Please forgive the pond... another triptych of Trumpian reptiles is on hand this Sunday. The pond doesn't like it, but it is what it is, it must be what it will be ...

 

Please don't blame the pond. It simply can't be helped that this weekend all the reptiles have carried on like a bunch of monkeys that have escaped from Dr.Moreau's island, gibbering and carrying on about the wonders of Trumpenstein ...

It's likely a mood, which might last four years or more, or perhaps it will quieten down in the silly holyday season, but for the moment here we are, and there is no escaping the current reptile obsession with MagaDonmania. 

The pond will understand if some decide to head off to the hills or to an alternative reality, the kind you might find in stories such as Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders (CNN didn't have the guts to turn 'controversial' into 'illegal') or Freedland in a state of hysteria in Think you know how bad Trump unleashed will be? Look at the evidence: it will be even worse,  or planetary doom in 'A wrecking ball': experts warn Trump's win sets back global climate action.

Forget all that. Don the rose-coloured glasses for the Don. Kiss the ring. Dissolve into the hive mind.

All three reptiles yesterday were offering forms of Trumpism yesterday in the pond, and all three new reptiles are at it again today ... and there's nothing the pond can do, except report on the phenomenon.

Even prattling Polonius couldn't resist, offering up his own patented form of sedate triumphalism, with him emerging from behind the arras to be the first demented reptile cab off the rank this day ...

The pond offers no prizes for the angle Polonius's prattle took ... inevitably the ABC and the Nine rags ended up in the mix. 

Polonius has typed it a zillion times, the pond has regurgitated it a quadrillion times, and those seeking sanity have howled at the moon millions of times. Yes, it's, yet again, for the until the twelfth of never time (and that's a very long time): ...the ABC is a conservative-free zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for the ABC’s key television, radio or online outlets. 

Possibly the pond should have offered a spoiler alert to that line; certainly it's okay to wonder when Polonius's short-cut key will expire from excessive overuse. Hey ho, to start with the header:

An out-of-touch media left baffled by ‘deplorables’, It should come as no surprise that the mainstream media in the US is left-wing. But Australia’s media left is just as out of touch as its American counterpart.

On the upside, the reptiles advised that Polonius was only a four minute read - though that is four minutes you'll never get back - and restricted the doddering dullard to just one visual distraction, at the get go and with the old garbage routine front and centre, Donald Trump holds a press conference from inside a garbage truck in Wisconsin in October. Picture: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP

If that was a press conference - a few words shouted at the disbelieving, maddened throng - the pond will have to revise its understanding of conference to include circus, clowns, stunts and low staggering to the door handle grifter comedy.

Never mind, on with the standard serve of Polonial rage, with the lad astonishingly adept at French:

Pardon the French but it was a quelle surprise! moment. The reference is to the discussion between David Speers (presenter of ABC TV’s Insiders program) and John Lyons (the ABC’s global affairs editor) in Washington DC not long after it became evident that Donald J. Trump had won the 2024 US presidential election.
Lyons told Speers he had just read Hillbilly Elegy by US vice-president-elect JD Vance. Lyons said the book “paints a devastating, bleak picture of so many parts of America – children going to bed at night with pain in their mouths because their teeth are rotten”. He added: “It’s that America that elected Donald Trump tonight.”
Lyons did not mention that this was the cohort of American society that Hillary Clinton mocked as “deplorables” in 2016 and President Joe Biden dismissed as “garbage” shortly before the election on Wednesday AEDT.
Then came the surprise. Lyons declared: “I think the media here (in the US), the left-wing media needs to … seriously look at how they got it wrong. It’s the second time they’ve got it wrong. They got it wrong in 2016 when The New York Times editor called the staff together and said, ‘What’s happened, how come you didn’t see this coming?’ They’ve got it wrong again tonight.”
It should come as no surprise that the mainstream media in the US – led by The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times; free-to-air networks ABC, CBS and NBC; and cable news channels MSNBC and CNN – is left-wing. What is unusual turns on the fact Lyons blamed the left-wing media for underestimating Trump’s support in 2016 and 2024. He could have added 2020, when Trump lost narrowly to Biden.
Lyons is a senior editor at the taxpayer-funded broadcaster. He is partly responsible for the fact the ABC is a conservative-free zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for the ABC’s key television, radio or online outlets. The ABC is at least as left-wing as The New York Times, NBC and the like. Yet Lyons chose an ABC platform to criticise the left-wing media in the US.

