Opinion
By Jeff Childers
11/16/24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! It’s time for the Weekend Edition. Thanks in part to oversleeping after this wild week, and in part to preparations for early Thanksgiving tomorrow, we have a short and sweet roundup today. Enjoy the cooler weather, bask in the glow of one of the greatest turnaround stories in history, and we’ll pick up the pieces on Monday morning.
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🔥🔥 It was another terrific “Trump Effect” development. Adweek ran a story yesterday headlined, “Comcast, Disney, and IBM Are Among Advertisers Returning to X After Ad Freeze.” It can’t be easy for them. It’s like when the clock struck midnight, and Cinderella had to go back to scrubbing toilets.
What’s causing major advertisers to return to X after collectively boycotting the social media platform for an entire year, over alleged ‘hate speech’? Could it be that advertisers concluded Twitter/X fixed its “hate speech problem?”
No. The article proposed several silly explanations, and quoted Elon gracefully giving the credit to his marketing team. None of the offered rationalizations was satisfying. Actually, this quick observation appearing late in the story is probably closest to the truth:
It’s true that Elon Musk made a good bet, and his bet is paying off. But I wonder whether there’s another explanation. It seems to me that more likely reason the ads are flowing again is that the election is over. There’s nothing left to interfere with.
Last year, a group of top advertisers, organized by a murky nonprofit, demanded X implement speech controls. Elon refused. They had the boycott ready to go, instantly launched it, and X’s revenues plunged from one day to the next by over $170 million, creating an instant financial crisis for Elon’s newest investment.
Elon stood firm. In a viral interview, Elon hotly said, “(Disney president) Bob Iger, go f*** yourself!” Elon also sued them. Headline from the New York Times, August:
Maybe the new DOJ should investigate whether it was election interference.
Boycotts can go both ways. And, a more efficient federal government might want to cut back on expensive IBM equipment and lavish conferences for bureacrats at Disney properties. Just saying.
🔥🔥 The far-left Financial Times ran a soul-searching story yesterday headlined, “Trump broke the Democrats’ thermostat.” The headline was slightly deceiving; the article painted a picture of progressives separating from moderates and Republicans starting around 2012. So it might be more accurate to say Obama broke the Democrats’ thermostat. But there’s more to the story.
“Whether or not progressives are ready to accept it,” the article concluded, “the evidence all points in one direction: America’s moderate voters have not deserted the Democrats; the party has pushed them away.”
The Financial Times admitted that it was just like that cute cartoon showing the center-left liberal being politically stranded next to the gross Republican, with the ‘American left’ sprinting ever leftwards. You’ve seen it; this one:
Despite being widely mocked by the sneering left, the cartoon wasn’t wrong. Despite all Obama’s “racial healing,” we got the George Floyd riots and the Defund Police movement. But beginning around Trump’s first administration, a counter-movement began. Sane people of all races and colors in the center started stumbling rightwards.
The astonishing result was, the more conservative were minority voters’ views, the more likely it was they’d identify as Republicans. This graph tells the story:
Just as Obama’s terms caused progressives to flee leftwards, so Trump’s term caused conservative minorities to surge toward the GOP. It really caught on in 2016, and the last leap, the jump between 2020 and 2024, was particularly acute. Take a moment to truly understand what that chart above shows.
The most subversive implication of this data is that Trump —the Charlottesville “fine people” loving white supremacist racist fascist— somehow caused an historic and astonishing realignment of the Democrats’ core minority constituency. That’s why the headline claimed Trump “broke” the Democrats. He’s broken the Democrats’ hypnotic hold on people who naturally should be GOP voters.
This development is incredibly awkward for the Democrat political argument. They did everything they could to paint Trump as anti-minority; but it spectacularly backfired. Minorities flocked to Trump.
The Financial Times observed the now-undeniable fact that, in every election between 1948 and 2012, voters always recognized the Democrat brand as “the party that stood up for the working class and the poor.”
But in 2016, the Times explained, “that flipped.”
Since Trump’s first term in 2016, voters began identifying Republicans with working-class issues. And now, in 2024, Democrats are now “seen primarily as the party of minority advocacy.” And, as the chart above suggests, even that narrow brand is crumbling.
🔥 President Trump enjoyed enthusiastic help from a surprising source — progressives themselves. The sharpest inflection point (as reflected on the graph) was in 2020, the pandemic. That was when the “party of the working class” fell madly in love with “vaccine-or-terminate” work rules. Remember how Democrats explained it? We’re not forcing anybody since people can just quit if they don’t want the shots.
When the needle hit the road, it was Republicans who stood up for workers.
Democrats’ pro-democracy stance dissolved in a million executive orders, in their mad rush to impose lockdowns, mask mandates, and school closures without waiting for a single vote by any democratic institution. Democrats’ anti-elitist bona fides disappeared in a foggy vapor of brainless, technocratic science worship. Their last tenuous grasp on classic liberalism collapsed in Democrats’ exuberant war against free speech, under the misleading banner of “misinformation.”
Even Democrats’ much ballyhooed “Me Too” credentials with women were consumed in the uncompromising fire of demanding that mentally-ill men be allowed into womens’ sports, bathrooms, and even motherhood itself, relabeling women as “birthing persons,” and insisting that all good Democrats agree men can be mothers, too. Their blue-collar credentials were sacrificed on progressive altars of relocating culture-wrecking Haitian villages into small American industrial towns.
President Trump’s genius was recognizing that progressives had hollowed out the Democrat party’s identity. Progressives surgically removed the Democrat party’s testicles and doped it with estrogen. Black folks, Latinos, Asians, and Muslims saw their children taught “transgender science” by public schools, teaching daughters they could become sons, and teaching sons they could become daughters, regardless of what their intolerant parents said.
Democrats know they’ve painted themselves into a rainbow-colored corner, too. DEI — the most anti-working-class policy imaginable — is thankfully dying on the vine, and the Democrats aren’t trying to save it. A fine example emerged this week: At some point over the last few months, in advance of the elections, far-left Congresswoman and (former) scantily-dressed bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quietly scrubbed the pronouns from her Twitter bio:
AOC must have realized that her core working-class message, that “no American should be too poor to live,” was immediately contradicted by her stupid, virtue-signaling pronoun labels.
Our mission, if we choose to accept it, is to not quit. We got soft in 2016, and relaxed, thinking we’d turned the corner. We should have run the enemy to ground and completely defeated the progressives. That was the strategy that the Republicans’ second president used to win the Civil War. Nicknamed by his men as “Unconditional Surrender,” Ulysses S Grant never allowed the enemy to retreat and regroup. He always ordered pursuit until the battle was won or the enemy had given up.
Our current moment is a U.S. Grant moment. We don’t quit until it’s over.
Have a wonderful weekend! C&C will be back with a full roundup on Monday morning, to kick off another exciting post-election week of essential news and commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
