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November 2024

No, you don’t have ‘post-election depression’ When did the liberal left become so dominated by overgrown children? Lauren Smith

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/10/no-you-dont-have-post-election-depression/

How is your mental health holding up after the re-election of Donald Trump this week? Do you need some ‘grief’ counselling? Did you take a day off work? How about a visit from an emotional-support duck, or some time to play with Lego? Believe it or not, these are all options being offered to grown adults at their places of work or study, to help cope with their supposed ‘post-election depression’.

In the aftermath of the election on Tuesday, the Guardian offered its staff extra counselling and support. In an email to employees, editor Katharine Viner said that the result was ‘upsetting’ and urged UK-based journalists to reach out and ‘offer your support’ to their US counterparts. ‘If you want to talk about it’, the email went on, ‘your manager and members of the leadership team are all available’.

The Collective – a ‘queer-owned’, ‘sustainable, vegan bulk refillery’ in Iowa – went further and shut up shop for the day after the election. This was to facilitate ‘a day of collective grief’, as explained in an Instagram post, ‘to protect our crew and to feel what needs to be felt’.

Universities across the US were also busy ‘feeling’ this week. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania gave some students the day off. Classes were cancelled, cut short or made optional. Many exams and assignments were extended or rescheduled. At Harvard, the dean told freshman students over breakfast that they should ‘let [themselves] feel a bunch of emotions’.

Campuses have essentially been turned into huge, open-air therapy sessions. At Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy in Washington, DC, a ‘self-care suite’ was opened for students. This offered them Lego to play with, crayons for colouring and milk and cookies ‘in recognition of these stressful times’.

America’s Victory: Trump’s Win Saved America The American people gave Trump his victory because they saw that Trump’s triumph is America’s. By Bradley A. Thayer and Lianchao Han

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/10/americas-victory-trumps-win-saved-america/

President Donald Trump’s election victory on November 5 was an epochal event in American history. The American people gave Trump a mandate with almost 51% of the vote. He received over 73 million votes, more than four million more than his opponent. A new American coalition—traditional Republican voters united with lower middle class, working class, African Americans, Hispanics, and white women—provided the monumental victory. At such a significant time, it is important to consider how America arrived at such a historical moment and what must be accomplished in the years ahead.

Retrospectively, Americans must understand how they came to this place in their history. According to the exit polls, a whopping 72% of Americans understood that their country was on the wrong path. America’s political ideology, culture, and traditions were under assault by the so-called “progressive” wing of the Democrat Party. The Biden-Harris administration weakened the economy, caused inflation rates not seen since the 1970s, opened U.S. borders to some 15 million people and facilitated their relocation throughout the U.S. and so weaponized the legal system to wage lawfare against Trump, his major political and legal advisors, and against many of his supporters.

In the realm of foreign and defense policy, the debacle of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the failure to deter the war in Ukraine, the horrific attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent wars it unleashed. Significantly, the Biden-Harris regime failed to deter Communist China’s hyper-aggression directed against U.S. allies like the Philippines and partners like Taiwan, and most importantly against the American people through the deaths of a quarter of a million of our fellow citizens from Chinese-provided fentanyl and the intellectual capture of so many of the American elite who parrot the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) policy positions to advance the CCP’s interests.

The deeper cause of how America arrived at this point is the embrace of Marxism by the Democratic Party and thus its increasing totalitarianism and alienation from the American people. In its embrace of this ideology, the Democrat Party demonstrated that it had completely become detached from the American experience, ideology, history, and culture in its effort to transform America into a one-party state on the road to totalitarianism. The American people saw this effort to continue the “fundamental transformation” of America—as Obama identified it on the eve of the 2008 election—and rejected it.

The Progressive Movement Is Finished Either Democrats reject this nonsense or their party is finished as well. By Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/10/the-progressive-movement-is-finished/

It was a wild ride. Imagine defunding the police, or insisting that a man can become a woman, that our very existence is killing Planet Earth, that driving an electric car is proof of your goodness, or that anyone having traditional American values is a racist bigot. Just imagine.

The Progressive movement has taken various forms over the past 60 years but it was always rooted in revolution. “Revolution against what?” you might ask. To paraphrase the great Thomas Sowell, it is a revolution against everything that works and in favor of what sounds good today. Open borders, transgenderism, “renewable” energy, white supremacy—these are just a sampling of the radicalism on full display that has proven to be an abject failure among the U.S. population.

