☕️ REVERSION ☙ Monday, November 25, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Sudden and unexpected mid-sermon heart attack; eye-watering failed narrative signals jab defeat; NYT analysis shows Dem worst-case scenario; Trump's GOP transformation; Dems reversion to mean; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s the Monday before Thanksgiving! We have so much to be thankful for, but also much to remember for our fellow citizens who continue to struggle for now. In today’s fiery roundup: vaccine-pushing Megachurch pastor collapses mid-sermon; eye-watering woke editorial exposes failed narrative shift attempt; New York Times post-election analysis exposes profound problems for Democrats; Trump’s quintessentially American character; how Trump transformed the GOP brand back to its populist origin; and how the Democrat brand collapsed back into its perpetual pro-slavery roots.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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This morning we are praying for Dallas megachurch Pastor ‘Bishop’ T. D. Jakes. He experienced a sudden and unexpected cardiac event during services yesterday. People ran the story headlined, “Megachurch Bishop T.D. Jakes Experiences 'Health Incident' Onstage After Sermon, Church Says He Is 'Stable’.”

Jakes was in the middle of preaching to his large, non-denominational congregation when it happened. He had just finished assuring the live and online audiences that preaching is about getting back more than you give when he suddenly got sick. He slowly lowered his microphone, dazedly looked downward, then dramatically collapsed and started convulsing. As people rushed to aid Pastor Jakes, the livestream winked out.

The good news is that, while he’s not yet been seen, staff at the 30,000-strong, multi-campus megachurch (founded in 1996) reported Pastor Jakes, 67, is stable and “under the care of medical professionals.” We pray for his healing and for a continuing good report.

💉 Coincidentally, Pastor Jakes was one of the very first Evangelical leaders to shoot right out of the propaganda gate in January 2021, by platforming human cockroach and anti-human atheist Tony Fauci, so the ratlike bureaucrat could convince skeptical black Christians to accept the unsafe and ineffective shots:

Pastor Jakes would continue in this theme, producing a steady —you might say relentless— stream of high-production-value videos and audio messages aimed at convincing Christians the shots were perfectly harmless, life-saving, and theologically compelled as a duty Christians owed to their already-vaccinated neighbors.

For instance, in “Conversations with America: Understanding the COVID-19 Vaccine,” Global Thought Leader Jakes hosted Dr. Fauci (NIAID), and for extra diversity, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett (also NIAID) and Dr. Onyema Ogbuagu (Pfizer), to address the “nearly 40 percent of Americans and some communities of color who are feeling vaccine hesitancy.”

During the pandemic, the gimlet eyes of HHS peered at Christians, especially Evangelical Christians, and discovered a glittering object of enduring fascination. Christians were considered resistant, hesitant, and uncooperative, and so the arrogant agents controlling the federal government of the United States set out to fix the Christian Problem, backed by billions in newly minted, no-strings-attached money allocated for the global health ‘emergency.’

There is plausible evidence the cooperation of some Evangelical leaders was purchased, to help push vaccines and to dilute the strength of people’s religious objections to the jabs, with the pieces of silver sloshed to financially-strapped churches through shady NGO’s and non-profits. At the very least, uncooperative faith leaders could not or would not receive helpful government largesse in the form of grants for community vaccination initiatives and so forth.

Anyway, I’m not implying anything about Pastor Jakes. He is a generic example of the larger problem. But that’s not even why I included his story in today’s post. It was because of this next astonishing article.

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Far-left Afru.com is a news/blog site that claims to “combine art and fashion with lifestyle commentary to create a strong social justice brand.” It’s so over-the-top woke it makes me suspect some three-letter agency is really behind it. Anyway, superficially, it is aimed at aggressively gay black folks and white “allies.” To give you a taste, current offerings include “Toke for two: honoring my favorite dead sex clients,” and, from a few weeks ago, “If Trump wins, I will have no choice but to take my own life.” (As far as we know, he didn’t.)

It’s hard to tell when this one published; the articles are undated. From the comments, it seems like it could be up to a year old. In any case, sometime late last year, the “AFRU STAFF” published an angry editorial that blew my socks off when I recently came across it. It was headlined, “They knew: why didn’t the unvaccinated do more to warn us?”

It was exactly what it sounded like. It was not ironic or sarcastic. “Our blood,” AFRU coldly claimed, “is now on their hands.” These three paragraphs summarize the article’s sentiment:

The unvaccinated had access to important information about the potential side effects of vaccines. They knew about the risks of severe allergic reactions, blood clots, and other serious health complications. They knew that vaccines did not immunize us. They knew it wasn’t effective, and that they can cause more harm than good.

They knew all of that, but instead of warning us, the unvaccinated chose to remain silent. They chose to look the other way and not speak out about the potential dangers of vaccines. They let millions of good folks who did the right thing (at the time) fall to death and disease, and many antivaxxers even gloated online about how their coin flip had been the right bet. The more diabolical even urged folks they disagree with to “get boosted.”

We are good people; we took those injections because it was the right thing to do — until it wasn’t. The silence of the unvaccinated was a dangerous, sociopathic, and irresponsible decision that has had serious consequences for those of us who received the vaccinations. And silence is, after all, consent.

