RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/18/the-democrats-are-now-the-party-of-the-rich/

In the US presidential election, the Democrats revealed their true colours. Candidate Kamala Harris spent her campaign espousing wispy platitudes and chasing celebrity endorsements, while President Joe Biden smeared half the electorate as ‘garbage’. The Democratic Party’s transformation from the party of the people to the party of the woke elites seemed all but complete, and it delivered a humiliating electoral defeat to the populist Donald Trump.

John R MacArthur joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the Democrats’ self-immolation. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Were you surprised at Donald Trump’s victory?

John R MacArthur: I wasn’t surprised that he won, but I was surprised he won the popular vote. I thought it would be closer. It just shows how weak the Democratic Party now is in so many respects. Hillary Clinton, who was a terrible candidate with a lot of baggage, still won the popular vote against Trump in 2016. For Harris to lose the popular vote speaks to a degradation beyond anything even I had thought possible.

The reason the Democrats lost was articulated by critics like Bernie Sanders, who wrote recently that the Democrats have become the party of the rich, not the working class. He says they have to make up their minds whose side they’re on.

The Democrats made up their minds a long time ago. They made up their minds in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton signed free-trade deals such as NAFTA and normalised trade relations with China. These decisions sent millions of manufacturing jobs from the US to countries like Mexico and China.

This election demonstrated the complete inversion of American politics. Harris outraised Trump three-to-one, and it didn’t come in small contributions. More than half of the people with a family income under $100,000 a year voted for Trump. Harris won a majority of the people with a family income above $100,000. There’s been a total inversion of what we used to think of as the New Deal coalition.

O’Neill: Would you say that Trump won this or that the Democrats lost it?

MacArthur: Trump’s popular vote total is almost exactly the same as it was four years ago. It’s not a MAGA landslide. Harris received 11million fewer votes than Biden in 2020. Where did those 11million voters go? Some went to Trump, but most of them presumably just didn’t vote.

We have to examine why they didn’t vote Democrat. One of the things that comes to mind is inflation, which the Democrats didn’t address, other than keeping interest rates high. One of Biden’s first acts was to expand the child tax credit, which literally cut the child poverty rate nearly in half. But they didn’t do anything else to help the poor cope with higher food prices. So the Democrats hadn’t taken care of the poor. They didn’t give them a reason to vote Democrat.

There are also a lot of working-class people who are still angry about NAFTA. I know lots of union members who say that it was nice of Biden to join the picket line, but it was too late. They will never vote for the Democratic Party again.

Then the party imposed Harris on the electorate. There was no primary and there had been no vetting. The Democratic Party told people they should be happy because she’s black and she’s a woman. Everybody resented that. Black people resented it. White people resented it. Deep down, nobody wants to vote for someone because of what colour or sex they are.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/you-dont-have-to-go-away-mad-bob-casey-just-go-away/

The Pennsylvania supreme court has spoken — spoken again, spoken with exasperation, spoken for the third time during the election cycle — and has finally lowered the boom on Senator Bob Casey Jr.’s futile attempts to fight his loss to Dave McCormick in the 2024 Pennsylvania Senate election.

As most here are already well aware, Casey lost narrowly to McCormick on November 5, but rather than concede the race, he instead hired Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias to try to squeeze a victory out of electorally impossible math. Elias’s proposed workaround? Cheat! Yes, just violate the law and dare someone to stop them. Let’s hope that, after today, they have finally been stopped.

McCormick currently leads Casey by around 17,000 votes, with nearly all valid ballots counted. All that remains to be counted are invalid ballots — those rejected for facial invalidity in one way or another, most often for missing signatures or missing date marks. Elias’s strategy has been to enjoin the Democratic commissioners of the Boards of Elections in Centre, Montgomery, Bucks, and Philadelphia Counties (all heavily Democratic strongholds except for Bucks, which was fought to a draw this year) to continue counting undated late-arriving mail ballots.

The problem is that Pennsylvania law and case law specifically stipulate that such ballots are invalid. The matter had already been litigated before the state supreme court twice before Election Day — and both times the court insisted that no, the law meant exactly what it said: Undated absentee or mail ballots are presumptively invalid.

https://www.racket.news/p/how-americas-accurate-election-polls

John McIntyre couldn’t believe it. The publisher of the Real Clear Polling National Average, America’s first presidential poll aggregator, woke on October 31st to see his product denounced in the New York Times. Launched in 2002 and long a mainstay of campaign writers and news consumers alike, the RCP average, he learned, was part of a “torrent” of partisan rubbish being “weaponized” to “deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm” and “undermine faith in the entire system.”

“They actually wrote that our problem was we didn’t weight results,” says an incredulous McIntyre. “That we didn’t put a thumb on the scale.”

The New York Times denounced a poll aggregator’s lack of subjectivity.

