Wednesday Potpourri

First, we had it on excellent authority that FEMA would never politicize disaster relief. Anyone who suggested as much was instantly denounced for peddling misinformation.

Well, apparently, it was happening, specifically in Florida. The agency just fired a supervisor who told workers, in the aftermath of hurricane Milton, to avoid houses that had Trump signs on them:

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell just confirmed that supervisor Marn'i Washington has been fired after I reported Friday that she directed relief workers in Florida to skip homes with Trump flags or signs. It has been referred to a special counsel for investigation.

One suspects that she is not alone, and that the policy has a few other fingerprints on it.

As it happened, and to no one’s surprise, Washington said yesterday that she was not alone, that other agents were doing the same thing in North Carolina. She said that it was common practice.

So much for misinformation!

Second, our psychiatrists are on the ball, offering sage and comforting advice on how to get through the upcoming Trump years.

One dimwitted psychiatric fellow, from Yale University, has recommended that you cut off anyone who voted for Trump. Shun and ostracize your family members for wrongthink. 

Legal Insurrection has the story:

Every time Trump wins an election, the media trots out a Yale psychiatrist to say crazy things.

This time, Joy Reid of MSNBC spoke to Dr. Amanda Calhoun, who suggested it is perfectly reasonable for people on the left who are upset about the outcome of the election to cut off family members and friends who voted for Trump.

Are they in the business of treating mental illness or producing it?

Third, sometimes derangement does not do it justice. According to the Daily Mirror a woman is divorcing her husband because he voted for Trump.

And for one American the divorce papers have also come extremely quickly. He wrote online: “I voted for Trump, my wife sent me divorce papers. What do I do? I didn’t even know it was possible to be served divorce papers this quickly.”

His post has been shared widely and has more than 12.5 million views on X and sparked a fierce debate. The man also wrote: “I don’t even know what to say. I’m shocked I married somebody willing to throw away our entire life over politics. Last week we were happy, today we’re getting divorced.

"She won’t have a discussion, she says nothing will change her mind Insists she is going to report my parents because they live off of disability but my dad does some cash work auto repair, so now I’m worried for my while family (sic).”

It clearly seems that the relationship has quickly become acrimonious with a vicious argument now over possessions. He continued in his post: “She wants me to buy her out of the house, we have $300k in it plus built a 4-bay garage since we bought it 3 years ago. I can’t afford that.

"When I told her this as she was packing her things she said “I guess you’re finally going to really know how it feels to be f****d by a Democrat.” ETA: her name is on the deed but not the mortgage. I’m not confident that I can reason with her. What do I do? Where do I start? How do I fix this? Is anybody else experiencing this in the wake of election results?”

It has prompted nearly 7,000 comments so far with a mix of people feeling sympathy for him and understanding his shock while others suggest he had it coming. One person wrote: “Jesus, when the dust settles he will be glad she is gone. If she would leave him over this, then she was already out the door and looking for an excuse. I hope he finds a nice, conservative woman who actually loves and respects him.”

Some people take politics way too seriously. And why do we not see that in her lust to hurt her husband she is also hurting herself?

Fourth, over at the State department the staff was so discombobulated by the election results that the management started holding therapy sessions.

The Washington Free Beacon reported:

The Biden-Harris State Department organized an in-house therapy session for employees early Friday following Donald Trump’s election victory, four sources with knowledge of the meeting told the Washington Free Beacon.

"Managing stress during change," read an internal State Department email sent across the agency that encouraged employees to attend a one-hour session in which they could discuss their feelings about Tuesday’s election results. The department’s Employee Consultation Services in the Bureau of Medical Services hosted the session, according to a copy of the email notice described by sources to the Free Beacon.

"Change is a constant in our lives, but it can often bring about stress and uncertainty," the email said. "Join us for an insightful webinar where we delve into effective stress management techniques to help you navigate these challenging times. This session will provide tips and practical strategies for managing stress and maintaining your well being."

One can only hope that they might all engage in some self-criticism, considering how poorly they conducted American foreign policy these past four years.

Fifth, over in Iraq we are seeing what it means to have a strictly Islamist culture. American radicals are out marching for Palestine, for homophobia and honor killings. As though that is not bad enough Iraq is about to institute child marriage. A man might soon be able to marry a nine year old. Trust me, the girl will not be free to choose.

