* “Are the Years of Madness Ending?” (Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness)
From the article — Never in U.S. history has a president-elect been welcomed as the real president before his January 20 inauguration. And never has the incumbent president so willingly surrendered his last two months in office and all but abdicated—to the relief of his nation and the rest of the world.
One reason so many are welcoming Trump’s return is the universally desperate hope that his election spelled an end to a collective madness at home and its ripples abroad during the last four years. And why not?
* “We may finally be recovering from the woke brain rot: For the first time in decades, the sane among us have the upper hand.” (Lionel Shriver, spiked!)
From the article — Whatever the more complex truth of the matter, it’s in our interest to promote the trope that woke is over. That woke has been vanquished. That woke is totally yesterday, hopelessly stale and played out. That the rest of us are all moving on to genuinely thorny questions that aren’t stupid. That we’ll no longer waste our time pushing back against petty amateur linguists who insist we call the portly ‘people living with obesity’. That, whatever our private reservations about the guy, Trump’s election marks a hard Before and After. That as Kamala would say, we’ve ‘turned the page’ and ‘we’re not going back’.
Because when you say something enough times (this is a gambit the wokesters themselves have mastered), you can make it true. Wokesters are highly suggestible. Furthermore, most of these folks don’t really care about social justice. They care about appearing to care about social justice. They care about other people’s esteem. They care about fitting in. They echo what everyone else around them says, because being a mindless copycat means other mindless copycats will like them and they’ll keep their friends and their jobs. And they care about social fashion
* “Beyond Green: Down with Al Gore once and for all! The case for a rational energy policy.” (Michael Lind, Tablet)
From the article — If progressives are to be believed, the world is facing a “climate emergency” that requires the rapid elimination of fossil fuels and massive, never-ending taxpayer subsidies for wind, solar, and related infrastructure. But despite being ceaselessly propagandized by alarmist climate change messaging, a majority of Americans do not believe that global warming will pose serious threats in their own lifetimes, by a ratio of 54-to-45.
* “The Democrats’ Anti-Israel Future: It all changed with Barack Obama.” (Joshua Muravchik, Commentary)
From the article — The 2024 election left the Democrats “considering how to navigate a dark future,” said the New York Times. Voices from the progressive wing instantly made clear that one matter at issue will be the party’s stance toward Israel.
The Democrats’ traditional friendliness to the Jewish state had resonated in the words of President Joe Biden’s immediate reaction to Hamas’s invasion and massacre of October 7, 2023. “This was an act of sheer evil,” he pronounced. “Israel has the right…in-deed has a duty to respond… . If the United States experienced [the likes of this] our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming.” He said that the U.S. was “surging military assistance” and had moved a carrier strike group and additional fighter aircraft to the area. “The United States has Israel’s back. It’s as simple as that…. We’re with Israel.”
Yet, over the ensuing weeks and months, it proved not as simple as that. Biden grew increasingly focused on protecting Gazan noncombatants and on restraining Israel in other ways. Vice President Kamala Harris, to whom he passed the Democratic standard in withdrawing from the 2024 election, was still more assertive in that direction, as was, to an even greater degree, her chosen running mate, Tim Walz. Their apparent predispositions, and the political currents within their party, prompted CNN political analyst Ronald Brownstein to muse, “Biden could be the last Democratic president for the foreseeable future who aligns so unreservedly with” Israel.
* “American Men and the Emerging Culture Shift” (Pedro Gonzalez, Chronicles)
From the article — And that’s really what I’m getting at: there is a growing appetite for a new culture, for items that are both free from ideological shackles and expressive of values and virtues divergent from those that have come to dominate the mainstream under the thumb of progressive hegemony. Now is the time to create and patronize new things. In particular, I think the market for literature looks promising.
Back in August, Alex Perez, a Cuban-American writer based in Miami, lamented the lack of masculine fiction in the literary scene—and struck back at those who criticized him for pointing out what is an obvious problem. Much of what passes for fiction today is dreck. If it features men at all, they are too often portrayed as weak, incompetent, villainous, or some combination of all three. Man is allowed to exist in the pages of today’s novels only if “he writes apologetically and shamefully” about being an American man—the worst kind imaginable. For Perez, “American man” doesn’t necessarily mean right-wing, either.