Two weeks and a bit more after election day, and the meltdown, panic, and dismay among the progs, the establishment media, and the entertainment world continues. I’m taking an unworthy pleasure in reading reports of panic and back-biting among partisans of the Harris/Walz camp and the noisy laments of their cis-gender or bi significant others. I’m also taking a savage pleasure in reading about or viewing evidence of the dismayed realization among the managerial class in certain industries dependent economically on the choices of the general public – that conservatives and Trump voters buy shoes, too. Also movie tickets, newspaper and magazine subscriptions and other consumer goods.
You’d think that anyone paying attention might have realized this some months, or even years ago, but apparently our managerial class of the liberal persuasion need to be smacked with the obvious – along the lines of a mushroom cloud over a Japanese city, a dinosaur-killing asteroid, an earthquake along the New Madrid seismic zone (which made the Mississippi River briefly flow backwards), or the Trump landslide. If, as Andrew Breitbart observed once, politics is downstream from culture – are we seeing that current reversed, and is culture flowing downstream from MAGA?
More than two weeks have gone by, and Trump’s success is still all too much for some of them to take. A good few are reacting in an embarrassingly theatrical manner. Abandoning Twitter/X and flouncing off to the echo chamber of Bluesky. Rob Reiner is signing himself into some kind of rehab center, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are flouncing off and going to Britain to live … well, at least one celebrity couple are making good to leave the US on account of Trump’s election. My only question is – can’t they take Oprah Winfrey with them? I’ve never paid any heed to celeb endorsements, by the way – and the gruesome crew who came out for Harris-Walz is enough to put one off going to their movies ever again. (Good thing that Harrison Ford is pretty much aged out of anything but character parts. He’s now in my ‘not unless dragged by wild horses’ category, right alongside Jane Fonda and every single one of those participants in that horrifyingly embarrassing ‘zoom call-avengers assemble!’ video promotion.)
The more sensible corporations and companies – or those who have been paying attention to the bottom line, and who desire their companies to continue making a handsome (or even a moderately attractive) profit seem to have made a rational decision. Indeed, the owner of the L.A. Times (which once used to be a substantial and respected newspaper) and the international book publisher Hachette apparently do want to rein in the hysterical progressives among their respective employees and appeal to that niche market of the majority of American consumers. Even if their employees are having screaming meltdowns. Yes, there’s a large audience out there – probably more for books, than for newspaper subscriptions. How many other companies have decided, in the wake of Trump’s election that they had rather make a fat bottom line, and never mind the howling from their in-house woke element? Discuss as you wish.