The political left has an urgent and rising problem with authoritarianism. An alarmingly high percentage of self-identified progressives are punitive, bullying, and intolerant of disagreement— and the problem is getting worse. As social psychologist Luke Conway demonstrates, it’ s not just right-wing extremists who long for an authority figure to crush their enemies, silence opponents, and restore order; it’ s also those who preach “ be kind” and celebrate their “ inclusivity.” A persistent proportion of left-wingers demonstrate authoritarian tendencies, and they’ re becoming more emboldened as they gain cultural and political power. On a range of scientific and social issues, they are increasingly advocating censorship over free debate, disregarding the rule of law, and dehumanizing their opponents. These tendencies are part of an accelerating “ threat circle” of mutual hatred and fear between left and right that could tear apart our basic democratic norms. Concluding with an eloquent call for firm but rational resistance to this rising tide of liberal bullying, Conway presents a path forward that no one concerned about our hyper-partisan political arena can afford to ignore.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/trumped
For months, the media have issued apocalyptic warnings about a second Donald Trump presidency. Arcane diagrams of nefarious political connections and multipage spreads of damning quotes have laid out how Trump will tear down democratic norms. He will unleash the National Guard on Democratic voters. He will wreak vengeance on his enemies. He will usher in fascism. He will have Liz Cheney shot. He will be a dictator on Day One. He will use the military to round up millions of migrants. He will seek a national abortion ban. He will outlaw in vitro fertilization. He will suppress free speech.
And now that Trump has been elected again, in a historic political comeback, the press continues to lay down a marker against which to measure its own ideological blinders. On Wednesday, November 6, the New York Times issued the same parade of horribles that it has been hawking since Trump declared his 2024 candidacy: Trump will “use military force against his political opponents . . . crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad.” He will “turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters” and rule as a “dictator”—if only on Day One.
According to a Times headline, America has just hired a “strongman.” Its news reporting explains: “America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.”
Historian Ruth Ben-Chait tells the paper that Trump has prepared for authoritarian government by teaching the public to “see American democracy as a failed experiment.” His victory means the triumph of a style of government that uses “violence as a means of solving political problems.”
A national political correspondent for the Washington Post, Ashley Parker, said on MSNBC that Trump will “take revenge on his enemies” this time around.
None of these things will happen. Trump will not usher in authoritarian government or fascism. He will not shred the rule of law. His administration will not ask Internet platforms to censor information and opinion that opposes administration policies, as did the Biden administration. The press predictions are all on the record and can be consulted for accuracy from this moment onward.
https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/08/another-big-nov-5-loser-lefts-lawfare-campaign-against-trump-maga/
Of all the excesses of the four-year Trump interregnum that was the Biden-Harris administration, none was worse than the left’s use of our legal system to exact political retribution and “send a message” to those who dared oppose progressive extremism. It had all the markings of totalitarian behavior, but now it’s going down in flames.
The idea of America as a nation ruled by laws, not by the biases and whims of political powers, has been central to our country’s identity and stability since its very founding. It’s what makes our country unique in the world.
But after Biden’s 2020 election win, Democrats repeatedly used spurious and at times fraudulent readings of our laws to get revenge on Donald Trump and those who had the temerity to publicly support him.
They first went after those who demonstrated at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Many of them still imprisoned and suffering under false charges of “insurrection.” More than 1,530 were charged with crimes and about 615 have served, or are still serving, lengthy prison terms, basically for staging a rowdy protest in front of Congress over the 2020 presidential election.
Meanwhile, those who rioted during the long, hot summer of 2020, leading to at least 28 deaths and more than $2 billion in property and other damage, went virtually uncharged for their violent crimes. Why? It was for a cause, the death of drug addict George Floyd at the hands of the police. It turned out, his death was not caused by the police. To the left, it didn’t matter. It still doesn’t.
They then went after Trump’s political allies and advisers, such as Steve Bannon. He was released from prison at the end of October after serving four months for “contempt of Congress” charges for refusing to comply with a subpoena to testify.
Looking for bigger game, emboldened progressive prosecutors went after Trump, hitting him with 116 felony charges in four separate cases brought by federal prosecutors under Attorney General Merrick Garland and lefty blue-state legal authorities.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-11-6-election-aftermath-where-do-the-democrats-go-from-here
Donald Trump has now decisively won the presidency. I have a big collection of ideas for him on things to do once he takes office. So far, I’ve been holding off on writing about those ideas, not wanting to get ahead of myself only to then have him lose the election. Now, the gates can open.
