For the first time since the Reagan years a Republican took Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Michigan.  After years of waiting for the rise of the MARs (Middle-American Radicals), I hear the ghost of Sam Francis chortling with unrestrained mirth.

Trump took on the Clinton machine, the Republican Party, the media, the oligarchs, the neocons, and the national-security establishment—and he won.  A massive media campaign, the likes of which we have never seen before in this country, was unleashed against him.  A fifth column of NeverTrump Republican mandarins mobilized to stop him.  Every official victim group in the book howled and hurled imprecations—and it backfired so badly that it catapulted Trump into the White House.

The reaction of the media is a wonderful sight to behold: Shock, disbelief, horror, and now the most vicious, albeit weak, counterattacks.  The latest: Trump is a Nazi.  Proof?  A conference of barely 200 “Alt-Right” losers held in Washington, D.C., featured these basement-dwellers Sieg Heiling Trump’s victory.  And of course, the media demanded that Trump denounce the Alt-Right: When he did, in no uncertain terms, they just kept bringing it up, again and again.

These people lack the one quality that ideological entrepreneurs must possess: imagination.  And so we’ll be subjected to an endless loop of Mrs. Clinton’s Alt-Right speech for the next four years.  It worked so well the first time . . .

What’s really gratifying to me is how spectacularly the Clinton campaign’s anti-Russian hysterics sank like a lead pirozhki.  During one of the debates, Hillary shrieked that Trump is a “Russian puppet.”  The entire response of the Clinton team to the WikiLeaks revelations was that it was all a Russian plot to elect Trump.  John Kasich’s campaign even set up a special website, trump-putin2016.com (no longer available) that purported to “prove” the Russo-Trumpian connection.  There was even a story circulated in the mainstream media that Trump headquarters had set up a special computer line to the Kremlin, the better to receive orders directly from Vlad!  Former CIA chief Mike Morell opined that Trump is an “unconscious” Kremlin asset.

The mainstream media echoed this smear campaign, lovingly detailing what they assumed to be Trump’s financial connections to Russian banks, while noting that Michael Flynn, who has since been tapped to be Trump’s national security advisor, had once had dinner with Putin, and had appeared on Russia Today, the state-funded Russian media outlet.

The Washington cognoscenti thought this remake of The Manchurian Candidate was a clever election ploy, certain to bring down Trump and pave the way for the Clinton Restoration.  Such certainty underscores what it means to be decadent elites unfit for office: They really believed that their own preoccupations were shared by the rest of the country.  They didn’t recognize their calls for starting a new cold war as mere propaganda.  Instead of cynically (but privately) dismissing it all as mere red meat for the masses, they actually succeeded in talking themselves into the absurdity that a country with the GDP of Spain represents a credible threat to Europe and the United States.

In short, they became impervious to facts.  And that was their undoing.

The icing on the cake is this: Rather than actually confronting reality, these arrogant technocrats created a computer simulation of it and let it make their campaign decisions for them.  As the Washington Post reported, they relied entirely on a computer program named Ada:

Ada is a complex computer algorithm that the campaign was prepared to publicly [sic] unveil after the election as its invisible guiding hand.  Named for a female 19th-century mathematician—Ada, Countess of Lovelace—the algorithm was said to play a role in virtually every strategic decision Clinton aides made, including where and when to deploy the candidate and her battalion of surrogates and where to air television ads—as well as when it was safe to stay dark.

True, Ada correctly anticipated the role of Pennsylvania as a battleground state, but “it appears that the importance of other states Clinton would lose—including Michigan and Wisconsin—never became fully apparent.”

Yet this was the key breakthrough that enabled the Trump campaign to capture the Rust Belt vote, and had them concentrating their resources and their candidate’s speaking schedule in those two states, which hadn’t gone Republican since Reagan.  In order to reach this decision, the Trump campaign had to employ the one thing missing from the algorithm-driven Clinton camp: imagination.  When the Clintonians decided to let a computer do their thinking for them, they neglected to follow a dictum first put into words by none other than the original Ada, Countess of Lovelace.  This daughter of Lord Byron, who died at the age of 36, invented the first algorithm and collaborated with mathematician Charles Babbage on the creation of the first computer, which she called the “Analytical Engine.”  About that machine, she wrote,

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing.  It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.  It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere.