This week, you’ve surely seen the same things I have: lots of discussions about how Kamala Harris didn’t get much of a convention bounce and the increasing fears on the Democrat side of the aisle that the 2024 election is about to become a long, slow slog along the same path that led to Mike Dukakis’ demise back in 1988.

All of that is plausible; I’ll endorse it because I wrote those very things in a previous column here at The American Spectator. That was less prognostication and more observation of political gravity: At some point, you’re going to have to have substance to both excite your medium-grade supporters and give persuadable voters a reason to be persuaded, and when time and their experience shows you to be both unqualified (Dukakis’ curriculum vitae, at least at first glance, actually showed he wasn’t all that awful a candidate; it was a deeper examination of his performance that ruined him) and completely out of the political mainstream, you start to run out of oxygen pretty quickly.

So it makes sense that they’re getting nervous. And there is a slow trickle of polling beginning to show Donald Trump is recovering the lead he held on Joe Biden prior to the latter’s electoral demise in July.

Is this a sure thing? No. It could be a mirage. And for all of the punditry and analysis out there, the one thing that decides elections much more than credit is given for is events.

We have no idea what unforeseen happenstance lies in wait to drive this election. This is all very much unknown. But it’s not a hallucination that Team Harris is writing campaign memos calling themselves underdogs in this race despite all the manifest advantages they ought to have as a de-facto incumbent.

So nothing in this edition of the 5QT will predict the results in November. But a few things do appear likely on the way there:

1. Guys vs. Gals

This isn’t a prediction. We’re already there. The Democrats have declared a quiet war on masculinity as part of Harris’ gender-gap appeal.

If you missed (and you’re excused if you did; only masochists and leftists would have seen this) Celinda Lake’s appearance on Mark Halperin’s 2Way podcast, you’ll know that the Democrat pollster and strategist is openly calling for a Battle of the Sexes this fall:

“We’ve got to win women by more than we lose men,” Lake says. “That’s really the formula for success … But it’s real Whac-A-Mole. You’ve got to keep men sullen but not mutinous, and you’ve got to win women enthusiastically.”

Our regular readers know that this column touts, ad nauseam, the crucial importance of four numbers that surfaced in exit polling from the 2022 midterm elections. Namely, that married men are R+20, married women are R+14, unmarried men are R+14, and unmarried women are a mass outlier at D+37.

Unmarried women are the Democrats’ real hope of winning this election. They’ve got to be the most fervent voting demographic of all. And it’s obvious they’re the target audience for the Harris campaign. Why do you think they told the lie that Taylor Swift or Beyonce would make a surprise appearance at the United Center on the last night of their convention? They were trying to juice that demographic’s interest in Kamala’s dud of an acceptance speech.

It was also not particularly subtle that the Democrats played up all the “nonthreatening” beta males they could at their convention, from the lisping Andy Beshear to the obnoxiously gay Pete Buttigieg to the cringey stage dancing of Chuck Schumer, while holding up Tim Walz — the gun-grabbing, COVID-nanny-lockdown-ing, BLM rioter-surrendering Minnesota governor with a record of Stolen Valor and “trans-sanctuary” policies— as their masculine ideal. Walz as the All-American dad resonates, sure; those R+20 married men definitely look up to the volunteer high school assistant football coach who doubles as the faculty adviser for the Gay-Straight Alliance club when he’s not taking 30 paid-for trips to Communist China and getting married on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

But Hulk Hogan is creepy and toxic, dontchaknow.

Baiting and switching single women as an open and obvious Democrat campaign strategy goes back to 2012 with the Life of Julia appeal by Team Obama. It’ll be even more open and obvious this year. What Lake perhaps has too much faith in is the Democrats’ ability to carry off this gender war without igniting men against Harris. We’ll see how that goes.

2. JD Vance Is Out of Touch, You Guys

You’re likely to see this clip given as much play as the one from several years ago about “childless cat ladies” did. It’s Vance dealing with a question about the cost of child care:

Q: “What can we do about lowering the cost of daycare?”

JD Vance: “…Maybe Grandpa and Grandma want to help a little bit more. Maybe there’s an uncle/aunt who wants to help a little bit more…” @Acyn
pic.twitter.com/MrKZ0cmyFx

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) September 5, 2024

This has been seized on as an example of how Vance is heartless and — that word again — “toxic.”

The policy piece to this, of course, is that if you suggest that family obligations are, in fact, family obligations rather than those of the government, then you lack compassion — when the reality is that government involvement in child care is disastrous pretty much across the board.

