In less than six months, the entire world has been turned upside down. There is no longer such a thing as conventional wisdom or the status quo.
The unthinkable has become the banal.
Take illegal immigration — remember the 10,000 daily illegal entries under former President Joe Biden?
Recall the only solution was supposedly “comprehensive immigration reform” — a euphemism for mass amnesties.
Now, there is no such thing as daily new illegal immigration. It simply disappeared with common-sense enforcement of existing immigration laws — and a new president.
How about the 40,000-50,000 shortfall in military recruitment?
Remember all the causes that the generals cited for their inability to enlist soldiers: generational gangs, obesity, drugs, and stiff competition with private industry? And now?
In just six months, recruitment targets are already met; the issue is mostly moot.
Why? The new Pentagon flipped the old, canceling its racist DEI programs and assuring the rural, middle-class Americans — especially white males — that they were not systemically racist after all.
Instead, they were re-invited to enlist as the critical combat cohort who died at twice their demographic share in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How about the “end of the NATO crisis,” supposedly brought on by a bullying U.S.?
Now the vast majority of NATO members have met their pledges to spend two percent of GDP on defense, which will soon increase to 5%.
What about indomitable, all-powerful, theocratic Iran, the scourge of the Middle East for nearly 50 years?
Although it had never won a war in the last half-century, its terrorist surrogates — Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis — were supposedly too dangerous to provoke. Now?
Most of their expeditionary terrorists are neutered, and their leaders are in hiding or dead. Iran has no air force, no real navy, no air defenses, and no active nuclear weapons program.
Its safety apparently depends only on the mood of the U.S. or Israel on any given day, not to fly into its airspace and take out its missiles, nuclear sites, generals, or theocrats at will.
What happened to the supposedly inevitable recession, hyperinflation, stock market collapse, unemployment spikes, and global trade war that last spring economists assured us would hit by summer?
It turns out that staying in the U.S. consumer market is the top priority of our trading partners. It seems their preexisting and mostly undisclosed profits were large enough to afford reasonable U.S. symmetrical tariffs.
For now, news of tax cuts, deregulation, “drill baby, drill” energy policies displacing Green New Deal strangulation, and $8-10 trillion in potential foreign investment has encouraged — rather than deterred — business.
So, what flipped everything?
We were living in an “emperor has no clothes” make-believe world for the last few years. The people knew establishment narratives were absurd, and our supposed experts were even more ridiculous.
But few — until now — had the guts to scream “the emperor is naked” to dispel the fantasies.
When they finally did, reality returned.