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Awakening the Giant: How the 2024 Election Sparked Real Cultural Change
Flopping Aces ^ | 11-20-24 | Robert Zimmerman

Posted on 11/21/2024 7:37:14 AM PST by Starman417

In my long life there have been a number of times post-election when pundits nationwide have claimed that the results signaled a major cultural transition. This claim was made in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president. It was made again in 1994 when voters gave the Republicans their first majority in the House of Representatives in about four decades. A similar claim was made in 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time.

In every single one of these cases the claim was false. There was no major cultural transition. Republicans might have won control, but the American public and its political class still largely leaned leftward. There was almost no change politically. Despite for example Bill Clinton’s announcement that “The era of big government is over” after the 1994 election, the federal government continued to grow in size and power, and to do so with ever increasing speed.

Even more significant, in every single case, the American people went back to sleep after the election. They considered the election their statement of what must be done, and assumed naively that the new elected officials would obey that statement. No matter how much conservatives attempted to make the public aware that the government remained out of control and was further beginning to institute leftist policies far outside what anyone in America wanted, those attempts fell on deaf ears.

The American people were essentially not interested. The only political movement that moved with any passion was that of the left, and it took advantage of this passion to successfully to get its policies imposed.

It seems however that the 2024 election signals a real cultural transition, far deeper and more significant than the mere shift of voting patterns to the right that most pundits are noting by all demographic groups.

No, what is happening is a shift in passion. The American public has awakened in a way I have never seen. I give you this news report as a clear sign, as the events it describes occurred last week, after the November election, when Americans in the past would gone back into slumber and stop paying attention. Watch and be amazed, not just by the outrage by hundreds of ordinary citizens, but by the fact that this outrage was reported correctly and sympathetically by a television news report.

BREAKING: Parents blasted the @StHelensSD school board after discovering that a teacher who was arrested for allegedly s*xuaIIy abusing students was LET BACK IN THE CLASSROOM while still under investigation without the school even informing parents.

Why are schools covering for… pic.twitter.com/4o1hFJC89R— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 14, 2024

Rather than go to sleep after the election, parents and students in large numbers descended on a school board meeting to express their righteous anger over the school board’s willingness for years to ignore sexual abuse complaints by students about their teachers. More significantly, this outrage grew quickly because everyone involved was able to get educated about what was happening by the new openness on social media, fueled further by the return of free speech on X.

Nor is this story an outlier. It is the pattern we are seeing nationwide. In another example, when Whoopi Goldberg slandered a bakery in Staten Island — claiming falsely that it refused to fill her order because of her politics when the problem was simply due to mechanical problems that made filling her large order impossible — the public quickly rose up to defend and support the bakery, while lambasting Goldberg for her slander.

Similarly, in only one of numerous recent examples, a Connecticut school teacher went on line to whine about Donald Trump’s election victory, and in doing so she actually threatened violence against Trump supporters. The public response was so loud and overwhelming that her school superintendent immediately removed her from the school premises pending his investigation, and she resigned almost immediately thereafter.

I spent the last four years reporting hundreds of similar slander and blacklisting attacks against the right. In most cases there was little public outcry, either because of apathy or fear of retaliation for speaking out. Now however the public will no longer sit still and take it, but is instead responding with a loud roar. Do not be surprised if Goldberg finds herself fired from her position on the television show, The View, because of this and other absurdly slanderous statements.

Both the school teacher in Connecticut and Goldberg were doing something far different than the hundreds of conservatives blacklisted by the left from 2020 to 2023. Those conservatives were almost always simply expressing reasonable conservative opinions, and getting destroyed because of this. The teacher however was threatening violence, while Goldberg was defaming the bakery with lies. Such behavior is beyond the pale, and should immediately disqualify both from their jobs — teaching any kids anywhere, or doing political analysis on television.

And now, the public is not only aware of these things, it is loudly and continuously rising up to demand consequences for anyone behaving in this manner.

In other words, Americans are no longer asleep. Or as one Japanese admiral wrote in his diary after leading the attack on Pearl Harbor, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

The Democrats have done all they could in the past decade to awake the sleeping giant of ordinary Americans. The last four years finished the job. Americans appear enraged and unwilling to fall asleep. Instead, they are using their smart phones to pay attention, and are responding angrily when people in the political realm behave badly.

The astonishing house cleaning to come

This is the real transition. American culture for decades has been dominated by a soft leftist bent that the general public was willing to tolerate, even if it often opposed these political goals. That has now ended. The consequences of this change will be hard to measure.

Take a look at this somewhat complex court decision that I reported on last week. In this court decision, a two-judge panel went beyond the specifics of the lawsuit before it to rule instead on the basic legal authority of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), concluding that its decades-long requirement that all government agencies obey its environmental recommendations in writing regulations was illegal, that CEQ simply did not have the statutory authority to do this.

As I said, the case itself is very complex. It is not even clear this ruling will stand up, since in the end the CEQ’s recommendations essentially reflect those of the President, whose authority to determine how the agencies under him create regulations based on Congressional law is legal and quite final.

The point however is not whether this decision will stand up. The point is that the judges were quite willing to rule on the legal authority of a government entity, and rule against its authority, essentially invalidating its power.

