Wouldn’t the answer be, to children who might ask why former and future President Donald Trump beat current Vice President and future private citizen Kamala Harris Emhoff in the election, that the United States held a free and fair election, and as in every election, one serious candidate won, and one serious candidate lost? But no, the American left, having gone off the rails in their #TrumpDerangementSyndrome, think something else is required.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

How do we explain this election to our children?

Children need us to accept their gift of hope, even if we aren’t feeling it, and they need us to use it to fight for them.

by Gwen Snyder, For The Inquirer | Wednesday, November 13, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST

The past two months have been a whirlwind of autumnal novelty and stimulation for my preschooler. There was Sesame Place, then her 3rd birthday, then her first day of school. Just as things began to settle, we launched into a cascade of Halloween activities. And then, fast on their heels came the election.

Her daughter was going to ‘school’ when she was just three years old?

As anyone in this city knows, election time is its own kind of festival here. Volunteers and committeepeople and organizers converge until there are knocks on the door three times a day, and every telephone pole is papered in colorful placards. One afternoon, we came home to find that a yard sign had popped up on our lawn, appearing suddenly like a mushroom after rain.

Really? Perhaps author Gwen Snyder, described as a “professional organizer and longtime Philadelphia activist,” had asked for that sign, but the way it’s written it at least appears that someone, perhaps yet another “longtime Philadelphia activist,” had just put one in front of someone else’s home, without knowing the political persuasion of the people who lived there.

It was an opportunity for lived education, I felt. I talked to my preschooler about it in terms of free school lunches: one candidate wanted all kids to have them, one, unkindly, did not. She canvassed our block with us cheerfully, reverse trick-or-treating with campaign lit. When Election Day came, she helped us press voting machine buttons and gave her leftover Halloween candy out to poll workers.

Ahhh, there it is: Mrs Snyder apparently thinks that there really is a free lunch! Perhaps the author might have explained to her preschooler that those free school lunches had to be paid for by someone, in that case, the taxpayers.

Instead, we tried to manage our emotions in front of her as we absorbed the news that Team Trump’s torrent of disinformation and hatred had resonated with voters once again. The fascist presidential candidate had prevailed, this time carrying the popular vote.

On social media, someone asked me how I was explaining this outcome to my child. I struggled with the enormity of that question, and still do. How do you explain this horror to a child when you are still not quite sure how to explain it to yourself?

As the author repeats the typical liberal description of Mr Trump as a “fascist,” I was reminded of how the children in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria are ‘educated’, by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency fore Palestine, UNRWA, to hate Jews and that Jews should be killed, as documented by the United Nations watch, and the august journal Foreign Policy.

The author does not particularly like other people expressing their views, as is documented by her call for people and government agencies to abandon Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — because she doesn’t like that majority owner Elon Musk has supported the apparently radical idea of freedom of speech. It’s wryly amusing that someone is using her freedom of speech and of the press to criticize freedom of speech and of the press for other people.

In that same vein, Mrs Snyder has ‘protected’ her tweets, so that only her “approved followers” can see what she has written.

How radical is Mrs Synder? She has the typical ‘pronouns’ in her Twitter bio, and tells us that she lives in ‘occupied Lenape land.’ And in this silliness posted on Mastodon, she refers not to ‘pregnant women’ but “birthing people.” She has a photo saying “TERFs (Trans exclusive Radical Feminists) suck” on her Instagram. In her own words:

Most progressive organizers (myself included) got our start in the street, not the polling place. We’re veterans of exciting moments of mass protest like the post-9/11 antiwar movement, 2011’s Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Matter marches of 2014. We got arrested at Abolish ICE protests in 2018 and tear-gassed during the George Floyd uprisings of 2020.

Translation: if there was a far-left cause célèbre, she was for it, and the Inquirer gives her space to advocate it. I’m pretty sure that if I submitted an OpEd to the Inky, on anything I’d ever write, it would be rejected. Editorially, it is not a serious newspaper.