Hi folks, how about another great article from my favorite poster, Greg Maresca who always hits the nail squarely on the head. This time he adds a little waggishness. How about that word, huh?
By Greg Maresca
The Nobel Prize Committee announced their annual nominees and since the committee is a willing hostage to woke politics, they nominated Black Lives Matter for the Nobel Peace Prize. If by happenchance, BLM does not win – burning down Nobel’s Swedish headquarters should definitely get them nominated again in 2022.
For saying Dominion’s voting machines fixed the presidential election for Joe Biden, Rudy Giuliani is being sued for $1.3 billion. Apparently, their board of directors voted unanimously 12-0 to file the lawsuit. However, the vote was 10-2, against, but that was before they ran the ballots through their latest software.
Concerning ballots, Gallup’s annual “Most Admired Man in America” poll, had Donald Trump victorious over Barack Obama, but the initial results are being called into question as some mail-in ballots are still being counted.
The popularity of mail-in ballots was not lost on Amazon employees. The company, however, adamantly opposed mail-in ballots for its employees on whether or not to unionize a warehouse in Alabama. Amazon was concerned about voter fraud. Imagine that? Ironically, Amazon’s now former CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, published one diatribe commentary after another leading up to November’s presidential election ridiculing everyone who expressed any concerns about the propensity for fraud concerning mailed ballots.
As good as Alec Baldwin the actor may be, he is definitely not the best actor in his marriage. Wife Hilaria (her stage name, perhaps?) born Hillary Lynn Thomas in Boston is obviously better having carried on the charade so convincingly for years that she was a foreign-born Hispanic. The Woke Cancel Culture just shrugged and gave the leftist Baldwin a pass. However, that was not the case when Country music artist Morgan Wallen said the infamous N-word during a recent recording session. Wallen has been exiled from numerous online merchandizing platforms for his iniquity. On the flip side, Wallen has great potential to kick-start a new career as a rapper.
The Democrat leadership in the U.S. House is stuck in the mental quicksand of Orwellian duplicity when “father, daughter, mother, and son” and all gendered pronouns were officially banned. But it gets even better. When Democrat Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri delivered the opening prayer of the 117th Congress, he concluded by saying: “… and god known by many names by many different faiths. Amen and a-woman.” The Hebrew word “amen,” means “May it be so,” yet Cleaver conjured up such a ridiculous fabrication because to Democrats “amen” sounds like an offensive reference to males. This is more than political correctness and identity politics run amuck; it’s diabolical. Moreover, this was coming from a man whose first name in Hebrew means “God with us” and is an ordained Methodist pastor. Perhaps he should change his name to Ewomanuel.
Best of all, anyone caught smirking will be charged with a hate crime.
The phrase “historic first” gets thrown around like a baseball during infield practice. Pete Buttigieg being confirmed as the next U.S. Secretary of Transportation is the first LGBTQ cabinet member in U.S. history. Buttigieg is former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a town not really known for its public transportation, but since when does that not make one qualified to oversee the entire nation’s system? We are talking woke identity politics here. Besides, Buttigieg tweeted he “loved transportation and proposed to his husband in an airport terminal.”
Kamala Harris is not the “first” American vice president of mixed race. That title goes to Charles Curtis who was the nation’s 31st vice president serving from 1929-1933 under Herbert Hoover. Curtis was a descendant of Chief White Plume of the Kaw Nation and Chief Pawhuska both on his mother’s side.
The Super Bowl was the site of yet another case of the “historic firsts syndrome” as Sarah Thomas was the first female to officiate at a Super Bowl. To be even more edgy and perhaps pull in more women fans, the NFL should hire all women officials. Who better than a group of women to catch and broadcast what men are doing wrong.
If firing someone because of race, or sexual orientation is discriminatory, isn’t hiring someone for the same reason just as discriminatory?
Remember the movie with a similar name? Yes, they were magnificent, great actors, all seven. But how about these seven. Did you do your research to see who they were? Well, I did and there were no surprises. Hmm, wonder how they’ll do in their next re-election? Of those seven, two are retiring and only one — Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski — faces her state’s voters in the next election cycle, 2022. But they’ll all do well since Americans have short memories. Anyway, here they are.
Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) attends a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee nomination hearing for Michael Stanley Regan to be Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, on February 3, 2021. (Photo by BRANDON BELL / POOL / AFP) (Photo by BRANDON BELL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) Political situation: Burr, who’s served in the Senate since 2005, announced years ago that this term would be his last. Two days after his vote to convict Trump, the North Carolina Republican Party unanimously voted to censure Burr.WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 12: Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) talks to reporters in the Senate subway on his way to the fourth day of the Senates second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol on February 12, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trumps defense team begins their presentation of the defense that Trump should not be held responsible for the January 6th attack at the U.S. Capitol on First Amendment grounds and the fact that he is no longer in office. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)Political situation: The backlash to Cassidy’s vote to convict was swift. The state GOP voted unanimously to censure him, releasing a statement saying it condemns Cassidy’s action.
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 04: Senator Susan Collins, R-ME, speaks during the confirmation hearing for Labor secretary nominee Marty Walsh testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill February 4, 2021 in Washington, DC. Walsh was previously the mayor of Boston. (Photo by Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images)Political situation: Collins’ next election is in 2026. Like Cassidy, Collins just won reelection in 2020, though her race was much closer in a state Trump lost (he won one electoral vote in the state for winning its 2nd Congressional District).
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 13: Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) talks to a reporter in the Senate subway at the conclusion of former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial February 13, 2021 in Washington, DC. The Senate voted 57-43 to acquit Trump. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)Political situation: Murkowski, a senator since 2002, is up for reelection next year, but as Alaska Public Media recently reported, her state’s new election rules likely mean she’ll be in less danger of losing her primary.
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 10: U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) enters the reception room ahead of the second day of Trumps second impeachment trial on February 10, 2021 in Washington, DC. Today is the second day in Trumps second impeachment trial addressing remarks that he made ahead of the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6. (Photo by Brandon Bell – Pool/Getty Images)Political situation: This wasn’t Romney’s first time harshly criticizing Trump or breaking ranks with his party. He was the only Republican to vote to convict Trump on one article during the former president’s first impeachment trial in early 2020, and in recent weeks was called “a joke” and a “traitor” by Trump supporters while traveling from Utah to Washington, D.C.
Senator Ben Sasse, R-NE speaks during a hearing for Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Bidens nominee for Secretary of the Treasury,as she participates in a Senate Finance Committee hearing in Washington DC, on January 19, 2021. – Biden, who will take office on January 20, 2021, has proposed a $1.9 trillion rescue package to help businesses and families struggling amid the pandemic, and Yellen would be tasked with getting that massive bill through a Congress where some are wary of the skyrocketing budget deficit. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker / POOL / AFP) (Photo by ANNA MONEYMAKER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images).Political situation: Sasse has spoken out against Trump in strong ways in recent months. In a call with constituents in October, Sasse worried out loud that Trump would bring down the Republican-controlled Senate in November.
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 30: Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) leaves the Senate chamber during a recess in the Senate impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump continues at the U.S. Capitol on January 30, 2020 in Washington, DC. On Thursday, Senators continue asking questions for the House impeachment managers and the president’s defense team. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images).Political situation: Toomey — who like Maine’s Collins represents a state Trump lost in the presidential election —announced in October that he would not seek reelection in 2022.
Any from your State (AK, ME, NE, UT, PA, LA, NC)? None from mine.
From a dear friend, and fellow retired Marine Brother
All, this for your consideration. Obviously can’t vouch for it all but do believe there was some stench in the past election and more to come in GA. And I did happen to see the Fox News episode when Newt was silenced. Comes from a good source: A retired Marine LtCol who was our Bn Air Officer in RVN.
S/F’ Vic
Thanks Vic. Good scoop at the end for those of us who have trashed FOX and are looking for a more reliable news network.
If you regularly watch Fox News and have been noticing something feels “off” with their election coverage, you’re not wrong. Around a year ago, conservative political wonks turned off Fox News for good. The reason why has to do with events that unfolded in 2019. What did these conservative news junkies see that the rest of us missed? And why does it matter now?
