Tag Archive for: DemocraticParty

Cracks in the Rainbow

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

For the future Left, demography will at last become destiny.

 

In many ways the geriatric Joe Biden, for all of his stumbles, his more-than-occasional incoherence, and his obviously diminished energy, is the perfect frontman for the Democratic coalition in 2024—just as the party establishment recognized he was in 2020. With a career in Washington stretching back more than a half-century (he was prominent enough back in 1988 to mount a brief but serious presidential run), Biden feels comfortably familiar even to those older voters who have seen their country radically transformed before their eyes.

In particular, Biden presents an unthreatening face—as well as a bit of faux moderation—to the older whiter voters that the Democrats still need (for now) in their coalition. In 2020, Biden took 42 percent of older white voters. This was on par with his overall performance among whites, and dramatically better than one might expect given that these voters experience the largest and most jarring difference between the America of their youth and the America of today. Among younger members of the Democratic coalition, Biden is also remembered with a warm glow by “Obama Democrats” because of his close association with Barack.

But “Uncle Joe” nostalgia has a rapidly approaching expiration date for the Democrats. His exit from the scene will likely hasten the rise of a more explicitly left-wing Democratic Party, dominated by minority politicians and often pushing explicitly anti-white interests. In this way, Biden is also an appropriate symbol for the Left—a geriatric, enfeebled white man serving as a figurehead for minority power. Going forward, the Left’s public face will increasingly match its public policies. At long last, the party’s demography finally will herald its destiny.

This presents both problems and opportunities for the Right. The Democratic coalition, which seems so powerful now, is actually tremendously unstable, filled with groups whose interests are often in direct conflict. Arguably only a shared loathing for Trump has sustained them for the past eight years. But at some point, whether in 2024 or afterward, they will not have Donald Trump to kick around anymore. And then many groups in the coalition will have difficult choices to make.

In particular, given current trends, the younger white members of the coalition will either have to content themselves with visibly subordinate roles in the party, front for policies that work explicitly against their interests, defect to the Right, or give up politics entirely. This change may not happen immediately. Half of California’s voters in the high-turnout 2020 election were white, while just about a quarter of California’s children are white, giving a substantial lead time between demographic transformation and political transformation. But given America’s rapidly changing demographics (the majority of American children now belong to minorities), this change is inevitable.

We began to see the first stage of this transformation in the most recent elections for the leadership of the House of Representatives. Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer ran things for two decades, with James Clyburn serving as the black face of leadership who could be counted on not to say anything that might scare the Democrats’ white voters.

But in 2022, we saw a full-scale leadership turnover in the House, with younger non-white lawmakers moving to the fore. African American Hakeem Jeffries became the Democratic leader while Latino Pete Aguilar took the third position. Katherine Clark, a white woman, took the second spot—but she has a transgender-identified kid who was arrested for crimes he committed as a member of Antifa, which affords her valuable identity politics points.

For now, though, the most notable contradiction in the Left’s coalition is the continued and disproportionate control of an overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and highly educated faction over an increasingly multi-racial, poor, and less educated constituency. The largely white overclass elite have kept the peace by distributing massive amounts of welfare, federal jobs, legal hiring preferences, and other benefits to their largely minority client base. But with America’s debts spiraling out of control and virtually every institution captured already, it is unclear that the continued growth of this largesse is sustainable. The Kulaks (the American middle class, and in particular the white middle class) have been blamed for all of America’s failings and have been drained of almost all influence and power. There simply aren’t enough other middle-class Americans left to fleece.

Why Hang Around?

As the Manhattan Institute’s Zach Goldberg has noted in his research, the increasing divergence between the Democrats’ elites and proles is getting harder to manage. It prompts the Democrats to obsess over social issues that are important to their elite demographic but not their actual voting base (Climate Change! Transgenderism!), while doing nothing to serve liberal white Democrats who, as has been shown in study after study, are actually miserableself-hating, and basically crazy.

For now, in a time of relative abundance, white Democrats still make up the (narrow) majority of voters in the coalition. They are not really being forced to choose between their supposed principles and their interests. But at some point in the not-too-distant future, whites with any minimal sense of dignity or self-respect will be forced to go elsewhere.

For example, of the 97 federal judges nominated by Biden in the first two years of his administration, 22 were black women and just five were white men. Mark first that white men hugely outnumber black women generally, and then consider further that, on virtually any objective metric (legal partnerships, LSATs, law school grades, scholarly articles, etc.), white men far outperform black women. The only way to achieve this result is anti-white racial discrimination on steroids. As minorities gain more and more power and votes in the Left’s coalition, there is no reason to think this discrimination will do anything other than increase.

If you were a talented young white male law student today who dreamed of being a federal judge, why would you cast your lot with a group that would actively discriminate against you and make it almost impossible for you to land a position? We may be seeing the effects of this today among younger white Americans, and to a lesser extent, Asian Americans, who are choosing their political networks now with an eye to the future.

The current Democratic coalition, overwhelmingly focused as it is on black interests, will inevitably fracture. It has been sustained so far to a certain extent by white guilt. But key and growing groups in the coalition, such as Asian Americans and Latinos, do not generally suffer from this guilt and often come from cultures which have more negative views of African Americans than elite whites do. It is increasingly difficult to imagine them leading a coalition in which they are discriminated against (in the case of Asian Americans) in favor of a group that they do not particularly care for.

