MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Elon Unbound: Some first, second, and third-order effects of the election.
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Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
November 7, 2024
RFK, JR. CALL YOUR OFFICE: CDC: Nearly 1 in 6 U.S. adults has diabetes.
HIGHER EDUCATION NEWS: Here’s everything Trump promised regarding higher ed reform during his campaign.
OUT RUNNING ERRANDS, I listened to Biden’s speech on the election on the radio. (How quaint!) It was excellent, the best I’ve heard from him in ages. A totally by the book, conciliatory, unity-based speech, straight out of civics 101. It occurred to me that if Democrats had reacted that way to Trump’s election in 2016, the country — and quite possibly the Democrats — would have been spared a lot of grief.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Prominent law professor blames Harris loss on ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘white supremacy.’
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT: Gen Z voters surge right in 2024, helping propel Trump to victory.
BUT NOT TOO DUMB TO BE PLAUSIBLE: Too Dumb to Check: Democrats Urging Sotomayor to Retire Before Trump Takes Office.
ROGER SIMON: After Trump’s Victory: ‘Justice Without Revenge.’
POST-ELECTION OPEN THREAD: Okay, this is probably the last of these morning election threads, but there’s a lot to talk about.
IT’S SATIRE, BUT IS IT?
Democrats Call For Abolishing Popular Vote https://t.co/OSsMUSMevG pic.twitter.com/piX5Eumlwu
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 6, 2024
PAUL BEDARD: Trump trounced elites and won ‘war of cultures.’
DON SURBER IS drinking liberal tears. “The presidential race in a nutshell: Trump’s secret weapon was a good presidency. We really were better off four years ago even in the midst of an overblown pandemic. Elections aren’t complicated. People vote for who is best for them. People who think they are smarter than everyone else overlook this simple fact. Which is why the day after Americans gave this mandate to President Trump, liberal tears gushed like an overflowing washer. Their Fountain of Uselessness was enjoyable. Their explanations of why the dumbest candidate for president imaginable lost were delicious.”
That picture of a distraught Nancy Pelosi at Kamala’s concession speech belongs in the Louvre.
Plus: “Bad personnel decisions have consequences. Policies do too, but don’t expect Democrats to change theirs. No, they change their messengers but never their message. They just replace their white male communists with DEI communists.”
ROGER KIMBALL: The Three Reasons Donald 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. . . .
Trump won because he offered a vision of a healed America — and he did so with a team that brought both unstoppable brio and an articulate discussion of policy issues to the table. Harris brought snarling animus and an unwillingness to engage in any serious discussion of policy. Asked about how she voted on California’s tough-on-crime Prop 36, she declined to answer. Amazing.
Trump won because people are worse off now than they were four years ago when he was president. Prices are higher, the border is broken and the world teeters on the edge of World War Three. That all happened on Harris’s watch. She couldn’t escape it.
But the third reason Trump won was a shift in the zeitgeist. The country is increasingly cognizant of and fed up with the administrative apparat that rules over us and that fabricated the manikin Kamala Harris as frontman for their agenda. Trump has exposed cracks in “The Narrative” that supports that agenda. Voters saw what Biden-Harris and, before them, Obama had done in their effort to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” They saw — and they rebelled. The result was that, come January 20, Donald J. Trump will be the 47th president of the United States.
I’m beginning to think that God really does look after fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.
Relatedly, a friend from Belgium texted yesterday: “On the Flemish news they interviewed Americans. Trump voters pointed out real problems, Dems were crying about how trump will take away their rights. Even the Flemish news noticed.”
ICYMI:
The view just basically said the quiet part out loud.
Kamala lost because Americans can now think for themselves and we have free speech on X. We no longer need to listen to the fake news media for the narrative and we can call out their lies in real timepic.twitter.com/49tYmBowDI
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 6, 2024
JOEL KOTKIN ON THE COUNTRY’S CHANGING BALANCE OF POWER: Who are the winners and losers from the US election?
November 6, 2024
MAKE THE RUBBLE BOUNCE:
Donald Trump wins 312 Electoral Votes.
Hey Libs,
This is a landslide.
And it’s about to get much worse.
National Voter ID is coming.
Mass deportations of criminal aliens.
Along with new census maps greatly empowering red states.
The Obama Dynasty is officially over.
You failed pic.twitter.com/SkmuP70yiq— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 7, 2024
DECISION DESK CALLS ARIZONA FOR TRUMP, giving him a win with 312 electoral votes.
Note his dramatic popular vote lead, too.
OPEN THREAD: Living in interesting times.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China’s new rocket for crew and moon to launch in 2026.
HELEN AND I SPENT A COUPLE OF HOURS AT A FRIEND’S HOUSE, sipping champagne and gloating reflecting on the elections. Our hostess, a woman who built a very successful business up from nothing against considerable hardships, commented that she thinks Trump’s four years in the wilderness are worth it. She said he had been “fine-tuned by fire,” and is now tougher, and much more knowledgeable about what he faces, than he would have been if he had been re-elected in 2020. I think she’s right.
UPDATE:
Pretty incredible when you think about how the entire corporate media was singularly focused over the last 4 years on destroying Trump, in tandem with most of the federal gov’t, the state of New York, as well as various assassins, & not only did Trump win, but he’s going to win…
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 6, 2024
Plus:
'Don't Despair,' Kamala Tells Celebrating Nation https://t.co/BoU27gGwJP pic.twitter.com/Ro1U9b78yl
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 7, 2024
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:
Sorry to beat a dead horse, but can we go back to what happened here? pic.twitter.com/FkScNHivuU
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 6, 2024
UPDATE: Eugene Volokh emails to suggest that the above chart is comparing apples and oranges: “Biden’s 81M was the final 2020 count; Harris’s 66M was the ongoing 2024 count, as of this morning. It appears that as of this morning there were still at least about 16M votes not yet included in the tallies, mostly but not entirely in Western states. In California, for instance, the current tallies include only 56% of the vote, and that amounts to 9.75M votes, so that’s about 7.7M votes not yet included in the totals in California alone. My rough projections from each state, based on how the vote broke down so far, is that there will be 9M extra votes for Harris and 7M for Trump, though there might be more (see https://reason.com/volokh/2024/11/06/quick-reminder-dont-compare-the-final-2020-popular-vote-totals-with-non-final-2024-vote-totals/). That will yield a total of roughly 76M for Harris and 79M for Trump, which is basically 5M less than Biden’s 81M for Harris and 5M more than Trump’s 2020 74M for Trump. It may even be a few million more (or possibly, though not likely, a few less). But it will be much more than the amounts reported so far in the right-hand column in the ZeroHedge comparison.”