For a very long time on my Aftershow podcast, which aired for 15 years behind the paywall of Hugh Hewitt's Hughniverse site, even before the Republican primaries got underway in earnest, I spent a lot of time looking at what America is going to look like after November 5th. 

At the time, Joe Biden had one foot in his political grave, and the other on a banana peel, and was poised to get beat by whomever the Republicans nominated. Yet the rhetoric being used by politicians on both side and in regime media got dialed up to 11 on Spinal Tap's guitar amplifier. My concern was that if Trump or a Republican won, half the country would absolutely freak out because the end of the American experiment was at hand. When it became clear Donald Trump would be the GOP nominee, the intensity of the threat to democracy rhetoric greatly increased. 

Even with the replacement on the Democratic side of Kamala Harris for Joe Biden, temporarily drawing the race back into at least the perception of a winnable one by Democrats and media, the demonization of Donald Trump and Republicans by media and Never Trumpers ratcheted up further to an absurdly hyperbolic level. I speculated with Ed on several of our Week in Review podcasts in the VIP section that if you are someone on the left and you've been convinced down to your bones that Trump is a mortal threat to democracy itself, then it begs the question what won't you do to stop Trump from taking the oath of office on January 20th? That was months before there were two assassination attempts on Trump's life. 

Now flash forward to this week. Donald Trump has shaved over half of Kamala Harris' national polling lead in Real Clear Politics' average, and has flipped Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan from blue to red in the Electoral College map, if you throw in leaning states. Trump's probability odds of winning it all in Polymarket has reached an all-time high of 58% to Kamala's 42% chance. Even left-leaning Nate Silver has seen the modest lead Kamala held in odds of winning evaporate. He now sees the race as a dead heat. 

With all of that as a backdrop, what happens if Trump wins? Mark Halperin, who fell out of favor with MSNBC as one of their favored pundit sons after his own #MeToo problem, nevertheless has retained his contacts within the Democratic Party, and was among the first to accurately predict that Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats would shove Joe Biden to the curb and out of the race for re-election as president. Halperin was on Tucker Carlson's podcast yesterday, and had this dire prediction.

The biggest mass mental health crisis in this country's history. And that's saying something when we're just four years removed from the physical, mental, and emotional damage done to millions of Americans after what a year of COVID restrictions, masking, and vaccine mandates did to us and our children. This prediction is ominous indeed. But Halperin went further and described how that mental health crisis would manifest itself, at least in part. 

And you only thought you had to worry about the Zombie apocalypse. Long-time political consultant and former Bill Clinton campaign guru James Carville is embracing denial fully, refusing to believe Democrats are going to lose, and terrified that Trump is going to arrest his political enemies. 

What makes this cut so delicious is that within two hours of saying this, Joe Biden was in Philly at a dinner to benefit Kamala Harris. Here's what he said. 

We've sailed well past 'Lock her up,' haven't we? Now that Kamala Harris is the nominee instead of Joe Biden, she's at least less inflammatory with her language, right? Nah. Here she is on the Breakfast Club with Charlamagne Tha God yesterday talking to a caller who seemed a little unhinged.

Notice that Kamala didn't begin her response by telling the caller he is crazy and that he should get ahold of himself and attempt to have a modicum of perspective. Instead, she told him he's making a very important point. She fed and nurtured the extremist rhetoric.

In Georgia, after Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Senator Raphael Warnock, and dozens of Democratic Party leaders warned that the election reform law in the Peach State would bring back Jim Crow or worse, Jim Eagle, a funny thing happened. After the first day of early voting in a state that we were reliably told would lead to restricted access, especially for Blacks, Georgians cast over 300,000 votes, 123% above their previous record. CNN's Kaitlan Collins had her X feed then meet reality now.

https://t.co/SmLhG3E2ni pic.twitter.com/m4ystMNVOS

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) October 16, 2024

On the Republican side, all the data, all the trends, all the historical error rates of the groups doing the polling still point to Donald Trump winning the election. If he does not, if there are anomalies in swing states in specific, targeted pockets of GOP strongholds and Kamala Harris ekes out a victory as narrow or even closer than the one that propelled Joe Biden to the White House, some of the base voters on the right are going to lose their minds. Close elections just do that anyway, but add in the rhetoric, albeit correct from my point of view, that Kamala Harris would destroy Constitutional norms in this country we thought would never be touched, and you have the ingredients for political turmoil on the right. 