Another significant demographic group whose presence in the Democratic coalition will become increasingly uncomfortable is Jews. Jews, at just a bit more than two percent of the U.S. population, provide up to half of the funding for Democrats. Hillary Clinton’s top five donors were Jewish. Biden has rewarded this group richly. His Secretary of State, Treasury Secretary, Attorney General, DHS Secretary, Director of National Intelligence, and Chief of Staff, among many other senior officials, are Jewish. But Biden’s appointments represent an old-guard, D.C.-centric view that will almost assuredly not be shared by his successors.

The base of the Democratic Party is moving strongly away from Israel—in contrast to most of their politicians. Eleven percent more Democrats (49-38) side with the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict according to Gallup. This is a very recent development, the effects of which have not been “priced in” to our electoral politics.

As late as 2016, in the early days of the Great Awokening, Democrats preferred the Israelis to the Palestinians by a margin of more than 30 pecent. Add to this viewpoint transformation several statements verging on outright antisemitism from members and allies of The Squad (a group of minority progressive lawmakers with large amounts of public clout on the Left), and many Jews may eventually be heading for the exits. Jewish donors, of course, care about many things besides Israel. But they will increasingly be hostile to a party that is likely to become increasingly hostile to them.

The timing of these transformations is ultimately uncertain. But in politics, contra the Right’s ever-present caucus of uber-pessimists, there are no permanent winners and losers. There is only permanent struggle. The Democratic coalition is destined to splinter. The only question is whether the Right will be smart and prepared enough to pick up the pieces.

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This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

The Culture War Isn’t The Most Important Issue Of 2024, It’s The Only Issue

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The more obvious it becomes that our domestic political struggles are actually part of a much larger spiritual war over the fate of western civilization, that we are today engaged not so much in a political fight as a religious battle between good and evil, the stronger the urge seems to be among Republican politicians to deny this reality and take refuge in the comforting political narratives of the past.

A perfect case in point was a tweet last week from Kari Lake’s permanent campaign, which managed in one fell swoop to channel the deeply misguided political analysis of the entire neocon Washington establishment: “No one is saying not to fight the culture war. But it’s simply not the most critical issue heading into 2024.”

“The GOP must show the country how it plans to turn the economy around & prevent World War 3,” she added. “We need to take this country back from @JoeBiden before we can take our culture back from his friends.”

Ah, yes. The comforting fiction that if we can just show voters how we plan to turn the economy around, surely then we’ll regain power, surely then we’ll have a mandate from the people — and then (and only then) we can “take our culture back.”

With apologies to Lake, who before the midterms seemed to have a bright political future in the emerging populist GOP, this is absolute nonsense. On the one hand, it’s a desperate cope, the embodiment of the stale, low-energy politics that have kept conservatives out of power in Washington for most of the last three decades. On the other, it’s a textbook neocon talking point, pretending the culture war is a distraction when in fact it’s the only war whose outcome really will decide the fate of our country.

Ironically, it’s also an example of the kind of politics that Lake herself purported to defy. She made a name for herself during the midterm cycle by taking on the political establishment and attacking the corporate media’s false narratives about 2020 and much else. Lake isn’t the politician you’d think would fall into this trap, yet she did. Why?

The best explanation has nothing to do with Lake in particular but with the tendency of all politicians to want to explain the problems we face and offer practical solutions. The economy is bad, here’s how we fix it. The cities are filled with dangerous lunatics, here’s how we make our streets safe again. The border is overrun with illegal immigration, here’s how we crack down and secure it.

Republicans are more naturally susceptible to this way of thinking because, unlike Democrats, they tend to be less rabidly ideological and less committed to fundamentally altering America and bringing about political and social revolution. But this way of thinking — that our most pressing problems just need common-sense policy fixes that normal people support! — is woefully inadequate for our current moment.

Put simply, the big mistake in thinking the culture war isn’t the most critical issue heading into 2024 is that all of American politics is now one big culture war. The culture war is the only issue because the cultural war is everything now. When one side stakes its claim to political power on offering abortion up until birth and transgender operations for 8-year-olds, and holds out these policies as proof of its moral authority, we’re way past arguing over how to get the economy back on track. There’s no going back to that kind of politics.

Tucker Carlson hit on this at the end of his big speech at Heritage recently. He compared the values of the political left to the values of the Aztecs, who sacrificed children to their bloodthirsty gods — and he wasn’t wrong. Our politics, he argued, have shifted profoundly in a relatively short period of time. Instead of arguing over the best means to bring about an agreed-upon common good, we no longer agree about what the common good is. Forget about whether Republicans or Democrats are right about the ideal marginal tax rate. We can’t even agree on whether men and women exist as meaningful categories. And if we don’t get that question right, you can forget about economic prosperity, much less anything like a republic or a constitutional system of government.

What the neocons and establishment politicians don’t seem to understand is that the culture war has become a grinding war of attrition that will end with the complete destruction of one side. There is no way to reconcile the vision of the common good espoused by the transgender movement, on the one hand, and orthodox Christians, on the other.

The culture war in America is not some luxury good that Republican politicians can sample now and then. It has consumed our politics by revealing deep, uncrossable chasms in our national life. So we now find ourselves in a different kind of struggle. Call it a culture war, a religious war, a battle between good and evil, or all of the above. It’s a war for survival between two competing and irreconcilable visions of what America should be.

