It has been over a week now since the Trumpening.
What a week it has been.
I hope all those reading XYZ have enjoyed the sterling coverage of recent world events by our gallant band of citizen reporters.
Amongst the latest articles that you simply can’t miss:
Eh?nonymous brilliantly documented the decline of the mainstream media in the face of Trump.
Bradly Billings rubbed it in the faces of the Western elites that Trump has exposed that they have no freaking idea what is going on in their own countries outside the hashtags on their twitter feeds.
Adam Piggott described the broader context of Trump, Brexit and the Cultural Revolution now underway, as well as the consequences of an establishment unwilling, or perhaps even unable to confront it.
If you have not read these fantastic articles as well as the many others posted in recent times by XYZ’s numerous talented contributors, please make sure to do so.
That this site, with no funding and a volunteer staff, not only predicted the rise of Trumpism but documented and explained it in a fashion that our well-funded sister over at the ABC seemed fundamentally incapable of doing, shows both the nature of the new world that we now live in, and also what an exciting world it is.
But for me personally, the highlight wasn’t watching ABC commentators melt down into pools of radioactive fair-trade sludge, or watching CNN hacks having to announce every incremental state victory towards the eventual Trumpslide. It wasn’t even the sheer and utter unadulterated joy of watching celebrity after celebrity explode in incandescent rage on Twitter.
I’m a simple man with simple tastes. For me the most poignant and hilarious moment was from our future Australian of the Year, Waleed Aly.
Now I’ve written about Waleed a couple of times before, as have my fellow XYZ contributors Ryan Fletcher, Moses Apostaticus and Tas-Man amongst others; he is for the left the acceptable face of Australian Islam, so for the constantly controversial counter-cultural writers carefully cultivated here at the XYZ, he is often a topic of discussion.
Needless to say, I was a little curious about his take on the glorious ascendency of the God-Emperor Trump.
Waleed didn’t disappoint.
Reporting live from New York on Wednesday night, The Project host was asked by fellow panellist Carrie Bickmore what he thought about the outcome.
‘How do you personally feel being in that country now as a Muslim, knowing who they just elected?’ she asked.
‘If I’m forced to think about it that way, it’s an incredibly confronting thing,’ Aly responded.
‘A lot of minority communities are worried about this tonight. There’s no glossing over that.
‘This is a clear victory, no doubt about that but there is a lot of real concerns. It is really, in a way, very scary.
‘I am not American, I get to get on a plane in a couple of days and come home and so I don’t have to live with this day to day but it is particularly frightening.’
Waleed had been sent over to the U.S.A. to attend Hilary Clinton’s victory party in New York, to bask in the death of conservative white America, and the end of any organised resistance to immigration to that land by followers of the Islamic faith.
He had gotten on the plane in Melbourne fully expecting to gloat at the failure of the stupid, backward rednecks to retake any measure of control over their country’s borders.
He was probably giddy with anticipation waiting in his first class seat on that long flight across the Pacific, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to figuratively open up his fly and urinate on the prostrate face of what had once been the foremost Western power in the history of the world, in one of its greatest cities.
And then the results came in.
It was fantastic.
The pain in Waleed’s eyes when he realised what his trip had turned into, the broken timbre of his usually oh-so-certain voice, the defeated form of his slumped shoulders, and shell-shocked expression as the new reality dawned, were lovely to behold.
The shattered emotional state he found himself in echoed in every syllable he spoke.
His good friend and fellow Leftist Carrie Bickmore seemed almost apologetic in questioning him at all on what must have been one of the most personally confronting days in the life of the most oppressed man in Australia.
My God it was delicious.
His normally smug face looked as though someone had broken into his home, relieved themselves on his dining room table, kicked his dog and sexually satisfied his no-doubt frustrated wife in front of him.
In a week of pure salty joy, with leftists of all stripes screaming, sobbing and probably cutting themselves in pure disbelief, the contribution of Waleed to my personal happiness could not have been greater if he had jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.
So thank you, Waleed: thank you for going, thank you for being there to witness the Trumpening first hand, and thank you most of all for still trying to be a petulant, whining little worm as the lights of the camera shone, a new day dawned, and a new future seemed possible.