Bonfire of the Inanities
President Biden, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Justin Trudeau are sinking beneath the intrusion of reality.
It appears that reality, deeply unfashionable in what’s left of our modern culture, is breaking out across North America. Something is amiss.
That of which is amiss is not too deep an intellectual river to wade: President Biden is sinking, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau might have called his own expulsion, and California’s Gavin Newsom might just lose his recall election.
For Biden, there’s no more lurid an emblem of his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan than that of coffins draped in the American flag, and paraded through the streets of the Eastern city of Khost in a mock funeral for the vanquished superpower. After twenty years, two trillion dollars, and thousands of American lives, Afghanistan returns to its default state. The victorious Taliban even found time to poke fun at Biden’s failures, promising behind hallucinated grins to be ‘open and inclusive.’ Later, Taliban militants went door-to-door, hunting down those thousands of allies whom Biden abandoned. Perhaps the Taliban just wanted to know what pronouns those allies would prefer to go by.
An inscrutable disaster, a monstrous withdrawal, the abandonment of one hundred Americans and thousands of Afghan allies, the largesse of billions in military hardware and cash, is almost unspinnable. Only Biden’s most faithful devotees, such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, would try and spin reality into something more comforting. At this point, you could tell Rubin that Biden had painted the sky in tartan, and she’d dash toward the nearest window for a look.
Most Americans aren’t fooled. Biden’s drowsy press conferences have permitted millions of Americans to take a second look at his eight months in office. From the economy to crime, to illegal immigration, Biden’s approval rating slides toward an unelectable average of 45 percent.
Like any relationship born of necessity or transaction, one’s brain blinds one’s eyes to what is obviously awry until one’s brain dares reveal what has all along danced beyond one’s nose.
Americans are noticing things—noticing inflation eating through their dollars, noticing cocksure criminals seething the streets, noticing two million illegal immigrants have—during an eighteen-month pandemic in which Americans were locked at home, their businesses dissolved, their faces masked with useless cloth, their children without schooling—waltzed across the southern border. Americans have noticed that something is amiss.
Clinging to Biden’s press conferences, they search for evidence that this is all some monstrous ‘Benny Drama’ joke. They ask, surely, the president of the United States is not who this woeful impressionist claims himself to be? A president surprised by the words falling from his tongue. A president insistent that a disaster of historical proportion is, actually, an ‘extraordinary success.’
They see him chattering to himself. They hear him couch the debacle in the crudest of falsehoods: that we either stay forever or leave disastrously. They see him ransack his brain, pulling open empty drawer after empty drawer, in profitless search of something which might make sense. They hear him blame the ‘extraordinary success’ on President Trump. They feel genuine heartache as he mentions his late son, Beau. They touch upon such a cynical ploy. Then they see him turn his back and walk out, and they smell something is up. You don’t need a sixth sense to make sense of this. It’s American History X.
Over in California, many sense the once inconceivable possibility that they could boot Governor Gavin Newsom from office. His recall election—the petition of which signed by 1.3 million Californians, and hundreds of thousands of registered Democrats—might just sink him.
Californians have noticed things, too. They’ve noticed that Newsom-in-private is not Newsom-in-public. Last November, public Newsom locked down the state, shuttered businesses, and masked citizens, before private Newsom enjoyed a $12,000 wine bill, and a $2,400 bottle of Domaine François Raveneau,  at the uber-bougie French Laundry restaurant.
That was just the start. Californians have noticed spiralling crime, homeless encampments, and general malaise across a state failing for all but Newsom’s mega-wealthy ilk.
Perhaps they’ve noticed California is as unequal as Honduras, that minorities are worse off in California than any other state. Perhaps they’ve noticed they cannot afford to live. Perhaps they’ve noticed their neighbours moving to Texas.
Hispanics in California—15.6 million people—have noticed things too. When asked what they think, 54 percent plan to recall Gavin Newsom.
It was never meant to be so close, yet polls have the race within the margin of error.
Panicked, Newsom and his true believers respond to Larry Elder, the opposition’s great hope, in the only way they know how: thoughtless identity politics. Elder, a conservative radio host, graduate of Crenshaw High School, and native of what he calls the ‘hood’ is, according to the L.A. Times, the ‘black face of white supremacy.’Â
You would think those utterly obsessed with skin colour would celebrate a black man rising from South Central and on to the cusp of the governor’s office. But Elder is the wrong kind of person of colour. He’s conservative.
Imagine, if you will, a conservative Republican winning in the beating heart of progressive ‘fast-forward’ America. The result? Trump 2016-levels of radioactivity.
Now imagine Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau calling an election and doing what we Brits have christened a ‘Theresa May.’ Like Mrs. May, Trudeau has gone to the polls to further his hand, and now the hands of millions of Canadians might just hand him a ticket out of office. He’s trialling to the Conservatives.
Like Biden, Afghanistan has exposed Trudeau’s intellectual truancy. Such serious business is impervious to Trudeau’s preoccupation with minting new additions to the Dictionary of Woke.
And he’s hardly helped by his administration’s tendency to say stupid things which appeal to neurotics on Twitter, but nobody else. Trudeau’s minister for women, Maryam Monsef, called the Taliban ‘brothers’. Trudeau says made-up words like ‘she-cession’ and ‘she-covery’. No, dear reader, me neither.
Something is amiss. Perhaps in this era of historic seriousness, Americans and Californians and Canadians are tiring of the unseriousness of the Vanity Left.
Perhaps they heard President Trump say in typically grandiloquent fashion what the vast majority knows to be true, and feels increasingly confident to say out loud: that everything woke turns to shit.
You had me at the image of Plugs "ransack(ing) his brain, pulling open empty drawer after empty drawer, in profitless search of something which might make sense."