The Daily Mirror reports:

A sick newly proposed age of consent law would allow old men in Iraq to marry children as young as nine years old, and "legalise child rape" activists claim.

Ultra-conservative Shia Muslim parties have launched a bid to pass a new law that would slash the existing age of consent in the pariah nation in half from the existing limit of 18. The changes, proposed by the dominant Shia coalition, would peel back the national "personal status law".

Replacing the major legislation, also known as Law 188, would further roll back women's rights, depriving them of the ability to divorce their partners, have custody for their children, and their inheritance. The latest proposals, initially announced in August 2024, would see one of the most progressive laws in the Middle East fully repealed, and has sparked outrage among women's rights activists.

We should keep this firmly in mind the next time someone suggests that we need to bring democracy and human rights to Middle Eastern cultures.

Sixth, in the therapy world we have this tidbit from Ryan McRogers on Twitter:

In grad school today, we spent the entire class period for career counseling making arts and crafts about how nonbinary therapists experience microaggressions. Sorry if this graduate level work is too complex for anyone.

The therapy profession is in the best of hands.

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Making Your Children Crazy

Move over Dr. Spock. Move over, Tiger Mom. We have a new way to bring up children, reported by Bethany Mandel in the New York Post.

I cannot tell you how prevalent it is. I do not know whether some enterprising mother is about to write a manual, instructing other mothers on how best to make their children crazy.

Specifically, the problem is Trump Derangement Syndrome, an offshoot of Bush Derangement Syndrome, first identified by psychiatrist Charles Krauthamner.

Apparently, some number of women suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome have chosen to visit their anxieties on their children.

Mandel reports:

Here’s a sampling of social-media posts I’ve seen since the re-election of President Donald Trump.

“My six-year-old son kept hugging me this morning and saying ‘don’t worry mama, I won’t let him hurt you.’ ”

“I told my 3yo to never have kids… I’ve been sobbing since I woke up.”

“I scared my poor 1-year-old son because I was crying so hard.”

“My 10-year-old broke down crying this morning saying ‘mommy now we’re going to die I’m worried.’ [I told her] to unite with all the kids that wanted Harris to win.”

On X, liberal commentator Wajahat Ali posted, “My 8-year-old girl just asked me, ‘Baba, do we have to move? Trump doesn’t like us.’”

These are real people, and unfortunately, real parents, who have decided to inflict severe emotional distress upon their children as some kind of political virtual signal.

In some cases these are small children. How does it happen that mothers think that it is acceptable to scare the bejesus out of small children. That is, traumatizing them. Are they incapable of keeping their feelings to themselves?

I will not on this occasion opine on whether women are more emotional than men. Did their therapists tell them that it was the right and healthy thing to do?

Or else, Mandel suggests, it’s a “political virtue signal.” She also calls it “hysterical posturing.”

But it’s especially odious to see this kind of hysterical posturing from mothers and fathers, showcasing their children’s fears and anxieties about the next president.

These parents are weaponizing the grief they themselves sowed into their own children, claiming that someone else caused this kind of fear for their kids.

Is it all just child abuse?

Observing the phenomenon on her own social-media feed, Emily Rose Chadwick, founder of the nonprofit Mama Wilder Foundation, posted, “If your young children are in tears over the election results, it’s because you’re the kind of parent who traumatizes your kids to feel good about your political choices.”

If they are in a lather over the harm Trump might do to their children, we note, with Mandel, that their outrage is highly selective:

Where was the outrage from these same liberals on the fainting couches when progressive teachers unions and their Democratic supporters closed schools for over a year and a half in blue areas, denying children the right to literally show their faces in public, play on a playground, let alone get an education?

They don’t care about the well-being of children.

Naturally, these parents are happy to take their children to therapy?

A therapist is seeing patients as young as 10 consumed with anxiety over the election showing up in her office.

She shared with me, “The parents are not mentally well themselves. I see it as performative emotionality but some of it is true emotional instability.”

Instead of working through their own emotional distress, they inflicted it on their children.

It is the ultimate betrayal of our most sacred duty to our children to intentionally harm them, yet that is what these parents are doing.

I will take a slight exception here. Such parents are anything but liberal. They do not believe in free thinking or even free speech. They do not respect differences of opinions, as classical liberals used to do.

