Five Quick Things: The Shift Is On

Amid a great deal of success with properties like The Chosen and Sound of Freedom, Angel Studios dropped an interesting film on the market last fall. The Shift was a bit different than the movie production company’s usual religion-driven fare — it’s a take on the Book of Job, but it’s told from a dystopian sci-fi angle which is far different than anything else Angel has released.

The Shift stars Kristoffer Polaha, whom you might remember from his portrayal of John Galt in the third Atlas Shrugged movie and from the countless Hallmark movies he’s starred in, as an ordinary guy in a struggling marriage who, after getting in a bad car wreck which leaves him dazed and bleeding, encounters The Benefactor, a devilish figure played by Neil McDonough (whose credits are too numerous to count). It turns out that The Benefactor has the power to shift people from one reality to any of countless others; he offers his services to Polaha, who turns him down and is thus plunged into a hellish reality absent his wife, played by Elizabeth Tabish (Mary Magdalene in The Chosen), and everything he knows.

The Shift is about keeping faith and continuing the good fight no matter the odds, though it does present a rather bleak picture of life with everything one loves having been ripped away.

It was a minor hit for Angel Studios, having earned some $12 million at the box office. Not that many people outside of conservative film circles really even knew about The Shift, and critical reviews were, as you might imagine, not particularly friendly. Nonetheless, it has percolated a bit on the streaming circuit, currently appearing at Amazon Prime.

1. This Feels A Little Like An Alternate Reality, Doesn’t It?

I mentioned The Shift because in the past week watching the all-out effort to turn Kamala Harris from the cackling dunce the American people have consistently rejected as a viable political property into … whatever it is the media and the Democrat Party are trying to cast her as now, there’s a very surreal quality to public life in America right now.

You’re seeing a great deal of discussion of Donald Trump’s campaign supposedly being off-balance since The Shift to Harris as the Democrats’ nominee. I don’t think that’s real at all. What’s happening right now has little to do with Trump.

This is a gaslighting operation, an information-warfare offensive making D-Day look like a schoolyard tussle. The Democrats and their media organs, not to mention their paid social media “influencer” propagandists, are attempting to do the impossible using “Yass Queen” memes, gross identity politics, and protestations of enthusiasm based on nothing other than sheer political willpower.

We’ve had psyops and information warfare as part of American politics before, but nothing like this.

On Wednesday, Kamala Harris’ campaign put on a free rap concert in Atlanta starring Megan Thee Stallion and filled a 15,000-seat arena. Harris gave a 20-minute speech in and among the twerking and foul language being spewed on the stage, which in a saner world would have utterly disqualified her as a serious presidential candidate. The highlight, such as it was, of Harris’ speech was a demand that Trump debate her — she said of his criticisms that Trump should “Say it to my face.”

And the propagandists on the Democrat side have all echoed this stupidity and are now accusing Trump of cowardice for having said that he’d wait to schedule debates with Harris until he was sure she would be the nominee.

Again, in a saner world this would play precisely opposite to the narrative the Democrats are pushing. Harris’ twerk-fest protestations looked pathetic, small and unserious, but in this alternate reality they’re somehow a sign of strength and Trump is on the defensive.

As is polling which suddenly shifts the ideological sample of the projected electorate six, eight or even 10 percent toward Democrat voters and presents the race as a dead heat.

When the fact is that the full picture of presidential polling at present doesn’t show any change from the reality before The Shift and its attendant forced delusions, as Dr. Steve Turley notes…

Nothing is real. It’s as though the neo-pagan fantasies of a life unbound by objective truth or natural law, in which sheer will and appropriate power can create any universe of one’s dream, have descended upon us and shifted us from what we knew to some strange new reality.

2. Yes, But Making This Last — Ay, There’s The Rub

On Thursday I was a guest on the excellent Alan Nathan show on the Main Street Radio Network, and Nathan brought up that old Lincoln quote: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Nathan was talking about this real-life Shift being perpetrated on the American people, and he said there was simply no way it can be maintained between now and November.

