OLD AND BUSTED: The Asian Murder Hornets.
The New Hotness? 43 monkeys escape South Carolina research facility; police warn residents to secure doors and windows.
Exit question:
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
November 7, 2024
TRUMP-BACKED PA SENATE CANDIDATE FLIPS LONGTIME DEM SEAT RED IN NAIL-BITER ELECTION: “Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick was declared victorious in his high-stakes election against longtime Democrat Sen. Bob Casey on Tuesday.”
UPDATE: Sen. Jon Tester loses re-election bid in Montana, NBC News projects.
Thus freeing up more time for Tester to shoot cows:
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.”
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?
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Will these celebrities follow through with their threats to leave America?
Has Bette Midler been spotted alive anywhere on planet earth in the last 24 hours? Bette Midler Not Handling Trump Win Well: Implies She’d Drink Drano, Nukes X Account.
OMG @bettemidler just deleted her account pic.twitter.com/nO9zzMXqlW
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) November 6, 2024
Assuming she didn’t actually go through with her cri de coeur, she’s far from the only distaff leftist melting down this week: Watch: The Lefty Meltdown Continues Over Trump’s Victory, Including One Woman Who Shaves Her Head in Rage.
THE DAILY BEAST REPORTS THAT DEMS ARE PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1859: Joe Biden’s Vengeance: Democrats Descend Into Civil War.
According to Politico’s ‘Playbook’, Biden loyalists were especially bitter over unnamed quotes in a Politico article claiming the president was the “singular reason” for the damning defeat and saying a Democratic primary race would have given Harris more time and opportunity to run a better campaign.
The Biden aides blamed Barack Obama’s advisers for the Harris missteps that ultimately cost her any hopes of the White House.
“There is no singular reason why we lost, but a big reason is because the Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee, and then signed up as the saviors of the campaign only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn’t Obama,” a former Biden staffer told Playbook.
Yes, throughout Kamala’s brief campaign, the public saw what happened when the “Obama-era playbook” was run with a candidate who lacked all of the chops and rock star charisma of that was the 2008-era Barack Obama. Her election bid was also a constant reminder that it’s near-impossible to run a “change” campaign when the person running is the sitting vice president of a failed and flailing administration, who has a well-known track record, well-documented on video in the era of social media. With a series of promises designed to appeal to the far left during her stillborn 2020 campaign run, and a lengthy history in similarly far left Bay Area politics. This is why typically during a time of political crisis such as 1976, or economic crisis (real or imagined) in 1992 or 2008, Democrats like to introduce relatively unknown candidates that they can project a sunny “hope and change” theme onto such as Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and “the composite character” that was Barack Obama.
CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD FORMS: Dems rage against Biden’s ‘arrogance*’ after Harris loss.
Democrats are directing their rage over losing the presidential race at Joe Biden, who they blame for setting up Kamala Harris for failure by not dropping out sooner.**
They say his advancing age, questions over his mental acuity and deep unpopularity put Democrats at a sharp disadvantage. They are livid that they were forced to embrace a candidate who voters had made clear they did not want — and then stayed in the race long after it was clear he couldn’t win.
“He shouldn’t have run,” said Jim Manley, a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings. He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”
According to interviews with nearly a dozen officials and party operatives, Biden squandered valuable months only to end in disaster on the debate stage. And by the time he decided to pass the torch, he had saddled Harris with too many challenges and far too little time to build a winning case for herself.
The fresh anger at Biden came as Democrats devolved into a round of recriminations following Tuesday’s decisive loss to Donald Trump, with officials struggling to explain why a majority of the electorate voted Republican for the first time in 20 years.
* That “arrogance” very much continues today: Look at that Smirk! It’s Official, Nobody Seems Happier About Trump’s Win Than Pres. Joe Biden (Watch).
** Actually, the Bidens were setting Kamala up for failure right from the start, by heaping impossible amounts of tasks upon an already deeply in over her head Vice President Selina Meyer.
