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Pogo might be right. The enemy is us! ++++++++++++++++++++
By Byron York
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If those living in "The Rotten Apple" accept what their mayor is incapable of then they are radically disturbed and have utter contempt for the rule of law. Criminality is the big winner.
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Despite Valiant Challenge from Zeldin, Hochul Manages to Win New York Gubernatorial Race
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Before I make my final comments on the election results i am going to post what others are saying:
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Republicans’ ‘Red Wave’ Proves to be a Mirage
The midterms delivered a seismic shock for the Democrats in Florida, but otherwise a mixed bag for both parties. Control of Congress remained undecided early Wednesday.
Republicans’ dreams of a red wave that would wash Democrats in Congress and state capitals out to sea proved to be overly optimistic as Democrats held on to key gubernatorial and Senate seats enough so that control of Congress remained up in the air Wednesday morning.
Democrats held on to a crucial Senate seat in New Hampshire, where incumbent Maggie Hassan defeated Republican Don Bolduc, a retired Army general, and managed to flip Pennsylvania’s Senate seat with a victory by John Fetterman. Republicans held Senate seats in Ohio and North Carolina, but it was still too early to call Senate seats in Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona that could determine the majority.
Democrats also were successful in governors’ races, winning in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but Republicans held on to governors’ mansions in Florida, Texas and Georgia. In the House, meanwhile, Democrats kept seats in districts from Virginia to Kansas to Rhode Island, while many districts in states like New York and California had not been called.
A shock described as nothing less than seismic followed from the state of Florida. Governor DeSantis and Senator Rubio handily won Miami-Dade county, which, just six years ago, Hillary Clinton won by 30 points. Mr. DeSantis himself lost the county by 20 points when he first ran for governor in 2018. A similar pattern followed in Puerto Rican-heavy Osceola County in Central Florida.
Florida’s 29 electoral votes, the pundits proclaimed after the night’s results, will be out of reach for the Democrats for the foreseeable future if the GOP capture holds. Florida is no longer a swing state, they said. It’s a red state if the Democrats can’t win Miami-Dade to offset GOP strength elsewhere in Florida.
In celebrating his victory, the Florida governor leaned into the culture wars that have served him so well so far.
"We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology,” Mr. DeSantis said at a rally in Tampa. “We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die!"
The Democrats fared better in other races being eyed as potential bellwethers for the night. Republicans came close to unseating two incumbent Democrats in deep-blue northern Virginia, Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexton, but ultimately failed, and incumbent Senator Bennet in Colorado managed to fend off a challenge from one of the GOP’s least Trump-aligned candidates, Joe O’Dea.
Democrats also prevailed in New York’s hard-fought race for governor. The incumbent, Kathy Hochul, declared victory over her Republican opponent, Congressman Lee Zeldin, shortly before midnight.
“Tonight you made your voices heard loud and clear. And, and you made me the first woman ever elected to be the governor of the state of New York. But I’m not here to make history, I’m here to make a difference," Hochul told supporters late Tuesday night.
Candidates backed by President Trump did not perform as well as the GOP might have hoped. Along with the three key battleground states, gubernatorial elections in Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Colorado all went to the Democrats, though voters in Arkansas did opt for Trump alumnus Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, easily bested Stacey Abrams to keep his seat.
Exit polls suggested that the electorate is not in a good state, but neither party seemed to be capitalizing on it to the extent they hoped. Early exit polls released by CNN illustrated the depth of anger. One brutal question asked about the way things are going in the country. Nearly three-fourths of respondents said they were either “dissatisfied” or “angry” about the state of the nation. Only 25 percent said they were either “enthusiastic” or “satisfied.”
Turnout hit record levels in several states, but reports of irregularities or other problems were relatively few. Mr. Trump, always eager to return to his favorite grievances, wasted no time before complaining after some hiccups involving printer settings stirred up his base at Maricopa county, Arizona. In a social media post, he called on Americans to “protest, protest, protest” what he described as a “voter integrity DISASTER” in Arizona.
In an interview that aired on NewsNation Tuesday, the former president and 2024 frontrunner for the GOP sought to make sure that the outcome of the day’s voting is a win-win for him regardless of which party, if any, can boast of a decisive victory. “I think if they win, I should get all the credit – and if they lose, I should not be blamed at all,” Mr. Trump said of his fellow Republicans.