I’m inclined to agree with him, mainly because this presentation of Harris as a figure of wide appeal with a laudable record and suitable gravitas for the highest office of the land is too absurd to sell over a long period of time — which three months most certainly is.

Have you noticed Harris has not done a single substantive interview, much less held a press conference, since becoming the Democrats’ standard-bearer? That’s an amazing little factoid, and a quite telling one: if you had a candidate who was capable of giving good answers to legitimate questions, which should be a fairly low bar for a presidential hopeful, you’d be holding pressers daily on the campaign trail.

It’s also a fairly stark contrast to Trump, who on Wednesday sat for a panel interview at the National Association of Black Journalists that was an utter disaster — for the NABJ.

Due to what was called an “equipment malfunction,” the interview started a half-hour late — when Trump left at the appointed end of the interview, he was accused of cutting it off early, as though he didn’t have his own schedule to keep to — and then it began with ABC News’ Rachel Scott blistering him with some of the rudest, most unprofessional accusations disguised as questions imaginable.

We’ll talk about that in a little bit different context below, but for right now the point to make is that Trump went directly into the lion’s den and slugged it out with the most hostile questioners imaginable, giving the other side some ammunition in the process but scoring lots of points of his own, and Harris won’t appear with anyone less friendly than Megan Thee Stallion.

People will begin to notice this, and when they do they’re going to recognize that the empress is naked under her new presidential-candidate clothes, as see-through as their fabric obviously is.

No, you can’t sustain this.

3. So When Does The Shift Reverse Itself?

As I said in discussing this topic in the first segment of this week’s Spectacle Podcast with the rather Eeyorite (yes, I just made up a new word, and yes, I’m keeping this one) Melissa Mackenzie, who had to be talked off the ledge since she thinks The Shift will set a predicate for The Steal, which is inevitably coming in her estimation, it’ll likely be events which drive a return to some sort of equilibrium.

The problem with an over-the-top scam attempted against a wide swath of people is that pulling it off generally depends on a whole lot of moving parts working in harmony over a protracted period of time. And a grand scam is exponentially harder to pull off the less plausible it is.

David Catron on Monday made the case here at The American Spectator that this sudden adoration for Harris will have an awfully short shelf life due to its utter implausibility. That was a perspective shared by James Piereson at The New Criterion, who noted the similarities between this post-selection bump for Harris and the summer awakening of Michael Dukakis’ ill-fated 1988 presidential campaign which collapsed into ruin as the autumn days grew shorter and the public began to understand Dukakis’ record as governor of Massachusetts.

Both are likely right, but things on the ground are what will shake loose the Kamalamania and make the scales fall from the eyes of persuadable voters. Already this week we have Israel launching a project to take out the world’s trash, including some of the top oxygen thieves of Hamas and Hezbollah, and that’s almost certain to expand the scope of the Gaza (and now Lebanon) conflict. Harris, who has been more or less openly pro-Hamas, is going to be pressed on that issue at some point as it plays larger and larger on the world stage, and her answers will alienate either Jewish donors or Arab voters in Michigan and New Jersey.

There is a lot of economic news out there indicating a precarious situation which could turn ugly over the next three months. It’s only a matter of time before one of Harris’ and Joe Biden’s illegal migrants commit some crime so heinous that it inflames not just Trump voters but members of her own base. What happens if some Tren de Aragua thug fresh out of the Caracas barrios rapes and kills a black girl in the Bronx or Southside Chicago in an especially horrid way? What then?

The scenarios are easy to envision. So many play so badly for such a vulnerable candidate as Harris that what they’re trying to accomplish with her is akin to a high-wire act with a cotton thread as the wire.

We might even revisit this topic in next week’s Five Quick Things.

4. The Shift to a Combative Style Is A Refreshing Change From Stupid Party Bush Republicanism

Did you happen to see Tom Cotton take CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to the woodshed for a ridiculously-premised, insulting question about Trump’s mockery of Harris’ race fluidity? It was a thing of beauty…

NEW: Sen. Tom Cotton DESTROYS Kaitlan Collins after she relentlessly asked him for over 7 minutes about Donald Trump saying he ‘didn’t know [Kamala Harris] was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black’

“you know, four years ago? Joe Biden said if you… pic.twitter.com/4Z6QosG0bi

— Unlimited L's (@unlimited_ls) August 1, 2024

This is the new style for Republican politicians, one which Trump has popularized but it seems to have really taken hold among the Gen X vintage. And it’s wonderful to see.