The coming years should produce a glorious slate of bios and memoirs, and when it comes to 2024’s “Making of the President” books, mister we could use a man like Theodore White again:
ROGER SIMON: After Trump’s Victory: ‘Justice Without Revenge.’
Arguably Trump’s most important appointment will be his attorney general. It is likely he will get the person he wants because of the new configuration of the Senate.
Let’s stipulate that our justice system has been thoroughly raped, misused to an extent never seen in our history in the name of a wretched relatively recent epidemic almost as bad as COVID-19 known as “lawfare.”.
This is comprised not just of wannabe Torquemadas like Jack Smith and tedious gasbags like New York City DA Alvin Bragg and New York State DA Letitia James, but also the upper reaches of our society by FBI director Wray and his attorney general Merrick Garland, not to mention myriad legal hacks from Georgia to Colorado.
This misuse of our legal system to destroy political opponents absolutely must end. The people who perpetrated it must be thoroughly exposed (not just in congressional hearings but in a court of law) and face legal consequences.
But it should be done in the Lope de Vega tradition of “Justice Without Revenge”. In other words, as a suggestion, in the case of most miscreants, they should simply be stripped of their positions and lose their licenses to practice law, not suffer incarceration or further punishment.
Nevertheless, in the process, we must learn to what extent Jan 6 was an inside job. Wray dodged the question of government involvement (agents provocateurs) on multiple occasions but to the degree that it is true it must be fully known and Wray himself stigmatized. Most, if not all, of those jailed for the “insurrection that wasn’t” will be released as promised by Donald Trump and made recompense. That part is true justice.
Read the whole thing.
OUR POUTING PALACE GUARD MEDIA: All the late-night TV hosts melted down over Trump’s win. We’ve got the clips. 👨🍳👌
Well, not all of the late TV hosts – the often number one rated late night host was quite pleased the result: Gutfeld! reacts to the ‘media meltdown’ over Trump’s epic win (video).
This October 11th headline at the Wrap should have been a wakeup call for Camp Kamala that trouble was brewing in the heartland: Gutfeld! Ratings Soar, Outpace Late Night Interviews With Kamala Harris, Tim Walz.
Related: Fox News Leads Broadcast and Cable TV During 2024 Election Night Coverage.
DAN MCLAUGHLIN: The seeds of Kamala Harris’ defeat were sown four years ago.
If Trump had been re-elected in 2020, Democrats might have been reaping that reward now. Republicans would probably have lost House seats in both 2022 and 2024; instead, they look likely to hold their House majority and gain between three and five Senate seats. That Senate buffer could make it harder for Democrats to retake the upper chamber in 2026.
Worse, Joe Biden inherited a bunch of bad hands, and played them so poorly that he made them worse. In the process, his party alienated large voting blocs.
The pandemic produced supply shortages due to the interruption of manufacturing and transport, while bipartisan bills in 2020 pumped money into the system while people were at home and unable to spend it all. Inflation was inevitable, and appeared across the Western world. It would have bitten Trump had he been in office. But Biden flooded the economy with deficit spending while his party railed against energy producers. That not only made inflation much worse, it meant that Democrats shouldered all the blame for it.
There was no good way to leave Afghanistan, and Trump was paving the way to do so. There, too, Biden was the one to bite the bullet, then mishandled it to maximise the political fallout. His approval rating never recovered. Meanwhile, war in Gaza produced inevitable fissures in the Democratic coalition, which could have been papered over had it happened on Trump’s watch. By contrast, war in Ukraine may have divided Trump’s coalition much worse had he remained in office.
The Covid vaccines, developed under Trump, were first available under Biden. Heavy-handed Democrat-backed mandates caused a backlash that ended with the likes of Robert F Kennedy Jr defecting to the Republicans.
The pandemic artificially throttled immigration. Trump had capitalised on emergency authority to seal the border. Biden was left to deal with its end, and again, his poor choices created a dramatic migrant crisis.