One’s immediate and perfectly normal reaction is to scoff loudly. What do they mean, we refused to speak? We were being rounded up and thrown in social media jail by the thousands. We were canceled, fired, ostracized, bot-butchered, and mercilessly mocked by sneering, arrogant white coats deployed in battalions to plague our comments, report us for terms of service violations, and we had to endure constantly being called stupid neanderthals unable to grasp “the science.”

We were also flying against the hot winds of “global thought leaders” like Pastor Jakes calling us bad Christians for even asking the question.

So, there’s that. But once one’s knee has jerked, more reflection produces more interesting fodder for thought. First, we’ve certainly come a long way if the dark underbelly of the wokeverse has shifted from denying vaccine injuries exist to blaming unvaccinated people for them.

It also occurred to me that this narrative was a nifty way of stopping some woke people from waking up to what their government did to them, by shifting the blame off bureaucrats onto their fellow citizens who managed to escape the same fate, which is just the kind of narrative a murky, off-book, three-letter-agency would cook up.

In the short period of time during which it was open for user comments, the article’s vast comment section did not end well:

Before the comments were closed, again, the article gathered thousands and thousands of white-hot responses, ranging from total outrage to total disbelief that the original post was anything but clickbait, or worse. Every comment I had time to read expressed a thought with which you would probably strongly agree. Fair warning: the comments are addictive.

Either way, the unvaccinated fooled us narrative never got much traction. Even if AFRU was just venting off some pent-up steam —what changed? were they vaccine-injured? lost a loved one?— it is fascinating this article exists.

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The New York Times ran (another) deep post-election analysis over the weekend headlined, “How Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message.” It described what is gaining speed to potentially become the Democrats’ worst-case scenario.

The article began by contrasting Trump’s 2016 and 2024 strategies. In 2016, Trump won using an electoral “Moneyball” approach, surprising Democrats by gaming out exactly which handful of key counties were needed to win the Electoral College. The 2020 election proved the Democrats learned their lesson and weren’t about to let Republicans win again through cherry-picking.

During his 2020-2024 wilderness years, amidst fending off FBI raids and a mudslide of political lawfare persecution, President Trump discarded wonky statistical manipulation. Instead, he leaned into his roots, his undeniable genius: marketing. The new strategy was not to win through statistical sleight of hand but by actually selling Americans on a better vision, a vision of a better America that was and an even better America that once again could be.

Make America Great Again. It was pure marketing genius.

Only President Trump could have done it, and that is because he is quintessentially American: part P.T. Barnum, part Teddy Roosevelt, part Abraham Lincoln.

Commonly referred to as a “master showman,” P.T. Barnum was a genius of spectacle and self-promotion. Like Trump, Barnum enjoyed an uncanny ability to captivate audiences, transform controversies into publicity, and consistently manifest a larger-than-life persona. Like Trump, Barnum built his fortune in Manhattan.

Like Trump, President Teddy Roosevelt (1901-1909), who coined “speak softly and carry a big stick,” was also a dynamic, larger-than-life figure, beloved for his populism, rugged individualism, and his feisty, combative spirit. He shattered political norms and redefined the GOP for a generation, delivering a "Square Deal" for America by waging war on the entrenched power structures of the day, especially big corporations (the “trusts”). Teddy was a strong Republican leader, but he shattered political norms by embracing the working class through his trust-busting, anti-corporate, and consumer protection policies.

Finally, Trump is easily compared to President Abraham Lincoln (1861-1864), who is regularly ranked as the nation’s greatest president by presidential historians. Like Trump, Lincoln was (and remains) deeply divisive. Democrats in 1860 were so enraged at the election of the first Republican president that seven heavily Democrat southern states quickly seceded between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration. They didn’t even wait for Lincoln to take the oath to see what he would do.

You could call it Lincoln Derangement Syndrome (LDS). And, of course, they shot both Lincoln and Trump in the head after each president’s first term.

There are many points of similarity, but here’s just one more: like Trump, Lincoln was also elected through a unique confluence of electoral events: a disunited Democrat party shattered into three competing candidates, paving the way for the first Republican to be elected president in the nation’s history.

I am not arguing Trump is just like these three great American men, not at all. President Trump is a unique modern amalgam of their circumstances and their best, quintessentially American qualities.

🔥 Regardless, during his presidential interregnum, master marketer Trump undertook to give the GOP a much-overdue brand refresh. He hawked conservatism to core parts of the Democrat base, the parts that don’t enjoy full membership benefits enjoyed by that party’s elite ruling class.

But … was it a re-brand? Or did Trump, like Teddy Roosevelt did, shift the GOP from an off-skew slant back toward its home base?

Trump’s success at communicating with discarded, disenfranchised Democrats is undeniable. Consider this chart from the New York Times’s analysis, calculating the 12-year shift toward the GOP:

In other words, men and women included, Trump gained with: young people, working-aged folks, college-educated minorities, black folks, Hispanics, Asians, all “other race” people, and working-class whites.

Now consider this: These gainers are all folks who would have voted for President Lincoln in 1860. Think about what that implies.