They are cult followers who have learned that you do well to hew to the party line and to affirm the depth of your commitment to the right cause by losing their minds, giving your mind over to the cause. The extent of your derangement is the extent of your commitment. And if you do not show a severe and serious commitment to the cause, you risk being shunned and canceled.

The shorthand explanation is this. If a normal group coheres because everyone speaks the same language, uses the same table manners, follows the same customs and norms, obeys the same dress and grooming codes-- this means that everyone knows who is and is not a member because of outward, visible signs.

When that breaks down, the default position, especially prevalent in multicultural hodgepodges, involves groupthink. Presumably the group coheres because everyone thinks the same thoughts, feels the same feelings and believes the same beliefs.

And yet, this is a problem, Whereas dress codes and table manners are objectively verifiable, no one really knows whether you believe the right beliefs. So, the spectre of doubt always falls over everyone’s claim that he or she believes the right beliefs. If everyone doubts your beliefs, they are doubting your membership in the group. In that case you need to resort to more extreme behavior, laden with out of control emotions, to erase all doubt and to show that you are a true believer.

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Is Wokery Ending?

New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters deserves extra credit. Before the election made clear to everyone who can see, he wrote an article explaining that wokeness had outlived its usefulness. People were turning against the scolds and the thought police. The rest is history.

Wokery assumes that the only truly salient problem in America today is prejudice and discrimination. It adds that the only way to win the war against bigotry is to police thought.

You might think that men and women are not the same thing. You might think that males should not be competing against females in volleyball. And you might want to hire and promote on the basis of merit, not in order to fulfill a diversity quota.

If you belong to the Democratic Party you are not allowed to say so. If you say so, you will be denounced as a bigot and shunned.

Wokesters want to own your mind. If wealth is distributed unevenly or unequally that can only mean that you have indulged in wrongthink. So, you are obliged to hand out credentials to people who have not earned them and to give jobs to people who cannot do them. Because then the workplace, the marketplace and the neighborhood will look like America.

Fundamentally, it’s cosmetic. It’s all about appearance. If you need more encouragement you need to turn on television shows, movie and advertising. There you will see the world as the radical left wishes it were. You may recall that Peggy Noonan once called it moral harassment.

The Kamala Harris candidacy was the last volley. She was the reductio ad absurdum of wokery. A woman who had no real qualifications, who lacked the ability to do the job, who was subliterate, was elevated to the role of presidential candidate without having earned it. 

That was the key. Harris was imposed on the populace. She was a triple diversity candidate so she did not need to be vetted. She did not need to compete for the honor.

So, the mainstream media flooded the zone with encomia about the greatness of Kamala. If you accept the premise, namely that being a black female counts as a qualification for office, then she ran a flawless, perfect campaign. If you did not see it, you were a bigot.

Keep in mind, thinking makes it so. Saying makes it so. There is no reality against which we need to judge qualifications or records. 

For those who had based their careers on their ability to fulfill diversity quotas, Kamala Harris was the test case. For those who doubted their own qualifications or even their own ability to do a job, the Harris candidacy was the acid test. 

They could not accept that Harris lost because she was inept and incompetent, that she had no business running for the presidency-- because then they would be putting their own ersatz achievements in question.

I am not going to name names here, but how many of the talking heads on television were obviously hired to fulfill diversity quotas. And how many of them refuse to accept that they are fundamentally incompetent and unqualified for what they are doing.

Obviously, the nation’s governmental and media and academic jobs are chock full of diversity hires. Reimposing meritocracy is not going to happen any time soon. 

Worse yet, as Shelby Steele pointed out decades ago, once you introduce diversity quotas into hiring and firing you discover that the achievements of anyone who falls within the protected class are subtly disrespected. 

It’s a sad state of affairs. It shows the problems with human engineering, even when undertaken for the most noble of intentions.

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Happy Birthday

You might not know it-- there is no reason why you should-- but today is my birthday. Obviously, this only matters to a select few, and I am happy that most of them remembered it.

I am also aware that in certain precincts-- as in Facebook-- people use their birthdays to raise money for worthy causes. Surely, that is a good way to celebrate an important milestone.

If I were to do the same, I would want to see a sign. The sign would identify a cause, one that I can wholeheartedly support. 

Happily, I did not need to look very far. I needed but recall that on Sundays I have paused my usual round of commentaries and have posted a request to raise funds-- to compensate my efforts. 

So, I am happy to invite one and all to join me in celebrating my birthday, by contributing to this blog. The Paypal button on the left will serve you well in this endeavor.

