John Hawkins’ Culturcidal blog at Substack is often a great place to see interesting discussion of important topics, especially on Democrats, and Hawkins’ latest entry is no exception. In a post Monday, Hawkins noted that tons of statistics out there indicate a level of gloom in America that perhaps hasn’t truly existed until now.

But something Hawkins pointed out was particularly striking. He caught part of a podcast in which lefty pundit Tim Ferriss was interviewing marketing guru Seth Godin, and Ferriss said this:

Tim Ferriss: With that backdrop, could you speak to how you think about nihilism and addressing nihilism? Because certainly even in my audience, and particularly among younger people, but I have seen it bleeding upward into my generation, even people who are older than me, what appears to be this creeping nihilism, this sense that nothing means anything. You can’t sort true from false, right from wrong. Everything’s too confusing.

We have deepfakes, misinformation, disinformation. You just can’t sort anything from anything else. And on top of that, it seems like the Titanic has already hit the iceberg. We’re on the way down. You can’t really patch the hole. So is the best we can do playing violins on the deck while she goes under? Or is there anything else to do? That is maybe an overstatement, but not much of one. This is something that I really do sense in many interactions that I’ve seen and felt. And I would just love to know how you have thought about that, because I have found myself…in a malaise. And some would say, “Well, it’s a well-warranted malaise. So what are you going to do about it?” And I would love to know what you suggest we do about it or what you have done about it…

Hawkins wasn’t impressed with Godin’s response, and the transcript bears that out — it’s a bunch of gobbledygook about climate refugees and workers at Amazon quitting in droves and other things.

But a couple of things stood out from his treatment of the exchange. First is that the Left is just as convinced as the Right that the world is ending. And second is that the “dooming” — to borrow a phrase from Kurt Schlichter, as I did in my last column in this space — from the other side is based on a completely different worldview.

Why? Leftists are a bunch of magical thinkers who won’t see the world as it is. They can’t process that world, so they process something else. An easy example of this can almost assuredly be found in the comments below — the lefty trolls will comment about a column that is about to get around to the manifest failures of their side by citing some legal difficulty of Donald Trump’s, which is akin to whataboutism twice removed, because they refuse to process those manifest failures as such.

So when leftists start thinking that the world is falling apart, they don’t come at it from the standpoint that the American nuclear family is dying (they don’t really like the American nuclear family, anyway), or that we’re rapidly becoming a post-Christian nation (again, to them a feature rather than a bug), or that our national birth rate is dropping precipitously (they’re Malthusians at heart, so a smaller population is a good thing in their eyes), or that our justice system has largely lost the confidence of the public (they’ve done everything they could to disrupt law and order and corrupt that system over the course of the last 60 years or more).

Instead, they think the world is falling apart, as Ferriss says, because of “disinformation.” Put another way, the harbinger of doom for them is that nobody trusts the leftist legacy media that they’ve corrupted and destroyed.

Or they think the world is falling apart because of climate change. In that Ferriss–Godin interview, part of Godin’s response to Ferriss’ question about nihilism is his insistence that “we look at the data on the climate, it’s very clear” that tens of millions of climate refugees will be on the move because “whole swaths of the planet are going to become uninhabitable.” That’s a contention that isn’t supported by actual science, but it’s repeated so often on the left that it’s now an article of faith.

Or they think racism is destroying society, when there is no evidence that we’re more racist than we were 30, 50, 100, or 200 years ago. It’s possible to argue — and I do just that in Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, my new book that is available for presale now from Calamo Press — that race relations are worse since Barack Obama came on the scene 15 or so years ago, but that’s nonetheless a manufactured problem.

In fact, they’re all manufactured problems, and what they come down to is fear over the prospect that regular people will stop listening to the magical-thinking narratives the Left has used to gain political advantage. Because, if that happens, the Left will ultimately have less power over its fellow man — and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real apocalypse, according to the Left.

Consider CNN’s treatment, a month ago, of a survey showing the effects of modern cultural, political, and economic aggressions made on young men, a demographic that is rapidly turning hard against the Democrat Party:

The problems of young men in America have been out there for a long time, and nobody on the left gave a damn about any of them. They still don’t. But what’s clear from the discussion is panic not over those problems but of the effects they have on politics. The real crisis, dontchaknow, is that Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson have a following now, and young men don’t care about climate change.

Which brings us to the meat of this conversation. Those on the left who are willing to put away the magical thinking for a moment — or are at least somewhat clear-eyed about the difficulties that can arise in foisting the magical thinking upon their fellow man — are becoming more terrified about the future than even the Right is.

So here’s terror for you, because this might be the worst salesman for magical thinking imaginable:

This isn’t somebody you can run for president next year.

And as downcast as Republicans might be — Trump supporters have largely convinced themselves that the Democrat machine will steal the 2024 election just like it stole the 2020 election; Trump detractors are terrified, or perhaps gleeful, that female voters simply will not vote for him and that, therefore, his vote ceiling will crash down onto his head on Election Night — what’s being missed is the five-alarm fire the Democrats are going to have to come to terms with where their 2024 ticket is concerned.

Which may or may not explain why this got next to zero play after it happened Sunday morning:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) says it’s time to “move on” from speculation that he might run in the 2024 White House race.

“Filing deadlines haven’t passed. [If] President Biden doesn’t run, why shouldn’t we consider you a likely candidate?” Chuck Todd asked Newsom in an interview set to air Sunday morning on “Meet the Press” on NBC.

“Well, I think the vice president is naturally the one lined up, and the filing deadlines are quickly coming to pass and I think we need to move past this notion that he’s not going to run,” Newsom said. “President Biden is going to run, and we’re looking forward to getting him reelected.”