Mr. Trump was not alone in his suspicion about the integrity of the vote. Before the polls had even closed in Georgia, Democratic activists were taking to the airwaves to denounce the night’s results. In a mid-afternoon appearance on MSNBC, contributor Jason Johnson was already calling into question the legitimacy of the vote.
“The level of voter suppression is beyond anything that we saw in 2018,” Mr. Johnson said. “We can’t say that whatever happens tonight is a fair and equitable election, because there have been too many laws passed by election deniers to keep people from being able to express themselves.”
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A divided nation cannot stand:
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Midterms show America remains a deeply divided nation
Democrats won the expectations game as a red wave didn’t materialize. But the results mean divided government and a worsening political tribal culture war.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(November 9, 2022 / JNS) If Americans thought that the midterm elections would provide a clear picture of their country’s future political direction, they woke up the next morning as confused as ever. The Democrats may have won the expectations game as the “red wave” that Republicans hoped would sweep them into control of both Houses of Congress didn’t materialize. But the stalemate the election seemingly produced is likely to only deepen the already stark partisan divide separating Americans into two warring camps that neither understands nor trusts one another.
Some key races were still undecided the following day, but it appears as if the Republicans have won control of the House of Representatives by a slim margin rather than the large majority they expected. The Democrats may well have held onto control of the Senate, though it’s possible the outcome won’t be decided until a Georgia runoff is held in December.
Strategists on both sides will likely spend the next two years pondering why Democrats did better than expected despite the handicap of a deeply unpopular incumbent president and a faltering economy accompanied by raging inflation.
The explanations will include the Republicans having nominated, in winnable contests, a great many unpopular candidates who were perceived as either too extreme or too close to former President Donald Trump. The Supreme Court ruling that overturned the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing a right to abortion will also be credited with energizing Democratic voters and some independents.
In some cases, the outcome may have turned on factors that were specific to individual races, such as in the Pennsylvania Senate faceoff, where Democrat John Fetterman’s victory could be credited as much to the fact that 700,000 votes were cast before his disastrous debate performance as to his opponent Dr. Mehmet Oz’s unpopularity or ties with Trump.
Moreover, a national narrative about Republican mistakes can’t explain the victories that the GOP did achieve, such as the landslides won by Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida. Similarly, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin came closer to victory than any member of his party had done in 20 years in that deep blue state.
This points to the problems that Democrats face in terms of their failures on issues like crime and the economy. DeSantis—like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the big winner of the 2021 off-year election—ran a campaign that was focused more on such topics as opposition to critical race theory and gender indoctrination in schools as it was on more traditional concerns. His showing undermines any neat narrative about voters preferring Republicans who eschewed culture war issues.
Moreover, claims that American’s changing demographics would bring victory to Democrats—a “great replacement theory” that both exultant liberals and fearful conservatives have pointed to in the last two decades—are also being proven false. That’s because Republicans are making huge inroads among Hispanic voters, who care about a lot of the same issues as members of other ethnic groups, including their concerns about illegal immigration.
Partisan stalemate
Taken as a whole, the one incontestable conclusion one can draw from the results is that partisan loyalties seem to be the most important factor for many, if not most, voters.
Democrats should have lost more ground in a year in which they held control of Congress and the White House and the economy was terrible. But they didn’t, because Americans who identify as Democrats held their noses and voted for most of their party’s candidates whether they liked them or not.
The victories of most incumbents illustrated that Republicans largely did the same. Though exit polling indicates that the GOP did make inroads among independents, the pull of partisanship in this hyper-partisan era seems to have predominated.
This, as well as the frustration that will be the inevitable consequence of a government no longer completely controlled by the Democrats, is bound only to increase the anger that both sides of the partisan divide feel toward one another.
Democrats ran this year mainly on a platform that proclaimed their opponents to be “semi-fascists” bent on the end of democracy. Republicans characterized the Biden administration in ways that depicted it as a captive to the woke left.
Historically, some administrations that suffered midterm setbacks moderated their policies in order to govern with their newly empowered opponents. This isn’t likely to happen today. The respective Democratic and Republican caucuses that will be sworn in next January will each be more ideologically charged than their predecessors.