Any politician on the right that doesn’t understand that, who thinks we just need to show voters our plan for getting the economy back on track, needs to step aside and make room for leaders who know what time it is, that the hour is late, the day now far spent, and the time for fighting has come. The culture war is now the big tent. Those who embrace it, who delve into the fray without apology, will be the next crop of leaders on both the right and the left.

Keep this in mind as we march toward the 2024 election cycle. The cast of buffoons and egomaniacs on the Republican side will feature mostly candidates who don’t understand or don’t want to admit what’s happening. They will say things like, “No one is saying not to fight the culture war. But it’s simply not the most critical issue heading into 2024.” And when they say that, they’ll be doing you a favor. You can then safely ignore whatever else they say because you’ll know at that point they’re either a fool or a coward, and all they have to offer is defeat.

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This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Here Are Some Shining Examples Of Pure Dem Insanity

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Led by Quadrillion-Dollar Man Joe Biden — about whom more later — today’s Democrat Party has decayed into a collection of psychoses fortified by police power, perpetual-motion monetary printing presses and easy access to atomic weapons. What could go wrong? Damn near everything.

Democrats spent much of the last generation attempting to heal the Southern blacks whom they brutalized through Jim Crow segregation. They promoted legal equality for women, aimed to enrich the poor and eradicated tear-inducing air and blazing rivers.

Despite their ham-fisted methods and extravagant budgets, yesterday’s Democrats often tried to do the right thing.

Today’s Democrats stroke their exotic fetishes in public, typically at taxpayer expense. Their counterproductive projects explode in their faces like unhurled grenades. And whenever they can cleave Americans racially or sexually, they do so with quasi-erotic passion.

Behold this snapshot of Demented Democrat insanity:

Washington, D.C.’s. City Council voted to let foreign citizens, including illegal aliens, vote in municipal elections. Exercising Congress’ power to overturn local D.C. laws, House Republicans voted unanimously to scrap this measure. “Only AMERICANS should vote in AMERICAN elections,” Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan argued via Twitter. Among House Democrats, 79% (162 of 204) disagreed and voted to let foreign citizens cast ballots in the nation’s capital.

D.C.’s City Council battled a local crime surge by reducing penalties for robbery, carjacking, home invasion and other violent offenses. Every Republican voted to junk this law. However, 85% (173 of 204) of Democrats dissented and stood proudly with their thug-hugging District counterparts.

Elusive Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has had his plate full, what with three pairs of passenger jets that nearly collided at JFK, Austin and Chicago airports in about as many weeks.

On February 3, a train laden with toxic chemicals derailed at East Palestine, Ohio. On-scene geniuses then set it ablaze and ignited an American Chernobyl. After 11 days without comment, Poisonous Pete shattered his silence — via Twitter.

He did find time to obsess over the racial makeup of America’s construction workforce. He whined to the National Association of Counties about “a neighborhood — often a neighborhood of color — that finally sees a project come to them, but everyone in the hard hats on that project, doing the good-paying jobs, don’t look like they came from anywhere near that neighborhood.”

After scolding the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Jennie Taer for interrupting his “personal time” as he strolled through Washington, D.C., on Tuesday night, Buttigieg finally reached East Palestine Thursday. This was one day after former President Donald J. Trump comforted its terrified residents and 20 days after a man-made mushroom cloud rained carcinogens on these American citizens.

Today’s Democrats believe that genitalia are as interchangeable as Lego parts. So, they steer insecure boys and girls toward “gender-affirming care.” This sounds as inviting as a Jacuzzi. However, such “care” manipulates hormones, halts puberty, castrates via chemicals, chops off breasts and lops off penises.

Left-wing teachers and school officials pressure vulnerable minors to keep their parents oblivious to these enormous, life-changing, irreversible medical interventions.

In a massive blow for transgenderism, New Hampshire’s Milford School Board voted Feb. 6 to disable boys’ room urinals with trash bags.
“No one requested this change,” student Jay Remella told WMUR-TV. “It was solely made by the school board and a parent complaint.”

After hundreds of high-school students walked out to protest this decision, the board reversed itself and liberated the urinals, proving who the real grown-ups are in Milford.

In America’s opposite corner, San Diego’s Bernardo Heights Middle School has installed a tampon dispenser in the boys’ room, near a urinal.

Democrats’ Menstrual Equity for All Act of 2021 mandates that every California government school supply free feminine-hygiene products in each female and all-gender restroom and at least one male bathroom.

“I think it’s crazy and unbelievable that they would put a tampon and pad dispenser in the boys’ locker room because they should KNOW that boys will be boys and waste them and cause trouble,” said a 13-year-old male Bernardo Heights student.

San Francisco Democrats have proposed $5 million in slavery reparations for every eligible black resident. If all 46,466 black San Franciscans qualified (per Census data), this would cost each of 768,735 local non-blacks $302,223. Total: $232.3 billion.
Reparations would consume this city’s entire $14 billion budget for the next 16 years and leave $0.00 for police, firefighters, schools, roads, healthcare, or anything else through 2039.

“If we don’t stay under 1.5 degrees Celsius,” President Biden told donors on January 31, “we’re going to have a real problem. It’s the single-most existential threat to humanity we’ve ever faced, including nuclear weapons.” The Democrats’ bright-green, $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act is supposed to help Biden meet his 2.7° Fahrenheit objective

Good luck with that.

