FRIDAY short TAKES.

The Militant Normals are on the side of reality.  Cultural curators never saw it.  "Voters didn’t just vote for Trump. They voted against the elitist institutions."  Buckle in for more hysteria.  "The party that said democracy was on the ballot is now the most antidemocratic force in modern history."  Van Jones filled the score card in correctly.   “We got whooped. We got whooped, and we did not understand that.”  Voters had reason to administer that whooping.  “Because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look down on me. ‘Preachy’ does.”  (Don't hector me and call it dialogue.)  Normals want to be left alone.  "Nothing has escaped your overreach, not gas stoves, raw milk, plastic bags, or straws. You infringed on our rights to free speech to refuse untested vaccines and move about unmasked."  Normals reject Expert Failure.  "The American people are sick and tired of having Beltway elitism shoved in their faces as the only way to run the government. The current regime of left-wing four-star generals and DoD lackeys has produced one of the most disastrous tenures in the Pentagon's history."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  Reality wins by default.  "When you expend all your political energy pissing off both men and women, what’s left? There really aren’t enough nonbinary folks out there to make up the difference."

2.  The woke sound nuts, observation 1.  "The speed at which the Left has demanded everyone treat these unhinged notions as the norm is mind-blowing."

3.  Thanks, Jon Meacham.  "Scranton Joe made his old boss look positively moderate." What happened next was not amusing. "The illiberal takeover of the Democratic Party threatened the rule of law more than anything that came out of Trump’s mouth."

4.  Pure projection.  "But all good autocrats know that democracy is just a tool to be discarded when it’s no longer useful."  Is that Erdogan's Turkey or Jayapal's Donk majority he's invoking?  "Things in a democracy should be hard to change and should require more than just a 50/50 majority."

5.  General managers in sports ask the same question.  “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the fuck?”

6.  Process, nuance, failure.  "These supposed geniuses suggest that Trump's foreign policy is haphazard, dangerous, unhinged; they long for the purported calm of Democratic foreign policy, based on specious nostrums about democracy, lack of enforcement mechanisms and endless negotiations that result in more conflict."

7.  The woke sound nuts, observation 2.  "In our quest not to offend anyone, we come across as totally out of line with how regular people think."

8.  Ever hear of the sunk cost fallacy?  "Palestinians have all lost too many family members for surrender to be considered an option."

9.  Hauteur isn't a productive strategy.  "This election, the left committed the two cardinal sins of American politics: one, never talk down to the American people as too stupid to appreciate the wisdom of their supposed elite betters; and two, never abandon the upwardly mobile aspirations and real struggles of the middle class."  How many times must we call attention to those bubbles?  "The more educated people are, the more they rely on NPR, the New York Times, NBC News, CNN, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the Hollywood trades—the less likely they are to see things as they really are rather than how they want them to be."

10.  Nor is flaunting your credentials.  "The lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump."  A reckoning will come.

11.  Epistemic closure is a category error.  "A difference of opinion is upsetting if you believe that it is somehow morally repugnant."

12.  Why did Biden think he could serve another four years?

13.  Trump was an outsider.  "That's what voters longed for: someone to break with the weak border policies, foreign-policy incompetence and 'Americans Last' globalist economics of Washington's leadership class."

14.  Democrats.  "You have to really misgovern to get people to flee California."

15.  Good.  "To Protest Trump, Liberal Women Vow To Abstain From Casual Sex, Start Attending Church, Get Married, And Start Families."

16.  Better.  "Most single men on the right are looking at this right now and thinking, 'Thank you, God.' Your refusal to date them means they don’t have to worry about accidentally hooking up with a harpy."