Okay, I’m not going to make fun of non-famous, non-influential, everyday leftists recording themselves losing their minds over the election any more. Because it has just gotten sad. And it’s actually sobering to see how many truly troubled and malfunctioning people are out there.
In a way, I can empathize with their situation, because the 2020 election was a horrific experience for me, as was Obama’s win in 2012, and the red-wave-less midterm in 2022. It was nauseating to watch my country choose such feckless leaders and self-destructive policies in each of those elections.
But do you know what I – and CO, and CO nation, and pretty much all conservatives – didn’t do in any of those years?
Record humiliating self-own videos during which we alternatingly cried, broke things and screamed obscenities, followed by vowing to leave the country, followed by ranting about how all Democrat voters were Nazis, followed by recording threats of violence against our fellow Americans who made the mistake of voting for Democrats.
The flood of hysterical leftists who lost their minds in 2016 caught me by surprise. The crazy ladies screaming at the sky, the beta males bawling so hard that their mascara was hopelessly smeared, the hordes of women who paraded around the mall with hats intentionally meant to resemble female genitalia. In public!
But what has surprised me even more – and the trend has accelerated in this election cycle – is the number of seemingly high-functioning professionals who have shown themselves to be as emotionally dysregulated and mentally unstable as the marginalized fringe-dwellers making ridiculous TikTok videos.
There are a ton of truly disturbed teachers out there, for example, with dozens of high-profile cases of career-ending rants. Examples include a male Moreno Valley, CA teacher hollering and swearing to his class about how he hates the patriarchy and “treasonous rapist and coward” Trump, and a self-recorded rant from a teacher in Connecticut threatening Trump voters with putting them “on a stretcher, gone forever” – and then later crying after getting fired.
The most unexpected examples, though, are the truly elite people who have shown themselves to be either emotional basket-cases, or else incapable of calmly perceiving reality and logically analyzing basic arguments. Three of these have stood out to me.
The first is Dr. Laura Helmuth, who got a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Berkeley and worked at prestigious jobs – Science Editor at the Smithsonian, and then at WAPO – before becoming editor-in-chief of the 175-year-old Scientific American.
Yet on election night, she posted a series of tweets that could have been written by the looniest of the dysfunctional drama queens on TikTok. She expressed, “Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f–k them to the moon and back.” She also apologized that her generation is “full of f**king fascists,” before slandering her home state of Indiana, which she left because of how “racist and sexist” it is.
Before she resigned a few days later, she tried an unconvincing apology, claiming that, “I respect and value people across the political spectrum.” Except for the mean, dumb, fascist, racist and sexist bigots, I guess.
The second example is historian Heather Cox Richardson, who appeared on Jon Stewart’s podcast The Weekly Show. I’d never seen his podcast, but wanted to see how his smarminess would be affected by the electoral beating, and she put on a world-class exhibition of point-missing and lie-repeating.
She talked about how great our economy is now, but uninformed Trump voters just don’t know it. She said that wages went up for working people under Biden, as if she didn’t understand what inflation is, or that it outpaced nominal wage gains. She said that people think that eggs cost too much, but she knows the real reasons: grocery stores have been price gouging, and there was a bird flu.
But anyone familiar with grocery stores knows that they have amongst the skinniest profit margins of any business – usually around 1-2%. And the bird flu? Yes, I know that there was a bird flu and that several million chickens were killed on factory farms.
But was there a cow flu that I don’t know about? Because I am an ice cream addict, and the cost of my addiction has doubled in the last 4 years. And was there an outbreak of popcorn weevils, because my popcorn is up about 60%?
And was there a metastasizing elephantiasis affecting interest rates that has caused 30-year-mortgage rates to double under Biden? Or a pandemic affecting the central nervous systems of millions of third-world residents, causing all of them to simultaneously experience a severe case of restless leg syndrome, such that they all found themselves walking thousands of miles up to and across our borders?
These are not low-IQ people, yet neither of them can bring themselves to consider that their premises are 180 degrees wrong. They use all of their brain power to overlook the obvious – Que Mala is a hollow bag of cliches and word goulash, data shows that most people were better off under Trump – and manufacture self-flattering lies to explain Trump’s win.
Speaking of which, my favorite example is Allan Lichtman, the academic previously heralded as the “Nostradamus of Pollsters.” I’ve previously written about him and his “13 Keys” that can supposedly predict any election’s outcome. Lichtman was quite cocky pre-election, when he explained that his keys proved that Kamala would win.
Thus Nostradamus became Nostra-dumb-ass.
On Wednesday he went on Piers Morgan’s tv show with fellow leftist Cenk Uygur, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you must! Lichtman goes first, and he gives two reasons why he missed this prediction: 1. The way the “spineless, cowardly Democrats openly and visibly trash[ed]” Biden, and 2. The huge amount of “disinformation” (he points to Elon as the chief culprit), which fooled the voters about the reality of the culture, the economy, and illegal immigrants.
Of course the professor knew about both of those when he made his calculations. Also, he makes the classic self-justifying move: the voters were wrong about reality, not him.
Cenk wasn’t having it. He said that he had debated Lichtman before, and that Cenk was right and Lichtman and his keys were wrong.
Which was true, but absolutely the wrong thing to say. Because an academic hates nothing more than clear statements of fact which destroy his own theory. So Lichtman performed the clearest and most concise distillation of academic hubris I’ve ever seen.
He snapped, “That’s a cheap shot and I won’t stand for it!” When Cenk repeated the obvious point that Lichtman’s predictions were wrong, the prof hollered and waved his arms, saying, “I’ve only been a professor for 51 years, published 13 books. How many books have you published?”
Which is a double-strength shot of trying to cover up a painful truth with irrelevant credentialism: “Sure, a monkey throwing darts at battleground states on a map would have been more accurate than my predictions. But just look at my curriculum vitae and the books I’ve written! I’m a ‘DOCTOR,’ dammit, just like Dr. Jill!”
Cenk responded succinctly. “Okay, but brother, you got it wrong! Preposterously and stupidly wrong!” (By the way, anyone writing a post-mortem on this election now has the title: “The Democrat Campaign, 2024: Preposterously and Stupidly Wrong.”)
That caused Lichtman to regress back to middle-school, where I’m guessing he spent a lot of time stuffed into a locker: “Don’t call me stupid! I admitted I was wrong. I don’t need YOU to call me stupid!” (But apparently he does, because the whole nation has been calling him stupid for two weeks, and it doesn’t seem to be sinking in yet.)
(Also, nice Fredo Corleone impression, Doc: “I’m not stupid. Not like everybody says. I’m smart, and I want respect!”)
Cenk then reminded us that he’s no genius either, telling Lichtman that “[he] needs a big glass of shut-up juice.” Which sounded as moronic in real life as it reads on your screen.
Lichtman then folded his arms and talked over Cenk, saying, “I will not stand for personal attacks, for blasphemy against me.”
And Cenk closed us out with the only logical reaction: “Blasphemy against you? Who the hell are you, Jesus Christ? You loser!”
I opened this column saying that I wouldn’t make fun of normal, mentally fragile people who freaked out about this election any more, and I want to stick to that. But arrogant and credentialed elitists who can’t think their way out of a wet paper bag are fair game!
When they’re not dropping F bombs in tweets like a drunken bar-fly, they’re denigrating Trump voters and proclaiming that anyone who disagrees with them is blaspheming against the great god Marx and all of his righteous disciples.
They deserve all the scorn we can heap upon them, and I can’t wait until January!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 