As the results of the 2024 election are scrutinized, the left and its media allies are shocked by the number of urban voters who had been loyal Democrats but suddenly shifted to Donald Trump. This shift helped propel Trump to victory in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan and significantly reduced the Democrats’ margin even in blue states they won.These “Trump Democrats” are also frontline victims of the ills that elected Democrats have caused in recent years.The old libertarian, anti-government Republican clichés won’t solve the crime and dysfunction besetting our cities.For better or worse, Republicans have largely abandoned the cities, leaving them to deal with the consequences of their own votes. This approach is understandable. But if the widespread defection of black and Jewish voters to Trump is seen as a cry for help, perhaps now is the time for conservatives to offer a better alternative: “municipal conservatism.”A few days after the election, liberal journalist Josh Barro published an insightful essay in the Atlantic that gained wide circulation, even in conservative circles. Barro boldly criticized Democrats’ poor governance, which drove many traditional Democratic voters to Trump. Declaring that “Democrats deserved to lose,” Barro highlighted issues like the breakdown of order in public transit, lack of policing, open shoplifting, merchandise locked in cases, expensive but failing schools, hotels filled with migrants, released criminals, and defunding of police.Despite his excellent analysis, Barro missed the mark by clinging to the outdated 20th-century assumption that Democrats aim to provide government services to improve their constituents’ lives. “The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem,” he wrote.“Better living through better government,” or simply “good government,” may have been the guiding philosophy during the days of Richard Daley in Chicago and Ed Koch in New York City — mayors who genuinely sought prosperity and order for their cities. Today, however, even the pretense of good government is gone. Many cities are now run by self-proclaimed revolutionaries who identify as Democrats but aim to dismantle the old order.These “Pol Pot mayors” speak of a new utopian vision, but in reality, they are destroying their cities, much as Pol Pot did when he depopulated Phnom Penh in his quest to reorganize Cambodian society. Crime, civil disorder, and anarcho-tyranny are not viewed as problems in these struggling blue cities. They are tools.These cities urgently need municipal conservatives in the mold of Rudy Giuliani — strong leaders who will restore order, even if they are not small-government purists aligned with Edmund Burke and Ludwig von Mises. Giuliani’s work cleaning up New York was remarkable, yet many conservatives initially dismissed him as too liberal because he didn’t focus on lowering taxes and limiting government. But New Yorkers weren’t looking for that. They wanted effective governance and a return to civil order. Rudy delivered.This isn’t to suggest that 20th-century Democratic urban governance is an ideal to emulate or repeat. I’m pointing out that Democrats have abandoned any commitment to safe, orderly cities, creating an opportunity for Republicans to offer viable solutions.There was nothing conservative about Democrat-run cities in the 20th century, with their focus on patronage, jobs programs, and generous pay and benefits for municipal employees. But with civil order and reliable policing, citizens tolerated the taxes and corruption and continued voting for Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans talked about privatizing city services and cutting city payrolls — and consistently lost at the polls.Many of us conservatives who left blue cities mock city-dwellers for not voting Republican, but perhaps they haven’t heard the right message about making cities livable again. Or maybe now is finally the time they’ll listen to that message.The old libertarian, anti-government Republican clichés won’t solve the crime and dysfunction besetting our cities. In fact, the left’s demand to abolish the police could itself be seen as a libertarian, anti-government stance.Republicans need to offer our struggling cities an agenda focused on delivering excellent city services, including effective policing, cleanliness, anti-vagrancy measures, public safety, reliable utilities, and family-friendly parks. This agenda should promote a political climate that supports small businesses, primary education, churches, families, and patriotism. Democrat-run cities have grown hostile to these foundational elements of urban civilization, creating an enormous opportunity for Republicans.Donald Trump has shown that even the most loyal Democratic constituencies are willing to vote Republican if it promises relief from the problems created by Democratic policies. A municipal conservatism that can restore civil order in our cities is exactly what voters need right now. Now, Republicans need to recruit modern-day Giulianis to make that pitch.