But for today, I have another topic to consider: the relatively tiny shift in party control of seats in the House of Representatives. Indeed, the shift is so small that it is not even completely clear at this writing that the Republicans will control the House. (Current betting odds are around 91% that Republicans will retain control.). Why didn’t Trump have any meaningful coattails in the House? The answer to that question can give some insights into how the respective parties’ odds might change the next time out.
Before the election, Republicans were running ahead by a small but consistent margin in the generic ballot for the House. (The so-called “generic ballot” records the response to the question, “If the election for the House were held today, would you vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate in your district?”). In other recent elections, even a slight advantage in the generic ballot has been sufficient to give the Republicans a meaningful House majority. (The reason for this phenomenon is that there is a “natural” gerrymander resulting from the greater concentration of Democrats in heavily one-party districts, mainly in big cities.). So the question is, why were the Republicans unable to capitalize on their generic ballot advantage?
https://www.jns.org/netanyahu-sends-planes-to-amsterdam-to-rescue-jews-from-pogrom/
The Israeli National Security Council told Israelis to remain in their hotel rooms, avoid wearing anything with Jewish or Israeli symbols and to return home early.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated at about 4:30 a.m. local time that he was dispatching two rescue planes to Amsterdam following a “very violent incident against Israeli citizens.”
“The harsh pictures of the assault on our citizens in Amsterdam will not be overlooked,” Netanyahu’s office stated. “Prime Minister Netanyahu views the horrifying incident with utmost gravity and demands that the Dutch government and security forces take vigorous and swift action against the rioters, and ensure the safety of our citizens.”
The Israeli National Security Council stated in Hebrew that Israelis in Amsterdam should remain in their hotel rooms and avoid the street, refrain from wearing visible Jewish or Israeli symbols and notify Dutch police and the Israeli mission about any threat or attack. The council also advised Israelis to return to home, with more planes expected.
Earlier in the day, Maccabi Tel Aviv lost 5-0 to Ajax Amsterdam in a Europa League soccer game. Various reports indicate that Israeli fans were attacked—with some reports of injuries—after leaving the game. Some reports indicated that up to dozens of people were arrested. (JNS sought comment from the Amsterdam police.)
Geert Wilders, who leads the largest political party in the Netherlands, wrote that it “looks like a Jew hunt in the streets of Amsterdam.”
“Arrest and deport the multicultural scum that attacked Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in our streets,” Wilders wrote. “Ashamed that this can happen in The Netherlands. Totally unacceptable.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/06/the-crumbling-of-the-democratic-empire/
Ever since the rise of Barack Obama, Democrats have seen themselves as destined to rule. With his presidential victory in 2008, they created a seemingly unbridgeable political empire. With the support of big cities, young progressives, universities, the media and an ever-expanding government workforce, the party – led by what Roger Kimball calls ‘the Syndicate’ – imagined it could stay in power indefinitely.
Given their advantages and the clear vulnerabilities of their only serious opponent, Donald Trump, Democrats should have expected an easy time in this presidential election. Instead, Trump won a convincing victory last night, with Republicans also winning control of the Senate and possibly the House of Representatives. Worse yet, from the progressive point of view, Kamala Harris was forced during the campaign to bow to Trumpian views on trade and immigration, a clear sign of her political weakness.
How did this happen? Much of it has to do with the imperiousness of the Democrats. The party elite and their financial backers live in a rarefied world where only their values and interests seem to matter. As Jacob Siegel has shown, they and their analogues in Europe are so convinced of their rectitude that they have grand plans to control the media and democracy for the long-run, through the control of election rules, mainstream media and, most critically, big social-media platforms.
These elites, like the financiers of the City of London or the landowning aristocracy during the height of the British Empire, have good reasons to want to keep the current imperial order. They did well financially under the rule of their frontman, Joe Biden, even if most Americans have not gained much since 2020. As even Ezra Klein, one of the few perceptive pundits in progressive media, has noted, these elites rule over the party with a ruthless sense of their dominion, while ‘ignoring the sentiments of legions of Democratic voters’. Only when they had no choice, did they whack Biden, despite his obvious frailty and plummeting popularity. They then gave the rank and file no role in the selection of the presidential candidate.