Event Number One: The Passing of the Torch
Rupert Murdoch was the media titan who built and developed Fox News into America’s conservative news juggernaut. Murdoch had six children. Of the six, his two sons Lachlan and James were in contention to take over Fox News even though both of them had openly repudiated Rupert’s conservative politics. In 2019, Lachlan officially took over the reins of Fox News. James, the more liberal of the two, opted to invest a large portion of his multi-billion-dollar inheritance in liberal media ventures. Once Lachlan took charge, his goal was to move Fox News left. His moves were no surprise to insiders considering his public ties to climate change activism, donating to the Clinton Foundation, and proudly taking responsibility for pushing Bill O’Reilley off the network. It’s worth noting that Fox Business is a separate entity from Fox News, even though both channels are owned by a new, scaled-back Fox Network.
Event Number Two: Fox News Hires the Haters
In March 2019, Fox News made a shocking move by hiring former DNC Committee Chief, Donna Brazile. She was famously fired from the DNC and CNN for leaking debate questions to Hillary Clinton prior to a 2016 Presidential Debate against Donald Trump. Another WTF hire was the failed VP Candidate, Paul Ryan. Ryan was named to the Fox News Board of Directors in March 2019. The well-known “never Trumper’ routinely stonewalled President Trump’s agenda as the Speaker of the House. And hired Juan Williams, a devoted Dem fired from NPR. Constantly contradicts anything good said by or about President Trump.
Event Number Three: “Shut-Up, Or Else…”
Just a month ago, Newt Gingrich’s mic was cut when he had the audacity to utter the name George Soros in an interview on Harris Faulkner’s Fox News show, Overtime Outnumbered. During the interview, the conversation moved into a discussion on political funding. Gingrich was presenting indisputable facts about Soros’s well-known financial backing of many extremely left-leaning political organizations. The mic cut surprised both Faulkner and Gingrich which led to a long, awkward, pregnant silence on air. Was Gingrich’s censorship a signal to other conservative voices?
Fast forward to this past week, Judge Jeanine Pirro, the host of Justice W/Jeanine on Fox News since 2011 announced the topic of her weekly show. The topic: Election Fraud. However, she was fired/suspended before her segment aired. Was Pirro’s firing meant to send a message to other popular Fox News hosts?
Just days after Pirro’s firing and Biden’s bogus campaign victory speech, Laura Ingram the host of the Ingram Angle stunned Republicans. On her show, she took it upon herself to offer President Trump advice on how to act graciously upon his pending election concession. It was uncharacteristic of Ingram to take this defeatist position considering she consistently supported President Trump throughout his first term. As a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ingram knows the law and knows the election is far from officially decided. Shecaved to save her lucrative paying job.
Next, Tucker Carlson. With the highest ratings of any cable news show in the days leading up to November 3rd, where is he now that the blatant election fraud is being exposed? Strangely quiet given Carlson’s fierce commitment to our Republic.
Then, there’s Hannity. If anyone deserves to be called a Trump fan-boy, it’s Sean Hannity. Even he is noticeably restrained in his election coverage. Hannity knows full-well President Trump won in a landslide on Nov. 3rd and remains the winner even after the Dem’s election fuckery. Why isn’t Hannity crying foul? Then there’s Chris Wallace. His performance as a debate moderator drew such harsh criticism from both political sides, his professional reputation may not ever recover.
Here IS what’s going on at Fox News
With just 73% of the votes counted in Arizona around midnight on November 3rd, Fox News made a stunning call, falsely awarding the win of the battleground state to Joe Biden. Now that we know the true nature of Fox News, have seen blatant election fraud, and seen a pattern of silence from the top talent on the channel; is it so far-fetched to think Fox News is playing a role in all of this?
There is no question the 2020 election is rampant with fraud and it continues. Proof is mounting, whistleblowers are coming forward, even Supreme Court injunctions have been issued. All of this will be investigated and litigated through the courts. Rudy Guiliani and the rest of the Trump legal team have vowed to fight. And, for good reason. The law is on Trump’s side. Recall this past summer when President Trump repeatedly warned America about mail-in voting and election fraud? Everything that’s happening now was anticipated by the Trump team, well in advance. Nothing so far has been a surprise to The President and his team.