Climate expert Bjorn Lomborg ran the IRA through the United Nations’ temperature models. He discovered that the IRA reduces expected global warming through 2100 by just 0.0009° F. This is like cranking a thermostat from 72° F all the way down to 71.9991° F.

So, $369 billion achieves just 0.0333% of Biden’s goal. Thus, Biden’s desired 2.7° reduction would cost $1.108 quadrillion — with a Q — more than 35 times America’s $31.5 trillion national debt.

Such madness confirms that the Democrat Party has slouched from a serious political institution into America’s largest mental hospital.

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This article was published by The Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

The Manic Methods of Mad Democrats

Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

We are faced with a revolutionary party well known from history that aims to change the nation into something unrecognizable by most Americans—and it feels that it has created the means to do it.

For all Joe Biden’s talk about “semi-fascist” and “un-American,” “ultra-MAGA” Republicans, it is the Democratic Party that has far more radically changed. It is descended into a woke, neo-socialist, radically green party. And it is committed, as Barack Obama once promised, to fundamentally transforming America. How it proceeds with that agenda is now as entirely predictable as it is creepy.

Election Warping
Before any presidential or midterm election, strict news suppression ensures that all bad news will follow, not precede, the voting. The Twitter files, Project Veritas ambush interviews, the Podesta emails, and occasional left-wing braggadocio like Molly Ball’s now infamous post-2020 election revelations in Time magazine, confirm the fusion between the media and the Democratic Party.

To the degree there is any independent journalistic inquiry about Biden—such as we are only now seeing with Biden’s security violations—it is likely only because the party wants the 80-year-old enfeebled Biden out of office.

The Democratic-media-deep-state nexus quashed all 2020 pre-election revelations about the embarrassing Hunter Biden laptop. Its contents more or less proved that the Biden family was corrupt.

Twitter and Facebook confessionals show how, in lapdog fashion, social media forbade coverage of the truth about the laptop. More than 50 former intelligence officers, organized by the confessed liars John Brennan and James Clapper—both of whom have admitted to deceiving Congress while under oath—used their former titles to fortify the pre-election lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely Russian disinformation.

A poll conducted after the election revealed that those voters who knew of the story might have changed their vote had they known the truth. Neither Clapper nor Brennan nor any of their subordinates has ever apologized. Their lack of contriteness recalls the late Senator Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) post-election brag about his effective pre-election lies concerning candidate Mitt Romney’s taxes: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”

Joe Biden, his lawyers, and the Justice Department likely knew that Biden had violated national security laws surrounding classified documents. Yet they suppressed that information until the 2022 midterms were over. The same is true of the pre-midterm news blackout of the massive fraud of mega-Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried. In close Senate races, where Democrats often referenced the Mar-a-Lago, it might well have mattered if they were confronted with Biden’s Garage-gate scandal, and the Madoff-like albatross of the obnoxious Bankman-Fried and his enabling family.

The list of 2022 pre-election gambits is endless. Biden offered amnesties for both student-loan debt payments and federal marijuana convictions. But perhaps the most flagrant Biden pre-midterm contortion was his sudden interest in flooding markets with oil and gas, hitherto reduced in supply within the United States due to his own green handlers.

Biden requested the Saudis to postpone OPEC cutbacks until after the election. Prior to the midterms, he begged illiberal regimes like Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to pump more oil as well. They were not keen to help him out, so, in the weeks leading up to the midterms, Biden began draining millions of barrels of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve to reduce gasoline prices, even as he lied that his own policies were bringing down oil and natural gas prices. Then shortly after the midterms, Biden announced he would cease drawing down the reserve that was banked at low prices under Trump and instead would buy a few million barrels at sky-high prices.

Since the election’s conclusion, he has been silent about concerns for the voter’s gasoline and natural gas price woes. Why the change?

Projection
The Democratic Left has mastered the art of projection. Most of their own nefarious activity (now soon to be revealed) will be recalibrated as the crimes of their opponents.

Hillary Clinton used three firewalls to conceal her employment of the fabulist Christopher Steele. He, in turn, never set foot in Russia to do any research. Instead, Steele, via money from the Clinton stream, enlisted a Moscow-based Clintonite Charles Dolan and Russian Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko, either to invent fantasies, or pass on real Russian disinformation.

Clintonites in and out of government then released the resulting concocted “dossier” to the media on the eve of the 2016 election, supposedly proving that Trump was, as James Clapper would later lie again, “A Russian asset.”

In truth, Hillary was a colluding conduit for Russian disinformation and tried to warp the election by spreading Steele’s lies among top government officials to lend authority to preplanned media leaks, as the FBI deceived FISA court judges to spy on Clinton’s political opponents.

Then we come to election denialism, which began in earnest in 2000 when, almost immediately after the final Florida count, the Democratic National Committee pushed the lie that the Electoral College vote was illegitimate, and George W. Bush was “selected not elected.” In 2004 it was Senator Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) turn. She, along with the recent chairman of the January 6 committee, U.S. Representative Benny Thompson (D-Miss.) and 31 other House members, voted to refuse to accept the Electoral College vote from Ohio.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton led the charge that Trump was “illegitimate” and had stolen the election. She never recanted and was soon joined by scores of Democratic officials, including perennial election-denier former President Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden. Her surrogates like Jill Stein sued to invalidate the election on the premise that computers were rigged, while has-been Hollywood actors peddled videos begging the electors to renounce their state popular vote tallies.

