https://hotair.com/generalissimo/2024/10/16/lets-assume-the-polling-
trends-are-right-and-donald-trumps-about-to-win-then-what-n3795867

"WEIRD" "NORMAL"
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For a very long time on my Aftershow podcast, which aired for 15 years
behind the paywall of Hugh Hewitt's Hughniverse site, even before the
Republican primaries got underway in earnest, I spent a lot of time
looking at what America is going to look like after November 5th.

At the time, Joe Biden had one foot in his political grave, and the other
on a banana peel, and was poised to get beat by whomever the Republicans
nominated. Yet the rhetoric being used by politicians on both side and in
regime media got dialed up to 11 on Spinal Tap's guitar amplifier. My
concern was that if Trump or a Republican won, half the country would
absolutely freak out because the end of the American experiment was at
hand. When it became clear Donald Trump would be the GOP nominee, the
intensity of the threat to democracy rhetoric greatly increased.

Even with the replacement on the Democratic side of Kamala Harris for Joe
Biden, temporarily drawing the race back into at least the perception of a
winnable one by Democrats and media, the demonization of Donald Trump and
Republicans by media and Never Trumpers ratcheted up further to an
absurdly hyperbolic level. I speculated with Ed on several of our Week in
Review podcasts in the VIP section that if you are someone on the left and
you've been convinced down to your bones that Trump is a mortal threat to
democracy itself, then it begs the question what won't you do to stop
Trump from taking the oath of office on January 20th? That was months
before there were two assassination attempts on Trump's life.

Now flash forward to this week. Donald Trump has shaved over half of
Kamala Harris' national polling lead in Real Clear Politics' average, and
has flipped Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan from blue to red in the
Electoral College map, if you throw in leaning states. Trump's probability
odds of winning it all in Polymarket has reached an all-time high of 58%
to Kamala's 42% chance. Even left-leaning Nate Silver has seen the modest
lead Kamala held in odds of winning evaporate. He now sees the race as a
dead heat.

With all of that as a backdrop, what happens if Trump wins? Mark Halperin,
who fell out of favor with MSNBC as one of their favored pundit sons after
his own #MeToo problem, nevertheless has retained his contacts within the
Democratic Party, and was among the first to accurately predict that Nancy
Pelosi and other senior Democrats would shove Joe Biden to the curb and
out of the race for re-election as president. Halperin was on Tucker
Carlson's podcast yesterday, and had this dire prediction.

The biggest mass mental health crisis in this country's history. And
that's saying something when we're just four years removed from the
physical, mental, and emotional damage done to millions of Americans after
what a year of COVID restrictions, masking, and vaccine mandates did to us
and our children. This prediction is ominous indeed. But Halperin went
further and described how that mental health crisis would manifest itself,
at least in part.

And you only thought you had to worry about the Zombie apocalypse. Long-
time political consultant and former Bill Clinton campaign guru James
Carville is embracing denial fully, refusing to believe Democrats are
going to lose, and terrified that Trump is going to arrest his political
enemies.

What makes this cut so delicious is that within two hours of saying this,
Joe Biden was in Philly at a dinner to benefit Kamala Harris. Here's what
he said.

We've sailed well past 'Lock her up,' haven't we? Now that Kamala Harris
is the nominee instead of Joe Biden, she's at least less inflammatory with
her language, right? Nah. Here she is on the Breakfast Club with
Charlamagne Tha God yesterday talking to a caller who seemed a little
unhinged.

Notice that Kamala didn't begin her response by telling the caller he is
crazy and that he should get ahold of himself and attempt to have a
modicum of perspective. Instead, she told him he's making a very important
point. She fed and nurtured the extremist rhetoric.

In Georgia, after Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Senator Raphael Warnock, and
dozens of Democratic Party leaders warned that the election reform law in
the Peach State would bring back Jim Crow or worse, Jim Eagle, a funny
thing happened. After the first day of early voting in a state that we
were reliably told would lead to restricted access, especially for Blacks,
Georgians cast over 300,000 votes, 123% above their previous record. CNN's
Kaitlan Collins had her X feed then meet reality now.

