If you’ve started to feel the U.S. election is sizing up to be The View versus The Dude you’re probably not wrong. The cultural schism in America seems to have moved from a hardline Left/ Right tussle to a conflict between unmarried women (the base for The View) and their support system.

Demographics rule. Recent polling in the Washington Examiner suggests that married men are 59 percent Republican. Married women are 55 percent Republican. Unmarried men are 52 percent Republican But a whopping 68 percent of unmarried women are backing Kamala. Despite this imbalance, their impact is multiplied disproportionately by Democrats and their media stenographers.

The View seems to best capture this diversity-obsessed gender demographic. Part of the panelists’ anxiety is a victimization profile in what is perhaps the best time in history to be a woman. How anxious are they about micro-aggressions and unconscious bias? Is it DEI or nothing? Do they dispute that men should be able to use womens’ change rooms?

Apparently, yes. And it’s making their viewers frightened as hell. This at a time when, to take just one example, President Biden appointed black women to 22 percent of the positions as judges in his first 18 months as president— when only two percent of lawyers in America are black women. And yet… it’s not enough to staunch the anxiety.

Pew Reports says that 80 percent of white liberal women have been diagnosed by a medical professional as having a mental-health condition in the past five years. Over 50 percent of liberal women of all races under 30 have sought help. Older white women account for 58 percent of people who’ve used anti-depressants the past five years.

As Heather Mac donald writes, DEI has removed merit from the selection process and satisfaction from winning an untainted hiring process. DEI has multiplied this corrosive effect across all hiring practices. To exploit these fears, says author Scott Adams, “Democrats have formed a digital ‘cult’ by denying competing information from entering their minds. They did this by demonizing one side of the country to the point where even sampling their news sources is considered dangerous.” So expect a 2024 election campaign to be fought on DEI principles.

Young woman feeling stressed on a gray background

As we wrote six years ago , this dramatic cultural shift has left behind many centrists in its rapidity, unsure they have a home on the political spectrum to support with a ballot. “As the Trump presidency has unspooled, I have had the most remarkable meetings with friends I’ve known for years. They look at me as if I’ve been undergoing some remarkably unsuccessful plastic surgery. Their brows knit, their eyes squint, their laugh is nervous and apprehensive. They ask, “What happened to you?”

What they mean is, you’re become a traitor to your class. “Down the rabbit hole”. Cast out.

In the tumult of Donald Trump’s election as president in the United States (in 2026), it’s tantamount to a crime against your urban liberal class to think this is anything but a calamity for America and the free world. That class being white educated Boomers who cut their teeth on The West Wing I should know. I used to be one of them. As long as I sang from the hymn book I was golden. I have a prize to prove it. Two, in fact.

I still know the secret handshakes. Know how to spot a racist or a homophobe when no one else can see one. Because I have been one of them, I know that no one in their virtue circle is conservative. They probably know more pygmies than conservatives. So they base their prejudices on cartoons painted for them by Stephen Colbert. It comforts them to condescend.

It’s been remarkable to see the surgical removal of humour from this self-regarding class. As Robert Tracinski of The Federalist says, they’ve immunized themselves against hostile messages. “(F)or years, the left has trained itself in the habit of assuming that the only reason anyone disagrees with them is because of racism. As a consequence, those who live in this bubble tend to reflexively dismiss anyone who brings them a contrary message from the outside world.”

Former liberal heroes, like law professor Alan Dershowitz and gay journalist Glenn Greenwald, have also felt the sting of being excommunicated . “It is not an insubstantial portion of Democratic online loyalists who believe that if you deviate from Democratic Party orthodoxy on the Trump-Russia question, you are a paid Kremlin agent,” says Greenwald. Anyone who questions the Russia consensus, he says, “becomes a blasphemer. Becomes a heretic. I think that’s what they see me as.” 

It’s not pretty. A recent exchange on Twitter with a (now) former friend ended with his bitter judgement about my career. What he was saying is that my political views have made me unacceptable in the media offices of downtown Toronto, where he’s been lodged for some time now, receiving the hosannas for keeping to the party line. (Which is his choice, of course). 

It’s very easy to hew to the party line. Liberalism is certainly light lifting. It’s the astonishment of people who ask each other in the office, at the dinner parties or waiting at private schools for their kids: “Do you know anyone who actually likes Trump or would vote for him? Me neither.”

They’re honestly surprised that millions out there did vote for the vain, profane Trump for president… Rather than broaden their net, the SJWs I meet use a Jimmy Kimmel stereotype to dismiss the whole thing as some great accident that can be rectified by a zany scheme where the Russians got Trump elected.

Where do we go from here? The media, the one institution that might have kept the middle ground clear of debris, has disqualified itself with its partisan narrative about Russian collusion— serving as cutouts for the plan to fix the election concocted by the Obama administration, the FBI and the intelligence community.

This fever may have kept the eight-person CNN panels humming, but it only served to destroy their credibility with average voters. (And tank their ratings.) How this has happened is neither a fluke nor an accident. It’s abdication of the trust most cherished in our business. How— or if— they will report when facts are settled is an open question.

So Trump? Take him or leave him. His message? A clear rebuke for people who think they have it all figured. The media: Irreparably damaged. 

And if assessment that makes me a traitor to my class, I guess it’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.