Mental Health Crisis?
I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country. I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision for what the future for them and their children could be like, and I think that will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals.
Reading between the lines of Halperin's Morning Meeting podcast since then, where (only for instance) he forbade Sean Spicer from criticizing his friend Ann Selzer, the "gold standard" pollster, for her wacky conclusion that Harris was ahead of Trump by 3 points in Iowa days before the election, it's pretty clear that Halperin was expecting the Trumpists would be the ones who'd have to line up at therapists' offices. In fact, from remarks he's made on the podcast at various times, I think he saw his mission as being the guy who'd lead the Trumpists back to sanity after their loss.I'm not the only one who's seen Halperin as grasping for an opportunity to rehabilitate himself in this election cycle. Paul Farhi at Vanity Fair was on his case in the past week:
Halperin’s career reassembly reflects today’s fractured media environment, in which the power of traditional media gatekeepers has diminished in recent years as new platforms have flourished. And it speaks to how quickly the collective memory can fade. When his name comes up in news accounts these days, Halperin is often described as a “political analyst,” not by a phrase that once preceded his name: “disgraced journalist.”
In any case, his sense of the election outcome at this point resembles nothing so much as the predictions in March of 2020 that the COVID outbreak would result in mass graves in public parks. Accounts from the real world were much more mundane; for instance, Nate Siver remarked on November 6,
[W]hen I was walking around New York this morning, I was surprised at how normal it all felt.
Nothing like 2016, the last time Donald Trump became president. That was basically the zombie apocalypse. I took the subway to the ABC News offices on Nov. 9 and the man sitting next to me on the 1 train recognized me but could barely get words out. I think he was trying to communicate sympathy. But he was a bad bluffer. His body language betrayed that his real reaction was, “Bro, what the [redacted] just happened?”
There was none of that this time. Maybe a little aloofness. But no funny looks. People were going about their day.
Sundance's impressions at The Conservative Treehouse were similar:
What we discover during this phase is that an unstable leftist population of 0.1% is not being stirred up by the Intelligence Community and the ideological leftist media who support them. Both the IC and their media are frozen.
There is that phase in every abusive relationship when the abuser has run out of manipulation that works. They realize their victims are numb to their efforts; things get quiet.
Worse still for Democrats, the grassroots believers are in full retreat because they are realizing they were gaslit into believing Kamala would win. The leftist influencers are losing their army of foot soldiers who believed them in mass. The dawn of the Great Awakening is upon us.
Well, maybe not everyone. Nate Silver was on the New York sidewalks. The New Yorkers many stories higher were in fact calling their therapists but that's because that's what they could afford to do.
Liberals in deep-blue New York City shocked and disturbed by President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory are flooding shrinks’ inboxes looking for appointments.
“It’s a perfect storm for New York therapists,” said Manhattan psychologist Chloe Carmichael, who estimated she’s received a 15% spike in inquiries from patients. “It’s a repeat of 2016, where a lot of people feel really scared and traumatized and angry.”
. . . On Wednesday morning, New York City-based psychotherapist Alyson Cohen woke up to a deluge of paranoid texts from clients begging for extra appointments this week, many of whom claimed to be “afraid for their futures and that of their children.”
It's hard to avoid thinking these are the 1% of the 1%, and they're doing it as a form of virtue signaling to their peers. For instance, Ella Emhoff, Kamala's stepdaughter:
Ella Emhoff appears to be losing her mind over her stepmother’s loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election.
Emhoff, 25, was photographed sobbing on the sidelines while Vice President Harris delivered her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday.
Less than 24 hours later, the lefty activist daughter of second gentleman Doug Emhoff posted one of the unflattering images of her crying during the speech to her Instagram story, along with the caption, “Truly no words. We are all going to get through this. It just f–king hurts like a bitch right now and that’s ok.
“Just please check in on your people right now,” she wrote to her 503,000 followers. “I’m here for all of you and I love you guys.”
But these reactions are primarily fashion accessories: We'll have to see if the election outcome continues to feed Mark Halperin's career rehabilitation, but I think he's made several bad calls during this attempt.