Welcome to the podcast. My name is Douglas Wilson. This is episode 355. 355, can you believe?

So this is just a few weeks after the presidential election in 2024, and I thought I would make a few electoral post-mortem observations.

This was a remarkable election in lots of ways.

Not only do we have a divided America in the typical red state blue state sense,

we have a divided America that way, but we also have a divided America in terms of information flow. And by that I mean,

one of the things that's surprising about the outcome of this election is how different people

were surprised in different ways. And that reveals a different kind of two Americas.

There are the Americans with their feet on the ground out in the populace, general populace,

rubbing shoulders with all kinds, interacting with people, regular people. And then there is

what we might call inside the elite urban bubble

America, or you might call it the MediaVille America.

There's some people who like to watch TikTok videos or compilations of lefties losing it.

You know, they want to drink the liberal tears.

But the thing that's informative about this is not the sadness that their guy lost,

but the juxtaposition between the high confidence that Harris would

win and the desolation afterwards. And so I'm wondering what was going on when these people were so

confident. Now, some of this has to do with your

ideological commitments. If you are all in, if you are, if you understand something thoroughly,

and whether you really do or not, it's not the point here. Some people understand everything

thoroughly and they really do. Other people understand something thoroughly and they really don't. What matters here is the dogmatism or the certitude or the, you know, the confidence that goes with it. If you have sort of a rock solid confidence that triangles have three sides and that Harris could not possibly lose to a caricature

like Trump. If you're absolutely confident of that, and then you look out at the American

population and everybody's, you know, people have driver's licenses and they have regular

...