Perhaps the real message of last November’s election is not that Donald Trump won, but that woke progressivism lost. After all, though Trump has flaws, he at least lives in the real world and not in some ideological fantasy. It is also fairly likely that, in the four years since he left office, he has improved his presidential abilities. For example: He is less likely to be so easily goaded into overreacting to his critics… also known as taking the bait.

Meanwhile, the spoiled children of the Left are running around convinced that their hair is on fire. Some are digging foxholes while others are drifting towards the center. This is most obvious in the media, since they are in the business of being obvious.

Also, California’s Gavin (“Hair Gel”) Newsom is trying to morph into a crime fighter as he provokes the Oakland political establishment to start letting cops pursue and catch criminals. Really, why? People are fed up with the dangerously lawless status quo endemic to our urban centers. And perhaps Newsom has other ambitions, since he’s getting termed out from the governorship at the end of ’26. His record in California, however, is a serious albatross hanging around his neck. And the spate of successful recalls of mayors and district attorneys is no secret and can only inspire voters to put the fear of career death into officeholders everywhere.

A lot hinges on how the MAGA crowd does when in office -- and this applies to all levels of government, not just the presidency or even the Congress. In addition to recent recalls, the failure of some incumbents to survive the will of an angry electorate indicates a profound political sea-change. Some examples include apostate former Democrats such as Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Manchin, and even RFK, Jr. Add to this Trump’s significant rise in popularity in otherwise traditional deep blue parts of the nation.

It is actually good to see some early conflicts rising to the surface within the MAGA cohort such as Elon Musk’s support of the H-1B visa program. Excessively orthodox purists want to close the immigration door even to economically valuable foreigners. This would not be that much of an issue had the American edutocracy been doing its job and properly training new scientists and engineers -- rather than filling their young skulls with even more DEI mush. It’s obviously important to get this stuff out of the way early. Breaking news: Trump just took Musk’s side on this… now they must turn this around and stick it to the @#%&! teachers unions.

Looking at the January 20th inauguration, that Monday is also the third day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend. It’s not hard to guess that, due to Trump’s recent success among minorities, some eloquent demonstration of Dr. King’s importance for that day’s events might well be showcased.

What is being underreported is how the woke progs are hopelessly trapped by their own harmful dogma. Newsom is still striving to ban gas-powered vehicles with a fair amount of support from the enablers within the Deep State. Various players are still trying to micromanage and ultimately thwart Israel’s struggle to avoid annihilation. Then, of course, there’s the plethora of obnoxious street bums plaguing much of the American landscape. The woke-progs continue to blame a lack of “affordable” housing… but “affordable” to a vagrant drug addict really means free.

Then there’s the enormously failed boondoggle: betting the farm on using the climate change hoax to manipulate the electorate. First off it started by damaging the most cherished of American possessions -- our standard of living. Second, it continues to be exposed to serious contradiction. Weather and climate are largely local phenomena and not uniformly global in their impact. Currently the Northwest is experiencing torrential rain, snow, and flooding while the Southwest remains in drought. The latest hysteria is over the emergence of vegetation in the frozen Antarctic, yet no mention is made of the discovery made years ago of dinosaur footprints found in frozen Antarctic mud. All those provocative statistics about “warmest year ever” and so on require careful selection of where and how the data is gathered.

Add to this some of the other ugly sacred cows of their agenda such as minimum wage, recycling, affirmative action, and fluid sexual identity among the underaged… and you have a politically toxic stew of harm gratuitously imposed on the same people needed for electoral success.

The lasting impression one may ultimately get from last November’s election is the horrible way the Harris-Walz campaign handled money. First off, they outspent Trump’s campaign by about three-to-one and still lost “bigly.” They also ran up a serious amount of debt in the process, causing a lot of discomfort among their deep-pockets donors. Some of that money was used to “encourage” endorsements and possibly pay people to attend rallies.

In a nutshell, this can be described as a toxic mixture of corruption and incompetence. Which also just so happens to be exactly how Democrats run the government when given the opportunity.

Image: Gage Skidmore