Right, that does it. Polonius is routinely bizarre, but more importantly, utterly without a sense of humour, devoid of self-awareness and the singular nature of his deeply Freudian obsessions, tedious to anyone forced to read him. It was time for the pond's Sunday cartoon distractions, as a way of making it through the carry on:

Polonius then helpfully explained the source of his dementia. He's a Faux Noise sort of guy. You know, get your insights from Hannity, Laura, Maria and the rest of the barking mad pack:

Anyone who tuned in to News Corp’s Fox News or reads News Corp’s New York Post or The Wall Street Journal would not be surprised by Trump’s substantial victory this week. The same is true of those who read News Corp Australia’s papers or watch Sky News. This is not the case with the ABC.

That puts Polonius in with this mob:

Sorry, it's the best the pond can do as a distraction. Carry on, at least those who are regardless:

A few recent examples illustrate the problem that Lyons chooses to overlook at his own workplace.
On October 27, Insiders ran an extract of an interview between Speers and Rory Stewart, who is best known as co-host with Alastair Campbell of The Rest is Politics podcast. Stewart is a former British Conservative MP who was expelled from the party for voting against it over Brexit. He is now quite hostile to the Conservatives.
Asked by Speers about the likely outcome of the US presidential election, Stewart declared, “I believe Kamala Harris will win.” He even criticised polls that suggested Trump had a slight chance of victory. Speers did not challenge Stewart’s prediction, which turned out to be hopelessly wrong.
On November 4, ABC TV’s Q+A ran a US election special program. There was a panel of four with Patricia Karvelas in the presenter’s chair. The panel comprised Anthony Scaramucci (who worked for Trump for a couple of weeks), Dennis Richardson (a former senior Australian diplomat and security chief), Amelia Lester (a Nine newspapers journalist) and American-born Australian commentator Bruce Wolpe. Wolpe is a Trump antagonist while Scaramucci is a Trump hater. There was no Harris antagonist or hater on the panel.
Scaramucci described Trump, variously, as “Gestapo-like”, a national socialist (that is, Nazi), which received loud audience approval, and compared a Trump campaign meeting with “a Nazi rally in 1939”. Karvelas did not challenge any of these claims.
Writing in Nine newspapers on November 7, Peter Hartcher threw the switch to hyperbole. He began with George Washington’s declaration that democracy was “an experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people” but declared that this had now been abandoned as a failed experiment on account of Trump’s victory. Elsewhere in the paper, Niki Savva claimed “the despicable Donald Trump has provided a formula for success built on lies, misogyny, undermining institutions and dividing people”.
This implies that over half the American electorate that voted for Trump-Vance are fools who have no regard for democracy and willingly elect despicable leaders. It’s a slightly different version of American society replete with deplorables and human garbage.
An objective reading of the US presidential election indicates that Trump won handsomely because he identified cost of living and border security as the issues most Americans were most concerned about. Trump’s commitment to reduce energy prices with his “drill baby drill” message also had a certain appeal.

Uh hu, talk about appeal. Fuck the planet, and fix up the price of eggs:

Who'd have thunk that Polonius would have fallen for the "strong man" routine? 

As in: Der Starke ist am mächtigsten allein, deployed by the likes of Schiller and Adolf, aka The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone.

