That's the hill you want to die on?

The left and their allies in the media, academia, and the bureaucracy still don't understand the new lay of the land. The present is not like the past.

Me, watching CNN.

There’s a new drinking game in my living room called How long can I watch CNN without a shot of Fireball? My post-election record is well under five minutes. If I were forced, ala Alex in A Clockwork Orange, to watch a full hour of CNN, I’d be in a coma after the first 20 minutes. It’s the only way that I could tolerate the copious amounts of fallacious, often completely amnesiac bullshit that constitutes the “resistance” to Trump. CNN and much of the rest of the legacy media, along with most of the political left, still haven’t gotten the memo that the past presidential election was won convincingly by Donald Trump. The present is not like the past.

Trump ran the table in all of the swing states last November and outperformed previous Republican presidential candidates virtually everywhere. Trump won both the electoral college and the popular vote with large swings to the right in heretofore competitive or even blue districts. Trump significantly outperformed his opponent, Kamala Harris, on all issues that mattered to voters the most. The results of this election were not particularly close, not some sort of aberration, and not the result of anything other than the clear desire of the American electorate for a change in our country’s direction. It was a mandate from voters that’s very difficult to misinterpret—unless you’re flat-out trying.

Right after the election, I wrote about the magnitude of Trump’s mandate and the hypocrisy of the left in dealing with it. I would simply say to my friends on the left that you should have seen this coming. In fact, I think that most of you did, though you were loath to admit it while watching the train wreck right in front of you.

Now I don’t know where those of you who contemplate the great questions in life come down on the Copenhagen vs. Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but if you are a many worlds kind of person, I submit to you that the probabilities are exceedingly low for any parallel universe in which candidate Harris and the issues on which she ran triumph in the past election. Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate running a vacuous campaign of “joy” that had the buoyancy among the electorate of a lead balloon on Jupiter. It wasn’t a failure to communicate from the left on the issues that produced a Trump victory. Voters understood the message just fine. That’s why Harris lost.

But, in the spirit of complaisance, I’d rather light a candle than curse your darkness. So I say to my friends on the left: If you want to have something useful to contribute to the body politic other than just “resisting” the results of a fair and free democratic process, you might try, I don’t know, running better candidates? Maybe see about getting on the same side of the issues that are of concern to most voters instead of dismissing those voters as bigots, racists, misogynists, or fools merely for thinking differently than you? It’s up to you, but I think that kind of strategy may eventually yield greater dividends than the wailing and gnashing of teeth that’s your raison d'être at the moment.

But in the meantime, the hills that the left, academia, and the legacy media seem intent on dying upon are very odd. Let’s go down the list.

Trump is an existential threat to democracy. This is the one that I find the most amusing on it’s face and insulting to anyone not drinking the Kool-Aid that the left serves up when objecting to anything that does not originate within the indulgent, self-imagined virtuous confines of their neutron star-dense and impenetrable craniums. You can only cry wolf so many times before no one pays any attention. We’re way past that with the left and Trump.

By continuously lying about the reasons that Trump won his first election, exaggerating his misdeeds, lying about why Biden was more fit than Trump for office in 2020, and leveling a barrage of unsuccessful lawfare against Trump in an attempt to mortally wound his political ambitions, the left has run out of moves. Trump, having been found guilty of 34 felonies in what many see as an egregious use of lawfare, has rendered most any current legal attack moot in the eyes of many voters. So no one much cares when pompous legal TV analysts drone on about Trump breaking the legal system.

That’s also, by the way, why many cable TV news ratings are in free fall. Once the amusement of blatant hypocrisy wears off, there’s simply no reason to watch.

Opposing (and tipping off) ICE raids. Illegal immigration was one of the issues that tilted the outcome of the last election to Trump. It turns out that a majority of Americans, across the social spectrum, find functionally open borders unacceptable. Trump has made significantly more progress in addressing this issue in just one month than the previous administration did in four years. It was never a matter of could not, as progressives are wont to claim; it was would not. Trump has made that distinction obvious. But the best is yet to come. When the activists getting crossways with legal deportations of criminals start ending up in handcuffs themselves, I predict that this form of “resistance” will fade quickly. All it takes is a few days in the slammer getting intimately familiar with the people that got you there in the first place to produce ephipanies.

