Goldtent TA Paradise

JEFF CHILDERS

1. Fullgoldcrown says:

   October 27, 2024 - 4:54 pm at 4:54 pm

   the New York Times shocked me (and its readers) by running a remarkably fair op-ed featuring two conservative foreign policy experts, headlined “‘They Would Never Be Doing This Under Trump’: Two G.O.P. Foreign Policy Experts on What a Second Term Would Mean for the World.” (It ran in today’s print edition, but appeared on the website on Thursday.)

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   The op-ed’s author, Ross Douthat, is the Times’ pet conservative, a Catholic who frequently criticizes free-market capitalism and decries nationalism. But he can sometimes surprise, as he did yesterday, when he published a long, interview-style op-ed with two former Trump officials: Robert O’Brien, who was Trump’s national security adviser 2019-2020, and Elbridge Colby, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense in 2017-2018, and helped draft Trump’s 2018 national defense strategy.

   The most astonishing things was that the Times’ editors green-lighted this op-ed right before the election at all. The piece —and I recommend you read it and maybe share it with others— was a full-throated intellectual argument for voting for Donald Trump. While it focused on foreign policy, it also quietly and forcefully made the election case in existential terms like what we saw from Robert Kennedy’s latest campaign ads.

   It wasn’t just me. Publishing this pro-Trump op-ed on the eve of the election, the Times badly triggered its readers, who clearly felt deeply betrayed. Maybe not betrayed to the extent of LA Times and Washington Post readers, but still. Here’s one example of a regular reader’s reaction to the tsunami of outrage welling up in the article’s comments section, just to give you a sense:

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   Behold Mr. Colby’s closing argument, which again, appears in today’s print edition, nine days before the election. Colby criticized the Biden administration’s bellicose nuclear escalation and basically said it was either “Vote for Trump or duck and cover”:

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   Colby’s not wrong. Where did the peace-loving left go? What about flower power? They just vanished in a puff of politically convenient smoke. Democrats are now so deranged that, if Trump is for peace, then they want full-on nuclear war.

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   Mr. O’Brien’s closing argument, on the other hand, made the positive case. He explained that Trump doesn’t just love America. He loves the American people:

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   And the American people have noticed. Many of them love the President back. Which brings us to the next segment.

   ?? The most shocking and thought-provoking theory appeared yesterday, when former Democrat and now independent journalist Michael Shellenberger published a Public News Substack titled, “Toxic Femininity And Wokeism Are Driving Men, Jews, Billionaires, and Muslims Away From Harris To Trump.”

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   People are flipping away from the cackling noises. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai apparently told President Trump that his McDonald’s shift was the biggest thing ever to happen on Google, which says a lot, both of the massive search and the fact Google’s CEO called Trump. A few days before that, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook also called Trump, to complain about EU over-regulation. Yesterday, a large group of Michigan muslim leaders endorsed Trump for president, reversing decades of support for Democrats.

   And yesterday, Dearborn, Michigan’s Democrat mayor announced he’s not endorsing anybody. So.

   Even worse for Harris, Shellenberger noted that the elite class —another Democrat stronghold— dumped Kamala like she was a cheating girlfriend. Various Silicon Valley venture capitalists, tech leaders, and billionaires like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman —all former Democrats— have now jumped the Democrats’ sinking ship of state and climbed aboard the Trump train. Plus, after spending $400 million to help Biden in 2020, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg now prudishly says he won’t endorse anybody for president.

   Then, on top of all those defections, this week the country’s two biggest lib papers refused to endorse Harris and probably won’t even come to her next birthday party.

   Shellenberger pointed out these remarkable developments were not obvious. For one example, Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos endorsed Black Lives Matter on the Amazon website in 2020, and sniped at the time that he was “happy to lose” any customers who disagreed.

   For most of these folks and liberal institutions, it’s a total turnaround.

   Six months ago, Shellenberger explained, “Democrats and their allies in the criminal justice system appeared close to getting Trump incarcerated or prevented from running for office.” Trump was never the clear front-runner. During the primaries, both DeSantis and Haley at times appeared viable, if not strong. Things got so bad that in August, after Trump had “the worst three weeks of his campaign,” I was forced to write an encouraging post titled “The Second Act,” promising that we’d soon see a better Third Act.

   (I was right, but I’m not gloating.)

   Now, barely three months following the Times noticing that Trump’s campaign had scraped bottom, the Times this week ran an op-ed by Democrat political consultant John Della Volpe titled, “Trump’s Bro Whispering Could Cost Democrats Too Many Young Men.” This is how far we’ve come: Della Volpe warned readers that President Trump “could peel enough young men away from the Democratic Party to transform the country’s electoral math for years to come.”

   Years.

   I don’t completely agree with Shellenberger’s theory, which is that the Democrat party’s Marxist strategy of knitting together various victim groups into a political quilt is finally fraying. Jews used to be victims of antisemitism, but are now shocked to find themselves yeeted as colonialists and oppressors. White women used to enjoy #MeToo survivor status, but now are just “Karens” whose “white tears” are themselves racist and transphobes if they don’t want to share locker rooms with male cross-dressers.

   Muslims, formerly victims of islamophobia, are fed up with the LGBT nonsense and are moving rightwards. Black folks are discovering they aren’t as valuable as illegals, who are claiming all the benefits and displacing everyone else from low-income housing.

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   Last night, former Clinton insider Van Jones basically told Bill Maher that woke progressives are tearing themselves to pieces:

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   It’s all falling apart. It’s almost like someone ran a color revolution against the Democrat party. Someone, perhaps, who learned firsthand how the deep state runs color revolutions against other countries, by exacerbating existing divisions. A former President perhaps.

   And listen closely. Color revolutions only work when the deep state can communicate directly with citizens of the target country. That’s why color revolutions work on countries like Ukraine and Venezuela, but not China, North Korea, or Russia. So if I’m right, somebody engineering this woke color revolution had to find a way two years ago to talk to Americans without deep state interference. And it cost them $45 billion dollars.

   Or Shellenberger could be right. He thinks that the left’s problems come from wokeness. Specifically, woke toxic feminism, which has formed a political party in Hillary Clinton’s shrill image. “Democrats,” Shellenberger suggested, “have cemented their position as the party of affluent women” —mean girls— “while Republicans are becoming the party of men and the working class.”

   I don’t disagree. But that’s been true for at least 20 years. Someone or something has tipped the teetering edifice, causing it to crash. At this last, desperate hour, could we be finally watching the ultimate collapse of the left’s cobbled-together, Frankensteinian, woke Tower of Babel?

   How amazing would that be?