My view of the election is that Trump and Harris were locked in a spiritual battle. Many, including myself, felt that the sparing of Trump’s life in the first assassination attempt was an act of clear divine Providence. For him to turn his head at that precise moment to avoid the assassin’s bullet, suffering only a grazed ear — it defies belief. I don’t believe in coincidences like that. Trump himself leaned into the religious overtones, understanding that many Christian supporters had come to see him as a messianic figure. Personally, I do believe — and there are many examples of this in the Bible — that God selects certain individuals to carry out His plans on Earth, and there is no doubt in my mind that Trump is one of those individuals. Isaiah 6:8 says: “I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.” Trump’s travails have been almost Job-like. Stripped of virtually everything, impeached, battered, humiliated, almost killed, slandered, deplatformed, sued, and on the verge of being thrown in prison for the rest of his life, Trump found the strength to mount a remarkable campaign and win. It is the greatest political comeback in American history. Many see his resilience as superhuman and divinely inspired. Wokeism is in some ways similar to those other two secular cults in that it has rituals, priests, and the elements of original sin — whiteness, privilege, etc. Wokeism even has a millenarian bent in that it presumes that the world is fundamentally unjust and subject to vast, oppressive conspiracies. Now, on the other side, we have another religion — one I consider idolatrous, but a religion nonetheless. See, when you strip God from life, you don’t leave people intact, but rather, you leave them with a God-shaped hole. Today’s left has eliminated (or corrupted) the church, and in its place, leftists have adopted secular religions (some call this Gnosticism). Harris and her progressive supporters subscribe to three of these cults: climate doomerism, wokeism, and, to a lesser extent, AI safety. Broadly, these all fall under the umbrella of decel-ism. Apocalypse forever It's worth unpacking these slightly. Climate and AI doomers are contemporary millenarian cults; that is, they are concerned with the apocalypse. Adherents to such cults believe that a reckoning is coming that will transform the Earth, punish the sinful, save the worthy, or just wipe us out entirely. On climate, the idea is that we committed a grave original sin by debauching nature and emitting CO2; Gaia is punishing us by unleashing her wrath in the form of ever-intensifying storms (never mind that the cost to humans from climate-related disasters has been falling); and if we don’t sufficiently change our ways, we will be extinguished in a final day of reckoning (think "The Day After Tomorrow"). AI safety is a newer cult, but very similar: We summoned a demon of sorts by creating AI, and we risk destroying humanity if we delve any deeper into machine intelligence. There is a trippier variant of the AI doomer cult in which we achieve a rapture and merge with the machine god in some kind of singularity. Both cults stress the sin of industrial pursuit, and in both cases, the solutions are the same: Slow down or even reverse progress. Compare Trump and Harris on AI and climate. Trump wants to re-energize America’s heartland, unleash our abundant energy resources for Bitcoin mining, AI, chip manufacturing, and so on. Trump recognizes that we cannot hamstring ourselves with a Merkel-style Energiewende. It’s suicide to sacrifice ourselves to the angry climate god via Thunberg-esque atonement while China prints coal and nuclear plants. Meanwhile, Harris stands for an insipid green transition that simply hasn’t paid off anywhere it has been tried. The left’s infatuation with green transitions should be understood as superstition, not policy. If progressives really believed in the existential risk from climate, they would be all in on nuclear, or even global cooling with aerosolized sulfates. They aren’t. On AI, Harris stands for AI safety, the self-aggrandizing Silicon Valley cult that both worships and fears the machine god. On the other hand,Trump sees AI as a vital strategic resource to be unleashed, making no underlying metaphysical claims whatsoever. Leaving aside the decel cults, the most important spiritual lens through which Harris should be understood is wokeism. Wokeism is in some ways similar to those other two secular cults in that it has rituals, priests, and the elements of original sin — whiteness, privilege, etc. Wokeism even has a millenarian bent in that it presumes that the world is fundamentally unjust and subject to vast, oppressive conspiracies (although it doesn’t clearly specify what the day of reckoning might look like). However, the inherent flaw of wokeism and the reason it doesn’t universalize well is that it offers no absolution. There’s no way for a straight white man (or anyone else near the top of the privilege hierarchy) to atone for his original sin. Compare with Christianity, which stresses (depending on the denomination) that all you have to do to be absolved of your sins is accept Jesus Christ into your heart. So wokeism can’t really sustain itself, because it’s dependent on a spiritual underclass of “oppressors” who are willing to continually submit to and elevate the least privileged (the trans disabled POC, etc). But who would sign up for a religion that offers no atonement? Even the most ardent white wokes must feel a twinge of doubt at their membership in the cult, realizing that they are permanent Dalits in the woke caste system. A spiritual war for the soul of a nation So I see the Trump-Harris conflict through the lens of a spiritual war. Of course, the battle between right and left already has a spiritual component since it’s not just two sets of rival policy positions but in fact a much more deep-seated set of mutually conflicting worldviews: individual versus system-level thinking; merit versus racial score-settling; small government versus collectivism; the nuclear family versus the state as your family; and so on. In the case of Trump and Harris, it was even more direct. Trump plays the role of an unintentional messiah, almost accidentally thrust into this savior role. Though Trump’s faith may not be particularly sincere, his fans’ belief