XPost: talk.politics.misc, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.guns
XPost: sac.politics, alt.society.liberalism
In less than six months, the entire world has been turned upside down.
There is no longer such a thing as conventional wisdom or the status quo.
The unthinkable has become the banal.
Take illegal immigration -- remember the 10,000 daily illegal entries
under former President Joe Biden?
Recall the only solution was supposedly "comprehensive immigration
reform"--a euphemism for mass amnesties.
Now, there is no such thing as daily new illegal immigration. It simply disappeared with common-sense enforcement of existing immigration laws --
and a new president.
How about the 40,000-50,000 shortfall in military recruitment?
Remember all the causes that the generals cited for their inability to
enlist soldiers: generational gangs, obesity, drugs, and stiff competition
with private industry?
And now?
In just six months, recruitment targets are already met; the issue is
mostly moot.
Why? The new Pentagon flipped the old, canceling its racist DEI programs
and assuring the rural, middle-class Americans -- especially white males -
- that they were not systemically racist after all.
Instead, they were reinvited to enlist as the critical combat cohort who
died at twice their demographic share in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How about the "end of the NATO crisis," supposedly brought on by a
bullying U.S.?
Now the vast majority of NATO members have met their pledges to spend two percent of GDP on defense, which will soon increase to 5%.
Iconic neutrals like Sweden and Finland have become frontline NATO
nations, arming to the teeth. The smiling NATO Secretary-General even
called Trump the "daddy" of the alliance.
What about indomitable, all-powerful, theocratic Iran, the scourge of the Middle East for nearly 50 years?
Although it had never won a war in the last half-century, its terrorist surrogates -- Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis -- were supposedly too dangerous to provoke.
Now?
Most of their expeditionary terrorists are neutered, and their leaders are
in hiding or dead. Iran has no air force, no real navy, no air defenses,
and no active nuclear weapons program.
Its safety apparently depends only on the mood of the U.S. or Israel on
any given day, not to fly into its airspace and take out its missiles,
nuclear sites, generals, or theocrats at will.vWhat happened to the
supposedly inevitable recession, hyperinflation, stock market collapse, unemployment spikes, and global trade war that last spring economists
assured us would hit by summer?
Job growth is strong, and April's inflation rate is the lowest in four
years. GDP is still steady. The stock market hit a record high. Trade
partners are renegotiating their surpluses with the U.S.vIt turns out that staying in the U.S. consumer market is the top priority of our trading partners. It seems their preexisting and mostly undisclosed profits were
large enough to afford reasonable U.S. symmetrical tariffs.
For now, news of tax cuts, deregulation, "drill baby, drill" energy
policies displacing Green New Deal strangulation, and $8-10 trillion in potential foreign investment has encouraged -- rather than deterred -- business.
Then there were our marquee elite universities, whose prestige, riches,
and powerful alumni made them answerable to no one.
And now, after the executive and congressional crackdown on their decades
of hubris?
Supposedly brilliant university presidents have resigned in shame. The
public has caught on to their grant surcharge gouging.
Campuses have backed off their arrogant defiance of the Supreme Court's
civil rights rulings.
They are panicked about the public exposure of their systemic
antisemitism.
They are scrambling to explain away their institutionalized ideological
bias and their tawdry profit-making schemes and mass recruitment of
wealthy foreign students from illiberal regimes.
So, the mighty Ivy League powerhouses are now humbling themselves to cut a
deal to save their financial hides and hopefully return to their proper
mission of disinterested education.
What happened to the trans juggernaut of sex as a social construct and its bookend gospel that biological men could dominate women's sports?
People woke up. They were no longer afraid to state that sex is binary and biologically determined. And biological men who dominate women's sports
are bullies, not heroes.
Where are the millionaire scamming architects of BLM now? Where is the
"DEI now, tomorrow, and forever" conventional wisdom?
Where are Professor Ibram X. Kendi and his $30,000 Zoom lessons on how to
fight racism by being racist?
They have all been exposed as the race hustlers they always were. Their
creed that it is OK for supposed victims to be racist victimizers
themselves was exposed as an absurd con.
So, what flipped everything?
We were living in an "emperor has no clothes" make-believe world for the
last few years. The people knew establishment narratives were absurd, and
our supposed experts were even more ridiculous.
But few -- until now -- had the guts to scream "the emperor is naked" to
dispel the fantasies.
When they finally did, reality returned.
https://pjmedia.com/victor-davis-hanson/2025/07/18/the-world-woke-up-
n4941859
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