As a rule, leftists who most ardently denied the 2016 election—current House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is the most notorious example—were the most vigorous in attacking conservatives for “denying” the 2020 election.

Stacey Abrams, who lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election by more than 50,000 votes but who described herself as the “real” governor, created a lucrative career barnstorming the country and lecturing Democratic audiences about how “voter suppression” had “robbed” her of the governorship.

Since 2000, as a general truism, the only presidential elections Democrats did not deny were those they won.

Suppression
We now know that prominent Democrats such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), along with the FBI, successfully used Twitter and Facebook to ban bothersome news stories and silence political opponents. The locus classicus of such efforts was the left-wing banning of the president of the United States from social media platforms while Iranian theocrats, ISIS, and the Taliban freely used them.

The reading public is only now learning through the Twitter disclosures of the accurate Nunes House Intelligence Committee majority memo, and the utterly fraudulent Schiff minority version—truth that was self-evident, but mostly suppressed by the media.

Again, Molly Ball outlined how Silicon Valley poured hundreds of millions into selected precincts to warp the voting turnout, how it suppressed unwelcome news, how the Democratic elite modulated the 2020 violent street demonstrations to fit Biden’s advantage, and how corporate America help to fund and advance what she called variously a “cabal” and a “conspiracy.”

Changing the Rules
It is hard to determine any major constitutional norms or long-held customs and traditions the new Jacobin Party has not sought to alter or junk to its own advantage. Remember there is no consistent policy concerning any of these proposed changes. Radical demands for reforms from the Left hinge only on their perceived short-term temporary political advantage.

In the House, Democrats destroyed the old idea that the minority leader was granted his own party’s selections to serve on congressional committees simply to stack the January 6 committee. They also recalibrated congressional House subpoenas as matters of criminality and staged performance-art arrests of anyone who resisted—the antithesis to the manner in which the subpoena denier and former Attorney General Eric Holder simply ignored all summons with impunity.

Jacobins normalized the idea of impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost the House, and to conduct such a proceeding without a special counsel’s report or serious cross examinations. They also introduced the new idea of impeaching a president twice, and then once he left office to try him as a private citizen in the Senate.

Thanks to Democrats, we have a new custom of raiding a former president’s private home in search of classified presidential papers, on the allegation that said president had not yet used his legal authority to declassify them.

The Democrats predictably want to end the filibuster and destroy the Electoral College—but predicated in the former case only on whether they currently enjoy a Senate majority, and in the latter only when it lost the Electoral College vote but won the popular balloting.

The Democrats wish to bring Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. into statehood. Were it a matter of adding new conservative states, and with them four additional conservative senators, they would abort the idea in its infancy.

They want to stack the court by enlarging it to 15 justices. Had any conservative voiced such “reforms” during the heyday of the Warren Court, he would have been denounced as an insurrectionist nut.

To ensure nationwide outlawing of voter IDs, Democrats tried to pass a national voting law to surpass the constitutional directive that the primary responsibility to establish voting laws remains with the states.

In just four years, the Left engineered the most radical changes in voting laws in U.S. history. The result was that in many states, under the excuse of COVID, some 70 percent of the electorate did not vote on Election Day—even as the rejection rate of improper non-Election Day balloting plunged.

The Left clamored for extended balloting because it had mastered the arts of mass-mailing absentee ballots, third-party ballot harvesting, ballot curing, and relaxing rules on authenticating addresses, and signatures, and matching ballots with registrars’ lists.

Asymmetries
One overriding principle of the new Democratic Party is asymmetry—or the notion that the Left’s moral superiority earns absolute exemption from the very methods they employ against their opponents.

Disproportionality explains why the historic Mar-a-Lago raid was constructed in bogus fashion as a legitimate search for “nuclear codes.” Yet it would have sparked outrage had the FBI, on rumors of Biden sloppiness, sent armed agents into Jill Biden’s underwear drawers looking for classified papers concerning Ukraine and Iran, or towed away Joe Biden’s Corvette to get access to a garage full of unlawfully stored classified papers, or strewn Biden’s papers across the floor for an FBI concocted photo-op.

The buffoonish protestors and rioters of January 6 were to be jailed for months without formal charges, put in solitary confinement, and often sentenced to the maximum punishment possible. But the rioters, shooters, and killers of 120 days of mayhem and violence during summer 2020 were calibrated as “summer of love” rowdies. Antifa and Black Lives Matter sort of, kind of got a little bit out of hand in torching a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic Washington, D.C. church, as well as trying to storm the White House grounds, sending the president into an underground bunker.

That Antifa and BLM plotted much of their anarchy and violence on social media unimpeded was unremarked upon. That fact mattered not at all in comparison to the illegal paraders and rioters of January 6. Police who shoot unarmed protestors usually have their identities immediately revealed; yet when they lethally shoot the likes of an Ashli Babbitt, their identities are suppressed, and their questionable conduct lauded.