Now that the fraud has been executed, it relies on two key factors to actually succeed.
Play number one is “lawfare”. The election fraud is designed to stir up chaos, forcing the election to be decided by the courts, rather than at the ballot box. How the Dems are weaponizing the law to manage the election outcome is called lawfare. The Dems are great at this. Remember Hillary’s numerous provable felonies when she mishandled top secret information on her personal server? The head of the FBI, Comey, called it a “matter” not a “crime”. A crime can be legally prosecuted, a matter cannot. See what they did there? Effective lawfare. Hillary walked.
The second key play is the “information war”. This is where Fox News is playing a key role. Here’s the breakdown: Fox News delivered blatantly fake news by calling AZ a win for Biden. They delivered the lie early. So early in fact Fox News dominated the news cycle and grabbed control of the election narrative going forward. Fox News is attempting to position President Trump as the loser who is fighting a losing battle against fake election fraud in the courts, because he can’t take the L. Having Fox News deliver this news is part of the plan in order to give the lie credibility. To add extra credence to the hoax, the management at Fox News has succeeded in manipulating their top talent to support the fake narrative. The left is counting on the average Trump supporter to believe the lie since it comes from the trusted, “conservative” Fox News and its top personalities. The rationale goes like this: If Fox News is reporting Trump lost AZ, it must be true. Why would Fox lie about the Republican candidate to their Republican audience?
Do not underestimate the power and effectiveness of the “information war”. It’s meant to demoralize Trump supporters, weak-kneed Republican politicians, law enforcement, the military, foreign leaders etc. The left does not want an energized, organized opposition fighting for America’s election integrity. What we’re seeing now isn’t the Dem’s kill-shot, they’re trying to soften the target. The mainstream media knows it can make any claims about who won the election without consequences, especially since it’s a coordinated attack. They need Trump supporters to give up and concede in order to win.
For the people who want a free and fair election, internalize this: the media doesn’t decide elections. Trump won in a landslide. The Dems cheated to try to win. Every legal vote will be counted so states can legally certify official results. All the criminal participants from local election officials to the head(s) of the fraud operation will be prosecuted. None of this will happen quickly, but it will happen. Trump and his team are in full control of this fight. As he came off his well-deserved round of golf over the weekend, his only quote was, “We’re gonna win. Wait.” The only outstanding question is, are you going to give the opposition what they want? Are you going to get weak, loose hope, and abandon our duly elected President?
Where to go from here?
It’s critical for us all to combat the “information war”. This means staying informed with real, accurate news and sharing it with our friends, families, and neighbors. It’s not easy because social media platforms and the coordinated mainstream media have created an information firewall. However, with a little persistence, sharing with our networks by using word-of-mouth neutralizes the firewall. By texting, emailing, and conversing we are creating our own media network that offers more information that is being hidden from everyone. So, the question becomes where to find real news to share since Fox News has proven to be a turd in a tuxedo
It’s time to switch to alternative news sources. To make the jump, it takes some temporary “getting used-to”. Be prepared for things like lower production quality, occasional technical glitches, and watching on other devices — unless you put in a little work to figure out how to connect your phone or internet to your TV. It may take downloading a new app or visiting a new site. These minor short-term inconveniences are worth it to get real, honest news.
To get started, here are my three 24/7 news channel picks to replace Fox News (linked)
OANN: One America News Network
24/7 news channel. Scrappy and accurate. OANN is building serious cred with reporters in the official White House Press Pool and former military intelligence. On-air talent can be dry, but they consistently deliver the goods.
24/7 news. Positioned to be the next conservative media giant. Recently came out strong in support of election integrity by refusing to air Biden’s bogus victory speech. Newsmax checks the facts. Delivers a wide range of programming.
24/7 news. Strong Programming Lineup. AVN is on the move. Heavy investment in new programs and upping overall production quality. Reliable and accurate. Lots of insider, breaking news embedded in several programs e.g. National Pulse, Bannon’s Warrooom etc. The live-chat feature on the AVN YouTube Channel is worth a try.