Room for compromise already barely existed. It may now have evaporated with the presence of greater numbers than before of conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats, all of whom are convinced that their mandate is to represent their voters’ beliefs, not to govern effectively.
That ought to stand as a warning to those groups—like the Anti-Defamation League—which have done the most to stoke the fires of the culture war. By endorsing the Democrats’ talking points about the alleged Republican assault on democracy, they continue to contribute to a situation in which supporters of both parties have bought into the notion that opponents are evil rather than mistaken. And it’s hardly surprising that many on the other side of the equation feel the same way.
Under the circumstances, we should expect that sort of thinking to continue to predominate, as the political stalemate creates even more frustration across the spectrum. This leaves both liberals and conservatives more vulnerable to the purveyors of conspiracy theories, as each side—not without reason—believes the worst about the other.
Given that the 2024 presidential race is about to begin in earnest once all the midterm results are finally tabulated, this destructive mindset is likely to color much of American political discourse for the next two years.
Winners and losers
The results of the congressional midterms will have an impact on the 2024 race.
On the Democratic side, the ability of the party to hold its own will strengthen President Joe Biden’s position. Had it
suffered the kind of shellacking that most observers anticipated, it’s likely that party leaders would have done their best to force him to announce he wouldn’t seek re-election.
Considering the way he appears to be diminished with his erratic and consistently false statements becoming a regular feature of his presidency, this would almost certainly be the best thing for the Democrats and the nation.
Yet, having worked his whole life to achieve the presidency, Biden is unlikely to give it up without a fight, no matter how badly he comes across. And since he can claim that his last-minute appeals to smear Republicans as fascists worked, the results will encourage him to dig in and defy younger Democrats to oppose an incumbent president in the 2024 race.
Though Biden has largely governed to please the left wing of his party, Jewish Democrats who embraced him in 2020 as preferable to more radical alternatives are similarly stuck with him as the candidate.
By contrast, the results did not help Trump.
Some of the candidates he endorsed, such as J.D. Vance in Ohio, won. But others seen as closely aligned with him, such as Blake Masters in Arizona, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire and Oz, did not. Though Herschel Walker still has a chance to win in a Georgia runoff, he, too, can be seen as a Trump-imposed choice who fell short of expectations.
Even worse for Trump was the fact that DeSantis must be seen as the big GOP winner of 2022.
The Florida governor’s triumph came only days after Trump took a swipe at him, trying out a derogatory nickname—“DeSanctimonious”—to put him down as he did his GOP rivals in 2016. Trump fears and loathes DeSantis as much as he does his left-wing opponents, because he sees him as the most plausible contender as Republican presidential nominee.
Trump was planning on announcing another presidential run soon, so as to intimidate potential challengers to stay out of it. Still, DeSantis’s landslide victory gives him even more of a reason to consider a 2024 run.
While Trump remains the favorite choice of most Republicans, his decision to insult the Florida governor went over like a lead balloon, and seems even more foolish in light of DeSantis’s triumph.
It also may encourage other Republicans to try their luck in 2024, though a crowded primary field will help the former president.
This sets up an interesting contest for the affections of Jewish Republicans. Trump retains the loyalty of the GOP grassroots, which increases with each attempt by the Democrats to take him down by what Republicans believe are unfair means.
Trump’s record as the most pro-Israel president in history means he can count on many, if not most, Jewish conservatives to back him, even if, as he constantly laments, liberals give him no credit for it.
But DeSantis, who was the head of the Middle East Forum’s Israel Victory Caucus when he was in Congress, is likely to get a lot of Jewish-Republican support, as well. Some in the party think it’s time to leave Trump’s grudges about 2020 behind and get a younger face at the head of the GOP.
If so, it’s easy to imagine Trump reacting with rage at what he will claim is a betrayal. That sets up a primary battle that could get messy, and with the Jews right in the middle of it.
So, while many Americans will regard the end of the elections with relief and hope for some political peace, it’s not what they’re likely to get. If the 2020 results promised more years of political strife to follow, the same is almost certainly true with respect to what happened in 2022.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
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Can/will Moore go against his own because Maryland's problem is more related to black criminality and anti-social behaviour than anything else?