The Left destroyed the southern border to attract 5 million illegal-alien and impoverished future constituents from Mexico and former Third World Latin American and Caribbean countries. Had conservatives fast-tracked a massive legal immigration program to attract 5 million skilled and degreed immigrants from Europe or the former British commonwealth, the Left would have gone berserk in their cries of “racist,” and their current “demography is destiny” boasts suddenly would be replaced by the slur of “Great Replacement Theory.”

Donald Trump was deemed crazy. A Yale physiatrist made the rounds on television and in Congress to claim he needed an intervention and straitjacket. The FBI and an interim attorney general discussed wearing a wire to entrap Donald Trump and convince his cabinet he was nuts. If the FBI and the Justice Department did the same to Joe Biden, the Left would have claimed a coup was in progress.

Ditto if a major former Bush official wrote, in Rosa Brooks fashion, 11 days after the inauguration of Joe Biden, that he should be removed by either the 25th Amendment, impeachment—or a military coup.

Would anything be comparable to the twisted genre of murderous fantasies among has-been politicians, Twitter creatures, and grade-C actors—competing to dream up how Biden should be torched, stabbed, decapitated, hanged, dismembered, and shot, in the manner of the four-year venom from Trump haters? Would the FBI investigate all that if there were?

What would the Left have done if a conservative version of Madonna had screamed on Inauguration Day that she dreamed of blowing up the White House, as rioters flooded D.C. streets?

Joe Biden daily forgets where he is and what he is doing. Someday historians will fault those who knowingly used a non compos mentis septuagenarian, without regard for the interests of the American people, to mask a radical neo-socialist agenda.

Biden shakes imaginary hands. He insists his son died in Iraq. In his mind, Brian Sicknick was murdered on January 6. In Walter Mitty-style, he brags that he has been a semi-truck driver, an arrested civil rights activist, a major college football prospect, a U.S. Naval Academy scholarship prospect, and on and on. If Biden was given the Montreal Cognitive Test, as was Trump, he would likely flunk it outright.

Conservatives should be aware that they are not dealing with the party of JFK and LBJ. The Democratic Party has nothing in common with the agendas of a slick Bill Clinton and is well beyond the “fundamental transformations” of arch-narcissist Barack Obama.

We are faced with a strictly disciplined, no-nonsense revolutionary party, well known from history that aims to change the nation into something unrecognizable by most Americans. And it feels that it has now created the means to do it.

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This article was published by American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

What This Election is About

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Editors’ Note: It is no secret that The Prickly Pear believes strongly in the exceptional character of America since its founding as a Republic with individual sovereignty and government by consent of ‘We the People’. What is occurring today with the political party currently in control of the federal government is a direct result of radical and far left policies under a tragically compromised President. The past two years have been a nightmarish experience and insult for everyday Americans. Our national condition from economics to public safety, an engineered invasion of our southern border, dangerous foreign policy and a disgusting racial divide is front and center to most citizens casting their votes in this midterm election. It is important to recognize that the ideology defining Democrat public policy is not just at the federal level. Arizona Democrat candidates in this election cycle from the top of the ticket to the bottom are of the same ilk – radical ‘progressive’ and now evolving into a true socialist nature. As the author makes clear below, it is really time to vote them out. We fervently hope that a resounding Democrat electoral defeat will begin their transition back to a constitutional and foundational support of our American way of life and governing.

 

Yes, we are having an election next week and there could not be a clearer choice. In fact, there never has been.

I understand why some people wanted to toss Donald Trump out of office. He has a great ability to say things in ridiculously stupid ways. But he had this country in a rather good place until his replacement took over.

Let’s recount what has happened since Mr. Biden took over:

1. He has given away over $426 billion of our money to people who made a choice to take out college loans and now somehow feel oppressed. That does not include the billions he has already given away through other college loan relief programs. And yet he has proposed zero reforms to prevent this from happening again.

2. Parents in this country finally woke up to the fact the country’s public schools are dismal. This is the best thing that came out of the pandemic. They have come to realize that teachers’ unions have negligible interest in our children. The already horrific performance of these schools only became worse. Standardized test scores have plummeted from their already dismal levels. It is easy to brand the teachers’ unions as the most racist organizations in the country based on their performance with black and Hispanic children and their adamant opposition to charter schools.

3. Mr. Biden passed multiple bills that unnecessarily handed out money to people. Congress had just passed a trillion-dollar pandemic relief bill in late 2020 that had not filtered into the system when he assumed office. Then in March of 2021, the Democrats and Biden passed another $1.9 billion bill. And another. And another.

4. They committed $1.2 trillion to infrastructure. Has anyone seen any benefit from this yet? If there were bridges being fixed and roads being built it would be on the front pages of the NYT and WaPo. None to be seen.

5. These actions have caused inflation to soar. They keep blaming others as if printing $5 trillion with nothing to support it was of no consequence. This administration claims inflation is worldwide as if the largest economy in the world has nothing to do with it. As Milton Friedman stated in 1978, only Washington can cause inflation because only Washington can print money.

6. Crime has soared across the nation largely because of Democrat policies combined with Democrat DAs that favor criminals over law-abiding citizens. Forget the historically stupid idea of defunding the police. The idea of no bail laws has caused multiple repeat offenders to go back on the streets and repeat their crimes over and over and over again. If you are not looking over your shoulder in a big city, you are a fool. This is their doing.

7. The stock market has tumbled in the last year losing well over 20% of its value. This is a direct cause of Biden and his party’s leadership. This has cost hardworking Americans trillions of dollars in lost savings.