It failed because it was all based on lies. When your entire platform is centered around lies, eventually people become wise to it. We are at that moment.

To understand why the Progressive movement has failed, one only needs to look at the Kamala Harris campaign for president in 2024. At its core, the campaign had entirely too many flaws and a boatload of dishonesty for it to be pulled off.

A big flaw was the candidate herself, an empty pantsuit that brought absolutely nothing to her own campaign except inane word salads, repeating memorized narratives, and proving to be incapable of articulating a single substantive idea for running the country. Showmanship is an important aspect of a political campaign, and Harris was lousy at putting on a show.

But the real reason why voters are rejecting Harris was the avalanche of lies. An avalanche of lies that the enablers in the mainstream media were all too happy to parrot.

Democrats expected voters to sign up for a campaign that was deceitfully hollow, counting on the insanely dishonest notion that the last four years did not happen (never mind what you experienced) and that this was a “new way forward.” A new way forward to where? Unprecedented inflation not seen in 60 years? A southern border that is as porous as a sieve. An economy that has many Americans feeling left behind.

Legitimate questions on policy specifics that seem to have veered wildly from day to day were met with a dumbfounding “My values have not changed.” What is that supposed to mean?

The Aftermath: Trump’s Victory Sparks Media Outrage and National Introspection Following Donald Trump’s landslide victory, shocked commentators echo 2016 concerns, while emerging economic and geopolitical shifts suggest stability under his leadership. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/10/the-aftermath-trumps-victory-sparks-media-outrage-and-national-introspection/

What a difference a week makes.

Last week, I reiterated the prediction I had been making since at least July: the polls were wrong. Kamala Harris was going to lose, and Donald Trump would win by a landslide. His campaign, I said, would be like George Patton’s Third Army racing across France in 1944.

All that elicited a certain amount of scoffing, of varying degrees of politeness, from the commentariat and assorted grumblers.  The actual results of the election—the biggest victory since Reagan’s blowout in 1984—seem to have precipitated the “national mental health crisis” that Mark Halperin forecast in October. As James Piereson has noted, the response of many commentators has been to blame the voters.  How could they vote for a man they had identified as evil, an incipient dictator, a fascist, the reincarnation of Hitler who would trample on the Constitution, etc.?

Thus we have The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, who declared that Trump’s election “is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be.” The people are sorry they could not rise to your level of smugness, Sue!

Peter “Mr. Moralism” Wehner weighed in with a similar threnody: “This election was a CAT scan on the American people,” he wrote, “and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption. Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.” How could we have disappointed you, Pete?

And then there is the genius loci of NeverTrump agitation, William Kristol, the former conservative. Writing at The Bulwark, Kristol thundered that “The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open. . . . After everything . . . the American people liked what they saw [in Trump]. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.” Oh, those awful American people.

One of the most amusing, if inadvertently amusing, eructations came from The New York Times, which put together a histrionic video in which a series of discredited Timesmen (and Timeswomen) somberly hold forth about how “extreme” and nasty the next Trump administration is likely to be: dictatorship, camps for ideological enemies, economic recession, etc., etc. As one commentator observed, it’s as if “Jonestown had recorded a final video.”

There was a fair amount of that infantilized insanity wherever the fetid pools of wokeness oozed.  Thus we had Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, incubator of future diplomats and policymakers, advising their tender charges that “Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises,” “Milk and Cookies,” and “Legos and Coloring” were on offer to offset the trauma of Trump’s victory.

A humanitarian, holistic plan for Gaza The Gaza enclave can be rebuilt and replaced with an infrastructure that will benefit all residents in the area and the region. Dr. Moshe Dann

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/398755

Israeli control of the Gaza Strip is critical for its security and the future of the entire region. Allowing enemies of Israel to resume their control of the area — directly and indirectly — cannot be the basis for its future after the war. Hamas, the PIJ and other terrorist organizations turned the Gaza Strip into a vast underground system for hiding weapons, moving terrorists and attacking Israel. Except for tribal clans in Gaza, the population overwhelmingly supports Hamas. They chose Hamas over the PA/PLO in free elections, and they will do so again.

Although there are some exceptions, an overwhelming majority of Gazans support Hamas – directly and indirectly. They are, therefore, not actually civilians; their support for Hamas makes them accomplices.