Yep in Polonius's world, the bullying Mr Bone Spurs "presents as strong":

Then there is the issue of leadership. Trump presents as strong. On October 20, The Wall Street Journal reported on Trump meeting its editorial board. In response to a question by Paul Gigot about whether a Trump administration would use military force against a blockade on Taiwan, the former president replied: “I wouldn’t have to because he (China’s President Xi Jinping) respects me and he knows I’m f..king crazy.”
Like all of us mere mortals, Trump has his faults. But it’s difficult to see how a person who was elected by a majority of American voters in a fair election constitutes a threat to democracy.
The Trump-Vance duo supported by the likes of Tulsi Gabbard and Nikki Haley are a threat to the professional class that runs the Democratic Party.
Trump won significant support among lower-income Americans without tertiary degrees. Research by the CT Group Australia indicates a similar trend is under way in Australia with respect to Peter Dutton and the Coalition that may, or may not, influence the next election.
Lyons would be well advised to be a bit less global and bit more local. Australia’s media left is just as out of touch as its American counterpart.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

So Polonius is officially infatuated with the fucking crazy and is happy to go along for the ride:

Next up is the Ughmann, with the reptiles advising that this was an epic five minute read under the header: Elite world scrambles as defiant chaos returns, From Tokyo to London, through the presidential palaces of Europe and rippling across the Pacific to Canberra, the establishment quails at the resurrection of Donald Trump.

Ah, the 'leets, yet the Ughmann (Chris Uhlmann to any stray new reader) seemed a trifle disturbed at the ambivalent nature of defiant chaos returning, and was inclined to do a bit of quailing himself.

First came a snap with caption Donald Trump is an assault on the sensibilities of the plutocrats, a Hun who has breached the castle wall. Above, as president Trump 2019. Picture: Adrian Dennis / AFP

By golly Poms on parade and the Queen nowhere to be seen. 

The pond was reassured and relieved by the Ughaman's talk. The reptiles tend to get agitated when Adolf is mentioned, but the Ughmann was also happy to talk of the Hun.

The Ughman carried on with the WWI metaphor:

It’s all disquiet on the Western front as the world digests the return of America’s id to the White House.
From Tokyo to London, through the presidential palaces of Europe and rippling across the Pacific to Canberra, a shockwave roils the halls of power as the establishment quails at the resurrection of Donald Trump.
His defiant return underscores the wisdom in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s observation that the world is witnessing great change not seen in a century.
In an era defined by chaos, a rough beast now slouches towards Washington. Again.

For some reason the Ughmann didn't carry on with the implications of that line from the poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Faux Noise to be born?

Instead the Ughmann relished the chaos that the rough beast would bring, sounding happy that angry mobs might light torches and storm the streets, as in the good old days:

See how happy he sounds, up for a book burning and perhaps even a Kristallnacht:

But chaos can be destructive and creative, and Trump brings both, if in unequal measure. What should be creative is the opportunity to finally break through the intellectual barricades Western elites have erected around some of their more risible ideas.
Because, although they always paint themselves as revolutionaries, progressives are the new aristocracy and their ideas dominate national and international institutions. Here they have the commanding heights of the bureaucracy, universities, public broadcasting and big business.
Internationally the same ideas animate the bureaucrats at the UN, EU and just about any institution you can name in the blizzard of abbreviations that populates the globe. Even once sensible organisations such as the International Energy Agency have moved from producing data to peddling propaganda.
Trump is an assault on the sensibilities of the plutocrats, a Hun who has breached the castle wall. But he is just the loudest signal among many that point to an angry mob lighting torches from Nashville to Naples.
Too often the progressive class cries democracy while holding its exercise in contempt. Too often the people’s will is met with patronising claims that they were misled or misinformed. That they are too dumb to understand what is good for them. The dark mood of the mob is dismissed with the pejorative populism.
Here, the best recent example was the elite response to the overwhelming rejection of the voice. There were two choices after the referendum: to trust the wisdom of the people or to denigrate them as fools. What should have been read as a people rejecting an ill-formed plan to divide them by race was turned into commentary that branded them racist.