DEI and related social pathologies. The most effective ad in the last campaign cycle was Trump’s “Harris is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” As I mentioned last week, DEI isn’t popular anywhere outside of leftist enclaves. It isn’t even completely legal anymore. So when your message to voters is that diversity, equity, and inclusion—which mean whatever you want them to mean in the moment—are more important than merit, fairness, and legality, which are universally understood, you are on the losing side of an argument with most voters.

Insisting that biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports (to the extent of attempting to enshrine it in Title IX, a law that was originally written specifically to protect women) is, outside of very progressive bubbles, a winning argument to no one, ever. The same may be said of the recent practice of sending male inmates who claim to be female to women’s prisons where rape and abuse almost inevitably follow. No sentence that sends a woman to prison is supposed to include rape. Yet that’s exactly what various federal and state penitentiaries have ensured by placing male offenders with female inmates. It’s batshit crazy, and the majority of voters see it for exactly that. If that’s a hill you want to die on, I have just one question. What’s wrong with you?

Who elected Elon Musk? Okay, so who elected Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, Ron Klain, and whoever else was in charge of the executive branch during Joe Biden's clearly evident cognitive decline over the previous four years? At least I know who Musk is and what he’s up to because it’s all out there on his X feed. All we ever heard about Joe Biden was that he was fit as a fiddle and totally in charge—both obvious falsehoods.

In terms of the DOGE and its impact on the federal bureaucracy, who, two months ago, thought that rooting fraud, waste, inefficiency, and abuse out of the federal government was a bad thing? Indeed, most politicians run, at least in part, on reducing financial waste. Yet someone in the Democratic Party recently thought it was a great photo op to wheel out various progressive luminaries in front of the Department of the Treasury and the Pentagon to “resist” DOGE. I heart the federal bureaucracy is a slogan embraced by no one of my acquaintance.

Resisting Trump by defending the Pentagon, an arm of the federal government responsible for between 10% and 20% of our overall annual national budget and notorious for never having been successfully audited even one time, seems an exceedingly odd hill for anyone on the left to even defend, much less want to die on. But that’s how powerful the siren song of the resistance happens to be.

While I may disagree with Musk's methods and some of his access, I support the overarching goal of dismantling superfluous parts of a bloated government that compels me to pay taxes for wasteful nonsense (see USAID). I’m even over my objection to the shock-and-awe nature of the DOGE campaign because it’s evident that putting the bureaucrats in various federal agencies on notice instead of blowing the doors down would have been an invitation for them to dig in and evade. Again, most Americans, even if they are not completely onboard with the methods being used, are just fine with downsizing the federal beauracracy. You have to spend all of your time in the rarefied air of some distant weirdly elliptical orbit that only occasionally grazes Earth’s atmosphere to not get this. Yeah, CNN, that’s you.

Trump and the new right are only for MAGA. You are either a sucker or evil if you go for what they are selling. I have had this accusation leveled at me a lot since the election despite the fact that I did not vote for Trump and don’t much like the guy. I’m not MAGA in any way, shape, form, manner, or style. But I am willing to separate citizen Trump from President Trump and judge each on their respective merits. That, in the eyes of the left, is a mortal sin. In these tribal times, you’re either 100% with us or you’re the enemy. If you have anything good to say about Trump, as the thinking goes, you must not care about us, and we sure don’t care about you.

Let me suggest just one thing to all of those erstwhile friends and acquaintances who’ve decided that people like me are of morally dubious character because we won’t mindlessly and unproductively condemn all things Trump: There’s a difference between people who actually care about you and those who merely wish to exploit you for political power. If the ability to read minds existed, you might be surprised by how this might sort itself out.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com