that he is a tortured savior chosen by God is. Meanwhile, Harris is the purest representative we’ve seen of the progressive religion to date, being selected for the role not due to her track record in government but because of her anointed status within the woke cult. She is perfect: black, Indian, a woman, and so on. She merely lacked charisma, meaningful policy views, a distinct message of change, and a platform. There can be no real dispute that she was more of an empty vessel for woke payloads than a genuine candidate. Her campaign was mainly focused on marshaling the high-propensity female vote on abortion, shaming minorities into falling in line, scolding men into voting “for their wives and daughters,” and so on. She flatly refused to specify meaningful policy positions, keeping them deliberately vague, running instead on pure identitarianism. The Democrats should engage in soul-searching and realize that by embracing cults like wokeism and GDP-destroying fantasies like climate doomerism and AI doomerism, they are swimming against the current. To the right, her great sacrilege was her primary campaign issue — the murder of unborn children. Other issues she stands for — the coercive chemical castration of children, for instance — are considered not only simply poor policy by the right but downright satanic. It’s unsurprising that Trump’s strongest campaign message was “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.” For Trump’s Christian supporters, the distinction could not have been starker. Many felt that this was the last election if she won. The left misunderstood this when folks like Elon Musk said it. The idea wasn’t that there would never be an election ever again but rather that the left would vastly accelerate import of the third world and spontaneously grant these newcomers citizenship. This isn’t far-fetched. Leftists were quite explicit about their desire to do this, and they partially executed it under Biden. Some on the left, too, felt that if Trump regained power, he would fashion the government into a fascist authoritarian regime and permanently leave democracy behind. So this election had a decidedly existential bent to it. Many on both sides felt that this would be the last freely contested vote. As a Christian and a conservative, I am encouraged that America resoundingly rejected these woke cults and their emissary in Harris. This was a realigning election that cannot be written off as a fluke like 2016 was. Hispanics shifted abruptly right, undermining the left’s core coalition. Harris actually underperformed Biden with black voters, showing the weakness of her identitarian campaign. Black men in particular defected from the left quite markedly. Trump gained with young voters, a generally secular group that is still infatuated with wokeism. By contrast, Trump did astoundingly well with Catholics, winning them by 18 points, the largest gap in decades. Trump also gained with Protestants relative to 2020. Eighty percent of evangelicals broke for Trump, again a better margin than 2020. Harris’ campaign built around Roe simply wasn’t compelling enough. And some of her high-propensity supporters, like suburban white moms, were turned off by the left’s ritual sacrifice of girls at the altar of wokeism (by allowing males in women’s sports, for instance). Voters were more concerned with immigration and the economy. The Democrats should engage in soul-searching and realize that by embracing cults like wokeism and GDP-destroying fantasies like climate doomerism and AI doomerism, they are swimming against the current. Their Obama coalition has been shattered in the biggest realigning election since Reagan. Having lost the working class and the Hispanic vote, and unable to import new voters as they had planned, if they continue down the path of racial shame and elevating DEI candidates, they will lose over and over. As for those on the right, they have resurrected their messiah. Expectations couldn’t be higher. But one thing is clear: Religion, real religion, is still a force to be reckoned with in American politics. The left has lost the Mandate of Heaven. It belongs to Trump now. This article originally appeared on X.

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Marvel confirmed this summer that Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars will keep their May 2026 and May 2027 release dates despite speculation that the Avengers movies in the Multiverse Saga might see delays following last year's strikes. The Jonathan Majors accusations were also a potential cause for postponing the conclusion of the saga. Kevin Feige made the best of the situation and delivered a massive surprise. Not only are the Russo brothers going to direct the movies, but Robert Downey Jr. will return. He won't come back as Iron Man, at least not officially. He'll play Doctor Doom, the big villain of both Doomsday and Secret Wars. I hope this Doctor Doom version is actually a variant of Iron Man from the multiverse, and Marvel is just cleverly disguising the comeback of the MCU's now-dead Iron Man. But there's no leak to support this theory, and we'll have to wait for plot spoilers to see if there's any hope to see Iron Man return. That said, there is one Secret Wars spoiler that we can all see coming. We don't need the movie to end to determine whether RDJ will stay in the MCU as Doctor Doom. An insider has some information on that, and it's exactly what you think. But I'll warn you that minor spoilers might follow below. Continue reading... The post Avengers: Secret Wars might be the last we see of Doctor Doom appeared first on BGR. Today's Top Deals Today’s deals: $179 AirPods Pro 2, space heaters from $36, $100 off Bose QuietComfort Ultra, more Today’s deals: $100 off iPad mini 7, $60 off Nintendo Switch OLED, $90 Ninja Air Fryer Pro XL, more Best Apple Watch deals for November 2024 Today’s deals: $280 Acer Aspire 3 laptop, $23 TP-Link WiFi extender, $199 Shark vacuum, $60 Keurig, more

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Donald Trump met Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago club with Argentine President Javier Milei, the first foreign leader to meet with the president-elect since his victory in last week's election. The meeting was confirmed by a person who insisted on anonymity to discuss a meeting ...