For those of you who do not know who Victor Davis Hanson is, here is what Wikipedia says about him:
“Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, The Washington Times and other media outlets. ”
For someone born, raised, and educated in California he certainly has his stuff all in one bag — as we used to say in the Corps. He will be 63 in a week
The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities go on with their ritual self-destruction.
n February, New York was the world’s most dynamic metropolis. By August, the city was more like the ruins of Ephesus. It is not all that hard to blow up a culture. You can do it in a summer if you haven’t much worry about others.
When you loot and burn a Target in an hour, it takes months to realize there are no more neighborhood Target-stocked groceries, toilet paper, and Advil to buy this winter.
You can in a night assault the police, spit at them, hope to infect them with the coronavirus, and even burn them alive. But when you call 911 in a few weeks after your car is vandalized, your wallet is stolen, and your spouse is violent, and no one comes, only then do you sense that you earlier were voting for a pre-civilized wilderness.
You can burn down a Burger King in half an hour. But it will take years to find anyone at Burger King, Inc., who would ever be dumb enough to rebuild atop the charred ruins—to prepare for the next round of arson in 2021 or 2023.
Today’s looter carrying off sneakers and smartphones in 10 years will be tomorrow’s urban activist, understandably but in vain demanding stores return to a charred no man’s land, to do their fair share, and to help restore the downtown, neighborhood, inner-city, or the “community.”
Old Liberal Ideas Are Being Destroyed
We are living in the most racially polarized climate since the 1960s. America’s past, present, and future are in the process of being recalibrated entirely through the lens of one’s skin color. Columbus is reduced to nothing more than another racist white Italian sailor of a half-millennium past. Grant might as well have fought for slavery in the mind of today’s campus ignoramus. Apparently, the Antifa thug thinks he could just as easily have written the Gettysburg Address or sculpted a statue of Frederick Douglass.
The old liberal ideas of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage are being destroyed by the Left under the specious doctrines of cultural appropriation, or “acting white” or “how we look is who we are.”
A new fuzzy Jim Crow returns with racially segregated campus safe spaces and theme houses or the race-based reeducation and training sessions in the workplace—all predicated to stop racism! Somehow selecting strangers on the basis of their race to bully in a restaurant, or targeting old anonymous men and women to beat up in the street by their race, or singling out suburbanites by their race for racial taunts and profanity is redefined as reparatory justice or overdue payback—on the assumption that no one would dare say that the arson, looting, and rhetoric are descending into ever more hate-filled nihilism.
Our collective future of nationalized tribalism will become what always results when citizens identify by superficial appearance or shared religion. Just go to Lebanon, the Balkans, or Iraq to see what is in store first hand.
Tribalism Rising
To survive, all groups will self-identify, at first quietly, but eventually unapologetically. Some will form alliances of self-preservation, others will war with each other. Tribal gangs, as they already do now in our streets of fire and looting, will assume they are exempt from consequences; and so will their antitheses of vigilantes who band together to guard their stores in the absence of a defunded police.
Liberal elite whites themselves are now uneasy, since the abstract doctrines they so nihilistically advocated, from defunding the police to recalibrating looting as “redistribution,” are now becoming reified and closer to home. They see that when BLM protestors jam a restaurant to demand fealty or lecture on “white privilege” or march into a suburb to wake up the commuter to apprise him of his immorality, the racialists will not qualify their agendas with “except for woke whites.”
When tribalism is distilled to its innate and terrifying essence, there are never exemptions for individuals: you are reduced to what you appear superficially as to strangers. The white felon is no different than the white Harvard president, the black shoplifter is the same as the black physicist. We are all condensed to a sort of collective nothingness, or rather a racial “allness.”
The Self-Immolation of Pro Sports
Professional sports, once an integral part of American life, appears to be nearly in ruins. Professional baseball, basketball, and football might have survived the virus, the lockdown, and the recession—and then maybe they might not have. After all, millions of the bored more quickly than expected got acculturated to the idea of soon not listening to a boring rant from LeBron James or the sad confessionals of Drew Brees.