Or else, you may mail me a check at 310 East 46th St. 24H  New York, NY 10017.

Thank you in advance.

Saturday Miscellany

First, Scientific American is supposedly a serious publication. It cares about science, don’t you know. Now its editor is named Laura Helmuth, about whom you might ask how such a deranged individual could have been elevated to head such a publication.

Now, in the aftermath of the election, Helmuth said this:

I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.

Fair is fair. She quickly deleted her idiotic remarks. But, you still have to wonder about the mindset of the people who run Scientific American. And you need but await the reckoning that will show up in declining subscriptions.

Second, a few words from Nellie Bowles at TGIF, in the Free Press. The extent of the electoral wipeout is clear when you take a look at California, and especially about the overthrow of the progressive regime that had been governing that state, and that had produced rampant homelessness and crime.

Los Angeles’s very progressive district attorney George Gascón was ousted in favor of a moderate. San Francisco’s mayor London Breed lost her reelection bid, ousted by Daniel Lurie, a great guy and, yes, another moderate liberal. Kids, we’re doing extra helpings of granola for dessert tonight! 

And the biggest news: Crime is illegal again in California with a new tough-on-crime bill. For years, anything stolen worth less than $950 was considered a misdemeanor, which local DAs explicitly said they wouldn’t pursue, leading to a whole industry of folks clearing out our Rite Aids and reselling stuff on Amazon. Now, with Prop 36 passed, your third low-level theft can be considered a felony. I’m happy for California, but I’ll always treasure my stolen printer cartridge, which I bought on Amazon and keep as a prize. 

Third, women are not taking it lying down. America’s failure to elect a manifestly unqualified woman counts as an offense against all women. Thus a movement has arisen: women are going on a sex strike. It has been happening in South Korea and it is as old as Lysistrata.

The Telegraph reports:

“Men will always be against women,” read the caption in one TikTok video of a young woman crying in a car, encouraging women to join the 4B movement. “Women are just as capable to be presidents as a man.”

In another video, a woman says that “for the next four years I am going to abstain from sex with men”.

A separate video was captioned: “I think it’s time for American women to participate in our own 4B movement.”

Many of the videos addressed concerns over abortion, which was on the ballot in 10 states and was central to the Harris campaign.

“If men won’t respect our bodies, they don’t get access to our bodies,” one woman said. “All I have to say is, good luck getting laid. Especially in Florida, because me and my girlies are participating in the 4B movement.”

If you look carefully at this level of thinking you will thank your stars that we will not have it in the White House. Maybe the American people knew something that these young women did not.

Fourth, there is an old psychoanalytic theory called projective identification. It involves people who accuse others of doing what they themselves are doing, but refuse to acknowledge.

More than once these past days conservative critics have denounced the attacks on Donald Trump, on the ground that the people doing the attacking have been doing what they have accused Trump of doing.

Now, Heather Mac Donald explains it all in the City Journal. In response to those who believe that Republicans are waging culture war:

Here is how you wage a culture war: You ban teachers from telling parents that their child has “changed” his gender. You require everyone around that child to adhere to the child’s new counterfactual “pronouns.” You pass regulations making opposition to male athletes competing against female athletes in female sports a civil rights offense. You assign graphic novels depicting sex, in this case, gay sex, to school children. You make celebrations of sexual identity, in this case, “queer” and every other type of “non-heteronormative” sexual identity, a routine part of the school curriculum and calendar. You make race and sex, that is, non-white race and non-male sex, a qualification for scientific hiring and research grants. Opposing those radical changes is not waging a war; it is belatedly trying to play defense.)

Want some more? This in relation to the social disruptions the nation has been suffering:

Actually, what initiated a period of disruption beyond anything current generations have seen is enabling millions of Third World illegal aliens to enter the country, enforcing a mass delusion regarding the malleability of biological sex, ending meritocracy in favor of race and gender quotas, and setting up a collapse of the electrical grid through fantastical requirements regarding “green” energy.

Fifth, for those who are still running around shrieking that Trump is Hitler, we learn that Trump received 50% more votes from Jews this time.

He also received record numbers of black and Hispanic votes.

Sixth, Jon Stewart offered the voice of reason about the election-- contrary to the absurd declamations of more than a few Democratic governors.

