online following, and a quick look at the podcast charts or trending channels on YouTube shows the disparity between conservative vs progressive creators’ reach online.

Without a network of culturally relevant influential content creators boosting and translating their messaging, the Democratic Party is rapidly losing credibility among younger, predominantly male audiences who have become ardent supporters of influencers that promote a distinctly conservative worldview.

This imbalance when it comes to online influence is no accident. It is the result of massive structural disadvantages in funding, promotion, and institutional support. And understanding why Democrats can’t (or really won’t) cultivate an equivalent independent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built is crucial for anyone who hopes to ever see the Democrats back into power.

The conservative media landscape in the United States is exceptionally well-funded, meticulously constructed, and highly coordinated. Wealthy donors, PACs, and corporations with a vested interest in preserving or expanding conservative policies strategically invest in right-wing media channels and up and coming content creators.

This creates a well oiled pipeline for conservative influencers: young TikTokers, YouTubers, livestreamers, or podcasters are discovered, developed, and pushed to larger platforms, often with the financial backing of conservative billionaires or organizations on the right who have long recognized the content creator industry a valuable means of shaping public opinion and policy.

Organizations like Turning Point USA, PragerU, and The Daily Wire and others receive millions from backers who view them as advertising for a broader conservative agenda. These media entities act as content creator incubators and spend extensively on outreach, production quality, and audience growth. The resources and near unlimited funds they receive allow conservative content creators to grow rapidly and spread their message widely.

If only Dems had, oh, I dunno, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and NPR in the tank for them. I’d add the New York Times to this list, but I have it on good authority that they’re in completely in the tank for Trump: Taylor Lorenz Says NYT Only Allows Right-Wing Opinions At Newspaper.

“Trump’s Podcast Offensive Worked,” River Page writes at the Free Press. So what caused guys to tune into Rogan and other podcasts so much?

None of these podcasts or streams are inherently political, and neither is the UFC. They are not right-wing media, in any traditional sense of the word. They are, though, the young male mainstream, representing a large but silent minority—one ignored by politicians at best and demonized at worst.

Each program in this system differs a bit: The Nelk Boys started out as a prank show on YouTube, Adin Ross plays video games, and Von has a successful stand-up career. Rogan is rather thoughtful, while Ross and the Nelk Boys are more interested in making the audience laugh. The Barstool Media Universe, presided over by Dave Portnoy, has a loose sports focus. What they all have in common though is that they involve men talking, mostly to other men, off the cuff. The audience doesn’t view them as journalists or thought leaders, but rather as para-social friends. They have natural, long-winded conversations that could go anywhere. It’s like hanging out—in a way.

I’m a 28-year-old man, and it’s virtually impossible to not encounter this media ecosystem, particularly if you’re online, whether through YouTube’s suggestion algorithm or as clips on TikTok. The fact that most streamers comment on the news, but don’t focus on it incessantly, is a reprieve from the 24-hour news cycle.

Several months ago, left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker went on the liberal podcast Pod Save America. Twitch is a video platform where people stream themselves for hours, often while playing video games, and Piker is one of the most popular streamers there. He admitted on the podcast that his program was an outlier when it comes to politics. “If you’re a dude under 30 and you have any hobbies whatsoever—playing video games, working out, listening to a history podcast or whatever—[it] is completely dominated by center-right to Trumpian right-wing politics.”

That shouldn’t be a shock. Increasingly, every male interest, from going to the gym, apparently a fascist recruiting ground, to playing video games is decried as right-wing by the left. If you tell young men that everything they like is right wing, you shouldn’t be surprised when they start to believe you.

And as a result, we’ve entered some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Van Jones is a voice of sanity:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 7th, 2024

COPING TAKES MANY FORMS:

Smith explained that “when I say ‘unfortunately’, I don’t mean ‘unfortunately for me’. I will make more money under Trump than I would have under Harris thanks to low taxes. I will be fine. The bad fortune belongs to other people.”

It seems not to have occurred to him that lower taxes (and an improved economy) was exactly the “unity” that millions of non-traditional GOP voters wanted when they voted for Trump. But I guess Smith knows better what they need than they do.

“I got mine, you’ll get what I give you” isn’t a good look but it is a common one on the Left.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 7th, 2024

OH, THAT DEATH OF THE GROWNUP: Legos, Cocoa, and Coloring Books for Georgetown Students. At the McCourt School of Public Policy, officials are offering ‘mindfulness’ options to cope with the election. The only thing missing is a blankie.

On Wednesday, the day after the election, most of us are going to roll out of bed, have our breakfast, and get on with our day—no matter which presidential candidate wins. But students at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy—where diplomats and policymakers are molded—have another option: They can play with Legos. Seriously.