Too often the Ughmann heads down rabbit holes, then emerges truly weird, capped by the reptiles renewed love for the liar of the shire: Then prime minister Scott Morrison holds a bilateral meeting with Trump at the G7 Summit in Biarritz in 2019. Picture: Adam Taylor/PMO

The pond is getting saturated with snaps of the liar, and even more tired of the notion that climate science is just a concept in need of a plan. Apparently the assault on the planet is best seen as an assault on the poor, but when it comes to climate mayhem, you'll need lots of dollars to escape the apocalypse:

Gaslighting is a term beloved of the progressive class. It’s ironic because they do it so often to dismiss legitimate grievances. The mob is apparently wrong to believe that mass migration puts pressure on housing or increases competition for jobs. That globalisation has offshored blue-collar jobs and hollowed out once-thriving communities. That climate plans are an assault on the poor that drives up the cost of living. In Queensland, concerns about youth crime were dismissed as a media beat-up and university studies were produced to prove the people wrong.
Everywhere you care to look in Western democracies there is deep division between the in and out castes. The castes often can be defined by geography: those who hug the cities and those in the far-flung commuter suburbs or regions. The ideological chasm is between those who have access to all the benefits of the world and those who bear the costs of a world that has changed beyond their recognition.
So, the good chaos that Trump brings is that he unsettles the global establishment and, hopefully, gives them pause to reflect.

For no particular reason, the reptiles then introduced Macron, with the caption France's President Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump pose during a joint press conference in Biarritz, south-west France, on the third day of the annual G7 summit in 2019. Picture: AFP

At this point, the Ughmann decided to do a screeching doughnut, crunch the gears into reverse and deliver a giant billy goat butt:

But, billy goat, butt some fear of Trump is rational. What happens in the world’s most consequential democracy has consequences for all, and Trump is more than willing to mete out retribution on real and imagined slights. His list of miscreants, like his memory, is long. In Washington, Australia’s plenipotentiary, Kevin Rudd, is busy purging his Twitter account to erase all trace of an unfortunate bout of truth-telling. He, apparently, used the platform in 2020 to accuse the once and future president of dragging “America and democracy through the mud”. An opinion a reasonable person could hold.
Rudd removing the offending post recalls being caught smoking in the school toilets as a teenager. You can try to flush away the butts but you can’t erase the smell as you stand, denying everything, in front of a teacher with a small cloud drifting over your head. Predictably, the attempt to scrub the post from history only rebirthed it as a news story.
A big cloud is drifting over the rest of Washington, where 92 per cent of its voters dutifully turned out for Kamala Harris. The shadow of Twitter looms large as the eccentric billionaire who turned the platform into X has stamped a great big cross on the entire city.
Elon Musk just may get handed a cabinet job with the chilling title of the Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk has assured a member of Trump’s transition planning team that he will have no trouble ripping out “at least” $US2 trillion ($3 trillion) from the $US6.8 trillion federal budget. This seems a tad excessive.
Other capitals, such as Kyiv, also will fear the flow of weapons will falter, exposing its people to a real beast.
In Moscow, Vladimir Putin must now be contemplating pushing as deep as possible into Ukraine’s heartland, planting his flag in it and awaiting a favourable, temporary, peace around expanded Russian borders.
In Jerusalem there will be jubilation at the return of a staunch ally to the White House. Benjamin Netanyahu was among the first to call and congratulate Trump, but the president-elect has made it clear he wants an end to the wars by the time he assumes office. The question there is how, and on what terms, a peace can be struck between combatants who now all seem committed to a one-state solution.