To these Democratic imperialists, like their equally deluded British antecedents, politics need only serve the most deserving – that is, themselves. They are adept at virtue-signalling about left-sounding causes, but are loyal to their class interests in all things. They are ultra-progressive on social and cultural issues, but are not keen on redistributing income or wealth, and are hostile to any constraints on their market power.
Of course, some in the oligarchy, notably Elon Musk, backed Trump in this election. But the bulk of the big money bankrolled Harris. When Musk began supporting Trump, the Atlantic – owned by Harris’s good buddy, Laurene Jobs – accused the X owner of ‘bend[ing] the knee’ to ‘strongman politics’. I guess when oligarchs like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, George Soros or Bill Gates get the cheque book out for Harris, they are acting for purely selfless, public-spirited reasons.
In its glory days, the British Empire had the best weapons and the most cash. But, as occurred in the American Revolution, it did not always know how to best use them. Similarly, despite the Democrats having near total control over the media, and raising three times as much money as the Trump campaign, their candidate failed to make much of an impression on what we used to call Middle America. Instead, Harris cultivated the support of the elite’s court jesters, as evidenced by her final Pennsylvania event with Lady Gaga, Oprah and Ricky Martin taking the stage. She would have been better off sharing the platform with, say, state governor Josh Shapiro or senator John Fetterman, Democratic politicians who can reach working-class voters.
Although they may see themselves as the natural leaders of the nation, the imperial elites have proven amazingly inept politically. Harris may be a favourite of the oligarchs, but she is also one of the most useless politicians ever to run for president.
Harris was never going to be capable of fending off Trump and dispatching him into oblivion as he deserves. This is largely because those who pull the strings in the Democratic Party have no idea whatsoever how to counter his appeal, without assaulting his supporters with charges of racism, misogyny and fascism. Unable to focus on the key issue of our time – the growing gap between the uber-elite and everyone else – they have tried to put all their eggs in the culture-war basket. They essentially whistled kumbaya as Trump took over as the working-class tribune.
Harris’s defeat last night is not a temporary setback but the harbinger of an ongoing imperial crisis. Simply put, the empire, dominated by the rich and those feeding off government largesse, whose ranks have burgeoned under Biden, simply has no comprehension of the economic fears, or concerns over crime and the border, that are felt in large parts of the country. The fact that Harris hails from California, and rose up the political ranks in San Francisco, a city of massive class divides that has fallen into dystopian ruin, did not help.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/biden-harris-doj-is-poised-to-end-lawfare-pursuit-of-trump/
Hopefully, the feds’ example will influence the progressive Democratic state prosecutors to stand down.
I confess to being pleasantly surprised by reports this afternoon that Biden-Harris Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith will end DOJ’s two cases against President-elect Donald Trump: the so-called January 6 (J6) case in Washington, D.C., and the Mar-a-Lago documents case in Florida (currently on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit).
Pleasantly surprised . . . but not shocked.
As I tried to explain in a column we posted a short while ago, the expungement of the cases — whether by pardon or dismissal by the Justice Department — is deeply in the interests of President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
Biden, of course, will soon be pardoning his son, Hunter, pre-election avowals to the contrary notwithstanding. In a vacuum, extinguishing the felony gun and tax convictions would be seen as corrupt self-dealing. But once the Trump cases are dismissed, the Hunter pardon will be seen as part of a clemency package that moves the country away from the era of lawfare — the Biden-Harris administration’s exploitation of the government’s law-enforcement apparatus as a weapon against their chief political adversary.
Democrats, moreover, must comprehend that the lawfare campaign against Trump was deeply unpopular outside Trump-obsessed circles. It was regarded as un-American by much of the country. Further, it lulled Democrats into a false sense of security that made them think they could win a presidential campaign based on sheer anti-Trump animus and with a vapid candidate — Vice President Kamala Harris — who tried to run on vibes rather than substance and policy (having turned away from the woke-progressive ideas she held until about five minutes before the nomination was handed to her).
In addition, Biden would not be giving up much by dismissing the federal Trump cases. If it were pursued, it would take years to get the J6 case to trial. The same goes for the Mar-a-Lago case, assuming DOJ wins its appeal of Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal of the indictment (on finding that Smith’s special-counsel appointment violated the Constitution’s appointments clause), which is no sure thing.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-elections-utter-losers-and-winners/
Deservedly Losers
The polls—with the exception once again of AltasIntel, Trafalgar, and Rasmussen—were off, and way off in the Senate races.
The pollsters’ reputation is again in full reverse and now back to their nadir of 2020 and 2016. Many shamelessly warped their data in the last two weeks to gin up Harris momentum, fund-raising, and voter turnout.
And to no avail.
There were plenty of indications long ago in key states of a Trump thunderstorm: defections of minorities, anger among both the Jewish and Muslim voters, alienated union members, massive increases in Republican registrations and non-Election-Day balloting. And all were deliberately ignored by the corrupt media and pollsters.
Democrats know—but will do nothing about the fact—they have become the party of the upscale professionals and rich, and the subsidized poor. They have alienated the entire middle class—white, black, Hispanic—and ceding it to the new Republican populist-nationalist party.
Open borders, hyperinflation, abortion deification, the transgendered mania, the crime wave, and the green obsessions all did their bit to repel voters. The “racist” Trump won more minority support than any Dole, McCain, or Romney figure of the past.
What now will the buffoonish Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, and Jack Smith do with their pseudo-indictments and convictions?
Try to nullify an American election by putting the president-elect in jail, as the projectionist and now paranoid Left screams that a soon to be President Trump might lawfare them in the manner they did him?
https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/07/harris-was-always-doomed/
The presidential race was not unpredictable, as the now once again discredited polls swore to us.
Instead, the great Trump comeback victory was clear by the last weeks of the campaign.
The Republicans had made massive gains in voter registrations since 2020, when Trump had lost the Electoral College by only a few thousand strategically placed votes.
Republicans began to master the transition to non-Election Day balloting—first engineered by the left in 2020 under the pretext of COVID.
They not only vastly exceeded their early/mail-in voting totals of 2020, but by Election Day, they often outpaced Democrats.
For months, it was widely reported, albeit grudgingly, that there were large defections in Hispanic and African American voters from Harris.
The betting odds over the last three weeks usually favored Trump.
Harris simply could not run on anything she had so emphatically promoted in the past—given these left-wing, unpopular, and failed policies had no majority support.
So, the chameleon Harris renounced her prior 30 years of earlier radical advocacies that, along with her race and gender, had forced Joe Biden in 2020 to select her as vice president.
There was no way Harris could still support banning fracking, defunding police, opposing border security and the wall, or calling for mass amnesties and an end to the border patrol.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/the_greatest_comeback_of_all_time.html
The “experts” said it couldn’t be done. They called him a “loser” and an “illegitimate” president whose time in office should be stricken from the pages of history. Political pundits said his refusal to accept the mail-in-ballot-fraud-tainted 2020 election results made him an “insurrectionist” and a “dangerous threat to democracy.” Democrat prosecutors and judges threw his supporters in jail. Democrat operatives in the FBI and DOJ insinuated that he is a “Russian spy” and “domestic enemy” who should be convicted of treason. The most hoity-toity “reporters” from the fanciest newspapers in the land said that Americans would never elect a criminal defendant facing the possibility of life in prison. All of the “very best people” from the “most respected institutions” told us that Donald Trump’s political comeback was impossible.
They…were…wrong.
No president has won a second term in office after suffering a re-election loss in 130 years. When Grover Cleveland last pulled off this neat trick, he, too, returned to the White House after first losing it to gross electoral fraud. Americans do not like rigged elections, but they absolutely despise elections that are so rigged that the robbery is impossible to ignore.
In 2020, President Trump won almost every traditional bellwether county in the country by double-digits and increased his 2016 totals by over ten million votes. He won a record share of the vote from black and Hispanic Americans, blue-collar workers, and other Democrat-leaning voting blocs. Despite all of this evidence that the American people supported Trump’s handling of the economy, illegal immigration, violent crime, and foreign wars, professional political pundits immediately painted Joe Biden’s razor-thin “victory” (in which the dementia-addled nursing home patient magically “won” extra mail-in ballots in Democrat-controlled counties in battleground states days after the election) as a national rejection of Donald Trump.
They…were…wrong.