On the Republican side, all the data, all the trends, all the historical
error rates of the groups doing the polling still point to Donald Trump
winning the election. If he does not, if there are anomalies in swing
states in specific, targeted pockets of GOP strongholds and Kamala Harris
ekes out a victory as narrow or even closer than the one that propelled
Joe Biden to the White House, some of the base voters on the right are
going to lose their minds. Close elections just do that anyway, but add in
the rhetoric, albeit correct from my point of view, that Kamala Harris
would destroy Constitutional norms in this country we thought would never
be touched, and you have the ingredients for political turmoil on the
right.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, who was on the House impeachment committee going after
Donald Trump for his role in the J6 Capitol riots, which the left still
believes was an even bigger threat to democracy than the 9/11 attacks on
New York and Washington, D.C, has flipped on a dime. If Donald Trump wins,
Raskin is all for having the House not certify the election. The crazy in
this country is getting hotter faster than my new Solaire Infrared Grille.

Here's the question. What is this doing to our kids?

We have an entire generation of young people that just came through a
pandemic that saw them banned from attending school in-person, being
forced to mask even while playing outside when there was no scientific
reason to support the political decision behind the orders, and many were
forced to take a vaccine as a ticket to re-entry when schools did
reconvene. Even today, some kids live in fear of a virus that in most
cases was never a threat to their age cohort by wearing masks in class.
For that matter, I see adults every day, by themselves, driving their car
with a mask on. Millions of kids are dealing with learning deficits as a
result of the educational interruption.

Now, after dealing with that dystopian trauma, these kids are watching and
listening to grown-ups, mostly their parents but others as well, react
viscerally to the political campaigns vying to be the leaders for the
immediate future of this country. These same grown-ups, who outside of
politics would otherwise act relatively normal, turn into crazy people
when the T-word is mentioned. And we haven't even begun to discuss what
antisemitism is doing to rot American society, and especially to academia.

I'm not one that thinks it's likely or possible to put this extremist
genie back in the bottle and cap it in the next couple weeks. I pray
fervently that God continues to keep this country stitched together, in
spite of what we deserve, but I'm not counting on it. I worry that Mark
Halperin's forecast is spot on. And I will not lift one toe off of the
pedal between now and Election Day, because I continue to believe that
this election actually is the most important one of our lifetime. I
believe that because the radical ideology that got substituted in at the
last minute has not been fully vetted by the American people. We truly are
in a dangerous time, both domestically and internationally. This is no
time for a radical faux intellectual with a track record of being clueless
and wrong every step of her career in public life.

A female miscellaneous random person who grew up in our house that has now
begun her college career three weeks ago just went throug an incident that
necessitated obtaining a restraining order. Yesterday, as Kamala Harris
was once again pandering for Black votes by embracing the idea of
trillions of taxpayer dollars in reparations, I was faced with what's
going on in the real world with this next generation of students. As I was
waiting for three hours to file the appropriate forms, about a dozen of
them, I noticed this young person and her roommate trying to catch up with
schoolwork on their laptops. They hadn't had a great night sleep in
several days, and they were pretty subdued. The weight of their world was
on their shoulders.

As a parent, it breaks my heart to see them have to go through this type
of trauma. I certainly don't think it's necessary or appropriate to pile
on and talk politics just because it's that season. Politics is
extraordinarily important to me, but not so important as being the parent
your kids need, not necessarily the parent those kids think they want. You
have to protect them as best you can while letting them spread their wings
when it's appropriate to do so. You have to be there for them, offer
advice when asked, be a shoulder to cry on when the situation warrants,
and resist the temptation to use your own life experience to shortcut
their process and just tell them what to do.

But most importantly, we parents have to remember that even when we're in
the throes of political combat, hopefully the rhetorical type, the
followers that matter most are not those on social media or the internet.
The people that should cause us to watch what we say and how we say it are
those that are going to be the ones charged with keeping this country
together long after we're gone. It's his kids that keep J.D. Vance
grounded. I talked about that with John Ashbrook of the Ruthless podcast
in today's edition of Duane's World.

Being better in how you frame your argument isn't just the moral thing to
do. Being better also happens to be much more persuasive and convincing.
Let's hope that in this next two-plus weeks, and for the turbulent time
sure to follow, let's be firm, resolved, and unwavering in our principles.
But let's also deliver that message in a way that won't make us an
embarrassment to our children and grandchildren, or in a way that will
continue to tear the country apart.

--
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem. It has none.

No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.