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Celeb-spotters at the nation’s airports have been disappointed this past week.
A whole cast of celebrities swore that they would leave the country if Trump won this month’s election.
And yet — to date — the great celebrity exodus is nowhere to be seen.
People have stood in vain waiting to see if Whoopi Goldberg would make good on her promise and get on a plane after Trump’s victory.
Ahead of this election — just like in 2016 — Cher said that she would leave America if Trump got into the Oval Office.
But this time Cher really meant it.
“This time I will leave,” she told an interviewer ahead of this election.
Yet so far as we know Cher is still among us.
As are Amy Schumer, Bruce Springsteen and Bryan Cranston.
I know that a lot of people will still be worried at the thought of living in a country that does not have Bryan Cranston in it.
But for the time-being it looks like Canada doesn’t attract him as much as he thought.
Of course we have seen all this before.
Ahead of Trump’s 2016 victory we were threatened with the loss not only of Miley Cyrus, but also of Lena Dunham.
Yes, Lena Dunham.
And yet the public voted the way they wanted to in spite of Dunham’s threats.
I don’t point to these grandiose celebrity threats just to mock them.
But because it’s about time that the Democrats learned something from their defeat.
All the celebrity-courting that Kamala and the Democrats did ahead of this election was worse than useless.
It was costly and useless.
It turns out that Oprah Winfrey’s support came at a price.
One million dollars to her production company to be exact.
But it is also the case that these celebrities were among the people who pushed the Democrats to the place they got to.
A place where they became unelectable.
The more thoughtful Democrats have been noticeably quiet over the past 10 days.
Outside of the asylums of “The View” and Joy Reid’s appearances on MSNBC it seems as though a period of reflection could actually be happening.
The scale of the Trump win — the fact that he also got the popular vote — is the sort of thing that should make any moderate Democrat wonder about the path they were on in recent years.
For instance, why did the Democrats think that the American public would keep being whipped into line by Democrat lies about abortion rights in the US?
While they seemed to think the voters were too stupid to understand that the overturning of Roe v Wade simply returned the issue to state level, why did they make it such a central campaign issue?
To many people the Democrats looked not as though they were in favor of a woman’s right to choose but as though they just loved abortions.
At one New York fashion week party for Kamala Harris a big screen blared out “Abortion rights are hot.”
And remember how at the DNC attendees were offered free abortions and vasectomies?
Or remember the giant inflatable IUD that was floating around outside the convention center.
Democrats may have thought that was cool.
But seriously?
That was all actually weird.
It’s the same on a range of social issues.
I notice that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has just removed her pronouns from her X (Twitter) bio.
Has she worked out that everybody already knew she was a woman and that putting “she/her” in her bio didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t know?
That it was what it always looked like — a stupid sop to a stupid and dangerous fad?
I’d like to think so.
If squad members like AOC are starting to realize they might be the problem then something really could be changing.
Still it’s worth remembering just how far the left tried to take the country on these issues in recent years.
It was satisfying that the nickname “Tampon Tim” stuck for the worst Vice Presidential candidate in recent memory.
But why did people like Tim Walz ever fall into this weird religious-like belief in which everyone was meant to pretend that boys might need tampons?
Or that it would be bigoted not to offer them?
Did the Democrats really have to get this thumping electoral defeat to realize that the things that obsessed them were really off-putting to any normal voter?
Did we have to go through this stupid era of pretending that a dude in a bathing suit can become a woman when he enters the water if he says he is one?
Or that a man can punch the hell out of a woman in women’s boxing and everyone was just meant to be fine with it?
It’s not like this was all something made up by right-wing culture warriors.
It was something they were forcing on us.
American parents noticed (especially during the Covid period) the change in what their children were being taught in once-normal American schools.
Like the idea that there are a hundred genders.
Or maybe more.
That drag-queen story hour is some ancient and venerable tradition — as American as Thanksgiving turkey.
Or that the country was founded in 1619 when the first slaves arrived and that Americans are all living on “stolen land.”
Or that the Founding Fathers and almost every hero in American history was not in fact heroic but just a group of “dead white men” who were all slavers and nothing more.
All of these issues and more have obsessed the American left in recent years.
The left have pushed these issues down people’s throats until we were thoroughly bored and fed up of them.
And yet they kept pushing.
Then, at the last stage, they decided to pretend that anyone who didn’t like what they were being fed was a transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist piece of Nazi garbage.
Well it turned out that the strategy “insult the voters’ intelligence,” and then just “insult the voters,” didn’t work all that well.
For any Democrats who’d like their party to be electable again it’s worth thinking on that.
I suppose they can do the thinking in Canada if they want.