Leftist Narratives Have Collapsed!

By Steven Yates

January 24, 2025

Donald Trump is back! During his Inauguration ceremony he made it clear as crystal: the Bidenista era is over!

What’s also over is the credibility of the cultural left. There’s nothing … well … left! Its narratives have collapsed!

Left wing Democrats — in government, in “legacy” media, in corporations — did everything in their power to try to stop Trump’s return to the Oval Office! They pursued four criminal cases and a civil case against him. They defamed him. They tried to invoke the Insurrection Clause in the Sixteenth Amendment to keep him off state ballots. They threw an enormous sum of money into his opponent’s war chest.

All for naught!

Only one of the criminal cases, the one over hush money payments to the porn star, landed any blows. But few outside the leftist ecosphere bought the transforming of bookkeeping mistakes into felonies at the behest of a leftist prosecutor who’d run for the office on his open desire to “get Trump.”

Corporate media regaled audiences daily about the (nonexistent) “progress” of the other cases. They’ve now been dropped. Jack Smith crawled off like a scolded puppy, tail between his legs.

The civil case, E. Jean Carroll’s accusation of sexual assault, was based on the flimsiest evidence imaginable and would probably have been thrown out of court had its target been anyone else.

Leftists treat the infamous Hollywood Access Tape as evidence Trump thinks sexual assault is okay. That’s defamatory! Taken in context, all he was saying is that it is very easy for a male celebrity to find someone to have sex with, that he could get away with nearly anything because women practically threw themselves at him.

Over 75.5 million voters shrugged it all off. They’ve learned what lawfare looks and sounds like. They were unimpressed by repeated mantras by Democrat judges, Democrat-controlled courts, and Democrat-dominated corporate media, that Trump was facing the “rule of law.”

Moneyed interests threw over a billion dollars at Kamala Harris. Wasted. Voters weren’t going to put Sleepy Joe’s DEI (“Didn’t Earn It”) VP in the White House, although she did get an alarming 72.4 million official votes.

Trump was portrayed as a “threat to democracy” by people who (1) relied on specious legal reasoning trying to remove him from the ballot when he was the clear favorite of opposition voters, and (2) whose own candidate had never won a single primary vote. This, too, wasn’t lost on anyone.

* * *

In the meantime, Democrats and their corporate media allies spent four years trying to cover up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. They gaslit the public about what we could see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears: a president whose speech was often slurred, never took questions which called for extemporaneous responses, had to be led on and off stage, who at least once tried to shake hands with someone who wasn’t there, and once claimed to have “just spoken with” a foreign leader (France’s Mitterand) who died years ago.

Then Sleepy Joe fell apart in front of tens of millions of viewers trying to debate Trump.

He belligerently tried to hang on. Dementia sufferers often go into denial. Having had a parent who succumbed to dementia, I can spot it a mile away. I tried to tell anyone who would listen back in 2020 that Sleepy Joe was in cognitive decline. Finally, his own people had to tell him, “You’re done.”

The irony is, given the sheer intensity of their efforts to destroy Trump’s reputation and ruin his life, Democrats might have had a chance to win had they not indulged Sleepy Joe for as long as they did in his belief (which he apparently still holds!) that he could have defeated Trump and served four more years.

When Kamala was given the opportunity to differentiate her ideas and proposals from his, asked what she’d do differently, the best she could stammer went something like, “I can’t think of a thing.” I suppose it’s worth noting that she said something intelligible for a change.

* * *

Leftists clearly consider themselves smarter than us ordinary mortals. They’ll say (as one of their number on MSNBC said the other day) that Trump and his billionaire cronies (meaning: Elon Musk) have “duped” America.

That’s to say, they “duped” the more than 75.5 million voters who cast ballots for Trump.

In my experience (which includes watching them up close in academia for years), cultural leftists excel at two things. (1) They can look facts in the face and deny that they exist. Like Sleepy Joe’s cognitive decline. (2) They can make up “facts” out of whole cloth and tell us it’s real. Like Kamala’s qualifications to be president.

It has become increasingly evident, moreover, that the cultural left has put forth some truly idiotic ideas over the past few years. These ideas have been helped by the collapse of education in America, its transformation into a branch of the left wing ecosphere. Coming to mind first: that men can “transition” into women, and women into men, through “gender affirming care” including hormone treatments, and that such procedures ought to be made available to grade school children.

According to these people, you can be any “gender” you like! They seem to have dozens of “genders”!

“Transgenders” — not just adults, but teenagers and kids — have come out of the walls!

