You can draw a straight line from October 7, 2023 to November 5, 2024. After October 7, Americans now saw progressives for what they truly were: an unholy coalition of power-hungry totalitarians. That one event, the worst mass murder of Jews since the Nazi era, exposed every single cause progressive Democrats had preached about — from #MeToo to #BelieveAllWomen to Black Lives Matter to DEI — as a fraud perpetrated on the American public. On November 5, Americans convicted Democrats of that fraud and sentenced them to the political wilderness. Before October 7, Americans had already been growing skeptical of these movements’ excesses. Some Americans had heard about the antisemitism in the Women’s March. Some were aware of BLM leaders’ racism and outrageous misuse of funds on mansions, clothes, and other frivolities.  And some were aware of the toll the “Ferguson effect” on law enforcement had taken on minority communities. But October 7 was the tipping point.  In an instant, progressivism, which for a decade had been self-righteously preaching about racial justice, social justice, climate justice, and transgender justice, and scolding or destroying anyone who didn’t get with the program, entirely and irrevocably lost its moral authority. It didn’t matter whether you were Jewish. Progressives’ response to October 7 was so grotesque, so immoral, that Americans of all stripes were utterly repelled by what they saw. The same people who lectured Americans for years to “believe all women” denied or ignored the horrific sexual violence that Hamas perpetrated at the NOVA festival.  The same people who claimed to be our moral superiors, who instructed us that “Black Lives Matter” and punished those who said “All Lives Matter,” sent a tweet celebrating and glorifying the October 7 attacks on October 8. The sainted progressive Ta-Nehisi Coates, who told us we owed him reparations for slavery, slandered Israel as an “apartheid” state and said he might not have been able to resist joining in the October 7th pogrom. For a decade people have had their careers and lives ruined by social justice warriors over the slightest matter.  Misuse pronouns?  Off to HR.  Object to transgender men using the women’s room or playing in girls sports?  Off to reeducation.  Print an op-ed that makes people “feel unsafe”?  Lose your job.  Fail to genuflect properly to Ta-Nehisi Coates?  Your boss will force you to make a humiliating apology. But when confronted with the base barbarism of October 7, progressives now insisted we consider context.  Nuance.  About how this didn’t start on October 7.  All of America watched as the progressive Left — the animating force in Democratic politics today — which had been hectoring them for years about “justice” stood with the greatest monsters of our time. Americans didn’t just roll their eyes at this hypocrisy.  Progressives had destroyed too many lives and too many careers for Americans to shrug it off.  Progressives had injected too much terror into Americans’ daily conversations and workplaces to get away with just an eyeroll. Instead, Americans reacted on November 5 with fury, as if they were tearing down the Berlin Wall.  No more would Americans allow progressive thought police to dictate, Stasi-like, the limits of their conversations.  No longer would Americans allow the immoral cretins sympathizing with Hamas barbarians to dictate the moral boundaries of American society. Who were the heroes of the November 5 election?  Joe Rogan, the independent podcaster.  Elon Musk, the proprietor of the only social network committed to free speech.  Bari Weiss and the Free Pressers.  Douglas Murray, the independent journalist committed to telling the truth about the Gaza war.  The people who heard America screaming “tear down this wall!” and did it. After October 7, Americans understood beyond a shadow of a doubt that DEI and BLM were never about equality.  No, Americans saw them for what they truly were about: power.  About asserting power over others.  About tearing down one group of so-called “oppressors” and replacing them with the supposed “oppressed.” About extorting spoils from some to give to others. The so-called social justice warriors didn’t care about justice.  These were people who enjoyed the power to destroy careers, who thrilled to the social destruction of others.  These were people who gleefully told others to shut up and think right or else. It was a sadistic frenzy worthy of the Salem witch trials or the height of Nazi fanaticism. These were people who had no interest in making an omelet.  They were in it to break the eggs. And Americans said nuts to that. Americans instinctively knew that the harassment Jews faced on campus would not be tolerated for a second if Black or Hispanic students were the ones being harassed. Americans well knew that if the campus tent cities had been populated by students and faculty supporting the Klan instead of students and faculty supporting Hamas, they would have been rolled up within a week. After October 7 Americans viscerally understood, in a way that Asian-Americans’ lawsuits against colleges’ and high schools’ biased admissions procedures could not convey, that DEI was not about equality.  It was about promoting favored minorities and asserting power over others — especially disfavored minorities — and destroying standards and merit in order to do so. The rot ran all the way to the top. The DOJ Civil Rights Division, which has embraced every cockamamie progressive theory of justice and imposed it on police departments and universities throughout the country, didn’t lift a finger to protect Jewish students’ basic right to move freely about campuses. It took private plaintiffs to file suit in federal court to force UCLA to dismantle the Jew checkpoints student radicals had established on campus. Jews are a minority of minorities, even in the United States.  There are more Blacks and Hispanics in America than there are Jews in the world.  Yet when radical Islamists attacked this tiny minority in Israel, not only did progressives not set out to support the beleaguered Jewish minority, they also immediately launched a parallel assault on Jews in the United States. After October 7, Americans retrospectively looked at the decade of wokeism, of social, racial, climate, and transgender “justice” and saw something far darker, far more malevolent. Progressives were not Martin Luther King Jr., bending the arc of the universe toward justice, and they even ridiculed King’s “colorblind” vision for America.  After October 7, Americans now saw progressives for what they truly were: an unholy coalition of power-hungry totalitarians and amoral destructive nihilists.  A repugnant combination of Joseph Stalin and the Joker, authoritarians imposing their will through the barrel of a gun and people who just wanted to watch the world burn. And why would we expect things to get better? Eighteen Democratic senators just voted to impose an arms embargo on Israel, an ally whose population has been running to bomb shelters every night for over a year because of the genocidal Islamist maniacs on their borders.  Does anyone not think that number will only go up in the future?  We see what American universities are churning out.  With the Senate vote, progressive Democrats doubled down on their abandonment of Jews after November 5. Thanks to the post-October 7 grotesqueries of the progressive movement in its treatment of Jews, and the endless venom it directs toward the State of Israel, Americans were able to stand up on November 5 and say enough.  October 7 created the critical mass needed to overthrow the entire woke edifice of DEI administrators, HR speech police, social media Stasi informants, and the Democratic Party married to all of it. It’s not an autopsy Democrats need to do post-November 5.  It’s surgery.  The current incarnation of progressivism is a cancerous tumor.  The Democrats must remove it from their party, or there will be many more November 5ths to come. READ MORE from Michael Ginsberg: Ukraine’s West Berlin Solution Fairfax County Public Schools’ Mask Mandate: Safetyism Run Amok The post After Oct. 7, Progressives Destroyed the Democrats appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.