The New York Post reports:

Jon Stewart admitted Friday that liberals are shocked that President-elect Donald Trump so easily won re-election fair and square, saying bluntly, “F—k us, f—k me — I was wrong.”

On his podcast “The Weekly Show,” the seasoned political comic said the most shocking thing about Trump’s spectacular comeback victory is that he achieved it through a legal democratic process.

“I feel like we were prepared for all scenarios and in each one of those scenarios it was, how is Donald Trump going to finagle his way back into the [White House]? How is he going to use undemocratic principles?” Stewart said in the episode, which aired Friday.

“What measure of intimidation and underhanded [shenanigans] will this man use to worm his way back into the Oval Office?” he asked of conspiracies soon proven wildly unfounded.

“And it turned out, he used our electoral system as it is designed. And in that moment, I thought, well, f—k. I’m not sure we have a team of lawyers for that,” he quipped with a glum inflection.

Seventh, a few words from Charlamagne tha god.

“Don’t y’all find it strange that now that he’s won, they’re not calling him a threat to democracy? They’re not calling him a fascist ... I would think that, if you really believe that, then somebody’s speech would be about how America effed up and how things are about to be really bad. It just makes you wonder how much of it did they really believe, or how much of it was just politics." 

Eighth, a few brilliant comments from a New York Times reader, in their letters section:

The very best thing that the Democrats can do for themselves is not ideological. It is to make the deep Blue cities and states where they have a  supermajority into American paradises. Los Angeles, New York, California, Baltimore, Chicago, etc. Show us that you can got her an effectively. Low crime, great schools, moderate taxes, excellent mass transit, etc.  Then the rest of the country will come to believe that your way is the right way. Because it is not what we have seen.”

Ninth, I have not been following the story of the Spanish floods. Apparently, they have caused significant damage, to lives and property.

As a sidelight, Daniel Hannan explains that it was all exacerbated by the green agenda:

The most under-reported aspect of the tragic floods in eastern Spain is that dams had been demolished, partly as a result of EU demands and partly under pressure from local eco-activists.

Tenth, apparently the Biden administration transmania seriously compromised Kamala’s electoral prospects. Wesley Yang summarizes the policies that America just rejected:

Before the Assistant Secretary for Health and Human Services pressured WPATH to strip out all age limits for puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, surgeries; before thousands of schools districts with millions of students mandated that teachers actively deceive parents about the mental health of their children; before thousands of girls as young as 11 had their breasts amputated after being caught up in an online fad; before thousands of school districts began teaching kids that anyone can be male, female, both or neither as a fact; before social media networks instituted bans on correctly sexing or referring to the pre-transition names of someone claiming to be the opposite sex; before the House of Representative issued rules calling for avoidance of non-inclusive words like "mother." 

Eleventh, the Democratic Party was seriously outmanned in the recent election. America rejected the girl power agenda, as well as the constant whining about authoritarian males.

You can tell when you remark that the 2028 election campaign has already begun. New Jersey Governor Murphy; Illinois Governor Pritzker, California Governor Newsome and New York Governor Hochul have all issued statements emphasizing their willingness to fight, fight, fight. 

Now where do you think they got that idea?

They are not conceding manliness, at least, not yet.

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Two Election Post-Mortems

Let the post-mortems begin. What are the lessons that good liberals will be drawing from their most recent electoral wipeout?

Such questions will define the future of one of our political parties. They ginned up boundless hatred of Donald Trump, but they could not beat him in a fair election. Because they were defending democracy. Well, democracy just bit them in the ass.

Among the more interesting analyses of what went wrong in the Harris campaign, we have Pamela Paul and Bret Stephens, both from the New York Times.

Paul addresses the campaign’s failure to appeal to women. Harris treated women as a caricature, defined by the existence of a uterus, and failed to address any of the other issues that concern women.

Apart from promising to safeguard abortion rights, the Harris campaign didn’t do nearly enough to address other issues important to women, including the “kitchen table” economy, education, gun control, health care, the environment and immigration. The long hangover of Covid was brushed aside like yesterday’s nightmare. If there’s one thing almost every woman can agree on, it’s that they do not like being taken for granted.

Harris’s biggest mistake was leaning hard on a single issue, making abortion rights a centerpiece of her campaign, which reflects a fairly reductive view of women’s lives as citizens. Women — even women who favor abortion rights — do not vote by uterus alone.