Back in the late 1990s, I took a two-year public health education curriculum and received an MPH. I never once heard the word transgender, neither from faculty nor fellow students. Given how that department stressed sex ed, had the idea been kicking around back then, I’m positive I would have encountered it.

Gender dysphoria is real, though not exactly common. Once, not terribly long ago, it was seen as a disorder and treated, not given affirmative action protections which, if you criticized, you could lose your job.

Trump has restored sanity with a single executive order, declaring that henceforth, the U.S. federal government will “recognize two sexes, male and female,” noting how “gender ideology” has nothing to do with biological reality. The fact that so many people now use the term gender when they mean sex indicates how deeply cultural leftism now permeates American life.

* * *

Multiple other failures and lies came back to haunt the previous dumpster-fire administration.

Lies about what happened on January 6, 2021: it was not an “insurrection”; Trump did not order anyone to enter the Capital, just to march to the Capital (he used the phrase “legacy” media always omits: peacefully and patriotically). No leftists shrieks or howl will alter this. One of Trump’s first actions was to pardon those in prison or who now have criminal records because they entered the Capitol that day.

It’s true that a few (under 10 percent) engaged in vandalism or got violent with police. I’d have looked at individual cases before granting a blanket pardon (JD Vance had suggested this) … but Trump’s bypassing this is surely no worse than Sleepy Joe (or, more likely, his handlers) pardoning his son after saying he wouldn’t, and then giving “preemptive pardons” to other family members, Mark Milley, Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, and others.

Indeed, while Trump pardoned 1,550 people and ordered cases against 900 more dismissed, Sleepy Joe had given last-minute pardons to over 8,000 — in some cases, to criminals far more violent than any Jan-6er!

America’s southern border: we barely need to look at the mess that developed, which Trump is also going to try to clean up. That was also Kamala’s doing, as Sleepy Joe (or, more likely, his handlers) had delegated that responsibility to her.

Maybe Trump exaggerates the level of criminality here, although Laken Riley’s family wouldn’t agree. But there are procedures for immigrating to the U.S. legally and working in the U.S. legally, just as there are for entering the country legally. Why is this so difficult for leftists to understand?

Foreign policy disasters: as much as has been written about Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, I think we can ask whether he would have undertaken it had he sensed there would be competent opposition from the Asylum on the Potomac.

Would Hamas have done what they did on October 7, 2023; or Israel undertaken its brutal retaliation in Gaza which has killed far more people than Hamas did, had both parties not realized that leadership in the West was diminished to near-nonexistence?

Lies about the economy: I continue to read how Biden left us an “economic boom.” First of all, politicians don’t create “economic booms.” They can, at best, create conditions for economic betterment, but the worst inflation since the 1970s wasn’t going to accomplish that. Because second, no one in his right mind believes the economy is “booming” when at least half of the population is struggling to afford groceries, healthcare, and the roof over their heads. Homelessness, as I’ve observed elsewhere, hit a record high last year because rentals and housing prices have skyrocketed and continue to rise.

“It’s in the numbers!” bleat the corporate media zombies.

It has become clear, the Dow has completely decoupled from the real economy, the one in which you and I buy our groceries. The point-zero-one percenters now control more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population. Leftists used to care about such things, but guess what? If the present breed of leftist has any realistic plans to change this, to improve the world the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population has to live in, he/she/they are sure guarding their secrets!

Official government numbers (inflation, unemployment, etc.) just aren’t believed by many people anymore, now that they realize how much they’ve been lied to.

“Legacy” corporate media, left-of-center for decades, is in a shambles. Their viewership in freefall, MSNBC and CNN are being forced into layoffs. People are turning to X, Epoch Times, Breitbart.com, Substack publications, NewsWithViews.com, and other nontraditional platforms for truthful commentary.

* * *

That the cultural left lives in an alternative reality is something it continues to confirm all by itself, without any help from conservatives.

Consider Elon Musk’s purported “Nazi salute”: the first left-wing outburst of the new Trump era (it took less than 24 hours!).

As John Nolte explained on Breitbart, that’s not what happened. I’ll hand him the mike:

What Musk did was not at all confusing to decent people. Speaking to a crowd of Trump supporters Monday at the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., he said, “I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you.” Then he touches his heart and makes a gesture throwing his heart out to the crowd. Then he literally says, “Thank you. My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured, thanks to you.” CNN just lost a defamation suit and here are a couple of CNN’s basement-ratings harpies defaming Elon Musk by removing all of the context from the moment — and by “context” I mean the audio where he says, “My heart goes out to you.” Without the only context that matters, of course, it looks like a Nazi salute….