Vance’s answer wasn’t “out of touch.” It was the opposite, given that he was talking about his own personal experience. And contra Walz’s stupid attacks on him for having attended law school at Yale (Walz was amid a host of DNC speakers who had attended Yale and other Ivy League schools not just for law school but for undergrad as well; what is more significant as a marker for Vance’s identity is that he parlayed his military service into tuition at Ohio State), Vance didn’t come from a “privileged” background. His grandmother didn’t pitch in because she was a bored richy-rich dilettante; she did it because his mother was an addict and it was the only way to keep him off the streets-to-prison conveyor belt.

It turns out that’s the obvious solution for a huge portion of Americans. And Vance is pushing an expansion of child tax credits in order to give regular Americans resources to find their own solutions for child care.

What you’re not allowed to notice is that upscale Americans who can live well on one income often do. The great feminist narrative being sold to that D+37 demographic is that a career as an office worker in a cubicle is more noble than spending one’s young adulthood as part of a household with kids. Which sustains the D+37 mindset. It also creates a demand for child care beyond the available (and particularly the available high-quality) supply, which means for young married women in the workforce they’re essentially spinning their wheels paying for child care with the depressed salaries they’re making.

All this at a time when many of those cubicle jobs are being subsumed to AI.

We need a national conversation about whether this rat race serves the needs of anybody but the woke multinational corporations that increasingly dominate our economy. Vance is just now scratching the edges of that conversation, and it’s existential to the Democrats’ future electoral hopes. So naturally he has to be demonized.

And he will be. The attacks on Vance have hardly even started. Just watch.

3. Russia, Russia, Russia

This isn’t even a column unto itself. It’s a book. There is so much to unpack here that it’s hard to know where to start.

Except Merrick Garland was kind enough to help us out with that this week, unveiling an indictment of a pair of Russians who threw funding at a Tennessee media startup called Tenet Media, which runs a YouTube page that carries podcasts from conservative influencers like Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and a few others.

The indictment claims Tenet was using the podcasters as Russian propagandists, which has led to all of them getting bombarded on social media as Russian spies and traitors. Rubin, Johnson, Pool, Taylor Hansen, Matt Christiansen, and Lauren Southern have all responded with spirited denials that they’ve been directed by the Russians to say anything.

Without weighing in on any of that, what’s important here is how pernicious this is. On a host of levels.

The most obvious one is that the Department of Justice is weaponizing itself against dissident independent media voices. You can howl about how the Russians are pumping money into election interference and somebody has to do something about it all you want. That comes off as pretty hollow given how wide-open Chinese money has been in influencing legacy corporate media entities like the Washington Post for YEARS. Where is DOJ on that topic?

Nowhere.

I know nothing about Tenet Media. Their YouTube page is a whole bunch of “Benny Johnson DESTROYS [insert leftist name here] Over Issue X” videos. Most of that is more low-brow than is my taste, so I can’t speak to it. But the idea that Tim Pool or Lauren Southern are Russian spies is so stupid it’s insulting.

What’s the effect? If you’re a conservative influencer, particularly an independent who isn’t yoked to corporate media and therefore can’t be controlled by the ruling class, a persistent problem is getting capital and funding to build a business infrastructure behind your operations. You can’t monetize through advertising the way traditional media could; Google and Facebook destroyed that the better part of a decade ago. You have to build a subscriber base to survive now, but that’s brutally difficult given all the competition out there and the throttling of independent media (not just conservative media, mind you) by the big social media platforms.

So how do you pay the bills?

Well, on the Left there are nonprofits galore throwing out grant money for all kinds of things. There’s a leftist outfit called Covering Climate Now that gives out prizes for the best global-warmist “reporting,” literally fueling that insanity, and it’s only one example of a panoply of funding wacko Democrats in independent media can get. They get throttled by social media platforms and don’t make a lot from the digital ad networks, but they very often get lavishly funded anyway.

On the right, there is no such structure. Big-money conservative donors who understand and appreciate the value of a media presence beyond Fox News are sadly few and far between, and a lot of them either fancy themselves media celebrities in their own right or soon wilt under the pressure of left-wing boycotts and other hostile acts when they surface as supporters of conservative talkers.

And now you have evidence that if you do a deal with somebody who actually does have money on offer, you’ll be tarred as a foreign spy and a traitor just before an election. The underhandedness of this can’t be overemphasized. It’s a dirty, evil form of censorship.