Finally, Democrats overplayed the hand that Trump gave them on January 6, 2021. Had Trump remained in power, he wouldn’t have faced the same overreaching barrage of criminal prosecutions. Instead, Biden’s own Justice Department ended up trying to jail his opponent while elements of his party tried to get Trump thrown off the ballot. It backfired.
Back in April, the Politico noted that the Trump campaign “will use his trial to attract Black voters,” using “his legal troubles — and issues of race in New York more broadly — to appeal to Black voters by suggesting that Trump, a 77-year-old white man from a family of privilege and with a history of offensive rhetoric, is beset by the same injustices that afflict Black Americans.”
It worked; the New York Post reported yesterday: Trump makes massive gains with Hispanics nationwide and black voters in swing states: exit polls.
Not surprisingly, given the left’s absolute obsession with replacing the Bad Orange Man’s custom-made Brioni business suit with an off-the-rack orange prison jumpsuit, as the Daily Signal noted yesterday, “Voters Saw the Left, Not Trump, as True Threat to Democracy.”
THE CRITICAL DRINKER: Production Hell — Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (Video).
Earlier, from your humble narrator: Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket: Standing in the Shadow of 2001. How Full Metal Jacket was the dark doppelganger to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Clearly, AOC is suffering from a strange case of amnesia, given her barnstorming “New Socialist ‘It Girl'” debut to the world in 2019, when she wanted to ban and regulate the entire US economy, her original chief of staff was photographed on multiple occasions wearing a T-shirt celebrating a Nazi collaborator, and she gave passionate shoutouts to Evita Peron and the Black Panthers. Such was the stuff of legend before everything went pear-shaped starting in March of the next year, thanks to Dr. Fauci’s form of authoritarianism.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL IN JULY: Is Kamala setting herself up for a Dewey-versus-Truman defeat?
While noting the distance Harris has kept from the news media — she has neither granted an interview nor convened a news conference since emerging as the Democrats’ nominee — the New York Times nonetheless reported recently: “Some political strategists say Ms. Harris is doing exactly what she should be doing.”
Perhaps it’s not “exactly what she should be doing,” though — not when recalling campaign history and the case of Dewey, who served three terms as Republican governor of New York but twice lost the presidency as his party’s nominee.
Dewey in 1948 embraced a distant, glide-path strategy against President Harry Truman (D), sidestepping controversy and offering tame platitudes such as the importance of national “unity.”
“When you’re leading, don’t talk,” Dewey told a supporter, according to his biographer.
He specifically rejected suggestions by Republican leaders to undertake a vigorous, hard-hitting effort against Truman, who had become president in 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“I will not get down into the gutter with that fellow,” Dewey said of Truman.
The last days of Kamala’s campaign seemed somewhat reminiscent of Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign, when Truman, struggling in the polls, went all out smearing Thomas Dewey with the F-word, which ultimately helped earn Harry his legendary “Dewey Defeats Truman” photo. But that would have seemed shocking just three years after the end of WWII, especially coming from the man who had ended it. 76 years later, after every Republican presidential nominee since has been declared a Nazi, the attack has lost its punch, especially after Kamala and Biden played footsie with those with a similarly vicious antisemitic bent.
NIALL FERGUSON: The Resurrection of Donald J. Trump.
This is a bigger comeback than Grover Cleveland’s in 1892, when he became the first—and, until last night, only—American president to win a second nonconsecutive term. This is a bigger comeback than Richard Nixon’s, when he was elected president in 1968, eight years after he lost by a dubious whisker to John F. Kennedy. It’s bigger than Winston Churchill’s multiple comebacks, the biggest of which were in 1940 and 1951. It’s bigger than Charles de Gaulle’s in 1958. It’s bigger than Napoleon’s Hundred Days in 1815. In fact, I am tempted to say that the only comeback it’s not bigger than is the Resurrection.
Why? Because all of Trump’s political opponents made a vain effort to destroy him. In the words of Elon Musk—who has been a key variable in Trump’s epic comeback—Trump is the man “who they tried to kill twice, bankrupt, and imprison for eternity.” Trump faced two assassination attempts, one of which came within an inch of killing him. He was indicted in four criminal cases and convicted in one of them. He was impeached twice as president, in December 2019 (over his infamous call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky) and again in January 2021 (over the mob’s invasion of the Capitol on January 6).
In a civil case in May 2023, a Manhattan jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming the journalist E. Jean Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages. Last May, he was convicted in a Manhattan court on 34 felony counts relating to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. My colleague Eli Lake puts the grand total at 116 indictments. This wasn’t just lawfare; it was total lawfare.
And still he won. He totally won.
What all this goes to show is that Trump is authentically antifragile. That term originated with my brilliant friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Let me quote his definition from the book Antifragile: “Antifragility. . . is beyond robustness: It is about loving randomness and disorder and benefiting from shocks. And love of randomness is love of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to do things without understanding them—and do them well, mostly much better than by understanding them.”
Friedrich Nietzsche put it more elegantly: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” That famous aphorism, from Twilight of the Idols (1889), will provide the perfect epigraph for the first serious biography of Trump, when a younger version of me gets around to writing it.
Speaking of analogies that involve the Other World, Seth Mandel on “The Sixth Sense Election:”
“I see dead people.” One of the most famous lines from any Bruce Willis film—and certainly the single best-known line in M. Night Shyamalan’s catalogue—was also a stroke of true genius. The Sixth Sense tells you the big twist up front but bets, correctly, that you won’t be paying close enough attention to realize it. Willis’s character is a specter, a figment the whole time, no matter how real he seems.
Last night was the Sixth Sense Election. We were told, up front and in no uncertain terms, that this was the “vibes election.” We were not misled—we misled ourselves. By every metric, Kamala Harris vs. Donald Trump was going to be the closest presidential election since 2000. On Election Eve, Nate Silver’s team put their data through 80,000 simulations; Harris won 40,012 times.
There were momentum swings, but the polling averages showed razor-thin margins. The momentum swings were vibe swings. They seemed real—it became conventional wisdom that a joke about Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally would cost him Pennsylvania. We all watched the movie together.
Then came the twist: The campaign we watched wasn’t real. It was a specter, a figment all along.
It certainly felt like that each step of the way, but as with Biden in 2020 and almost with Hillary in 2016 and Gore in 2000, the power of the DNC-MSM to help get a stiff of a candidate over the finish line and eke out a win should not be dismissed. Hence all of our “don’t get cocky” reminders (which were increasingly puréed through the thesaurus as November got closer, just to spice things up).
November 6, 2024
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Kamala Calls For Peaceful Transfer Of Power To Adolf Hitler.
CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY: Bulwark Crew Wishes Biden Would’ve Been More Authoritarian to Prevent Authoritarianism.
Anyone catch this? At the end of last night's @BulwarkOnline's election coverage, the hosts, agitated at Democrats' impending demise, said the Biden Admin should have gotten even more extreme to prevent this from occurring.
Jonathan Last (JVL): "[The Biden Admin] should have… pic.twitter.com/o0BaClnj6b
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 6, 2024
And don’t get them started on how much they appreciate the common sense of the average voter:
We witnessed a total meltdown on The Bulwark's election stream last night.
"Voters are too stupid to even, like, exist in the world…they're just morons who can't understand anything." pic.twitter.com/1VqsWnyj9n
— America 2100 (@America_2100) November 6, 2024
Or ask them for their thoughts on illegal immigration:
One of the panelists on The Bulwark election stream last night declared that he was "prepared" to hide illegal immigrants in his attic—to protect them from being deported. https://t.co/XPsa0bg3xe pic.twitter.com/SzMfXRtK9k
— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) November 7, 2024
YES! Shelley Luther, former Dallas salon owner jailed during COVID-19, wins in TX House Dist. 62.
Flashback to May of 2020: A Look At The Democrat Dallas Judge Who Jailed A Salon Owner.