That a black has been elected governor qualifies him for seeking the presidency validates what I have said for years; "when all else fails lower your standards.'" Moore may be a a top notch executive but it takes more than a resume to handle the job of president.
The same goes for being a proud Jew.
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Wes Moore makes history as Maryland’s first Black governor - POLITICO
Wes Moore makes history as Maryland’s first Black governor
Moore, the charismatic best-selling author sweeps into office as the darling of the Democratic party, notching endorsements from Obama, Biden and Oprah Winfrey–amid whispers of a potential White House run.
Moore took to the stage, accompanied by his wife Dawn and their two children, Mia and James, as the Whitney Houston and Kygo hit, “Higher Love” blasted over the speakers.
“What an amazing night,” Moore said, “and what an improbable journey.”
Moore joins only Douglas Wilder of Virginia and Deval Patrick as the only Black governors elected in this nation’s 246-year history.
His victory also provided an early bright spot for a party that, heading into Election Night, was girding itself against the loss of the House — and the potential loss of the Senate, too.
Democrats were keen on taking back Maryland and Massachusetts — two deep-blue states headed by popular Republican governors who were not on the ballot this year. Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker decided against seeking a third term and term limits barred Maryland’s Larry Hogan from running again.
Across the nation, 36 states are holding gubernatorial elections but only a handful of them feature Black nominees: Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Deidre DeJear in Iowa, Yolanda Flowers in Alabama, Chris Jones in Arkansas, and Moore — all Democrats.
All but Moore fell short in their bids. This includes perhaps the most-closely watched gubernatorial contest in the Peach State, a rematch of the 2018 contest where Brian Kemp bested Abrams by roughly 54,000 votes.
In his acceptance speech, Moore reiterated themes from his campaign that he promises to put into action once he’s sworn in. He vowed to work with both police and local communities to help usher in a new era of public safety; promised to be a champion for abortion access; and leaned into his campaign slogan of “leave no one behind.”
He also invoked the memory of his Cuban-born grandmother who immigrated to Jamaica before coming to the United States. She died last week at 95, Moore said.
“Her name was Winell Thomas and we called her Mama Win,” Moore told the crowd. “I could not think of a more appropriate name.”
Moore defeats Republican Del. Dan Cox, who lagged throughout the general election campaign in fundraising and approval ratings, down by 30 percentage points in several public polls in the closing stretch of the campaign. By midnight, Cox had not conceded the race.
Moore, a moderate, became an instant star in the Democratic Party.
That was evident by the party’s luminaries who lent his campaign a boost in the closing days of the campaign — despite Moore’s path to victory never really being in doubt. Vice President Kamala Harris, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison and on the eve of the election, President Biden, all traveled to Maryland, a liberal bastion, to stump for Moore.
“Our lifetimes are going to be shaped by what happens in the next year to three years. It’s going to shape what the next couple decades look like,” President Biden said at a Monday evening rally on the campus of Bowie State University, a historically Black university.
Biden then reminded the audience how he bookended his midterm election push appearing with Moore this summer.
“Back in August, I came to Rockville to kick off a campaign season with Wes, and we’re here to close it out with Wes.”
Moore also has powerful friends who lent their support to his candidacy.
“My friend Wes Moore is the leader Maryland needs,” former President Barack Obama said of Moore in a recent campaign ad. Oprah Winfrey, the CEO of the OWN Network where Moore hosted the show, “Beyond Belief,” even cut an ad for Moore. “This moment that we’re in demands a different type of leader. For governor in Maryland, you have one in my friend Wes Moore,” Winfrey said in the endorsement spot.
Attracting this level of star-power for a first-time candidate is extremely rare. It also speaks to the towering expectations many in the party have placed on him, with some already beginning to whisper about a future White House run even before he’s sworn in as Maryland’s 63rd governor.
At 44, Moore’s victory also catapults Moore into the upper echelon of future leaders who are younger and more diverse than the long-tenured party heads—and who, presumably, can help ignite enthusiasm among the Democratic base.
Moore defeats Republican Dan Cox, who lagged throughout the general election campaign in fundraising and approval ratings, down by 30 percentage points in several public polls in the closing stretch of the campaign.
Cox could never duplicate the Hogan aura. Hogan, a Republican who was sworn into office in 2015, enjoyed broad appeal in a state where Democrats have roughly double the voter registration advantage over the GOP.
