RUTHFULLY YOURS

Maybe the mystery of the drones swarming over New Jersey and elsewhere will be solved by the time you read this. Some timid souls suggest that they are from a “foreign entity,” maybe an “Iranian mothership” bobbing in the Atlantic somewhere off the East Coast of the United States. The Pentagon denied the existence of the fecund Iranian naval vessel. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States,” a Pentagon spokesman said, “and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.”

That news saddened me, in part because I was looking forward to circulating the word “mothership.” It has a certain sci-fi aura that seems in keeping with these paranoid times. And let’s face it, the combination of “Iranian” and anything martial reinforces the minatory nimbus.

All is not lost, however. For although there is no Iranian familial ship disgorging drones, I am in a position to report, from the very highest authorities, that the drones are in fact the advance scouts of an alien invasion. I cannot promise that Joe Biden, current President of the United States, will behave as did Bill Pullman in Independence Day, but I have managed to retain my serenity in the face of this existential threat.

I am a little less serene about the news that Joe Biden has pardoned or commuted the sentences of 15,000,000 people.

You see how rumors get started. It was the largest single orgy of presidential commutations and pardons in history, but it encompassed only about 1,500 people. Or, if you count Hunter Biden, 1501.

Anyway, there is a certain giddiness wafting across the fruited plain these days. People who say that it is because of the election of Donald Trump are not wrong, exactly, but I do suspect that they mistake the catalyst for the ensuing transformation.

There has been a lot of talk about a “vibe shift” in American culture over the last several months. I wrote about the phenomenon in this space in April. Noting various examples of a shift in the emotional weather of the commonwealth, I also noted that resistance to these flags of dissent and independent thinking could be expected to grow. “My point is this,” I wrote,

as evidence of a “vibe shift” grows more numerous and more substantive, so too will the vibe-stiffening reaction among the guardians of the status quo.

The melancholy datum to bear in mind is that those guardians control virtually all of the levers of power in our society, beginning with the regime’s police power and wending its way down to the soft but ingratiating power of the media, the ditto-head cultural establishment, and practically the entire educational apparat.

What this means is that for any serious “vibe shift” to happen, something like cultural warfare, if not the other kind, is going to have to unfold. I do not expect the coming months to be tranquil or pleasant. I do think they will tell us whether we get to resuscitate our constitutional republic or whether we will continue the long and rebarbative slide into woke socialist conformity.

I believe that the results of November’s election show that we have been given leave to resuscitate our constitutional republic and reject the amorphous but engulfing socialist imperatives that have been deforming American society for decades.

And by “results of November’s election,” I do not mean only the astonishing vote tally in favor of Donald Trump. That was the conditio sine qua non of the shift in the existential breezes everyone senses without yet being able to define. But the really telling thing is the tectonic shift in the mood of the country.

This shift has negative as well as positive elements. There is some talk of Democratic members of Congress (I won’t say “lawmakers,” as the news reports do) planning to “boycott” Trump’s inauguration just as many did in 2017. But even if some do boycott it, the movement is gaining no traction. Those who participate in the boycott will be gesturing in the void. No one will care. The narrative will have moved on, leaving them to hurl their imprecations into a theater utterly drained of political relevance.

Will there be battalions of pathetic, pink-hatted females waddling about the Washington Mall to broadcast their unhappiness? I doubt it. That train, too, has departed the station. As I write, it is being reported that ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos have agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump. They will pay $15 million as a charitable contribution to Trump’s presidential foundation as well as $1 million to defray Trump’s legal fees. They have also issued a statement of “regret” (that’s “apology” in plain English).

Expect to see a lot more where that came from.

But more important than such negative bulletins is the electric buzz of possibility one senses. Mirabile dictu, Trump has been named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” (they now call it “Person of the Year,” but we may overlook that inelegancy). Saturday, Trump went to the Army-Navy football game with Vice President-elect J. D. Vance, several cabinet nominees, and recently acquitted Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who was charged with homicide (and with being white) by soon-to-be rusticated Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. The crowd at the game was ecstatic.

The bottom line is that the country’s cultural confidence account has been lavishly replenished. There will, as is inevitable in this sublunary world, be disappointments ahead. But there will also be many, many successes as the aftermath of Trump’s victory solidifies first into a movement and then into a consensus. We are, as I put it early in November, “on the threshold of a political and social counter-revolution.”