Pshaw, after the genocide, think of the real estate opportunities for Jared and Ivanka, and as for Vlad the sociopath, oligarchs and strong men must stand together, and fittingly the next snap featured two strong men, as Polonius is inclined to call authoritarians with a penchant for dictatorship: China's President Xi Jinping and then president Donald Trump attend a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2017. Picture: AFP

For some reason, the Ughmann turned nervous nelly about a protracted period of disorder, but surely that's what chaos lovers want:

In Beijing, Xi will be thinking more deeply than most about how to ride this wave from Washington. If the US retreats from trying to preserve the world order it established, China will fill the void. Beijing is already using the wars in Ukraine and Gaza to stoke global opinion against America and blame it for waging a new cold war.
There will be turbulence with tariff walls and attempts to retool supply chains to bypass China. But in a wide world there are always ways around a wall and some supplies simply can’t come from anywhere else. One example: China now accounts for 95 per cent of the world’s global polysilicon, ingot and wafer production. As this is an essential material for the production of solar panels and semiconductors, slapping tariffs on that will be a big call.
Beijing will know tariff walls also will drive a divide between the US and many countries, including its allies in Europe.
The rise of Trump fits with Xi’s view that the world is facing a protracted period of disorder. He will take it as yet another sign that the sun is rising in the East and setting in the West.

Thank you Ughmann for your chaotic contribution to chaos theory, and so to the final reptile in this day's triptych, Dame Slap showing her obsession with the notion that diversity, equity and inclusion are terrible, what with her penchant for bigotry, uniformity, blonde homogeneity, sameness, inequity, imbalance, inequality, polarity and exclusion, disbarring, keeping out, prohibiting and ostracising. Yes, it can't hurt to embrace the Mango Mussolini circus in her header:

Fed-up voters say ‘no thanks’ to the ultimate DEI hire, Most people don’t need another Donald Trump victory to realise that the ‘progressive’ left has gone too far in its modern-day project to mould society to suit its personal cultural cravings. But it can’t hurt.

It was the lengthiest of the reptile reads, some six minutes the reptiles alleged, and so came last, so that readers could go about more urgent business.

Besides, everybody already knows Dame Slap's form on this matter, a MAGA cap moment the pond always mentions when Dame Slap and the Trumpiest of them all turn up in the same space:

Of course the reptiles didn't mention any of that, they just provided a snap of the wicked witch, with caption: Democrats couldn’t knock back Kamala Harris as presidential candidate when Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign for re-election imploded. Picture: AFP

Then Dame Slap could get on with a fine serve of bitchy blonde black bashing. That's her typical methodology. Ignore the cavalcade of clowns, ignore the circus. Remember this motley crew?:

 

Nah, none of that. No need to dwell on the circus or the clowns. Instead blame the noise the circus makes on Democrats, leftists, progressives, 'leets, whatever, and get down to black bashing, more fun than eating dogs and cats and pets in Springfield. After all, can't have those uppity, difficult, tricky blacks getting too ahead of themselves. Why a corrupt, deeply crooked, notorious con artist, grifter, snake oil salesman, and inveterate liar is much more to Dame Slap's taste:

Kamala Harris scored her last job opportunity by topping the world’s most notorious female-only candidate list. So how did that work out for the Democrats?
When spruiking himself for president before 2020, Joe Biden committed to picking not only a woman but one of colour to be his vice-president.
Faced with an exquisite DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – dilemma of their own making, Democrats couldn’t knock back Harris as presidential candidate when Biden’s 2024 campaign for re-election imploded. Much of the legacy media slotted in like soldiers, outdoing their previous partisanship. Shilling for a Democrat woman of colour for president was simply irresistible.
The 2024 presidential race was many things. Among them, here was the ultimate DEI election. And DEI bombed.
Barely two years ago, the New York Post ran this headline mocking Donald Trump’s decision to enter the 2024 presidential race: “Florida Man Makes Announcement.” The left’s dogmatic embrace of DEI merely worked to ensure the outcome they most loathed: Florida man trounced the woman of colour. DEI lost.
The incompetent woman running for president was whupped; the DEI Democrats were crushed, too, in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the end, American voters didn’t give a toss about Harris’s gender or race.
They most certainly didn’t care for DEI. If they did, a woman of colour would be the 47th president. Instead, they cared about the economy, the rising cost of living, the border. Americans wanted change. How could that come from a candidate who, when asked how a Harris administration would be different from that of her boss, said it wouldn’t?

