I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! Ours was guaranteed to be good, since we didn’t have to travel. Karen’s brothers and their spouses came over, and Emily was home from college. And even though Katie and her husband are in Denver and my sister and mom are in Tennessee, we’ll be seeing all of them shortly.
Katie is flying in for Emily’s graduation and an early Christmas celebration in a couple of weeks, and we’ll be going up to spend some time with mom and sis for an early Christmas in Tennessee after that, before returning home for Christmas. So we’ll have three Christmas celebrations this year!
As my favorite month begins, I’m still basking in the continuous waves of good news that are washing over our country since the election. In fact, as an homage to our instinctive optimism here in the CO nation, I’d like to coin a new term to reflect our sunny outlook: “green flag.”
Everybody knows the term “red flag” – an ominous sign indicating that things are going wrong. For example, when San Francisco deteriorated to the point that some tech-savvy resident made a “poop map” app so that people could try to avoid the most heavily fecal areas of the once-great city, that was a red flag.
Or as Adam Carolla has said, when LA started to encase some of their highway signs in barbed wire to discourage vandalism, that was a red flag. Or when hulking dudes in makeup and dresses reading to toddlers became part of public-school curricula, that was a red flag. I could go on and on.
In fact, if Gavin Newsom actually does run for president in 2028, I’ve already got his campaign slogan: “Drag Queens, Barbed Wire, and Mounds of Human Waste – Newsom ’28!”
But I’d like to point out the opposite of red flags, which I am drawing from the traffic light system – hence, green flags. (But not in the environmentalist sense. Because the Green New Deal was a huge red flag, ironically enough.) By “green flags” I mean positive and encouraging signs that things are heading in the right direction.
Over the last three weeks, I’ve seen a ton of green flags. And as CO often says, everything is better when turned into a list:
1. I absolutely love the idea that’s been floated of changing the seating arrangement of the press corps in the White House briefing room. The existing arrangement has always given the best seats up front to the corrupt dinosaurs of the legacy media: the New York Times and WAPO, and the main tv networks. But that arrangement is anachronistic now. The big newspapers have been bleeding subscribers for decades, and the network news talking heads are preaching to an ever-diminishing choir.
But in addition to their declining influence, they’ve also shown themselves to be little more than dishonest leftist propagandists, so it makes no sense to continue rewarding them with prime locations and the first chance to launch their sleazy attacks thinly disguised as legitimate questions.
Independent and conservative podcasters have much larger audiences and are driving more of the mainstream cultural conversation lately, and influential conservative outlets such as The Daily Wire, The Blaze and Breitbart have done more honest – though transparently partisan – reporting and commentary than the MSM has done.
So let the far lefties sit in the back near the bathrooms – like the few conservatives in the room have been doing for decades – and learn from their time in the media wilderness to which they’ve been deservedly banished.
2. I also love the way the Trumpsters are maneuvering various bad actors into some form of self-deportation. Of course, the best example is those who have illegally come into the country. Lefty critics are always saying, “What are you going to do, deport 10 million people?”
But we won’t have to do that. We can get a lot of easy wins at first, by focusing on those who have already received deportation orders after their asylum claims were denied, and those who have committed other crimes in addition to their illegal entry.
Catching and deporting several hundred thousand of those will send a clear message, and between doing that and shutting down all of the incentives to try to stay (free housing, food, travel and phones, plus easy access to jobs) we’ll help many illegals see that returning home is their best option.
In fact, Breitbart reported last week that many Haitians who had gone to Springfield, Ohio are already “self-deporting… fleeing to sanctuary jurisdictions such as Chicago and NYC.” That’s a good first step.
And after Trump shuts off some federal funding and otherwise pressures sanctuary cities, and they spend a few months with reduced income to deal with illegals – and more and growing unrest from citizens, because these cities are almost all economic basket cases already – those cities will be increasingly undesirable options for illegals.
I’ll bet that after six months or a year of mass deportations, if we start offering free flights back to their home countries, many people will voluntarily go, especially when the alternative is to go to detention centers from which they are likely to be deported after a relatively short time anyway.
3. But pressures to self-deport in a different way are also building. Many of the corrupt bureaucrats in DC – especially in the FBI, intelligence agencies and DOJ – are already scrubbing websites, shredding records and preparing resumes or resignation papers, and good riddance to them.
Additionally, tons of federal employees are still using the pandemic as an excuse to work from home, and requiring them to come back to the office full-time will undoubtedly result in many more resignations.
Trump is also talking about relocating many DC-centric federal agencies out into fly-over country, which I think is brilliant. Many employees will voluntarily quit rather than move, some doing so for family or other legitimate personal reasons. But some will quit because they are snobby coastal elites who look down on the garbage voters who just kicked their arses in November, and we’ll all be well rid of them.
Those who move will generally be those more dedicated to doing their jobs, which will improve the average quality of federal employees. And for those who are open-minded enough to learn from experience, they’ll discover that the quality of many people and communities in flyover country compares quite well to those they’d been surrounded by in DC.
Okay, I’ll have more encouraging “green flags” in my column on Wednesday. But I wanted to comment on one other enjoyable mistake the Dems are making as they sift through the ashes of November 5th and try to figure out what went wrong.
Many Dem and MSM elites have settled on the idea that Kamala was severely handicapped by the fact that Biden got out so late, leaving her so little time to get her campaign up and running. “Considering that she only had 107 days, I think she did incredibly well,” they say.
Which I find to be comically wrong, for two reasons. (Besides the obvious: if THAT was “incredibly well done,” what would “terribly done” look like?!)
First, it blames only Biden for his staying in way too long. Obviously that was a problem…but it was a problem entirely within the control of the Dem elites, who didn’t just allow it, but aided and abetted it.
I’m reminded of the dilemma in many families when grandpa is obviously diminished to the point that he’s not safe driving anymore. Although it makes for an ugly scene, even marginally functional families go through the uncomfortable confrontation of explaining to gramps that they’re taking the keys, because he’s a danger to himself and others on the road.
Only the most severely dysfunctional, social train-wrecks of families LET GRANDPA KEEP DRIVING! OH!! OHHHH!!! (There’s your little dose of Sam Kinison for a Monday morning.)
“Sure, he’s run over a dozen curbs, two pets and a fire hydrant. And he did rear-end that daycare van full of toddlers yesterday. But hey, that’s just lovable, avuncular gramps. In fact, he’s the best gramps he’s ever been. Sharp as a tack! How dare you suggest that within the next fortnight he’s going to plow through the front window of a café, killing a dozen customers, because he doesn’t remember the difference between the gas and the brake?!”
Well, that’s what the Dems did. It was obvious to everybody with functioning eyes that Biden should have been checked into Shady Acres Retirement Village and put on an all-broth diet several years ago. But they lied to themselves and us, right up until he crumbled on the debate stage.
But the second reason is even more self-flattering Democrat nonsense, because it proposes that Kamala just needed more time on the big stage, when the truth was exactly the opposite.
We knew from the Dem primaries in 2019 that scrutiny was Que Mala’s kryptonite. Because when Tulsi lobbed a couple of fair questions at her, she melted into the floor and became the first contender to drop out.
Which was why she was at her “best” for the first 45 days or so of her campaign this time, when she hid out and gave zero interviews. Far from being hurt by only running for 107 days, she would have had a much better chance if she’d had only about two weeks to campaign!
The leftist MSM and Dem machine could have filled the air with clouds of BS about joy and a totally phony biography: she’s a tough law-and-order prosecutor who was raised in the middle class, and she’ll be the first half Indian-American and half African-American – but somehow still mostly black – president.
Not to mention that she’ll be the first woman president! That’s right, she’ll be the epoch-defining vagician who would break the previously unbreakable glass ceiling, and usher in a glorious new age of female empowerment!
I’m encouraged by watching the Dem post-mortem election analysis, because almost all of it seems to be shot-through with delusion and denial of their real problems.
Trump isn’t the demon they think he is.
They’re not the righteous social justice warriors they think they are.
And the American public aren’t the deplorable garbage they think they are.
So if they can keep this up, continuing to learn the wrong lessons and doubling down on what cost them this election, they should be wandering in the political wilderness for a long time to come.
And we are all here for it. Come on, January!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 