But what the NBA and NFL, and perhaps MLB won’t survive is cultural suicide as players fragment into causes. The NBA existed on the premise that billionaires were willing to pay multimillionaires to lose billions as a prestige lark—as a franchise became a sort of a huge, showy Louis Vuitton bag. But even billionaires have limits. Snobbery and appearing cool do not always trump losing the equivalent of a Ferrari every hour or a Gulfstream each week.
The NBA, we are told, is a woke industry.
But it’s also the strangest, most nondiverse, right-wing, money-obsessed woke institution in America. More than three-quarters of the multimillionaire players are African-American. Over 90 percent of the billionaire team owners are white.
Yet the entire industry—players, coaches, owners, staff—lecture Americans ad nauseam about their supposed sins. The monotonous sermons have become transparent medieval redemptions—given the mortal sin that the NBA sold its very soul to a racist, genocidal, and totalitarian China—to recover billions abroad for the billions lost in viewership and attendance at home.
Nondiverse multimillionaires, working for even less diverse billionaires, finger-pointing at middle-class Americans on the evils of privilege, in the pay of the Chinese Communist Party, is not a way to win back fans.
Institutional Crack-Ups
Universities are in for hard times. The federal government eventually will get out of the $1.5 trillion student loan subsidy business, and force spendthrift colleges to accept their own self-created moral hazards. Charging $30,000-40,000 for tuition over Zoom is a bad business model in a recession. And the alphabet soups after the names of professors and deans will not make a bit of difference.
Thousands of college-educated protesters and rioters are not especially good advertisements for the building of lifelong character on woke university campuses. Once undergraduate institutions decided to make students socially conscious rather than educated, and once their graduates seem to be neither, then who really finds their mentors essential?
Our major cities, emerging from lockdown, and on the edge of nightly violence, remind us of what Procopius, the Byzantine historian, saw of Rome in AD 538, once the cultural and political megalopolis of the world: a mostly deserted shell of weeds, deserted streets, collapsed stone, choked fountains, and fortified villas where lawlessness reigned and feuding tribes were what was left of a government that once had enshrined habeas corpus.
No city gets a pass from history, not Athens, not Rome, not Alexandria—not Detroit, Baltimore, or Chicago.
After all, there is no rule that just because Bill Gates and Amazon headquartered in Seattle that its mayor, city council, and state governor will not abandon its signature downtown. What once made Portland great can be undone in a few weeks.
Wall Street may run the world, but it certainly does not run the New York City government. Electronic capital really does still have human legs and when the proverbial suited investor thinks he will be infected, short of toilet paper, or assaulted on the street, he leaves, taking his laptop with him. Bill de Blasio is left to govern, like a horned and bearded Visigoth, over an increasing shell of former grandeur.
To venture into San Francisco is to return in a time machine to 1855, a boomtown based on silicon chips, not gold dust, but one likewise lawless, fetid, and safe only for those with private security guards. To the casual visitor, it appears a lunatic place now recalibrated for the homeless, the looter, the assaulter—and the very rich. Crimes like public defecation and drug use, or shattering the windows of a parked car window to steal its contents are not crimes unless the targets are the well-connected.
The story of all Dark Ages is that when civilizations finally prefer suicide, they do it easily, and the remnants flock to the countryside to preserve what they can—allowing the cities to go on with their ritual self-destruction.
So it has begun to seem this endless summer.
My personal view is we have the gun to our head right now. It only has two cylinders, one has a round it it, the other is empty. In November the trigger will be pulled.
I watched the second night of the Republican National Convention the same way you fall in love or go bankrupt: gradually, but then suddenly stricken by a strange and somewhat inexplicable premonition. It was this: Donald John Trump is going to win in November, and win big.
Yeah, I know all about the polls. I understand the deep distaste many Americans, including some traditional Republican voters, feel for the president. I am well aware of the criticism of his conduct in handling COVID-19, or the riots following George Floyd’s death, or any number of issues. And yet, as Trump’s first surprise election ought to have taught us by now, when it comes to modern American politics, the only principle that truly matters is the Ooga Chaka principle: We vote for the candidate who gets us hooked on a feeling and high on believing.
