The Political Vibe Shift is Real, And It's Spectacular
America is Waking Up
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“My dog is dying,” the man said with a sigh.
It was the last thing I expected to hear.
We’ve been having problems with our home internet, and yesterday the company sent out a tech to see what’s going on.
A man in his late 50s showed up. I greeted him at the door, and took him to the modem and router. He got some equipment out of his bag, then settled into a chair to begin running diagnostics.
And that was when he dropped the unexpected bad news in my lap. We’d known each other for about 30 seconds at that point, so I knew it must have been weighing heavily on him.
“Oh man,” I replied sympathetically. He took it as permission to continue, which is exactly what it was.
He told me that the dog had been having seizures, and that they were getting worse. He had originally been scheduled to come by in the evening, but he needed to get off work early to go check on things and see if the dog needed to be put to sleep, or if they could keep him going for a while longer.
“He’s 14,” he told me. “Shih-Tzus live a long time.”
“I was just going to say,” I replied, “that we had a Shih-Tzu who died a couple years ago at age 13. Congestive heart failure. It was rough.”
We bonded over our dogs, and our appreciation for the breed. Both of us had gotten them because one of our children had bugged us relentlessly until we did. Both of us had wound up becoming the real owner and caretakers of the dogs. We laughed. His guard came down.
The topic shifted to work, and frustrations when dealing with having to rely on colleagues who didn’t really know what they were doing. We talked about our kids, and schooling, and then homeschooling specifically.
“We homeschooled both of ours,” he told me. “It’s the only way to go.”
He appeared to be either black, Hispanic, or some combination of the two, and had a noticeable New York accent. He told me he was originally from the Bronx. I told him I grew up upstate. A few years ago, I never would have made the leap to politics with someone who would have been considered superficially to be a slam dunk demographic Democrat, but despite the fact that we live in a fairly liberal city, I had a good feeling.
I tested the waters. I mentioned, in passing, something Trump had said that was relevant to that moment in the conversation. I think it was when he told the audience at a rally that the real threat to democracy in this country is “stupid people.”
He didn’t flinch. In fact, he made it clear that we were both on the same team. He talked about how Trump was well known for treating even the lowest-level employees with dignity and respect. He told me a story about a time when, as a limo driver, he came face to face with Trump in a Manhattan restaurant. We discussed our views on the state of the campaign, what we thought was coming in the election, and what we were worried would come after.
This guy who came to fix our internet, whose name I never even managed to get, sat and talked with me for about two hours. He was working most of the time, but we had a rich conversation that spanned a number of topics. By the time he left, I gave him the classic male “handshake hug.” I felt like we were old friends.
It was a very cool experience.
At a campaign event earlier this week, Tucker Carlson commented on the potent “vibe shift” in this country:
I found his language intriguing, because I’ve been using it, too. In my X/Twitter account, I have a bunch of bookmarks folders where I save relevant stories I come across so I can find them later when writing articles like this. One of those folders is called…
And the reason I have a folder named “Political Mood Shift” is because it’s so profound, it’s palpable.
What kind of stories do I save there? Well, here are a few:
Viewers of Theo Von’s podcast are commenting on his interview with JD Vance, saying things like, “I can’t believe I was told this guy was weird. Most normal MF I’ve ever heard talk.” The video clip shows Vance laughing harder and more sincerely than I’ve ever seen a politician laugh.
A number of videos of black Americans who have redpilled on Trump. They’re tired of being talked down to, told what to do, and treated like they’re stupid.
Here’s one example.
Another. (Black men only)
Another. (Black women only)
Yet another.
And don’t forget last summer’s “Blacks Against Harris” call. The organizers claimed 72,000 participants, and put the whole thing online.
But wait, Chris Cuomo, of all people, is redpilling too!
Shazam! actor Zachary Levi, sitting on a stage with Tulsi Gabbard, talks about the pervasiveness of liberalism in Hollywood, and how his Trump endorsement may be career suicide, but he believes that we should still treat Harris voters with “grace.”
In a separate piece in Variety, Levi says:
“They’ve sent me lots of messages, plenty of people in Hollywood, who are terrified to publicly say they would vote for Donald Trump or be conservative in any way. They know there’s ramifications for this kind of sh*t. But ya’ll, our industry is going to be f*cking gonzo. My cry to all of you out there, you closeted Trump voters, it’s now or never...If you need to come out publicly and say it...know that if what you’re afraid of is somehow the backlash of an industry that’s not going to exist very soon, then don’t let that hold you back.”
Both the LA Times and the Washington Post have declined to make a presidential endorsement, leading to a meltdown on the Left.
Polymarket, the biggest prediction market site (where people bet big money on predicted outcomes, which tends to be weirdly accurate) has Trump up with Regan-style numbers:
A new national poll isn’t far behind:
And in addition to Tulsi Gabbard’s defection to the Republican Party, there are a countless posts like the following floating around:
The liberal establishment is turning on Kamala. Lots of video clips, but I’m not going to bog down this post with them. Here’s just one collection of brief clips (courtesy of Collin Rugg):
The Left rolled out new smear attacks this week that they thought would be campaign enders. Earlier this week, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic released a salacious hit piece about Trump, alleging once again that he disparaged a military family (the family disputes this; they’re Trump supporters) and that he loves him some Nazis. Kamala repeated the unsourced allegations from behind the vice presidential seal, then took off without taking questions. Then, last night, a former model (and Harris supporter) said that Trump groped her 31 years ago, which she conveniently decided to remember and disclose two weeks before the election.
But here’s the thing: both of these attacks fell utterly flat. In fact, all over social media, people have been mocking these transparent attempts to damage the frontrunner’s credibility.Today, the Trump team fired back with an ad featuring Jerry Wartski, a holocaust survivor who isn’t having any of this childish comparison between Trump and Hitler:
And finally, I just have to throw these in here, because they speak for themselves:
So the upshot is: Tucker is right.
But let’s make it stick. Go out and vote!