Let It Go, Part 2
Does it matter if Barack Obama still believes "elections have consequences"?
Let me ask you a few questions.
Since only two groups of voters — affluent people and white people — cast more votes for Kamala Harris than they did for Joe Biden, does that make Democrats the party of rich white people?
Since Kamala Harris performed worse than Biden with women voters, black voters, latino voters, and young voters who helped put Donald Trump back into the White House, does that make Democrats the party of old white people?
If you ask David Brooks (the New York Times columnist who famously adored the crease of Barack Obama’s pants) and Musa Al-Gharbi (the Muslim sociologist David Brooks described as “a rising intellectual star”) the answer to these two questions is yes.
And since Smilin’ Joe Biden welcomed Donald Trump to the White House to begin the peaceful transfer of power, does that make Democrats the party of Fascist Collusion?
Okay, I admit this is unfair even when Democrats call one of their own candidates a “Nazi cooperator,” so I’ll allow Democrat readers to remain ignorant that this answer is also yes.
Because that’s all true, Democrats desperately need an answer to another question: What is a Democrat?
My regular readers know I prefer to avoid overtly political questions, favoring instead the philosophical and historical. But there is always some overlap, and this year there has been historic overlap in America’s understanding of the word “Democrat.”
Unfortunately, Democrats can’t even define the word woman, so any answer they provide about their own identity should be met with scientific skepticism.
Fortunately, as noted in my previous missive, a few diehard Democrats are beginning to understand that the stupid games Democrats play with words are beginning to come to an end.
Peer into the zeitgeist and you see, among other things, young women athletes who are so done with men playing on women’s teams.
The spirit of the age also says Barack Obama’s tenure as the leader of the Democrat Party is done. He presided over the loss of more House, Senate, state legislative and governors seats than any other president in American history, he launched a technically-failed coup in 2016, he made Joe Biden the nominee in 2020, he led the shadow government that made decisions for the Biden administration, and he forced Joe to stand down and prop up Kamala in 2024.
Okay, you can have your own opinions about that last paragraph, but you can’t have your own facts. And the fact is that Obama famously once said “elections have consequences.” Another fact is that people who once insisted “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences” are morbidly afraid President 47 will do to them what they did to him.
Democrats are so afraid they’re even contemplating a formal “shadow cabinet” — after gaining experience with the informal version operated out of the Obama mansion in DC’s tony Kalorama neighborhood.
After a decade of persecuting people who use the wrong pronouns, banning truthful speech on the origin of COVID-19, tasking the FBI with the Russian Collusion hoax, interfering with the 2016 and 2020 elections, banning Trump from Twitter, and prosecuting Trump and his top aides, Democrat operatives are having schizophrenic reactions to pet issues like election interference, free speech, lawfare, and consequences.
When Elon Musk said on X that there will be “consequences” for those who “pushed foreign interference hoaxes,” Obama staffer Tommy Vietor responded, “America’s new oligarch is threatening to arrest people for saying things he doesn’t like. Free speech absolutist!”
As noted by Victor Davis Hanson, “government bullies and cowardly bureaucratic grandees” in the Obama-Harris regime are terrified that Trump’s “crazy” and “unqualified” cabinet picks will do what the voters have asked Trump to do: rein in an out-of-control federal government. Even worse, Trump is picking the right squad to do it.
I’ve noted before that Leftists want to destroy the 2,000-year-old moral code adopted by America even as they expect to live under its protections, and David Brooks inadvertently provides us with more evidence of that fact.
In his NYT mea culpa titled “Why We Got It So Wrong,” Brooks wrote that we all have “mental models of reality in our heads” and that some of those models are broken, primary among them being identity politics. So far so good.
And then he asked the most salient question: “Where did we get our current models?”
Well, if we pressed half the country to seriously consider that question, they’d conclude that the models are the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Half of those people would include the Bible in the list.
Those models ask and answer such questions as: Should we all tell the truth? Yes. Do our leaders lie? Yes. Should we commit murder? No. Can a murderer be a good leader? Yes. Is there a law above government? Yes. Does government get to revoke rights that come from God? No.
But those models are conspicuously missing from Brooks’ answer. He wrote, “Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture.”
If you rely on those models to answer the serious questions, you get a “sympathetic elderly [president] with a poor memory” and a Department of Justice that won’t hold him accountable for being a “serious risk to national security.” And you get a government that fabricates a “dream job” of enforcing laws like “thou shalt not commit misinformation.”
The Ministry of Truth rabbit hole is deep, so I won’t get into Nina Jankowicz or her illegal dream job. All I can suggest for those not following the trials and tribulations of The Blob is to watch this highly recommend Hillsdale College lecture by Mike Benz.
I will end where David Brooks ends, and in much the same way. But I will go where he dares not tread. Brooks opines:
“In 1959 the British jurist Patrick Devlin made a point that should haunt us: ‘Without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics, no society can exist.’ He added, ‘If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil, they will fail; if having based it on common agreement, the agreement goes, the society will disintegrate.’
“We need a social vision that is as morally compelling as identity politics but does a better job of describing reality. We need a national narrative that points us to some ideal and gives each of us a noble role in pursuing it. That’s the gigantic cultural task that lies ahead.”
Close, David, but no cigar. Or, as the Fool* says in King Lear, “But there, alas, lies the rub: It is too late to make amends.”
To simplify, let’s say Brooks and his ilk want us all to share this moral code: “You can have freedom of speech but not freedom from consequences.” They want citizens to derive that code from a mental model formed by an educational system, the media, and popular culture … all controlled by people who think exactly like they do and are willing to deliver the consequences when needed.
The rub is that America has had that mental model for more than a century! And it took the 2024 election — really? an election? — to make them admit the problem: “this mind-set has just crashed against the rocks of reality.”
America once had a shared moral code that delivered exactly what Progressives say they want. Proverbs 21:23: “Those who guard their mouths and their tongues keep themselves from calamity.”
But what Progressives say they want is not what they actually want.
The Progressive society intentionally removed the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Bible from the classroom, substituting a toxic brew of New Deal, Great Society, Critical Race Theory bullshit (or, to use the common tongue, Communism). This is the deeply un-American ideology that is finally crumbling: the supremacy of collective rights over individual rights, and a power structure that says compelling speech and forcing behavior is “freedom.”
As the next Inauguration Day approaches, we all know the triglyceride-rich birthing unit will refuse to belt out its concession tune. And we also know that — without a legitimately abject apology — Progressives have forfeited their right to participate in the “gigantic cultural task” of rebuilding America.
It’s time for the adults to take over. Let it go, Democrats. Let it go.
* It was not the Fool, but Prospero, and not King Lear, but The Tempest. But you knew that, right? Or was it Hamlet in Hamlet? I had to look it up. :)
If I'd thought about this article a bit more, and spent another few hours on it, I'd have included this:
Any parent who knows anything knows that the natural consequences of a child's misbehavior will teach a far better lesson than any artificial consequence ever could.
But Democrats are bad parents who treat Americans like bad children. They want the power to create and enforce speech codes that don't (and never can) work.
America already has a speech code, and it's called Proverbs 21:23: “Those who guard their mouths and their tongues keep themselves from calamity.” It is superior because a) it is voluntary, and b) anyone who breaks it suffers the natural consequences of "f#ck around and find out." That truth will make you free.
Democrats desperately want to save their crumbling and deeply un-American ideology: the supremacy of collective rights over individual rights, and a power structure that says compelling speech and forcing behavior is “freedom.” That "truth" ends in slavery.
If that ideology wins, America is done. Put your shoulder to the wheel and help. All you have to do is speak up.
"We need a social vision that is as morally compelling as identity politics but does a better job of describing reality."
In other words, Progressives need to better mask their agenda with euphemisms that better deceive the general public in order to exert their will over society. There is no better substitute for identity politics than to be sacrificed on the alter of public humiliation and relegated to the ash heap of history. Collectivism, no matter what form it takes, is the supreme danger to the ideals of liberty and the individual. And no amount of political gobbledygook will ever be able to dress it up and make it palatable. $#!+ will always taste like $#!+ no matter how much salt and pepper or how much sugar you use to "dress it up." It will always be just that, $hit!