From the start, Cox appeared out of step with most Maryland voters. He arranged buses of MAGA supporters to attend then-President Donald Trump’s rally on Jan. 6 in Washington and called into question the 2020 presidential results. And during a televised debate last month, he refused to say if he would accept the outcome of his own gubernatorial contest.
He did earn the endorsement of Trump, but not that of Hogan, who referred to Cox as a “Q’Anon whack job.”
Attracting this level of star-power for a first-time candidate is extremely rare. It also speaks to the towering expectations many in the party have placed on him, with some already beginning to whisper about a future White House run even before he’s sworn in as Maryland’s 63rd governor.
Maryland isn’t the only state to make history on Election Night. Maura Healey, the Massachusetts Gov.-elect, will be the nation’s first lesbian governor. Both Moore and Healey will be working with legislatures already under Democratic control.
Some early pressures the Moore administration will face include filling the large number of vacancies in state government agencies, including the department of corrections, juvenile services and public health.
And
Josh Shapiro, Democrat who made his Jewishness a campaign focus, wins Pennsylvania governor’s race
By Andrew Lapin
(JTA) — Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who openly embraced his Jewish faith on the campaign trail and called his opponent out for his connections to antisemitic supporters, has won the state’s race for governor against the far-right Republican candidate Doug Mastriano.
Shapiro, who is currently the state’s attorney general, launched his campaign with ads that referenced his Shabbat observance and sends his children to Jewish day school. His decisive win makes him one of the most influential Jewish politicians in the United States.
The race was closely watched largely because of Mastriano, one of the most extreme Republicans running for any statewide race in the midterms who counted both former president Donald Trump and Christian nationalists among his backers. The state senator advertised on the social network Gab, a haven for far-right extremists, including the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and later accepted a campaign donation from the site’s openly antisemitic founder Andrew Torba even as he said he “rejects antisemitism in any form.” Mastriano’s Gab ties earned him a rare intra-party rebuke from the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Mastriano’s decisive loss — Shapiro had more than 55% of the vote early Wednesday, with more than 90% of ballots counted — represents a setback for the right-wing of the Republican party.
Beyond its Gab ties, Mastriano’s campaign amassed several other Jewish-themed controversial moments. He attacked the Jewish day school that Shapiro sends his children to, calling it “elite” without specifying it was Jewish; one of his advisers called Shapiro “at best a secular Jew”; and his wife told an Israeli reporter they “probably” love Israel “more than a lot of Jews do.” Prior to his running for governor, Mastriano also funded and acted in a Holocaust movie meant to advance conservative ideas about gun control and abortion.
His campaign continued to turn heads in its closing hours, when his final stop ended with a Messianic Jew serenading him with a parody of a “Fiddler On The Roof” song.
And:
The 2022 midterm elections are being counted as I write this and I'm sure there are millions of conservatives out there placing the bulk of their hopes on a "red sweep" as the tally continues. Likely, we will not know the full results for a few days as electronic voting seems to have complicated the process beyond all recognition, rather than streamlining it or making the count more accurate. Needless to say, some kind of change needs to happen. The majority of Americans know this. Even the people that refrain from voting are watching the elections, just to see if the momentum of the country has shifted even a little.
My view on elections has adapted over the years to positive and negative elements within American politics. A decade ago or more, my impression of voting was purely skeptical, especially when it came to the Republican Party.
With the Democrats, you knew what they were about for the most part. They are going to push the deconstruction of social norms and principles, they are going to spend with wild abandon, and they are going to raise your taxes to do it. Beyond that, they are going to back any measure that erases constitutional protections and erodes individual rights. They don't really try to hide their intent.
With the GOP, there were some good guys and true conservatives trying to defend basic values and freedoms, but then there were the Neocons, the fakes, the RINOs, the impostors who pretended to represent conservatism but then backed every progressive policy under the sun while sabotaging the country in the meantime.
These guys had to go because they were the key pillar of the false left/right paradigm. If the Neocons could be removed from the equation, then maybe there would be a chance for the U.S. in political terms. When your party is actively trying to destroy true conservatives like Ron Paul and running fraud candidates like Mitt Romney against Barack Obama, you know that the game is rigged.