In an email to McCourt students, Jaclyn Clevenger, the school’s director of student engagement, introduced the school’s post-election “Self-Care Suite.”

“In recognition of these stressful times,” she wrote, “all McCourt community members are welcome to gather. . . in the 3rd floor Commons to take a much needed break, joining us for mindfulness activities and snacks throughout the day.”
Here’s the agenda (and no, you can’t make this up):

10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Tea, Cocoa, and Self-Care

11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Legos Station

12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.: Healthy Treats and Healthy Habits

1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.: Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises

2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.: Milk and Cookies

4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.: Legos and Coloring

5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.: Snacks and Self-Guided Meditation

I wanted to ask Clevenger why college and graduate students needed milk and cookies to recover from their stress—and how being coddled in college might someday affect American diplomacy—but she didn’t respond to my calls or emails.

More from the New York Post, in an article that’s likely not paywalled: Georgetown U. provides ‘self-care suites’ for coddled students stressed about Election Day — complete with milk and cookies and coloring books.

The coddling is akin to a move by the posh woke New York City private Ethical Culture Fieldston School that surfaced last week.

Fieldston is allowing any of its students who become “emotionally distressed” over the election to skip school Wednesday — an offer immediately ridiculed by one of its famous former parents, comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

“What kind of lives have these people led that makes them think that this is the right way to handle young people?” he told the New York Times incredulously. “To encourage them to buckle. This is the lesson they are providing, for ungodly sums of money.”

In November of 2020, Heather Mac Donald asked: Will America Succumb to Safetyism?

Wide swatches of Blue State America certainly have.

UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs on Teaching Fragility:

Ithaca College’s programming includes meditation, painting, cocoa and counseling.

The University of Oregon offers dogs, goats and Quacktavious the Therapy Duck.

Caitlin Flanagan tweets:

The morning after Pearl Harbor, my father joined every other man at Amherst College and walked into town to enlist. I once asked him what he’d done next. He looked at me in mild confusion: “I went to class”

It was the same with my father, who was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Nebraska, except he was in ROTC, which was mandatory for male students, so he didn’t have to enlist. He was going to war, but not yet. So he went to class.

The generations before safetyism were made of infinitely sterner stuff.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 7th, 2024

FINALLY: A Democrat autopsy from a Republican consultant.

Republicans have, very foolishly, engaged in “autopsies” after recent election losses. This election, it’s the Democrats’ turn! The Democrats will engage in a circular firing squad for the next couple of years, with all factions doing their best to gain the upper hand by giving their rivals the shiv in the jailhouse shower. Allow me, a Republican political consultant without a dog in this fight, to answer the pressing question: who will Democrats blame for the campaign that inconceivably allowed the bad Orange Man to win and the obviously superior Kamala and Clooney and Oprah to fail?

First, let’s start with the obvious — black voters. The people at DNC HQ will be furious that black voters did not obey instructions and vote 95 percent for Democrats. It’s outrageous, really, when you think of all the great things white liberals have done for black people: BLM yard signs, volunteering once a year at a soup kitchen and promising young black men that Kamala would help them open weed stores. Yet even though the Democratic Party freed the slaves (young Democrats believe this), soooooo many black people voted for Trump. Shockingly ungrateful.

Second, brown voters. After everything Democrats have done for the brown people, their thanklessness stings even worse. All Democratic leaders religiously say “black and brown” in all their talking points, and Democrats have even opened the border to appease and accommodate Hispanics (who swung by fourteen points to Trump). Appallingly, Hispanic voters, who are legal American citizens, don’t want open borders! White liberal women have generously hired brown people to do their landscaping, clean their houses and raise their children — and despite all that, Hispanics have the nerve to vote for Trump and other Republicans. Even more ungrateful!

While being a wholly satirical parody account, Titania McGrath is not messing about today:

Posted at 5:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 7th, 2024

HMM: 2025 Torsus Terrastorm First Drive: For Serious Overlanders Only. “The reason I couldn’t drive the Torsus Terrastorm or its giant stablemate the Praetorian before now, the Torsus folks said, was because the previous press-fleet vehicles had all been deployed to Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion. It seemed appropriate, then, that the cab-chassis Terrastorm I was now driving at the old GM proving ground at Millbrook, just north of London, was camouflaged and had been lightly armored by Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms manufacturer.”

Honestly, it sounds like something that’s good enough off-road to get you stuck in a really remote location. Of course if you travel in third world back country, you’ll be amazed where people are able to go in just an elderly Toyota Corolla with a combination of boldness and driving skill.

