I spent the weekend on a much-needed fishing trip to a bass-stocked lake quite literally in the middle of nowhere, and therefore tuned out the nonstop clownshow that is our national political landscape — for 48 hours, at least.

It was a great opportunity for escape, which as I watch my current hometown of Baton Rouge descend into the depths of urban decline à la Jackson, Newark, and Baltimore was quite restorative.

If you can’t make it out to where the fish are, perhaps I might be able to offer some literary escapism to soothe your own sorrows. But I digress.

In any event, on the ride back to what passes for civilization in these parts, I heard the Fox News interview between Chris Wallace and Donald Trump everyone seems to be talking about. I’m not as exercised about Wallace’s behavior with the president as everyone else; the whining and semantic warfare Wallace trafficked in during his interview with Trump — most notably seen in Wallace’s insistence that Trump is lying when he says Biden’s platform defunds the police, followed immediately after by Wallace’s stipulation that the platform suggests “redirecting” funds from cops to social services — is of a piece with all of Wallace’s interviews.

Incidentally, defunding the police isn’t just in the platform document Wallace doesn’t believe is there — it’s also in the script whoever is controlling Biden provided to him for TV interviews.

The howling about Wallace, though, is itself a sign, I think. It’s a sign that Regular America Is Mad As Hell, And Not Going To Take It Anymore.

Nobody in the legacy media seems to have picked up on this, but it’s there. Boy, is it there.

And if you want to see it in technicolor, take a look at what happened to a different offending Wallace last week a bit west of Washington where the news presenter was doing battle with the president:

Bubba Wallace was greeted with loud booing from those in attendance at NASCAR’s Cup Series All-Star Race at Bristol, Tennessee this week.

Things didn’t improve for Wallace once the race began either. The sport’s lone full-time black driver crashed into a wall, after which the crowd cheered. Moreover, there were several confederate flags visible in and around the raceway. Flying in defiance of Wallace’s and NASCAR’s demand that the flags be removed from all official events.

Remember, when there were guffaws over the race car(d) driver’s story that he’d been threatened with a noose in his garage at Talladega, which turned out to be a garage door-pull rope tied in a loop that had been there for months, if not years, Bubba Wallace scolded “simple-minded” NASCAR fans for “jumping to conclusions” and needing education. Then after some 17 FBI agents descended on Talladega amid a federal investigation offering the prospect of turning the imaginary noose-hanger into a Dillinger for our time, it was shown that if anybody was “simple-minded” and “jumping to conclusions” it was Bubba Wallace.

So now he’s being booed at the track, until he crashes — at which time he gets his only cheers of the day.

There was a time not long ago when booing the only black driver on the stock car circuit was unthinkable. To do so was Obviously Racist, You Guys, and even the reddest of necks in the stands recognized the poor form inherent in such boorishness.

Except now they don’t care anymore.

Bristol was one of lots of current examples in which ordinary people are beginning to, figuratively, of course (for now) following the observation of the great H. L. Mencken that “every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats.”

There were the normal Americans who engaged in a bit of “counter-vandalism” and painted black over a “Black Lives Matter” mural in Martinez, California. Those were white folks; the cops are still looking for them. But the “Black Lives Matter” mural on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower has been “defaced” three separate times. The most recent episode of Bronx cheers for the BLM set produced an arrest of a pair of Staten Island women who might or might not have been lesbians, one of whom was black — a major embarrassment for New York’s troglodyte mayor Bill de Blasio. Particularly when following their release, they said in a statement the cops had treated them like “royalty” during their time in jail.

Then there was the “Baby Lives Matter” mural painted on a Salt Lake City street just in front of a Planned Parenthood location late Friday night. While the mural was removed by noon the next day, it still generated local news coverage and set the template for copycats all over the country. Perhaps a similar art project will come to a baby-parts mill near you.

There was Hillsdale College, who told Michigan’s tyrannical Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to suck an egg and defied her lockdown orders to hold an in-person graduation ceremony.

There is the “buycott” of Goya Foods, whose sales have exploded since Robert Unanue, CEO of the Hispanic canned-vegetable company, publicly defended Trump. Unanue, who twice in recent months has fended off deals that would take the family-owned company public and put it in the hands of investors like Warren Buffett and almost certainly reduce it to one more soulless corporation with a stupid woke message gracing its website. The market has embraced Goya since AOC and her fellow Cancel Culture morons put it in their crosshairs, giving a good example to others that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and backing down in response to the mob is not inevitable.

Then, in Portland, while Antifa clowns are screeching about the federal agents quietly plucking them off the streets for planning a CHAZ-style takeover of that city and its leftist local officials howl about the impertinence of the feds for insisting on doing their jobs, ordinary Americans are engaged in a bit of defiance by installing American flags all over town. Doing so is not an insignificant act of defiance — the Hard Left hates that flag and earnestly wants it down, but the optics of defacing or removing our national flag are horrible in the extreme, and putting up those flags either gives the oppressed minority of Normals in Portland a boost in morale or it puts a greater stink on the Antifa clowns for illuminating that they’re anti-American to the core.

Don’t forget last week’s GOP primary in the Alabama Senate election, in which former Auburn, Ole Miss, Texas Tech, and Cincinnati football coach Tommy Tuberville scorched prior incumbent Jeff Sessions by a 61-39 margin, in a race that was largely defined by the latter’s performance as the Attorney General who stepped aside and allowed the Trump–Russia hoax and its offspring the Mueller investigation to eat up two years of our lives. Republican voters in the Heart of Dixie, who had previously regarded Sessions as a favorite son, gave a very clear signal that they’re fed up with the establishment and the media and all their works. Sessions wasn’t even accused of colluding in their machinations; it was sufficient that he did a poor job of fighting them off in order to retire him.

If you look around, you can find lots of examples. Normal Americans have weathered the COVID-19 storm and the Left’s little urban cultural revolution, and they’ve had enough. Little cultural revolutions of a different stripe are touching off like brushfires, and the bet here is they’re only beginning. Those of us with jobs and productive lives are slow to respond to the provocations from the other side, but as Yamamoto said it’s unwise to awaken the sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

Wait until football season — assuming there is one — comes around. What happened to Bubba Wallace is a Swedish massage. That’s assuming Normal America doesn’t join me at the fishing hole this fall rather than patronize the woke and the suitably anti-American.