It got better. The next chart in the Times’s analysis showed the paltry three groups that improved for Democrats—the demographics that shifted away from Trump’s populism—and one group in particular stuck out like monkeypox:

The first outrageous implication, which I won’t dwell on because why pout about things you can’t change, is that if it had gone the other way, had Republicans only gained with over-educated whites, the New York Times would be jumping up and down shouting “white supremacy!!” from the skyrises.

But which party is actually, by the numbers, the party of “white supremacy?” Trump exposed the Democrats. The only group who solidly slid away from Trump’s populist MAGA movement was college-educated whites. Insufferable, pasty-skinned, wealthy coastal elites.

In other words, the same people who would have voted Democrat in 1860.

Nothing has changed! Nothing about Democrats has changed except, for a long time, the Democrats were able to fool minorities and working-class whites into thinking they’d abandoned their elitist, slave-owning roots. They tricked the same groups that, down south, the Democrats had consistently fooled before the Civil War.

But the Democrats have not, in fact, changed. The numbers prove it, and the Times’s analysis agreed. “Democrats,” the article explained, “became the party of institutions, the national security apparatus, norms and, ultimately, the status quo — not change.”

Pre-Civil War, the Southern Democrats were institutionalists. They even euphemistically called slavery their “peculiar institution.” Southern Democrats argued for preservation of the status quo. Southern Democrats claimed entitlement to enforcement of their elite norms.

The factors the Times attributed to Democrats’ landslide loss in the recent election were also true of Democrats in 1860.

Master marketer Trump was able to, at least partly, rip off the Democrats’ creaky, 150-year-old mask of deceit. As a result, Trump’s near-orbit is crowded with former Democrats like Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert Kennedy, Jr.

🔥 Which brings us to the really bad news for Democrats. Unlike Trump’s 2016 victory, this time his win signals a problem far beyond brilliant electoral gamesmanship. This time, Trump’s win signals a permanent shift in voter preferences.

Democrats never saw it coming.

“This pattern,” the Times glumly admitted, “has no modern precedent. It suggests that the backlash against Democrats during 2021 and 2022 affected the political allegiance of millions of voters — and ultimately the electoral map.”

In other words, MAGA is not a historical blip. It is a trend.

“Mr. Trump,” the Times continued, “flipped all of it around, weakening Democrats’ bonds with working-class voters, as well as nonwhite and young ones.” Trump’s victory “has shattered Democratic dreams of building a new majority with the rise of a new generation of young and nonwhite voters.”

More than made-up fears the dark night of fascism has finally landed on the United States instead of on Europe, this, more than anything else, is what truly terrifies and deeply discombobulates the Democrats. The Democrat party’s brand has reverted to the brand of big institutions, of aggressive preservation of elite norms, of sneering, arrogant academics and wealthy, slave-holding authoritarianism.

They’ve been Bud-Lited. And because it is true, it will be next to impossible for the Democrats to shed their authentic brand without the kind of fundamental transformation that their current ossified, geriatric leaders are institutionally unable to effect.

🔥 It reminds me of my lawsuit against a municipal “vaccinate or terminate” mandate that I successfully stopped in 2021. In their brief, the city’s lawyers invoked George Washington’s smallpox inoculation mandate during the Revolutionary War. If it’s good enough for the Father of the Country, they argued, it’s good enough for us.

But at the hearing on my motion to enjoin the mandate, I turned their Father of the Country argument around on them. With the greatest respect, and not applying modern values in hindsight, I delicately pointed out that George Washington owned slaves.

In other words, long before the Constitution, George Washington considered people to be property, the equivalent of a herd of cattle, to be vaccinated in herds at their owner’s inclination, regardless of the property’s own desires.

I explained to the judge that, like George Washington, the city considered its employees to be property. Municipal employees were just a cattle-like herd to be immunized solely because the paternalistic city thought best.

The judge got it.

Looking back, it seems obvious that the mad scramble to respond to the pandemic’s “emergency” forced Democrats to assume the position they’ve always secretly held since before the Civil War: elite owners of human property, us, the dumb cows who’d witlessly die of smallpox unless the herd was corraled and given its shots.

Vaccine mandates are the slave owners’ prerogative.

And so President Trump successfully surfed the tide of resentment at Democrats’ arrogant elitism and authoritarianism, riding the momentum to expose them at each grotesque level of their institutional incompetence.

🔥 CODA: A large section of the Times’s analysis of Democrat woes, the way they were ultimately exposed, was correctly ascribed to the authoritarian excesses of the pandemic. “Activists, academics and experts,” the Times dolefully explained, “pushed a sweeping response, from school shutdowns and mask mandates to diversity statements in hiring.”

The article failed to mention the giant human cockroach in the room: vaccine mandates. But the sound of their insectile legs could be distinctly heard scuttling throughout the Times’s analysis. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.

In short, paradoxically, the great suffering of the pandemic looks like one more thing for which we should be thankful this week.

Have a magnificent Monday! We shall resume our irreverent analysis of essential news and commentary tomorrow morning, in the Tuesday roundup. Don’t be late.

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