Just to repeat the dose, that was followed by another snap of said uppity black person needing to be done down, given a good whupping like they used to in the good old days:

Whup her good, whup her hard, The incompetent woman running for president was whupped. Picture: AFP

Phew, with all that whupping good and hard, and perhaps with a glimmer of Dame Slap's love of the good old slave days when blacks knew their place, the pond felt the need for a cartoon:

How did the pond know that cartoon would strike a nerve in Dame Slap's bigotry? It's not just the price of eggs, it's the need to whup the uppity ones:

But no one should mistake what happened across America this week as simply the convulsing of the nation’s hip-pocket nerve. Nor was it a warm embrace of Trump. A man with major-league foibles and profound human flaws such as Trump doesn’t win twice, this week in a landslide, without the left’s help.
Even a narcissist such as Trump will know that his stunning victory tells a story bigger than him. This was a landslide rejection of the progressive left’s determination over a few decades to mould our culture in ways that are an affront to millions of people, and to common sense too.
On one front, in particular, the meaning of Trump’s win struck with the sound and speed of lightning. DEI has been rejected as a crock.
It wasn’t Trump who drilled a giant-sized nail in the coffin of DEI. The secular commissars of culture on the left did that. They talk among themselves about the righteousness of the diversity, equity and inclusion project, convincing only themselves that they are doing the work of God. They brook no disagreement. They mistake silence for consensus.
Those who disagree with the left’s cultural colonisation of society do what makes sense: they stay quiet. They wait. And when the right opportunity arises, they react. Trump gave people licence to say “enough”.

Oh yes, it'll be enough alright ...

Sorry, but the reptiles also interrupted with a snap and a mind-blowing audio visual distraction: Even a narcissist such as Donald Trump will know that his stunning victory tells a story bigger than him. Picture: AFP

Oh enough already with the Christ posing ..

Even a narcissist? Really? Really truly?

At this point the reptiles gave up on the notion of interrupting Dame Slap as the vengeful harridan began ranting, shouting at clouds, and at anyone different or other:

When any idea becomes fundamentalist, when it’s cocooned from debate, untethered from reality, imposed by compunction, it will soon enough come a cropper.
Before this election, doctrinaire diversity policies were already on the nose. The US Supreme Court rejected affirmative-action policies at universities. More and more companies are dismantling DEI departments and directives. The US election gave millions of ordinary people a chance to deliver DEI the two-finger salute.
Democrats trashed the DEI project when they settled on Harris. It’s hard to overstate her underperformance. Pick a county, a state, a demographic, Harris underperformed just about everywhere, including among women. While Biden won women over Trump by 15 points in 2020, Harris managed only 10 per cent.
The media’s narrative of a gender election, of female voters disgusted with Trump propelling Harris into the White House, didn’t materialise.

The reptiles decided to break up the rant with some audio visual relief and a caption As the Democrats face defeat and Trump prepares to return to the White House, what's to come for the next four years relies on the last votes being counted.

Dame Slap carried on gloating, and black bashing, and never mind where her love of Magamania left her last time. She wants it all again, that deep malaise of the looniest of the far right:

Where does that leave the party of DEI, and the left’s chorus line of media cheerleaders in the US and abroad? Humbled? Keen to learn from the deeper causes of this election? Not likely. So far, they’ve been picking at political crumbs – her dumb decision to pick Tim Waltz as her VP running mate, what questions she botched, how she dodged and weaved when it came to her views on fracking. How she shunned podcaster Joe Rogan.
All of that is true. But they are symptoms of a deep malaise on the political left. The Democrats settled on Harris for the wrong reasons. Her flaws were well known. Her performance in the 2020 primaries was underwhelming and her failure to address immigration as VP was abysmal.

At this point, the pond began to feel like an unhappy cartoonist:

Is it just the pond or does Dame Slap become nastier and nastier and even more deeply racist as she proceeds? Or was she on hand for the whupping from the get go?