Such decisions have been unheard of for many many decades. Judges would never do such things. Since the mid-1900s they would always assume, without question, that such government agencies had the power to do what they were doing, and would only rule to refine that power, either to expand it or limit it somewhat.

Yet what these judges did last week is now becoming the norm, not the exception. The most well known examples are of course two recent Supreme Court decisions. First, the court ruled that the Roe v Wade decision was unconstitutional, that the power to regulation abortions was never given to the courts or the federal government, that the Constitution is very clear, this issue should be regulated by the states, and the states only.

(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net ...


TOPICS: Government; Politics
KEYWORDS: 2024; slander; trump; turning

1 posted on 11/21/2024 7:37:14 AM PST by Starman417
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To: Starman417

BTTT


2 posted on 11/21/2024 7:43:57 AM PST by nopardons
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To: Starman417

How about the real change in the GOP after the Tea Party got them in power again? Oh . . ..


3 posted on 11/21/2024 7:53:58 AM PST by oldplayer
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To: Starman417
Everyone always leaves off the most important part of that quote...

"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

Drive them back to the shadows. Do not stop attacking.

4 posted on 11/21/2024 7:54:08 AM PST by Frank Drebin (And don't ever let me catch you guys in America!)
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To: Starman417
Despite for example Bill Clinton’s announcement that “The era of big government is over” after the 1994 election, the federal government continued to grow in size and power, and to do so with ever increasing speed.

DC government employees need to 'look like America - and America is NOT a Sexual Weirdo Bathhouse or the women's division of BLM, AND it's definitely NOT 98% liberal democrat.

5 posted on 11/21/2024 7:55:18 AM PST by GOPJ (We need to calltrans what they really are: Men Pretending to be Women. Cancel culture's dead. )
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To: Starman417
DC government employees need to 'look like America - and America is NOT a Sexual Weirdo Bathhouse or the women's division of BLM, AND it's definitely NOT 98% liberal democrat.

To stop DC from becoming an entrenched royal liberal court it also needs 4 and 6 years jobs so citizens can experience government work without becoming married to it.

6 posted on 11/21/2024 7:57:44 AM PST by GOPJ (We need to calltrans what they really are: Men Pretending to be Women. Cancel culture's dead. )
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To: Starman417

I think the page has been turned on the tranny crap. To hear the Speaker of the House publicly state that “a man cannot become a woman” shows that the days of being cancelled for free speech are OVER.


7 posted on 11/21/2024 8:01:38 AM PST by bigbob (Yes. We ARE going back!)
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To: Starman417

Bob Dylan wrote this article?


8 posted on 11/21/2024 8:09:55 AM PST by Signalman (When your enemy is digging himself a hole, don't take away his shovel)
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To: nopardons

You dont need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows,Aye Bob?


9 posted on 11/21/2024 8:13:17 AM PST by dmcnash (Back off! I'm a Scientist.)
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To: Starman417
The author *almost* gets it. It is not a change in politics, which he sees. It is a change in the power of the old Media, which he ignores, although it is obvious.

The American people were essentially not interested. The only political movement that moved with any passion was that of the left, and it took advantage of this passion to successfully to get its policies imposed.

No, it was the Mediacracy which controlled the narrative and, hence public passion and opinion. People can only act on the information they have. For decades, the left had a lock on the information which people had access to, or, at least easy access to.

This is an enormous political change. It is not a change because people woke up. People woke up because the Left no longer had a lock on controlling the media.

10 posted on 11/21/2024 8:24:40 AM PST by marktwain (The Republic is at risk. Resistance to the Democratic Party is Resistance to Tyranny. )
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To: marktwain
Yes, that worm may be turning. Social and internet media is no less filtered and no less uncredible than the main stream media but there is a lot more of it to mislead and mislead it does. People now are al lot less discerning than some may have been in the past. They are also overwhelmed by information making it just that much harder to sort wheat from chaff and truth from fiction.

There is more mis, dis and wrong information on the net than there is in the main stream media. I wonder if it does not move us to something even more like anarchy?

11 posted on 11/21/2024 9:07:59 AM PST by Sequoyah101 (Donald John Trump. First man to be Elected to the Presidency THREE times since FDR.)
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To: bigbob
"To hear the Speaker of the House publicly state that “a man cannot become a woman” shows that the days of being cancelled for free speech are OVER."

For the moment perhaps, but leftists will never stop, and the moment people stop paying attention, and the moment the left regains any significant power, they will go right back to doing what they do: divide, censor, rage, intimidate, coerce, etc. It is who they are.

12 posted on 11/21/2024 9:16:57 AM PST by Sicon ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - G. Orwell)
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To: AdmSmith; AnonymousConservative; Arthur Wildfire! March; Berosus; Bockscar; BraveMan; cardinal4; ...

13 posted on 11/21/2024 11:16:23 AM PST by SunkenCiv (Putin should skip ahead to where he kills himself in the bunker.)
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To: Starman417

Wrong cause and effect.

Cultural change caused the election results.


14 posted on 11/21/2024 12:45:28 PM PST by metmom (He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus”)
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