If you understand Russian, here’s a gift for you. It’s a conversation between two leading Ukrainian thinkers about the nature of American society. Not only is the analysis brilliant, it’s based on a deeply conservative sensibility. The roasting of wokesters as a messianic cult and the explanation of Obama’s presidency are priceless.

These are people who love America and are sad to see its current turn towards “I have 73 genders and I’m a bigger victim than you.”

Let’s say I’m department Chair, and the administration says it’s going to cut 3 of our courses because of the budget difficulties. If I go and tell my colleagues that I lost us 3 whole courses, they’ll think I’m a loser, right? So what do I do?

Obviously, I go to the colleagues and tell them that the administration is cutting 16 of our courses. Everybody is stunned. 16 courses? This is a full third of all our course offerings. Sixteen??? This is catastrophic!

Yes, I say. These neoliberal bastards are rabid. Of course, I’ll do what I can but, honestly, I think it’s hopeless.

Then I go and bravely do absolutely nothing.

The administration takes away 4 of our courses because it’s always worse than what was announced.

I go back and tell the colleagues that we lost 4 courses. They were expecting 16, so losing only 4 sounds like an epic win. They think I’m a hero who defended 12 courses from elimination and eagerly set to cover the comparatively small loss of 4. Everybody loves me and votes to reelect me for a new term.

I haven’t done anything like it, and things don’t work like that at all. Everybody has to fulfill their contractual teaching loads, and the administration would never cut into that. I’m not talking about academia at all in this post.

I’ll let you guess what I’m actually talking about. I only want to add that spin is everything.

I voted D for Senate and Congress and R for everything else. Our races were not competitive but they are representative of wider trends. I couldn’t vote for the R candidates for Senate and Congress and barely managed to vote for the Republican challenger for the governorship because they weren’t serious people. They were bug-out crazies who weren’t trying to win. In all 3 cases, there was no campaign. No online presence, no yard signs (or, in Bailey’s case, a tiny number of the most poorly designed yard signs I’ve ever seen), no effort only to howl at the moon at night and not in public.

And the issues, my God. School closures, the forced masking of toddlers, the destruction of school sports and school programs for the developmentally disabled kids – which were some of the worst in the nation – were not mentioned. At all. The endless executive orders by the Dem governor, the destruction of small businesses – none of it was mentioned. My 6-year-old understands that in Illinois you need to run on the mismanagement of COVID. But Republicans ignored this surefire winning issue completely. In Illinois!

Inflation, another big issue. What kind of a suicidal move is it to recruit a bunch of heiresses to pose as “working mothers worried about paying bills”? These were the Republican candidates. Heiresses. You run an heiress against an actual mom from next door that we all know, and who do you think will sound more convincing on economic woes? Who do you think we are to love heiresses so much? Democrats?

The heiresses don’t seem to have noticed COVID, so it wasn’t mentioned in their mailers.

As we’ve seen with DeSantis, issues are what matters. Hard work, results – this is what brings victory. Random bleatings by fake working moms don’t work.

This was a well-deserved drubbing for the GOP. I hope it will finally serve as a lesson. We need a real party of the working people. That space is wide open in the US. Somebody needs to step into it.

It looks like the DeSantis win in Florida might be the only major win for our side tonight. I hope this is a lesson in what works for the rest of GOP.

And this is in an election where Trump isn’t even running for anything:

Imagine how joyfully they’ll feel sorry for themselves once he does run.

People are seriously bored in life.

If Floridians don’t return DeSantis to the governor’s mansion, I won’t even travel to Florida again. If you are lucky enough to get the best governor in the nation, you don’t piss that away. Come to Illinois and look at what things can be like if you aren’t happy with DeSantis.

Where’s everybody checking the results of the election? Please share your favorite place for getting the good news. But don’t share if it’s the TV. I don’t watch election news on TV anymore.

And if Democrats at least recognized what they did, if they said, “yeah, that ‘defund the police’ thing was a mistake” and “yes, shouldn’t have closed down the schools and forced toddlers into masks. We were scared, we made a mistake, sorry”, I would look at them kindly.

Even if they continued defending the defund the police, the 2020 riots, the school closures, the masked 2-year-olds – gosh, even that would be better than what they are actually doing which is this high-handed, supercilious gaslighting of the people whose brains don’t get wiped clean every night.

Every time I hear the now standard Democrat roll call of “what riots of 2020? You watch too much Fox News! We never supported defunding the police, and it was Republicans who closed down schools because they are ray-ceest,” I lose it. This is gaslighting, pure and simple.

Another pet peeve is the drama around election denialism. After denying the inconvenient election results in 2000 (and having large parts of the base deny them in 2004), after the nutso denialism of the clearly mentally impaired Stacey Abrams, after the denialism of 2016 that led to an utterly debunked “Russia collusion” conspiracy theory, you’ve got to have some really massive agallas even to bring up the topic of election denialism.

What’s really funny is that back in the 1990s, the 2000s and in the early 2010s, Democrats blamed their election losses on rich donors. There was an obsession on the Left with the Wall Street and the Koch brothers of enormous proportions.

But Democrats no longer blame rich people for their election losses because rich people now support them. They have become the party of Wall Street. So what to do? They tried using Russians but Russians are of limited use because it’s hard to explain their active involvement in state and local elections.

Instead, the vague concept of “misinformation” was chosen, and it’s a great find. Misinformation is everything and nothing. It’s whatever you don’t like at any given moment. All you need to decide what’s misinformation is to proclaim yourself the (and I mean THE) source of truth.