The Democrats’ blind obsession meant they preferred gender and race to proven performance, even at lower levels of government. Had Democrats focused on merit, not DEI, the 2024 presidential race might have been tighter. They might even have their man – or woman – in the Oval Office. Voters rejected the left’s obsession with DEI for good reason: because the DEI malaise has spread far beyond the political realm, into workplaces and schools, universities and publishing houses, bureaucracies, arts organisations, legal firms, their representative bodies, in courts and the media too.
Especially over the past decade or so, DEI ideology has been embedded systemically by people who don’t do anything productive. The purpose of a university, for example, is to teach and encourage research. DEI administrators do neither. It’s the same in myriad other institutions. Like workplace parasites, DEI commissars, whether they work in “people and culture” departments or evangelise elsewhere, live off others.
They burrow down deep into an institution, embedding themselves in senior ranks too, making the organisation less productive, mandating “cultural” training sessions, ensuring that hiring, firing and promotions adhere to DEI policies.
In July, Republican consultant and adviser Karl Rove wrote that referring to Harris as a “DEI hire … is stupid and ugly and alienates voters”. As it transpired, what alienated voters was the fact Harris was the real DEI deal – as in “didn’t earn it”.
DEI ideology is stupid and ugly. Harris didn’t have to fight for the presidential nomination; Democrats handed it to her. Peddling DEI sanctimony, the party and its media lackeys assumed a woman of colour would score a slam-dunk win against an old white guy with a foul mouth.

The more they promoted an incompetent black woman while daily bashing her white male counterpart, they more they reminded voters of why gender and race are lousy reasons for a promotion. With not a skerrick of shame, this same mob takes no responsibility for what transpired this week.

Yep, that'd pass for deeply racist, and with no notion of the racket that was being run up to the finish:

And with that there was just one further ranting at the clouds by Dame Slap:

It wasn’t just men who rejected Harris in large numbers. Women did too. Because DEI is not just an affront to mothers with sons, it disrespects women. DEI is patronising – and counter-productive.
DEI acolytes took a nice idea and turned it on its head. DEI ideology doesn’t encourage diversity, equity and inclusion; it stokes a new form of homogeneity, oppression and division. DEI doesn’t foster excellence. The boards of large companies, for example, have become breeding grounds for the sort of mediocrity guaranteed by DEI.
It takes a determined effort to miss the big cultural trends that explain Trump’s victory. Hand-in-hand with DEI has been the feminisation of modern Western societies. Too often, a desirable effort to ensure that women get their just deserts has meant treating feminine traits as superior and steadily chipping away at masculinity. Redefining even mainstream masculinity to be toxic may excite big-city elites, but it’s not earning applause in the suburbs where most people live.
Most people don’t need another Trump victory to realise that the poorly labelled progressive left has gone too far in its modern-day project to mould society to suit its personal cultural cravings. But it can’t hurt.
The meaning of Trump’s thumping, historic second win – after all that we know about him in 2024 – can be ignored only if you’re a cultural ideologue, part of the cultural rent-seeking class that uses institutions as breeding grounds for political agendas, or members of their feckless cheer squad in the media.
What happened in America this week was the political equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion, that fundamental principle of physics that states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Trump was the left’s creation in 2016. His win in 2024 is down to them, too.

Please, give credit where credit is due. 

Faux Noise and its minions did something to help, shilling madly for their supper, as did Uncle Leon and a host of oligarchs, shilling madly for government grants, lower taxes and no regulations to speak of. (Lordy, lordy, will the oligarch billionaires make out like masters of the grift, while the mug punters will pay for a tariff fest).

It's on that pack of grifters when the shit hits the fan, as it inevitably will. 

Unfortunately, for some reason, Dame Slap seems expert at dodging the shit - living abroad and only dropping in to don a Maga cap now and then helps - but it's understandable why others are keen to avoid the shit storm that threatens, as assorted clouds gather in the sky, and people talk of bug out kits or leaving the country: