Note on Gloating
One reason to hesitate.
Humorously serious response to the rhetorical end question in today’s “Ding, Dong, the Cult is Dead” article. Is it safe to laugh? Some readers offered a cautious yes, believing the defeat decisive. Others noted outpatients still run universities, public schools, and the media, and will be difficult to dislodge from federal bureaucracies. I’d be more confident in siding with the first group, but the Greatest Work of Human Art makes me worry the cult is only playing dead.
It’s a trick. Get an axe:
I hate to be the skunk at the party here, but the Long March Through the Institutions will not be reversed or defeated by the results of a single election, no matter how stinging a rebuke, and no matter how much Trump makes college professors act like they belong to a country club that was just invaded by Rodney Dangerfield.
The Long March achieved all its success one brain at a time, then one Admin or HR Dept at a time, through the power of memetic ideas and the cultivation of good feelings (compassion and the desire for fairness) that they were able to exploit and transform into bad feelings (denunciations, promiscuous bigotry accusations, tantrums). For every Blue-Haired They that's on X now performing her nonbinary rage, behind her stands an army of monomaniacal activists and Foucault Studies profs who worked fanatically to create these people, their beliefs and actions. (It helped that they are fanatics.)
Social Justice still remains the sacred ideology of America's liberal class (as well as the entire Anglosphere), these people still control almost all of academia and culture, and they will not be deprogrammed into a mellow, tolerant liberalism just because Trump pinned Kamala at WrestleMania 2024.
Trump's win is a victory for those of us who prize free speech, thought and expression, but his opponents will not just roll over and die and we aren't going back to the South Park anti-PC 90s anytime soon. Hopefully an explosion of creative freedom and a new infusion of fun and joy into American culture will follow this week, because that will be decisive—as freedom, fun and joy are garlic and crosses to the vampires of Woke.
X is all a-twitter with a fresh conspiracy theory that Musk used Starlink to hack the voting machines and change the tallies. So it’s not even close to being over I’m afraid.