Rep. Jamie Raskin, who was on the House impeachment committee going after Donald Trump for his role in the J6 Capitol riots, which the left still believes was an even bigger threat to democracy than the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C, has flipped on a dime. If Donald Trump wins, Raskin is all for having the House not certify the election. The crazy in this country is getting hotter faster than my new Solaire Infrared Grille.

Here's the question. What is this doing to our kids? 

We have an entire generation of young people that just came through a pandemic that saw them banned from attending school in-person, being forced to mask even while playing outside when there was no scientific reason to support the political decision behind the orders, and many were forced to take a vaccine as a ticket to re-entry when schools did reconvene. Even today, some kids live in fear of a virus that in most cases was never a threat to their age cohort by wearing masks in class. For that matter, I see adults every day, by themselves, driving their car with a mask on. Millions of kids are dealing with learning deficits as a result of the educational interruption. 

Now, after dealing with that dystopian trauma, these kids are watching and listening to grown-ups, mostly their parents but others as well, react viscerally to the political campaigns vying to be the leaders for the immediate future of this country. These same grown-ups, who outside of politics would otherwise act relatively normal, turn into crazy people when the T-word is mentioned. And we haven't even begun to discuss what antisemitism is doing to rot American society, and especially to academia. 

I'm not one that thinks it's likely or possible to put this extremist genie back in the bottle and cap it in the next couple weeks. I pray fervently that God continues to keep this country stitched together, in spite of what we deserve, but I'm not counting on it. I worry that Mark Halperin's forecast is spot on. And I will not lift one toe off of the pedal between now and Election Day, because I continue to believe that this election actually is the most important one of our lifetime. I believe that because the radical ideology that got substituted in at the last minute has not been fully vetted by the American people. We truly are in a dangerous time, both domestically and internationally. This is no time for a radical faux intellectual with a track record of being clueless and wrong every step of her career in public life.

A female miscellaneous random person who grew up in our house that has now begun her college career three weeks ago just went throug an incident that necessitated obtaining a restraining order. Yesterday, as Kamala Harris was once again pandering for Black votes by embracing the idea of trillions of taxpayer dollars in reparations, I was faced with what's going on in the real world with this next generation of students. As I was waiting for three hours to file the appropriate forms, about a dozen of them, I noticed this young person and her roommate trying to catch up with schoolwork on their laptops. They hadn't had a great night sleep in several days, and they were pretty subdued. The weight of their world was on their shoulders. 

As a parent, it breaks my heart to see them have to go through this type of trauma. I certainly don't think it's necessary or appropriate to pile on and talk politics just because it's that season. Politics is extraordinarily important to me, but not so important as being the parent your kids need, not necessarily the parent those kids think they want. You have to protect them as best you can while letting them spread their wings when it's appropriate to do so. You have to be there for them, offer advice when asked, be a shoulder to cry on when the situation warrants, and resist the temptation to use your own life experience to shortcut their process and just tell them what to do.

But most importantly, we parents have to remember that even when we're in the throes of political combat, hopefully the rhetorical type, the followers that matter most are not those on social media or the internet. The people that should cause us to watch what we say and how we say it are those that are going to be the ones charged with keeping this country together long after we're gone. It's his kids that keep J.D. Vance grounded. I talked about that with John Ashbrook of the Ruthless podcast in today's edition of Duane's World. 

Being better in how you frame your argument isn't just the moral thing to do. Being better also happens to be much more persuasive and convincing. Let's hope that in this next two-plus weeks, and for the turbulent time sure to follow, let's be firm, resolved, and unwavering in our principles. But let's also deliver that message in a way that won't make us an embarrassment to our children and grandchildren, or in a way that will continue to tear the country apart.