You're damn straight I'm still gloating

And sans any discovery of rational self-awareness from progressives, I'm looking forward to a long run with a smile on my face.

Woke science destroyer? I’m your huckleberry. Get some!

It’s been a little over three weeks since voters in this country issued a stunning and decisive rebuke to, first and foremost, the Democratic Party and their laughably inept candidates, but also to progressivism, DEI, wokeness, lawfare, the federal bureaucracy, the legacy media, celebrity cultural arbiters who don’t know their size, government censors and “disinformation” gatekeepers who are full of crap, tolerance of illegal immigration and crime, fealty to the expert class, and condescension from overcredentialed, underproductive, and generally useless academic and bureaucratic toadies.

It’s been 22 days, and the buzz still hasn’t worn off. I’ve actually been a little surprised by this reverie until a friend explained it to me yesterday in a way that made total sense. If truth, fairness, merit, and the rule of law are things you value, he told me, you’ve spent most of the 21st century wandering like a lost soul through an insane and unfriendly gaslit landscape. Until, that is, 22 days ago. “You have the right,” he explained, “to feel good about how things have turned out. You’ve earned it.”

Thanks, Larry.

So damn straight I'm still gloating. And here’s the best part: I couldn’t care less about Donald Trump. I didn't even vote for him. I’m not gloating because Trump won; I’m gloating because the left lost. Not just lost, but got absolutely clocked. Go perch on that, wokesters.

On the topic of exactly how big of an ass-whipping this election actually was for the left, Democratic operatives and pundits seem to have found some succor in Trump’s “narrow” margin of victory. According to one Harris strategist, “It was close. All we needed was a break here and there that we didn’t get.” That’s bullshit. Trump won by destroying the vaunted “blue wall.” In many of those heretofore blue states, Republican presidential candidates have historically run 5 or more points behind Democratic candidates. So if Trump won by, say, 2 points, that’s a 7+ point swing. Trump overperformed among nearly every demographic.

That’s not quite the same thing as barely squeaking across the finish line. Face it, Democrats, you got creamed.

As much as the left would like to chalk up this loss to just Biden, misogny, racism, or the economy, it was far more than that. It was a wholesale rejection of progressivism. November 5 was an unmistakable thumb in the eye of the left. And it wasn’t nearly as much that people loved Donald Trump as it was that they rejected the left—their lies, their illiberalism, their unmistakeable tilt towards totalitarianism, and their social lunacy.

For me, personally, this election was a decades-in-the-making rebuke of every DEI-obsessed, morally bereft university administrator that I was forced to take seriously under threat of losing my job rather than on account of even a scintilla of merit. It was a calldown to every progressive nimrod who attempted to censor their way to control over the last decade because their ideas would be found wanting if exposed to competition. It was a dope smack to every lefty academic or pundit shilling to save America by attacking our foundational ideals. It was a rejection of lawfare. And it was a foghorn blast from most of the country at everyone on the left who likes to end any challenge to their loopy ideas by shouting down critics as bigots.

For me, the most personally satisfying part of this election’s outcome was that it was an eff-u to every wokester who bent science, my life’s work, into a twisted funhouse mirror image of itself to justify nonsensical ideological bullshit. It’s an Oh yeah? to every ideologically driven halfwit who couldn’t come to terms with basic scientific principles if it bit them in the grollies, who nonetheless felt completely empowered to slag anyone questioning dubious (and ultimately erroneous) Covid narratives. It’s my way of clapping back at everyone who thinks that equity is more important than rigor in science.

There are days I’m tempted to start believing in heaven and hell, specifically for the opportunity to wish for a circle of hell for purveyors of woke science to rot in. I’m not down with science as just another postmodern “way of knowing.” Not by a long shot.

So yeah, I'm still rockin’.

This election, by the way, not only screams repudiation, but it comes with a roadmap of how it happened.

Courtesy of Colin Wright

Though I have always been an independent voter, I was, until recently, a much more natural political fit with the center left than the right. My professional career was predominantly in academia. I’m not religious, and I believe strongly in the separation of church and state. I do think that government can occasionally be helpful with things beyond what is strictly enumerated in our constitution—though the last few years have beaten a lot of that out of me. I believe in reputable science, whether it says what I want it to or not. I believe in democracy, which means not always getting everything that I want. And I believe in being as kind to others as I can. We’re all in this together. No one gets a free ride in life, and you never know what someone else is dealing with. When in doubt, be cool. Show some compassion. Try not to be an asshole any more than you absolutely have to.

All of that used to sound more like the provenance of the left to me than the right. But no more. Things have changed. Is giving up 10% of your income to an organization founded on the belief that an angel directed the chosen one to golden scrolls in a hillside that divinely inspired our constitution really anymore ludicrous, in terms of suspension of disbelief, than claiming that a man can become a woman with only the desire to change gender and maybe breast implants? I don’t think so. For folks like me, it’s a brave new world.

Did you just say you're gonna use the Nauvoo as a battering ram?

Many of you who, like me, have been relocated along the political spectrum without so much as moving a muscle have wished for an alternative to both political parties. That makes yesterday’s piece in Racket News, The Democrats’ Dirty Tricks Playbook, simultaneously interesting and disgusting. This reporting hits close to home, as I’ve joined every recent movement that’s attempting to form a serious, centrist third party in this country. It’s the only way I can effectively wash the stink off of me after I leave a voting booth.

Racket’s reporting confirms what many of us have suspected: that the Democrats will allow this only over their dead bodies. For all of their fearmongering and deceit over voter disenfranchisement, they evidently have no problem with disenfranchising candidates—something that is just as illegal as disenfranchising voters. When the Biden DOJ was informed, with plenty of evidence, that this was happening, their response was the sound of crickets. So much for being the defenders of our democracy.

Well, that and their attacks on the Bill of Rights, free speech, public safety, controlled immigration, inconvenient science, and the list goes on.

So yeah, I’m going to gloat. I earned it. And if you’re with me, you earned it too. I’ve become a member of the right not by choice but because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And I know who my friends are.

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