Instead of repeating a mistake and trying to reconstruct the Gaza Strip under a new regime, it can become a new regional transportation and communications center under Israeli control that will benefit others as well. The tunnels that Hamas built, for example, can be used to provide a creative future for Israel and serve to promote peace. Smuggling of weapons and terrorists via Gaza will thus end.

After placing the area under Israeli sovereignty, Israel can expand the narrow tunnels to accommodate a light rail – similar to what exists in other urban centers — that will be linked to Israel’s transportation system, especially its airports, and eventually extend to other countries as well.

On the surface, the Gaza enclave can be rebuilt and replaced with an infrastructure that will benefit all residents in the area and the region. It will include new housing and agriculture development, as well as commercial enterprises and industrial use which incorporate ecological innovations and concerns.

Under no conditions should the Gaza area be given to those who oppose Israel’s existence. Arab Gazans who have no connection to any terrorist organization and wish to remain in the area can be allowed to do so providing that they are willing to support Israel and Israeli sovereignty. Those who choose to support terrorism and terrorist organizations will be required to leave and relocate. Israel is under no obligation to allow any threats to its security. Nor are Gazans entitled to pose a threat simply because they consider Gaza to be their “homeland.”

10 things Trump can do to clean up Biden’s messes abroad by Douglas Murray

https://nypost.com/2024/11/07/opinion/10-things-trump-can-do-to-clean-up-bidens-messes-abroad/

Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday was so overwhelming that even his opponents seem to have gone quiet for a bit. Relatively speaking.

No doubt they will soon start constructing a whole new set of roadblocks to throw in his way. But there is no doubt that the president-elect now has an opportunity to reshape not just America, but the world.

The free world is desperately in need of strong leadership. And the un-free world is in desperate need of containment.

Here are 10 things the Trump administration could do to clean up the Biden-Harris chaos, and bring the peace that Trump-Vance promised in the campaign:

Ukraine

Trump has promised to negotiate a settlement to the war in Ukraine. It is inevitable at this stage that this will include some land compromises for the Ukrainians.

Some of us wish that wasn’t so. But Russia needs a way out, and Ukraine needs to not lose any more of its younger generation.

The quid pro quo should be that Trump makes it clear to Russia’s Vladimir Putin that there’ll be no more invasions on his watch.

And no more actual Russian election interference in neighboring countries like Georgia and Moldova.

Hamas Must Be Defeated, Not Legitimized by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21106/hamas-must-be-defeated

Hamas should not be permitted to play any role in the Gaza Strip after the war. This would allow the terror group to rearm and regroup and prepare for another October 7-style attack on Israel.

By negotiating with Hamas about the future of the Gaza Strip, Abbas is legitimizing the Iran-backed terror group and sending a message to the Palestinians and the rest of the world that he sees no problem with dealing with murderers and terrorists who committed the most horrific crimes… As we have seen most recently in the Chinese Communist Party, Iran and Afghanistan, negotiating with terrorists and their equivalents simply does not work.

Ever since Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, thousands of Palestinians have been killed in wars they initiated with Israel. With the help of Europe, Qatar and Iran, Hamas transformed the Gaza Strip, home to two million Palestinians, into one of the largest bases for Islamist terrorism in the Middle East.

The assumption that Hamas would voluntarily give up its control of the Gaza Strip because of any unity agreement with Abbas is just laughable.

The Biden administration chose to turn a blind eye to Abbas’s efforts to legitimize Hamas. The US offered it a lifeline. A terror group committed to the elimination of Israel should have no role in any Palestinian government — not in the West Bank and certainly not in the Gaza Strip. Such a group should be completely destroyed militarily and politically, and not invited to join any Palestinian government.

As long as Iran’s regime remains in place, torturing both its own people and others… there regrettably will be no peace. That is the only way to secure a truly peaceful future, not only for Israelis but for Palestinians and the Free World.

More than a year after the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to view the Iran-backed Islamist movement as a legitimate partner.

Last week, representatives of the PA’s ruling Fatah faction (headed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas) and Hamas held talks in the Egyptian capital of Cairo to discuss establishing a joint administration to rule the Gaza Strip. An Egyptian source confirmed that the Fatah-Hamas discussions aim at to create a committee to manage the affairs of the Gaza Strip, in addition to pursuing efforts to reach a ceasefire there.