However, times change and circumstances evolve, even if some people are too bitter or jaded to see it. The old guard Neocons trained in the Chicago school by Leo Strauss along with the acolytes of Irving Kristol are losing favor among voters and many are dying out. The era of Bush family politics is long gone. What is left is a kind of philosophical stew, a mixture of libertarians, independents, Republicans and patriots that don't necessarily affiliate with the GOP but they will vote for a candidate with a strong stance against the woke cultism and globalism of the political left. That's what they are looking for.
Their "Tyranny" Will Lead to the End of America...
The future of this country is under assault like nothing we've seen before. The Feds new secret "Project Hamilton" will obliterate freedom in America.
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Ron DeSantis and his election dominance in Florida show us that the GOP is now being forced to address real conservative issues and concerns, whether they like it or not. Because if they want to win big like DeSantis, they will have to start promoting the same policies and arguments as DeSantis. Republican candidates that don't will not succeed, at least anywhere near the same level.
Many people assume that Trump was the impetus for this new wave of conservatives which has abandoned the Neocon coup. But in reality, the wave started at least a decade ago and we are only now starting to see the results. Trump is a product of the wave, not the cause of it.
For me, voting these days is more about local and state focus, the positions of individual candidates as well as the threat presented by a particular Democrat on specific issues. In Montana, we had a Democrat running for congress that based a large portion of her campaign on pushing abortion as if it is a constitutional right. That's just not going to fly in this state, so, time to vote and get her out of the picture, even though the Republican candidate is not all that compelling.
Keeping my state as red as possible is also a matter of urgency because Montana conservatives witnessed what happens when we get lazy about keeping leftists out of power. Our governor at the beginning of the COVID event was Steve Bullock, a Democrat posing as a "middle of the road" pro-gun, pro-freedom guy. But when the federal pressure for mandates hit, Bullock followed right along with all other blue state politicians in trying to enforce unconstitutional restrictions and was antagonistic toward anyone questioning such policies.
In 2020, we booted him and most Democrats along with him out of office. We learned our lesson. Keep the state red because, in the event of crisis, these people will exploit the situation to steal power.
I have had a lot of folks tell me in the past that voting is irrelevant and that conservative leaders at the state and county level would fold and submit to the whims of the federal government when the time came for our liberties to be stripped away. These people were wrong. The time did come; the pandemic was the perfect opportunity for establishment authoritarians to take all that was left of our freedoms forever. And they tried, with all the tools available to them, including the controlled corporate media, big tech social media platforms, federal bureaucracy, etc. We came within a breath of full-spectrum tyranny.
But, they failed, and they failed because red states across the country refused to comply from the voters to the politicians. State leaders did not fold as many predicted, which means there is a chance to fight back on a level beyond defending our front porches with guns in hand.
At the very least, the actions of red states have bought us more time, and that is a precious commodity in an era of quickly escalating crisis. The situation is not quite as dire as I believed many years ago, and not as definitive as many liberty activists believe now. The end is not nigh. Our efforts are having an effect.
Am I putting blind faith in the 2022 elections? No. If a red sweep doesn't materialize will I lose all hope? No. I'm already seeing some positive outcomes that I think people need to consider. For example:
Florida sweep
Ron DeSantis crushed leftists in Florida based on a very vocal anti-woke, anti-establishment platform. He proved that this is what Americans want. Not middle of the road, not riding the fence or trying to be diplomatic, but remaining steadfast and uncompromising in the face of irrational cultism.
Some people in the liberty movement have their complaints about DeSantis, but what I'm looking at is results, and he has done more to stop the woke agenda in his state than any other state in the country. He also stood firm against COVID authoritarianism. Results are what matter most.
The "blue creep" threat was a lie
All the wailing and screaming I heard over the past two years about leftists relocating into red states during COVID and changing the demographics was complete nonsense. I've been saying since the pandemic began... Leftists don't move away from their hive, and they aren't taking over red states, at least not today. The latest midterms prove that the fear of "blue creep" was pure paranoia. If anything, in Montana we saw far more conservatives escaping blue states to live somewhere they felt was safe.
After this election, I don't want to hear another idiotic theory about the Dems turning Texas or Florida or other strong red states blue. Look at the vast sea of red on any midterm map, then shut up and move on.