Pressed on how he responds to private calls about 2024, Newsom said, “Time to move on. Let’s go.”

Newsom, who has long been considered a possible presidential contender, has repeatedly said he won’t run for the White House in 2024, even in the hypothetical that Biden, 80, decides against a reelection bid.

The California governor also stressed during the interview that, if Biden weren’t to run, Vice President Harris would be next up for the party to rally around.

“It’s the Biden-Harris administration. Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned … about presidents and vice presidents,” Newsom said.

What’s the effect of Gavin Newsom once again declaring he won’t be a candidate and anointing Kamala Harris as the heir-apparent for the job of OPOTUS (Obama Puppet of the United States)? A couple of interpretations that The American Spectator publisher Melissa Mackenzie and I discuss on The Spectacle podcast this week are that (1) Newsom thinks economic doom is coming, and that would make it very difficult for any Democrat to be very viable in 2024, or (2) Newsom thinks he has a better shot of rebuilding the Democrats from the wreckage of what the Obama machine will make of them next year — rather than trying to be the puppet-apparent atop the 2024 ticket.

And it’s entirely reasonable to pull back from running under either interpretation.

But there’s more. Who wants to lead a party full of politicians who do this?:

Emergency orders issued by New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham suspending the right to carry firearms in public in and around Albuquerque are getting pushback from gun rights groups and some law enforcement officials and elected leaders.

Citing the recent shooting deaths of three children, including an 11-year-old boy gunned down outside a minor league baseball park last week, Grisham issued a 30-day ban on open and concealed carrying of firearms in her state’s largest city and surrounding areas in Bernalillo County. The decree came a day after Lujan Grisham declared gun violence a statewide public health emergency, saying “the rate of gun deaths in New Mexico increased 43% from 2009 to 2018.”

“When New Mexicans are afraid to be in crowds, to take their kids to school, to leave a baseball game — when their very right to exist is threatened by the prospect of violence at every turn — something is very wrong,” Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, said in a statement.

The unhinged Karen governor of New Mexico is a perfect example of magical thinking at work — declare a “health” crisis when an able-bodied lunatic shoots other able-bodied people, and thus bootstrap yourself “emergency” powers to trample basic constitutional rights, and somehow this will make you a hero — but her clay-footed authoritarianism even got such leftist luminaries as David Hogg and Ted Lieu lecturing her about constitutional rights.

And then there’s Jennifer Granholm and her EV propaganda tour:

Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm had a rocky electric vehicle tour that included a confrontation with a family who called the police on her staff over a charging station standoff.

Granholm’s staff got into a tiff with an unhappy family earlier this summer after her team tried to hold an electric vehicle charging spot by parking a gas car there, according to an NPR story from Sunday headlined, “Electric cars have a road trip problem, even for the secretary of energy.”

The four-day trip from North Carolina to Tennessee was “intended to draw attention to the billions of dollars the White House is pouring into green energy and clean cars.”

Granholm’s ambitious southern trip that was “painstakingly mapped out ahead of time to allow for charging,” however, drew the ire of one family in particular, due to a familiar problem for electric car vehicle drivers.

“But between stops, Granholm’s entourage at times had to grapple with the limitations of the present,” NPR’s Camila Domonoske, who accompanied her on the trip, wrote. After Granholm’s staff realized there weren’t enough charging spots for electric vehicles at a stop near Augusta, Ga., “an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle by one of those working chargers to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary of energy.”

“That did not go down well: a regular gas-powered car blocking the only free spot for a charger?” Domonoske continued.

“In fact, a family that was boxed out — on a sweltering day, with a baby in the vehicle — was so upset they decided to get the authorities involved,” she explained. “They called the police.”

It’s hard to sell lies. You can’t stage-manage reality. Try to show everybody the false reality that it’s easy to find a charging station for your car, and you end up showing everybody how out-of-touch the Team Biden EV elite actually are.

And then, this:

President Joe Biden welcomed Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman by shaking his hand during the G20’s annual summit on Saturday in New Delhi, despite a somewhat tense relationship between the two.

World leaders at the summit discussed an international infrastructure project that would connect India, the Middle East and Europe with railways, shipping lines, high-speed data cables and energy pipelines. Saudi Arabia is set to be a part of the initiative due to a push from the Biden administration to complete its “mega-deal” with the country that included normalization between the kingdom and Israel, Axios reported on Saturday. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed said that the kingdom will take part in the project with a $20 billion investment.

For Biden, the possible Saudi-Israel peace agreement would mean a historic foreign policy achievement the White House has been pushing. However, the president has also had his criticisms towards Saudi Arabia as he has previously said Saudi Arabia’s government has “very little social redeeming value,” and that it had murdered “children…and innocent people” in Yemen.

Maybe that’s a foreign policy win and maybe it’s not, but what’s questionable is why we want to facilitate rail and other transportation that would more tightly knit together the economies of India, the Middle East, and Europe, when those countries are all in significant ways economic competitors of ours. How would this project help to promote American exports and bring down our record trade deficit?

And it’s worth noting that the Saudis have gone from a renegade, outlaw regime to Biden’s bestest pals at the same time gas is $4 a gallon and there’s nothing left in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to draw down. This isn’t fooling anyone. They’re desperate for a win, and they’ll take literally anything.

There’s more. There’s lots more. If you’re a Democrat, you have every reason to be terrified over the possibility that your party may collapse politically — because practically everything is pointing downward, and the machine can’t paper it over forever.

The Suck, as it happens, will eventually turn on its maker. Even the magical thinkers see that deep down.