The Great Hiccup?

My morning news perambulation brought me a handful of items that added up to something... interesting.

Biden and his administration remind me of a boss I briefly had back in my engineering days. Three years into my career, I was transferred onto a program that was previously a one-person operation in my particular discipline. It didn't take long for me to find out that I was a replacement, not a supplement, because my boss-in-name-only spent all his work time sorting out his retirement. I finally clued in when he gave me no direction and the barest sniffs of the work product he was supposed to approve. In other words, coasting out the door. Biden is similarly in near-total do-nothing mode, other than signing off on 1500 pardons and commutations, and the nation has already shifted to Trump-47.

So has the world. Trump, still five weeks from inauguration, is holding court at Mar-a-Lago, attending the reopening of Notre Dame, and talking to world leaders. Those leaders are, for the most part, glad-handing Trump and adjusting their own policies in expectation of his. For the most part: Canada's Justin Trudeau has decided to try and swing his rainbow [redacted] around rather than understand what has happened, and I expect he’s in for a rude ‘awokening.’

The broader message of Trump's decisive victory has accelerated what was already happening. DEI initiatives are being shed like last year's fashions out of Anna Wintour's closet, ESG is becoming a relic of history, sanity is slowly returning to women's sports, and it's OK to like JK Rowling again.

Douglas Murray's Sunday column at The Free Press included this pithy observation about Rowling's attempted cancellation by woke loons:

[W]e live in an era where things that are self-evidently true are denied by maniacs who are then flattered by cowards.

Then there was the Dunkelflaute over in Germany. Translated by Google as "dark calm," it is a combination of no wind, heavy cloud cover, and cold temperatures that wreaks havoc on Germany's wind-and-solar energy grid. The turbines don't spin, the solar panels don't generate, and the cold increases demand for electricity. So, naturally, costs skyrocket. Germany, some of you might recall, shut down her nuclear power plants (the greenest of sources) in a fit of green energy suicide, and now Germans (and other Europeans) are paying the piper. Some might recall the Texas power debacle from 2021 as a cautionary tale about grid reliability, and Germany's second Dunkelflaute in a month should drive the point home.

Michael Shermer offered a sane insight into the recent rash of drone sightings in New Jersey here, concluding that this spate is likely a self-perpetuating mass hysteria, where people's natural pattern-seeking proclivities are goosed by our also-natural fear of the unknown and a whole lot of pandering and tub-thumping by news outlets and politicians alike. My first guess is some classified stuff flying around that prompted everyone and their sister toward a drone-seeking mindset.

So many of the things I listed in my post-election bit The Great Rejection feel like products of mass hysterias, thrust upon us by Murray's maniacs and perpetuated by the cowards. I've long contended that Corporate America's knee-bend to wokeism was primarily born of defensiveness and cowardice. A fear of the Twitter mob, if you will, and a submission to the heckler's veto.

The maniacs who told us that biological men can compete fairly in women's sports, that the nation can painlessly transition away from fossil fuels, that judging people by the color of their skin is not racism, that a society based on coercively assuring equal outcome can function, and that we should trust our 'betters' to run our lives are losing their sway over the cowards. Reality has reintroduced itself to our culture. While the maniacs are not going to go away quietly (behold, Gavin Newsom, Justin Trudeau, Morning Joe Scarborough, the harridans over at The View, and more of the usual suspects, and that's before I get into the race hustlers and the BLM con artists), those who still buy into their bullshit are fewer and fewer.

It has become safe to be sane.

The self-evidently true is safe to voice aloud again.

Give this clip a quick look, and you get the idea.

The woke arc that began with the ascendance of Barack Obama and his style of politics-by-finger-pointing, got chummed into a frenzy by the surprise Trump victory in 2016, and then cranked to eleven by Joe Biden and his hard-left political turn may be coming to an end.

That end may have been heralded by the bang of Trump's victory, but with Biden turning to dust like a vampire being exposed to sunlight, it's turning into a whimper.

Future generations may look back at the first quarter of this century as a giant hiccup, a cultural spasm that was shocking, unpleasant, and hopefully not to be felt again.