The old Stupid Party Bush Republican style was to ingest every false premise of hostile leftist media types and then grovel and apologize for their disapproval. Nothing on earth was more demoralizing to see, and we saw it practically nonstop for almost 30 years before Trump came along.

But now we’re seeing something far different.

Remember this from a couple of months ago? Marco Rubio completely annihilated MSNBC’s Kirsten Welker when she demanded that Republicans accept the results of a possibly-stolen election this fall…

And then there was Wednesday in Chicago. Trump’s response to that utterly disgraceful, bitterly disrespectful attack disguised as a question by ABC News’ Rachel Scott at the National Association of Black Journalists conference on Wednesday may have infuriated the Left, and particularly the Left’s propagandists on Xwitter, but a funny thing began to happen following their initial uproar — support for the response is now outstripping the backlash.

Scott Adams seems to have captured at least some of the public reaction: Rachel Scott was a bitch to Trump and she was promptly treated as such.

Scott Adams marvels at Donald Trump's performance at the NABJ. Adam's conclusion is that the men in the audience were impressed by Trump:
"Oh my God it was perfect. It was good as the Rosie O'Donnell. In my mind this was as good as the Rosie O'Donnell play.
Did he look nervous?… pic.twitter.com/8ixIC5emxs

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) August 1, 2024

We keep hearing that Trump and J.D. Vance are falling off because they come off as “bullies,” and that Vance is “weird” because three years ago he noted the less-than-salutary effect that childless cat ladies have on American politics and government (something Aubrey Gulick expertly defended here at TAS yesterday). But what’s actually happening is a sea change in how GOP politics is done, and while it might be messy and combative, it’s the only appropriate response to being attacked by Democrat operatives dressed up as honest journalists.

Republican voters love it and persuadable voters respect it. When it’s done artfully and isn’t just an unintelligible growl but rather a reasoned, or even humorous, takedown, it’s a considerable win.

I’ve always wondered why Republican pols didn’t adopt the same persona toward hostile media that, say, a Nick Saban adopted. Saban made reporters dread asking him hostile questions by offering dismissive, mic-drop answers, and his fans loved every second. Instead we spent more than a generation watching the Mitt Romneys and Lindsey Grahams of the world fall all over themselves — and their swords — upon being asked idiotic, hack questions from Democrat operatives in the press.

That the younger generation — and I’m tempted to include Trump, because even though he’s 78 he carries himself more like a Gen X politician than a baby boomer — no longer rolls over so easily gives me great hope that the Stupid Party won’t stay stupid forever.

5. The Worst Olympics Ever

I haven’t been watching any of it, because after that perverse portrayal of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper tableau in the opening ceremony I decided I simply don’t care, but the Olympics certainly seem like a mess.

This alone is such an utter and complete repudiation of the concept of fair play as to destroy the legitimacy of the Games…

Something nobody seems to be talking about, beyond the obvious fact that the International Olympic Committee has utterly destroyed itself by accepting men into women’s sports, is the level of opprobrium due to Algeria for including Imane Khelif as a “female” boxer.

There’s a word for this:

Cheating.

It’s cheating to bring male ringers into women’s sports. It isn’t cowardice, it’s cheating. The supposed adults in charge of selecting these teams who seed them with men … they’re cheaters.

And we’re so poisoned by the stupid feminism which holds that there is no performative difference between men and women that we don’t have the stones to call cheaters out for the cheaters they are.

So to the cheaters in charge of the Algerian Olympic committee — you’ve cheated. You’ve dishonored yourself. Shame on you.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: Voila, Le Déluge

Our Legacy Corporate Media Is Full of Liars and Propagandists

Kamala Harris: Obama’s ‘Ding-Dong’

The post Five Quick Things: The Shift Is On appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.