Another ugly and intended effect is that anybody who questions the billions of dollars thrown into the maw of the Ukraine War that is long overdue to be resolved at the peace table will now be accused of shilling for Vladimir Putin and have their patriotism — and that of what funders, business partners, and sponsors — questioned. What do you get from that? Well, you get fewer questions asked, less likelihood of a peaceful resolution of that conflict, more likelihood of American kids being sent to die in a border conflict between tyrants, and a not-so-slow creep toward the day when a missile falls and a mushroom cloud rises over Dallas or Grand Rapids.

Again — if the DOJ gave a damn about the ChiComs buying up major American newspapers with sponsorship dollars, this would be a different conversation. Instead, we have a toxic attack on independent media without much in the way of evidence that the influencers in question did anything unpatriotic or untoward.

And they’ll try to once again monetize this against Trump and the GOP as a bunch of Putin puppets, having already flogged that narrative for eight years.

4. Oh, Yeah, Merchan Will Sentence Trump to Jail Time

This one is as clear as day. The only way it doesn’t happen is if internal polling by Harris’ camp shows it’s a sizable net negative for them if Trump is led out of that Manhattan courthouse in irons.

On Sept. 16, New York kangaroo judge Juan Merchan will announce his decision on the Supreme Court’s presidential-immunity ruling and how it affects the “hush money” case he’s presiding over. Two days later, before it’s even remotely possible for Trump’s attorneys to fire off an appeal — and it’s hard to find anybody who disagrees that Merchan will declare the presidential immunity ruling immaterial to his verdict — Merchan will hand down the sentence.

At best, he’ll suspend the sentence. At best, he’ll slap an ankle monitor on Trump and impose conditions that will hamstring his ability to campaign. More likely, he’ll try to put Trump in a prison cell, and once he’s incarcerated — if Merchan manages to do that without the U.S. Supreme Court stepping in — it’s anybody’s guess whether something very bad happens.

I didn’t think this would happen until last week. Once the word started hitting that Team Harris’ internal polling was marshmallow-soft, that changed. And the fact the Democrats cut loose $25 million from the Harris war chest and dumped it into congressional races was a telltale sign that word was a real thing.

Remember, this version of the Democrat Party doesn’t accept losses. They escalate. And Merchan sentencing Trump to prison over that stupid lawfare case, with no discernible crime anyone can articulate to back the guilty verdict, is the most obvious and available escalation they’ve got.

Andy McCarthy, who’s a pretty good go-to on matters such as this, agrees. Or, to be more honest about it, I’ve come around, and I agree with McCarthy.

5. Netflix’s Kaos Is Entertaining, If More Than a Bit Insulting

Given what I’d heard about Kaos, the new sendup of Greek mythology starring a gaudy ensemble cast headed up by Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, I was a bit dubious about whether I’d be able to stomach it.

But I’ll give credit where it’s due. This was a pretty good show, and if there’s a season two, I’ll bite.

And I’m saying this even though it’s fairly obvious that the show’s creator, Charlie Covell, is using it as a major middle finger to Western civilization. Covell is a woman using “they/them” pronouns, and there is a sizable and unnecessary bulge of LGBTQ advocacy baked into the plot. But of course, that’s true of most shows now, isn’t it? We’re so used to it, we don’t even let it register anymore, though most people still refuse to accept the legitimacy of Alphabet People supremacism shows such as this one offer.

Beyond all of that being thrust in your face, you should hate this show because its central tenets are that there is no afterlife, religion is a scam, and family is an evil thing. It’s clear Covell is using the Greek gods as a stand-in for Christianity, and the exposure of morality as a fraud as the story goes along is not very subtle.

But that said, you’re at least given an out as a viewer. Because what’s described isn’t a Christian society. Kaos takes place mostly on the island of Crete, which is ruled by the dictatorial Minos of mythological fame, and it’s Poseidon who essentially rules through him. Meanwhile, Goldblum’s Zeus rules from Mount Olympus, and he’s basically the least godlike god imaginable — petty, venal, stupid, and impulsive — just as the Greek myths suggested him to be.

Goldblum is his classic self, and Cliff Curtis is terrific as Poseidon. The show’s hero, an Orpheus who in this case is a rock star attempting to save his decliningly faithful wife from an eternity in the underworld following her death, is played ably by Killian Scott. There is some real heroism in Kaos, and it does have legitimate things to say about the corruption that power brings. The plot does twist and turn, and the story is clever and very humorous at times.

I saw every offensive thing in those eight episodes, and I still kept watching. I’ve got to give Covell credit. This might have been woke propaganda, but it’s at least fair-to-middling storytelling. And, as said above, Goldblum is excellent in it.

Also, be on the lookout for the first installment of From Hellmarsh With Love, the serialized sequel to my first American Spectator novel, King of the Jungle, this weekend!