Luther was released on Thursday however by the Texas Supreme Court which came just after the state’s Republican Governor, Greg Abbott issued an executive order retroactively suspending local ordinances that throw citizens in detention for noncompliance with local stay home orders.
“Throwing Texans in jail who have had their businesses shut down through no fault of their own is nonsensical, and I will not allow it to happen,” Abbott said the day after Luther was given jail time.
Abbott Spokesman John Whitaker made clear in a statement to The Federalist however, that the governor’s executive order still allows local fines and other penalties such as license suspensions to be handed down to those who open without authorization, implying Luther may still have to pay $7,000.
Moye condemned Luther’s defiance as “selfish,” charging Luther with “putting your own interests ahead of the community in which you live.
“You disrespected the orders of the state, the county, and this city,” Moye told Luther.
The episode has become a rallying cry for opening up, where many on the Left supporting the lockdowns have flocked to Moye’s defense, while conservatives characterize the ruling as an authoritarian power-grab from the Democratic judge and prop up Luther as a heroine fighting to preserve civil liberties under stress from the pandemic. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz went to the salon for a haircut on Friday and Abbott discussed the matter with the president at the White House.
Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton also charged Moye’s ruling as “outrageous,” a view which was echoed across Republican state leaders and earned backlash from an array of district judges in Dallas County labeling the criticism “inappropriate” for an independent judiciary.
As Glenn wrote back then, “Don’t miss the importance of this. The left/media (but I repeat myself) used to be able to make people so radioactive that even serious right politicians would shy away. Not anymore. This, and her half-million-dollar GoFundMe account, are serious blows to its power. Or maybe signs that that power is shrinking. Or both.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE ONCE GOLDEN STATE:
● Recalls of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and DA Pamela Price Appear to Be Passing.
● Daniel Lurie Poised to Be Next Mayor of San Francisco After Spending Record Sum In Election. “Lurie, the billionaire heir to a Levi’s jeans fortune who, with the help of his mother’s wealth, launched a campaign to become mayor of San Francisco, is well ahead of incumbent London Breed in ranked-choice votes.”
● Gascon Loses, Price is Recalled and Criminal Justice Reform Takes a Beating in California. “California voters on Tuesday approved a November ballot measure that will impose stricter penalties for repeat theft and crimes involving fentanyl, steering away from recent progressive policies that critics blamed for increased lawlessness…Proposition 36 will make it a felony for someone to steal merchandise of any value after two previous offenses and can lead to longer jail or prison sentences.”
Meanwhile, with Kamala Harris, a leftist Bay Area machine politician soundly thrashed last night by Trump, the San Francisco Chronicle yells, next batter up! The Democratic Party is now Gavin Newsom’s to lead. Does he have what it takes?
ROGER KIMBALL: The three reasons Trump won.
“Why Trump won.” That is my assignment. I shall treat it as a declaration, not a question. And even though I write before the returns are in, I can give you the reasons. After all, I have been predicting that Donald Trump would win “in a landslide” at least since July.
As has become increasingly clear over the past several weeks, there are three basic reasons that Trump won.
The first two are interwoven. Kamala Harris was a horrible candidate. Trump, on the contrary, was superb.
As to Kamala, her inarticulacy was a major stumbling block. So was her choice of running mate: Tim Walz may be the left-most governor in the country. Certainly, he is the weirdest. Harris’s 60 Minutes interview was a disaster, as was her interview with Bret Baier.
Often, Harris’s mistakes were fodder for Trump’s triumphs. Harris said she had worked the fry station at McDonald’s. There was no record of that, so Trump made hay of the apparent lie. He picked a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, made French fries and handed out food at the drive-through window. A publicity coup.
Then there was the Garbage Gambit. Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” The White House tried and failed to walk back the remark. But Trump’s team came up with the splendid idea of having a garbage truck emblazoned with the campaign logo meet his plane in Green Bay, Wisconsin. They topped that by slinging a neon orange and yellow maintenance vest over the president. He emerged from the plane wearing it, conducted a brief interview from the cab of the truck and then proceeded to his rally where he explained to the adoring crowd why he was wearing the vest. Brilliant.
The media were furious in October that Trump was doing Retail Politics 101, because it simultaneously undermined all of their efforts to portray him as Orange Hitler, and because it demonstrated that Kamala couldn’t or wouldn’t do these sorts of basic campaign stunts. Biden never thought he’d get called on his plagiarism by the media in the 1980s, and curiously, in the 21st century, Kamala never thought anyone would call her on inventing a job at McDonald’s to grab some populist street cred, as the Washington Free Beacon did in late August. Even so, it’s a safe bet that numerous local Mickey D owners, particularly in California, would have been thrilled to have her spend an hour or two posing at making fries. That she couldn’t be bothered to do so speaks volumes about her overall failure as a presidential candidate.
CLAIRE LEHMANN: Revenge of the Silent Male Voter.
In the coming days, much will be written about working class concerns—issues that have become familiar focal points for those seeking to understand Trump’s support. But while inflation and border policies will have no doubt played a role in the Republicans’ landslide victory, we might also want to look at the sentiments expressed by young male voters—voters who represent a new and emerging contingent in American politics. Nothing about the young men I spoke to appeared particularly conservative or “right-wing.” Yet it was easy for them to explain why they voted for Trump. And if we zoom out and look at broader cultural trends, it should be easy for us to understand too.
If we take a macro perspective, we see that such young men have never known a culture in which males are not routinely described as “problematic,” “toxic,” or “oppressive.” Going to university, and working at modern companies, they live in a world of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies—many of which promote an insidious and pervasive form of anti-male discrimination. Yet to talk about it in public invites social ostracism. To criticise DEI is to risk being called a Nazi.
These young male voters know about theories of patriarchy and white supremacy, but they have never known a culture which celebrates the Great Man Theory of history. Thomas Carlyle’s nineteenth-century framework for understanding the past is seen as an anachronism, not worthy of serious thought. Today we acknowledge historical figures not for their feats, but for their crimes. Whether it is due to slavery, colonisation, racism, or sexism, we tear down the monuments of our past, while building no new heroes for our future.
The problem with this way of viewing the world is that it is alienating and self-defeating. It is also wrong. By any objective standards, Elon Musk is a great man of history, who is influencing the course of human civilisation for generations to come. As one party-goer told me, “He caught a fucking rocket with mechanical chopsticks.” Yet despite his achievements, Musk is more likely to be scorned than celebrated by the Democratic establishment.
This tension between achievement and resentment explains much about our current moment. The young men I met that night in Manhattan weren’t just voting for Trump’s policies. They were voting for a different view of history and human nature. In their world, individual greatness matters. Male ambition serves a purpose. Risk-taking and defiance create progress.
Even Bernie Sanders can figure it out: “‘It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,’ the 83-year-old senator from Vermont wrote on social media.”
KEY DEMOCRAT CONSTITUENCY NOT TAKING KAMALA’S LOSS VERY WELL: Hollywood Seethes and Mourns Donald Trump’s Reelection: ‘America Is Done.’
Following Donald Trump’s reelection on Tuesday night, those who voted against him in Hollywood both mourned and raged on Wednesday morning, worrying for the future of the country.
In some cases, like that of “Dead to Me” star Christina Applegate, confusion reigned over everything else, as she encouraged anyone who voted for Trump to unfollow her.
“Why? Give me your reasons why????? My child is sobbing because her rights as a woman may be taken away,” she wrote. “Why?And if you disagree , please unfollow me.”
Of course, that may be a moot point, as in a separate post, the actress noted that she’ll be shutting down her account “because this is sick.”
Meanwhile, others mourned the future of the Supreme Court, which has the potential to swing even more conservative under Trump’s second term.
“Supreme Court gone for the rest of my lifetime,” Kevin McHale, former star of “Glee” posted. “Ultra-conservative evangelical bigotry, xenophobia, racism is the mandate.”