Last week, the Democrats used their convention to deliver three key messages: Joe Biden is a very decent person; Joe Biden is not Donald Trump, who is not a very decent person; and, being both a very decent person and not-Donald-Trump, Joe Biden is passionate about amplifying the voices of women and minorities, which is one important way to prove both your decency and your not-Trumpiness.
Who, precisely, might get hooked by these messages, and on what feeling? That Biden is a decent person is indisputable anywhere outside the airless quarters of the most quarrelsome partisans. That he shares little with the man he hopes to defeat is obvious—by now, Trump’s fans and detractors alike have very few misconceptions about the man’s character. That leaves us with the DNC’s heavy schmear of identity politics, a sentiment that doubtless resonates with the party’s educated, affluent base but says very little to those weary Americans who wonder why their cities are burning and why on earth anyone would ever want to defund the police.
The RNC, on the other hand, had a much more hearty offering on hand. It had no actors, singers, comedians, billionaires, academics, or former presidents present to offer perfectly polished paeans to character. Instead, it had people of faith affirming the singular importance of safeguarding the freedom of religion; immigrants affirming the notion, not controversial until very recently, that an American citizenship was an exceptional honor, not a universal right; blue-collar workers affirming the all-American reliance on small businesses, not tech behemoths; law enforcement officials affirming the foundational truth that, in America, when we disagree, we talk things over, not burn things down; and African Americans affirming the belief, central to the thinking of Martin Luther King Jr. and entirely alien to the current crop of race hustlers, that it’s the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin, that ought to matter.
In other words, whereas one party had the same narrow dogma repeated verbatim with very little variation, the other had—dare we say it?—diversity: of gender and of race and of experience, but also, more importantly, of interests and ideas.
This is not to say that watching both conventions will get a sizable number of voters to stop worrying and learn to love Donald Trump. But it is to say that it’s becoming increasingly more clear that the Democrats’ real problem isn’t the party’s aging candidate or its rambunctious left flank but, rather, its relationship with reality itself.
A party seriously interested in recapturing the White House would’ve done well to launch its bid by drafting a road map that roughly corresponds to America’s territory. It would’ve benefited from going long on big ideas and short on big personalities. It would’ve sought to vigorously court the millions who rejected it last time around, choosing instead to bet on an imperfect upstart. The Democrats orated, emoted, and fixated on nothing but the orange-haired object of their obsession.
To make matters worse, if you were watching the convention on TV—as fewer and fewer Americans do these handheld, device-driven days—you were treated to the dizzying but not altogether unpleasant experience of seeing the talking heads on cable news ask you to believe them rather than your own lying eyes. To hear the pundits tell it, the RNC is one part Thunderdome, one part plantation owners’ meeting, a series of dark and stormy nights dedicated to hating anyone or anything that isn’t white, rich, and smug. Examples are plentiful and sordid, but here’s one: After suing CNN and settling for an undisclosed sum, Nicholas Sandmann, the Kentucky high school student who was portrayed as a baby Grand-Wizard-in-training by our malicious media, appeared last night to tell his story. He was polite, earnest, and engaging but that didn’t stop our moral and intellectual betters from once again telling a very different story. Sandmann, sneered one cable news stalwart, was a “snot nose entitled kid” who was best ignored. That stalwart? Joe Lockhart, of CNN. There’s no better way to describe the last four years of American journalism than the mantra coined decades ago by Seinfeld’s showrunners: No hugging, no learning. And, like Seinfeld, all MSNBC, CNN, and their likes can produce these days are shows about nothing.
For better or worse, Americans want something—anything—else. Many dislike Donald Trump, and so will not vote for him no matter what. But many more, when in the privacy of the voting booth, will do what voters so often do and vote for the party that looks—and feels—more like them, and that can get them high on believing in an America that looks like the one they know and love—an imperfect but good nation ever slouching toward a brighter tomorrow. These last two nights, the RNC has made a very convincing case why that party may very well be the party of Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump.
Yep, I am HOOKED on that feeling and high on believing!! Are you?