Nicely put-- women do not vote by uterus alone!!

She continues:

Nor is abortion a universal concern. After all, large swaths of women aren’t trying to or able to get pregnant. And some of the reddest states have passed measures to protect abortion rights, but voted overwhelmingly for Trump. The majority of women who seek abortions are already mothers who often terminate pregnancies for financial reasons. They worry about how to feed and educate the kids they already have.

Obviously, abortion relieves women of the responsibility for feeding and educating their children. The campaign forgot about the women who did not have abortions and who were trying to bring up their children. The issue touches the concerns of many, many women.

In particular, the American education system is a dismal failure. Children suffered learning loss from the pandemic school closures. And we know that the teachers’ unions that are intrinsic to democratic politics spearheaded the closures. The Biden administration could not address the education issue because it could not question or attack the teachers’ unions.

The most stunning hole in Harris’s campaign was education. Only 16 percent of Americans think K-12 education is moving in the right direction. Women (and men) are upset by the broad failure of basic education standards in this country, a sentiment that was only exacerbated during Covid. As Jonathan Chait wrote recently in New York magazine, education was long a defining issue for Democrats. But President Biden didn’t make K-12 education in any way a priority and Harris was nearly silent about it on the campaign trail. It was barely and only blandly mentioned on her website. “Parents’ rights” were dismissed as a right-wing concern or a code for hate or the province of conservative women. There was little acknowledgment that Democrats are parents too.

And, of course, there is the simple fact that Kamala was the ultimate diversity hire. She had no real qualifications and no achievements on her resume.

The bottom line here is that a woman or a man who is hired for diversity must still do the job. Putting a subliterate buffoon whose vocabulary ranges from giggles to cackles in high office, on the grounds that she is a minority woman, discredits the accomplishments of all women.

Biden did Harris the disservice of explicitly stating he only wanted a woman before appointing her as his running mate. For any woman, even an implied “We hired you because we needed a woman” doesn’t land nearly as well as “You’re the best person for the job.” While women never want to be denied a job on the basis of sex, nor do they want to get those jobs because of it.

No one damaged Harris as much as she damaged herself. As soon as she stepped out of the shadows and underwent interviews, she showed herself to be vapid and vacuous. There was no way she was going to represent the nation on the world stage without making a fool of herself and us. And there was no way that someone who scrupulous kept herself uninformed was going to make intelligent decisions:

As a presidential candidate, Harris once again floundered. Onstage and in interviews, she sounded alternately glib and mechanical. She spoke in the foamy blather of a corporate human resources manager. She pandered to low-information, single women voters by appearing on podcasts like “Call Her Daddy” and goofballing along to her “brat” label. She often came across as fake and scripted, in a way that called to mind the herky-jerky ventriloquism of Roxie Hart on the witness stand, seeming to parrot whatever her political consultants told her. The act wore thin.

As much as women may want a first female president, they equally want someone who will succeed in that role. Nobody wants to see the first female president to go down as a failure. Kamala Harris did little to persuade female voters she was right for the job. Democrats need to remember that a woman, just as much as any man, needs to earn women’s confidence.

Women, like men, need to earn their way. They cannot succeed merely by extorting favors or getting put into offices that they cannot fill. DEI is the enemy of earned success. It makes people believe that success involves being selected, not in doing the job.

And then there is Bret Stephens. As we hear a certain number of deranged commentators explain that the only reason Kamala lost was bigotry, he offers a rejoinder:

The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

Many leftists suffered an intellectual deficiency. Like the man who only has a hammer and who thinks that everything is a nail, Democrats could not think their way outside of their bigotry narrative.

Democrats were not merely fighting Trump. They were fighting against reality, the reality of everyday experience. It was gaslighting on steroids:

First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe.

Yet when Americans saw and experienced things otherwise (as extensive survey data showed they did) the characteristic liberal response was to treat the complaints not only as baseless but also as immoral. The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. 

And clearly, the Democratic Party has been taken over by various leftist causes, causes that were decidedly unpopular in the general public. And progressive Democrats did not debate the issues. They denounced and defamed anyone who disagreed with them. 

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe.

Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

And then there was the cultural tyranny.

It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think.

Democrats forgot how to govern. They could do nothing more than attack Trump for the horrors he was going to visit on the country. As Stephens notes, Trump had already been president and these horrors had not taken place. Again, the gaslighting did not work.

It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

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