“The Wire” star Wendell Pierce wrote several posts, similarly lamenting the future of the court in one as well.
“Elections have consequences. The Supreme Court will be changed for a generation. I’ll never see a moderate court again in my lifetime,” he wrote. “Alito and Thomas will step down and Trump will appoint 40 year old partisans to the bench. The damage he is about to inflict on our institutions the next 2 years will be irreparable.”
Trump’s victory has even forced at least one celebrity into hiding — or worse: Disney Star Bette Midler Deletes Her X/Twitter Account After Trump Trounces Kamala.
Disney’s Hocus Pocus 2 star Bette Midler deleted her X/Twitter account after President-elect Donald Trump trounced Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
On Election Day, before deleting her account, Midler appeared to be coping poorly, suggesting drinking Drano in the event that Trump wins.
The actress had posted a photo to X showing a bottle of Drano clog remover with a Post-It sticker reading “Trump Wins.” next to it was a bottle of what looked to be Korbel champagne, with a sticker reading “Kamala Wins.”
Do we need a wellness check on Midler?
As for other celebrities, when do they start packing their bags? Hollywood Exodus? Stars Threaten to Leave U.S. After Trump Victory, Vowing Dramatic Farewells if He Takes Office.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: GOP Seizes Senate — But What About the House?
Right now, the GOP has a possible range of 52-55 Senate seats, and a probable range of 53-54. That’s a good night for Republicans, although perhaps a bit disappointing given Donald Trump’s apparent popular-vote victory.
That brings us to the House, where … nothing much has changed at all. Republicans went into last night with a narrow 0.3-point lead in the generic ballot in RCP’s aggregation. Anything better than a D+5 usually signals a shift of a significant number of seats to the GOP. And yet, in an environment where the House is as evenly split as any in recent history, we still didn’t see a red wave to match Trump’s momentum. CNN reports a net 5-seat gain for the GOP; our partners at DecisionDesk HQ put it at two. A number of races are still left to be resolved, and Republicans lead in most of them — but those are in GOP-held districts.
Politico reports this morning that Republicans are “bullish” on maintaining their majority in the House, but it’s gonna be close[.]
Ed Morrissey’s post from 11:20 am this morning included a tweet quoting Decision Desk HQ stating that there was a “79.4% probability of GOP control” of the next Congress. Those numbers have significantly improved:
UNBURDENED BY WHAT HAS BEEN: WaPo reporter: “Vice President Kamala Harris has called President-Elect Trump to concede and congratulate him, per a Harris aide.“
‘TRUMP SHOCK:’ European Media in Meltdown Over Trump’s Victory. Guardian columnist: “The thought of a Trump presidency is eating me alive.”
The European mainstream media is in a meltdown this morning after President Donald Trump’s historic victory in the U.S. election.
“Why do they vote for Trump?” the leading German news Tageszeitung asked. How could the majority of American voters “support a man like Trump, who insults political opponents, offends allied countries, questions the electoral system, and also advocates anti-worker policies?” the newspaper wondered.
“On paper, the Democrats’ program for the middle class is better than the Republicans’. But why are the Democrats receiving less and less support from this group?” the clueless German daily asked.
German magazine Der Spiegel covered the news with the headline “The Trump Shock.”
“After Donald Trump’s election victory, the U.S. is facing a political turning point,” the weekly added.
The German establishment fears that Trump will make them pay more for their own defense and raise tariffs to drive down the massive trade deficit. “What will happen” when Trump enters the White House?” the German weekly Der Stern asked Wednesday.
“Why do they vote for Trump?” the German Website asked:
● “We are now experiencing first-hand climate policy threatening the basis of our prosperity.”
● Are young people poised to slam the brake on endless economic growth?
● Volkswagen considers first closure of a German auto plant.
● Greta Thunberg: Germany Complicit in Genocide over Israel Support.
● Germany Vows ‘Knife Control’ After ISIS Refugee Slashes Throats at Diversity Festival.