8. The way we withdrew from Afghanistan was probably the most embarrassing moment in foreign relations since the British burned our Capitol.

9. That clearly emboldened the maniac in Russia to push forward and attack Ukraine. Many countries supported defending Ukraine. But where have they been in terms of real support? Running their mouths does nothing without real backup. The Baltic states and Poland have done their fair share, but the others? Where is Biden demanding equitable support? Just wait until the place must be rebuilt and see who carries the load.

10. Biden’s horrific idea to go back into negotiating with Iran. They were virtually broke, and he gave them money. Then he turned his back on Israel and the Abraham Accords countries. Biden does not understand that only the Left in America and Iran are still buying the pile of camel manure shoveled by the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia would be in the accords by now if it were not for Biden. And a Democrat told me he really liked Biden’s foreign policy.

11. Then there is the granddaddy of the horrible policy decisions. Biden has decided to abandon any sense of border enforcement. We now have millions of new people in the country without proper immigration. The Democrats like to point to the failure of bipartisan immigration reform. No, this is on Biden and his lying surrogates who tell us the border is secure. People from all over the planet have come here. We have no idea who they are, whether they are good people and whether they can add to our country as legions of legal immigrants have before. And then there is the flood of drugs, largely fentanyl, which is killing our citizens at outrageous rates.

Did I miss anything? Yes, these people should be voted out because of their constantly scaring people by saying our democracy is in danger. No, it isn’t and just because you are going to lose an election just reminds people you are a speck in the history of the planet.

Instead of changing course to retain power in Washington, the Democrats and their allies in the MSM have resorted to personal attacks on Republican candidates because they cannot argue on the issues.

The Dems have their own flawed candidates. Katie Hobbs, a candidate for Governor in Arizona, makes Karine Jean-Pierre seem like a wordsmith. No discussion about that. Mandela Barnes, a U.S. Senate candidate in Wisconsin, seems like a normal person. But up close he is just a Leftist who makes AOC appear mainstream.

Then there is the king of freak candidates, John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Way before he had his stroke this guy was plain weird. Walking around in a hoodie is not going to make you seem like working folk when your parents supported you until you were 49 years old. On public policy, this gentleman makes Bernie Sanders seem like Mitch McConnell. He is out there as far as one gets without being a member of the Sandinistas. Yet the press attacks Republicans.

And then there are Stacey Abrams and Robert Francis O’Rourke. They are special.

This election is all about public policy. If you feel safer, more affluent, and more secure, and your children or grandchildren are on track to a brighter future, then you should vote for the Democrats.

I personally cannot fathom how anyone based on the above would not vote these people out.

The Coming Radical Political Shift

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editors’ Note: The following article defines today’s Democrat party accurately. One no longer has to dissect through their ‘moderate’ messaging that has hidden their true agenda for decades. What you are seeing is what we get when today’s Democrats have unbalanced power. The Founders’ design of our Republic made every citizen sovereign rather than the government being sovereign and established that we are governed ‘by our consent’. Your vote is your consent. As you cast your ballot between now and November 8th, remember that the consequences of the consent you give will be how we are governed going forward. It is time to de-radicalize our governing class. Our future is in great jeopardy. The GOP is not a perfect party but it is not the party that engineered the southern border invasion and that is undermining our liberty, the rule of law, our children’s innocence and the security and safety of our neighborhoods and personal well-being. Let us resoundingly move the Democrats aside with this election by voting Republican all the way down your ballots and then demand the best from those we consent to govern us.

Many people believe that the current state of the Democrat Party is a danger to our constitutional structure and the underpinnings of what has made America the great country it has become. If you believe that is true you have not seen anything yet.

This column purposely strays from making predictions and rarely has done so in the last fifteen years of publishing weekly. The case that is being laid out is based on everything that is historical, facts you know, and historical reality.

We do not know for sure, but it is highly likely that the Republicans will take over the House of Representatives. It is hard to tell what will happen with the U.S. Senate. But with the current societal factors, particularly the economic ones, the chances of the Republicans taking control of the Senate increase daily. The overruling of Roe v. Wade changed little.

Let’s look at where that will leave the Democrats. They currently have leadership in the House and Senate that is collectively octogenarian. The last time the Dems took a beating, losing 63 seats in 2010, political normalcy would have seen the leadership tossed to the side. That did not happen because the remaining members of the house were the most liberal Democrat members and they kept Nancy Pelosi as their leader. However, this time she will be 82 years old and her top leadership team is just as old. There are legitimate questions about whether they will even remain in their seats.

There will also be pressure from the younger members to replace them and to toss Chuck Schumer in the Senate. The good thing is that the new leadership will not hide their leftist political leanings. They will be unabashed Leftists which will at least make matters clear to the voting public. Though many of the candidates supported by the far-left wing of the party have lost their primaries, many have won. There are already 100 members of the so-called “progressive caucus.” Now the caucus will completely control the House and members in the Senate will be in a greater position of control.

As for the presidency, the last two Democrats ran as moderates. They were barely disguised. We all remember then-candidate Obama proclaiming, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He lied about being a moderate right up to the time his team realized McCain and his team were incompetent and Obama believed his election was a lock. Obama was tame compared to Biden who we were told was moderate. Biden signed 22 executive orders in his first week demonstrating he was even more prepared than Obama to transform America.

The Democrats remaining in Congress will feel even bolder and express no need to disguise their plans. They were a lot more forthcoming in 2021 than they were in 2009. Many of these far-Left elected officials expressed no indication they wish to hold back on their plans. They believe that not only are their policies the correct ones for our country, but they believe the reason the Democrats have failed is that the policies have not been implemented. In their minds, if the policies were enacted we would be so much better off as a country.

Here is where the radical political shift happens. Republicans will not stay in power forever. The history of our country shows a back-and-forth when the electorate gets upset with the party in power. We vote out one party and hand over the control of government to the other. We did in 2020 even though we had no clue what Biden really stood for. He had campaigned from his basement in Delaware. People were upset with Trump and dumped him even though we got someone totally unprepared to be President. Look what he has wrought.

The next time is going to be different. The leaders of the House and Senate will come from the radical wing of the Democrat party. The President will as well. They will enact some of their extreme plans which to them are mainstream, such as expanding the Supreme Court or ditching the electoral college. Fortunately, our Constitution is very difficult to amend though they will do their best to try.

If you believe some of the actions of the Left are over-the-top now, I can only advise you have not seen anything yet.

*****

This article was published by Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

The New Age of Orwellianism

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Community organizer and left-wing social activist Saul Alinsky wrote, in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals,” that “he who controls the language controls the masses.”

Alinsky, whose work profoundly influenced at least one notable fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama, was in that quip channeling George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel “1984.”

“Newspeak,” the language of Orwell’s fictional single-political party superstate, was a tool devised for monitoring the people’s communications, prosecuting “thoughtcrimes,” and ultimately controlling and dictating the people’s very beliefs.

Conservatives have taken pleasure in poking fun at the modern left’s “Orwellian” tendencies—perhaps too much, actually, as overuse of the accusation has had the effect of limiting its potency.

But as the woke ideology metastasizes within the American left like cancer it is, and as censors increasingly clamp down on anything sniffing of dissent to the regime’s orthodoxy, it is now clear that we are in a new age of Orwellianism.

In this new age, the regime and its enforcers pursue the suffusion of its orthodoxy at any cost, gaslighting dissenters into not believing their own lying eyes.

This week, new governmental data revealed that the American economy, measured by gross domestic product, contracted for the second straight quarter. That was, up until perhaps a week ago, the universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “recession.”

This was not a partisan issue; indeed, well-known liberal, Democratic Party economists have frequently defined recession in precisely these terms.

Back in 2008, President Joe Biden’s current National Economic Council director, Brian Deese, stated: “Of course economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”

And in 2019, top Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein said that a “recession” is “defined as two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”

Democrats are now singing a different tune. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has stubbornly refused to concede that America is now in an economic recession.

Deese apparently also disagrees with his old self of 2008: Following the release of the data evincing the second straight quarter of economic contraction, Deese stipulated that we are “certainly in a transition,” but also added that “virtually nothing signals that this period … is recessionary.”

The ruse is transparent and obvious to the point of comedy. As famed investor David Sacks tweeted: “A lot of people are wondering about the definition of recession. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth if a Republican is president. The definition is far more complicated and unknowable if a Democrat is president.”

Democrats similarly seem interested in changing the definition of “inflation,” which currently sits at four-decade highs and is disproportionately responsible for Biden’s dismal job approval ratings and Democrats’ unfavorable political outlook this fall.

The widely accepted economic definition of inflation is when there is too much money chasing too few goods. The way to tamp down inflation is thus to limit the money supply and/or increase the production of goods.

Just this week, around the same time as when the U.S. formally entered a recession, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., finally reached an agreement on a version of the White House’s long-sought-after Build Back Better domestic initiative. But Democrats renamed the bill: It is now not called Build Back Better but the Inflation Reduction Act.

And the revised bill includes new government expenditures to the tune of nearly $400 billion in energy- and climate-related spending. Authorizing such a fiscal boondoggle is the precise opposite of limiting the money supply. It is the logical equivalent of trying to put out a fire with a blowtorch.

Remarkably, it is the same ideologues who are eager to change the well-accepted definitions of “recession” and “inflation” who remain perplexed as to what exactly a “woman” is.

In March, then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to replace the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, pointedly refused to define what a “woman” is. Her excuse was that she is “not a biologist.”

Related, in Matt Walsh’s excellent new documentary “What Is a Woman?” the myriad “gender studies” professors and gender ideology-bewitched “doctors” interviewed by Walsh invariably define a “woman,” in a circular fashion, as being “someone who identifies as a woman.”

Whether it is a Supreme Court justice herself or the vogue flatulence that now constitutes “gender studies” in the American academy, then, the left is incapable of defining what a “woman” is.

That confusion appears to be ubiquitous: Lia Thomas, the biological man who has been wreaking havoc in women’s collegiate swimming, was even nominated for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.

Alinsky would be proud of such imperious enforcement of regime-approved orthodoxy; “he who controls the language controls the masses,” after all.

The left’s fundamental problem is that its haughtiness, fervor, and zeal for gaslighting us sane Americans is belied by its unpopularity. It is curious that the left can talk and act this way when its most notable avatar, Biden, is as severely unpopular as he currently is.

Perhaps the left will be chastened by its impending November defeats at the ballot box. But don’t bet on it.

*****

This article was published by the Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.