Posted at 5:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 7th, 2024

PLOUFFE GOES POOF! Implosion: Kamala’s Top Campaign Operative Deletes X Account.

The civil war within the Democratic Party is well underway after former President Donald Trump, and Republicans broadly across the country, completely trounced them on Election Day.

Accusations are flying and the blame game is in full swing, with many Harris operatives blaming President Joe Biden for the epic failure.

One of those operatives is former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, who accused Biden of leaving the Harris campaign a hole too deep to dig out. Plouffe joined the Harris team shortly after Biden was pushed out of the 2024 race in July.

“It was a privilege to spend the last 100 days with @KamalaHarris and the amazing staff led by @omalleydillon who left it all on the field for their country. We dug out of a deep hole but not enough. A devastating loss. Thanks for being in the arena, all of you,” Plouffe posted on X Wednesday.

Twenty hours after sending the tweet, Plouffe deleted his entire account.

Flashback to The Hill on election Tuesday: Plouffe says Harris could win all 7 swing states.

David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Vice President Harris’s campaign, suggested Monday that the Democratic nominee could win all seven swing states.

“And, you know, just a couple hours ago, reviewing all the early vote data, what we’re projecting for Election Day, how we think undecideds are breaking, we have a credible pathway to all seven states tomorrow night to go into Kamala Harris’s column,” Plouffe told CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront.”

“But we believe they’re all going to be close,” he said.

Burnett then asked Plouffe, “But you think you could win all seven?”

“Yes,” he responded.

As The Hill noted today, in an article headlined, “Top Harris adviser deletes account after post suggesting criticism of Biden,” “In reality, Trump won all seven, according to Decision Desk HQ projections.”

 

Posted at 4:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 7th, 2024

MARK KRIKORIAN: Message to Illegals: Winter Is Coming, So Get Ahead of It.

President-elect Trump during the campaign promised “the largest deportation in the history of our country.” Polls taken during the campaign found widespread public support.

In an Axios poll this spring, 51 percent of respondents supported “mass deportations of undocumented immigrants,” including 42 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Latinos.

A CBS News poll in June found 62 percent support for a “new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants,” including a third of Democrats.

Trump’s decisive victory this week gives him the mandate to make good on his deportation promise starting in January.

And that gives illegal aliens a couple of months to get out while the getting is good.

Mitt Romney was widely mocked during his 2012 run for the White House when he said he supported “self-deportation” as the way to reduce the illegal population. This approach, which my own Center for Immigration Studies pioneered as “attrition through enforcement,” was described by Romney as “people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.”

There’s more to it than just that, but the point is to get illegal aliens to return home on their own by making it impractical to stay. Romney took it too far, plaintively protesting that “we’re not going to round people up,” when, in fact, some significant number of people will have to be taken into custody and forcibly removed.

But the basic idea is sound. Persuading illegal aliens to go home on their own saves the government time and money.

Beyond that, which way forward? This:

Or this?

Or a bit of both?

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 7th, 2024

I’VE SAID BEFORE THAT WE HAVE THE WORST RULING CLASS IN LIVING MEMORY, AND NOT JUST IN THE UNITED STATES:

Posted at 4:09 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 7th, 2024

MARK YOUR CALENDARS: SpaceX’s Starship Test, Weeks After the Last One, Highlights Rapid Changes in the Space Industry.

You’d think that a high-tech space company, in an industry known for painstaking research and vastly costly hardware development, would sit on its laurels for a while and carefully consider its next steps. Nope. It seems SpaceX’s engineers have already done that, and are so satisfied with the progress of the rocket’s development they just set a date for the next test flight, now scheduled for Nov. 18.

That’s about a month between the fifth and sixth flights of the world’s most powerful rocket. It means that SpaceX has the rocket and engine hardware for the next flight ready and waiting, and that it’s dealt with any issues like damage caused to the launch tower and the miles of complex fuel pipes, electrical wiring and mechanical systems needed to fuel the rocket up and get it flying into space. It’s a furious pace of development.

SpaceX’s post also notes that the next flight won’t merely be about replaying the previous mission. Instead the test will try to “expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities and get closer to bringing reuse of the entire system online.” Reuse is a critical goal for the program, based on the company’s successes in reducing the cost of flying satellites to orbit achieved in its existing, much smaller, Falcon 9 rocket.

The biggest hurdles remaining are orbital refueling and safely bringing the upper stage into Mechazilla’s tender embrace. Mexico likely won’t allow reentry through their airspace until Starship has made a few safe landings elsewhere.

There’s much left to do but the results have been impressive.

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 7th, 2024
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