Normal People understand the difference between “Sieg Heil!” and “My heart goes out to you.”

Not even the Anti-Defamation League is convinced it was a Nazi salute!

This hasn’t stopped academic lefties like New York University’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, of that school’s history department, who opined: “Historian of fascism here. It was a Nazi salute, and a very belligerent one, too!”

Nor did it stop AOC from following up: “In this country, we hate Nazis!”

Alternative reality!

Trump may have won, but this mindset still dominates American academia, much “legacy” media, and much of pop culture. It’s going to take much more than a mere political victory to dislodge it. “Legacy” media may well be finished before too much longer, but since Trump can’t simply waltz onto campuses and fire tenured faculty members, I’ve been saying for some time now that we need new “parallel” institutions … a lot of them! (Any potential donors out there? We’re not talking about something that can be done on a shoestring budget!)

Incidentally, the situation overseas, in Europe, isn’t much better for the left.

Over and over, we’ve read (in Establishment publications like The Guardian) about the rise of “authoritarianism,” “right wing extremists” and “populist” parties in European countries: Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Romania, and elsewhere.

What all these parties have in common is putting their own people first, as opposed to the open borders mindset of European Union political-corporate globalists who have turned a deaf ear to both the economic and cultural wasteland open migration has brought about.

All this means is that cultural leftist narratives have collapsed there as well.

* * *

Diversity, contrary to one of these, is not our strength! Not when it’s imposed involuntarily, willy nilly, on entire societies. What remains of democracy in the West still allows people to exercise what clout they still have in voting booths, and more and more, they support alternatives to political-corporate elites. Since the latter control the largest media, you’re not going to hear about these efforts if you don’t seek them out. They’re not on the 6 pm news.

Trump has moved to end DEI at the federal level. Corporations, moreover, are backing out of it. It doesn’t work! It gave Harvard a Claudine Gay! It’s allowed many colleges and universities to fill up with people who turn their classrooms into launching pads for left wing political activism, and who yell bloody murder if a conservative tries to do this. None of these people have done a thing to … say … help the black community in their cities. White women have reaped the lion’s share of the benefits. They’ve never had life better! And a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, right? This mindset has driven down the number of men pursuing higher education. Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), refusing to date or otherwise be involved with women, or working for women, has now become a national movement, balancing the radical feminist 4B Movement.

This division between the sexes, as I’ve noted previously, is not healthy for a civilization where birthrates were already falling. The cultural left has done this.

* * *

As I’ve noted in the past, once, long ago, there was a left many of us grew up with and even aligned with on a few things. That left rejected racial discrimination, paying women less than men for the same work, and the Vietnam War as moral wrongs. That left worried about economic inequality and seemed, at the time, genuinely concerned to bring about a more peaceful, just, and humane world. Did it get everything right? No, of course not. But it had considerably more credibility and moral authority than anything left-of-center today.

A major turning point, I was arguing as far back as the 1990s (no one paid attention), was the left-leaning Warren Burger Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) which shifted the meaning of discrimination from an action taken by individuals to lack of politically acceptable outcomes, or ratios. This shift in meaning crept into academic culture and from there into media and politics. It is behind the replacement of equality with equity. This is the reason we saw discrimination against white men … and eventually, in the new century, open attacks on “whiteness” and on “toxic masculinity.”

That genuine efforts to see women and minorities of merit given a fair shake were replaced by this sort of thing has not been lost on the more discerning of the latter, which is why a record number of blacks and Latinos voted for Trump in all three elections in which he has been a lead candidate.

That earlier left is dead, in America at least.

Now, it’s successor is dying, as Trump openly proclaims (again, handing over the mike):

We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based. This week I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.

He was referring to DEI, of course. His efforts are already getting pushback from the cultural lefties on platforms like HuffPo, aggregated by “legacy” outlets. Also getting pushback is his call to end birthright citizenship (a longstanding perverse incentive for illegal immigrants to have kids in the U.S.). Leftist legal eagles have already begun filing lawsuits against the new administration.

The long and short of it: even though Trump 2.0 is now in office we’re in for a wild ride, because although the cultural left’s narratives may have collapsed, no one thinks these people are going to go down without a fight. When they don’t get their way, I would not rule out their becoming violent.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com

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Steven Yates’s Substack publication is called Navigating the New Normal. You’ll find commentary there that isn’t available here. While more and more of the Internet is disappearing behind paywalls, NtNN is still free. Consider subscribing, as that is how the Substack algorithm knows I exist.

Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.

In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.

As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.

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