The abortion blue wave never happened
Remember after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade the number of media outlets proclaiming that conservatives would be destroyed during the elections? Apparently, average Americans are not as concerned with the "right" to kill babies as they had assumed. States that have moved to ban abortion are not facing a blue wave and these laws will most likely remain in place.
This fact upends a long-running narrative in the mainstream that any attempt to stop abortion is doomed to failure and that any political candidate that supports banning abortion would be soundly defeated. The narrative was a lie.
Americans place the economy above all other concerns
Regardless of how the elections eventually pan out, public polling before the midterms consistently revealed that the majority of Americans are worried about inflation and economic decline above all else, and the social issues that leftists typically run on are mostly at the bottom of the list.
This means that even if Dems retain a certain measure of governmental power the longer the economic crisis goes on the more they will be questioned about what they plan to do about it. They have no plan, and they don't intend to do anything about it except spend more money they don't have, which is what caused the crisis in the first place. At least conservative candidates are acknowledging the threat; leftist candidates still refuse to admit the threat exists.
I believe the economic danger will continue to grow, and unless there ends up being a supermajority of conservatives in the House and Senate there is little that can be done to stop it on a national level. This means the work will fall to individual states to protect themselves from the shock. I suspect red states will survive while blue states implode.
Is our cultural pendulum swinging back to reason? Yes, I see signs of it everywhere, but the fight ahead is going to be long and arduous. It's not just the woke activists and globalists within our own country that we have to contend with, it's the organized cultism in numerous countries throughout western nations. It took decades for us to get to the terrible spot we are in as a species, and it will most likely take decades to get us out of it. That said, there is hope. This fight can be won.
To truth and knowledge,
Brandon Smith
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Now for my own Wednesday Quarterback thoughts:
Tuesday's election reflects the severe decline in America's collective judgement. If abortion wins over the republic's survival then the 24/7's have won and democracy has lost. Why? Because The SCOTUS could not find, in the constitution, any reference to abortion so it returned the matter to the states as dictated in the constitution. Then democracy takes over and state legislators will make abortion decisions and citizens, of the various states, will have their say and input.
Perhaps a succinct win/lost list will best reflect my thoughts:
WIN:
Florida, DeSantis and Rubio.
Florida, DeSantis and Rubio.
Biden's nonsense about demonization of Republicans.
Criminality.
Republican Governorships.
LOSE:
The Republic.
The Republic.
Kitchen table issues.
Law and Order
The constitution.
Caliber of future American leadership.
Possibly Trump
The market
With respect to the market, there is a maxim that the market likes gridlock. That is because of the distrust investors have in legislators.
The inability of Republicans to win convincingly in the face of Biden's disastrous governance is disheartening and lamentably revealing. It reflects the serious decline in American values and concerns. That we have reached the point of tolerating crime, and all that is happening at our borders and the utter incompetent leadership of this administration seems not to be of concern is frightening.
And:
https://youtu.be/LhhoQbzupug+++++++++++++++++++++++
This is what the 24/7's want and are doing.
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If You Leave the Gate Open
If you cut police budgets, you will get more crime on the streets. So, if you intentionally cut police budgets, you wanted more crime on the streets.
If you cut back the supply of oil, gas prices will go up. So if you intentionally cut back the supply of oil, you wanted gas prices to rise.
If you print trillions of dollars without increasing the supply of goods, inflation will hit hard. So if you intentionally print trillions of dollars without more goods you wanted inflation to hit hard.
If you leave the southern border wide open, you get more drug trafficking and human trafficking. So if you intentionally leave the border wide open, you wanted more drug trafficking and human trafficking.
If you shut down 40% of the supply of baby formula in February, you'll get a huge shortage. When you KNOW a huge baby formula shortage is coming because of the FDAs actions and you purposefully do nothing to prevent it, month after month, until the crisis finally hits hard, you INTENDED this crisis.
It is time to recognize the evil people behind that old man. They want crisis. They want chaos. They want riots. They want conflicts in your town.
Their stated purpose years ago with Obama was to "take the US down a few notches on the world stage." You can feel the quality of your life going down with the country.
These are not foolish or misguided people. They are intentionally and purposely taking our country somewhere we don't want to go...
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