The Times ended its screed against RCP’s “scarlet-dominated” electoral map projection by quoting John Anzalone, Joe Biden’s former chief pollster, who said: “There’s a ton of garbage polls out there.” But being called “garbage” in America’s paper of record was nothing compared to what happened to RCP at Wikipedia.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/17/elections-have-consequences-how-trumps-second-term-challenges-the-political-status-quo/

“Elections,” Barack Obama told a group of cowering Republican lawmakers early in 2009, “have consequences.” He then drove the point home by reminding them, “I won.”

In truth, Democrats tend to understand this law of the political universe more clearly than do Republicans.

The usual rule is this: when Democrats win elections, they wield power. When Republicans win elections, they seek, or at least agree to, compromise.

In Suicide of the West, the political philosopher James Burnham quotes the nineteenth-century French writer Louis Veuillot, who summed up the essence of this political dialectic in one elegant sentence. Quand je suis le plus faible, je vous demande la liberté parce que tel est votre principe; mais quand je suis le plus fort, je vous l’ôte, parce que tel est le mien. “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.”

For examples of the latter, I invite you to ponder the behavior of Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, especially the behavior of the despicable Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, these last three and a half years.

Had the Democrats won the 2024 election, we would have seen many more examples of this principle in action. Assuming the Dems had kept the Senate, we would have seen them dispense with the filibuster, thus turning that chamber into what outgoing West Virginian Senator Joe Manchin called “the House on steroids.” They would have packed the Supreme Court, adding a few new “progressive” members to the bench to counter the power of Justices like Clarence Thomas. They likely would have imposed term- or age-limits on the Justices as well.

Elsewhere, I endeavored to provide a brief inventory of the “consequences” of a Harris victory. Donald Trump would have been bankrupted and jailed. It is likely that the same thing would have happened to Elon Musk. Just as John Kerry promised, the First Amendment would have been gutted if not discarded altogether in order to further the censorship and surveillance regime of the woke, progressive elite. A virtual ban on fracking and the mining of coal would have been enacted, further depressing America’s prosperity. The trans insanity of the last decade would have been extended, destroying women’s sports and disfiguring, mentally as well as physically, many thousands of confused teenagers.

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/11/tulsi-gabbard-director-of-national-intelligence?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tulsi-gabbard-director-of-national-intelligence

Tulsi Gabbard has just been appointed as the Director of National Intelligence. She has criticized the Biden administration for not being sufficiently supportive of Israel since October 7, 2023. She has spoken out about Islamic terrorism. She is a Hindu — she was sworn in as a congresswoman on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita — and that may mean she is aware of what the centuries of Muslim rule meant for the Hindus of India.

She was once a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, and even ran for president in 2020 in the Democratic primary. But since then she has had a road-to-Damascus conversion, and become a Republican. More on Tulsi Gabbard can be found here: “Trump selects Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence,” by Marc Rod, Jewish Insider, November 13, 2024:

…Gabbard, a military veteran, has been critical of the Biden administration for being insufficiently supportive of Israel since Oct. 7. She has been vocal against Islamic terrorism and has expressed strong support for the Jewish state, including at a speech at a Christians United for Israel conference during her time in Washington.

To see how far she has come, consider that in the past she voted against a House resolution condemning the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution opposing Israeli settlements. In 2019 she refused to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for antisemitic comments about U.S. support for Israel and voted for a resolution sponsored by Omar that aimed to defend the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. But Gabbard has since then clearly expressed her opposition to the BDS movement and voted for anti-BDS legislation. And in 2020, she even supported Bernie Sanders, a severe critic of Israel, to be President. But that was a world away from Tulsi Gabbard today; the former Democrat has been appearing at rallies for Donald Trump.

By 2022, she had moved rightward. In October 2024 she stood by Donald Trump at a rally and announced that she was joining the Republican Party. She explained that she found she agreed with the Republicans on the most important issues, including immigration. She described the Democratic Party as “unrecognizable” from what it had been twenty years before , and she attacked the “elitist cabal of warmongers” and “woke” ideologue” in the party.

She has said that anti-Israel college protesters are “antisemitic” and have become “puppets” of a “radical Islamist organization.” On October 7, 2024 she posted on Instagram that “Hamas’s horrific attack against Israel one year ago today that took the lives of approximately 1,200 Israelis at a music concert and in their homes, is a stark reminder of the ongoing short and long term threat of Islamist terrorism that continues to spread around the world today. Their goal is to establish a global Islamist caliphate, where all must live under their sharia law. Many leaders in the west have promised to defeat this threat and failed, because they refuse to acknowledge that it must be defeated ideologically and militarily.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/team-of-successors

Donald Trump has announced his first high-level appointments, including some surprising choices. Pete Hegseth, best known for his Fox News appearances, was nominated as Secretary of Defense. Matt Gaetz, who waged an intraparty feud against fellow Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, has been put forward as Attorney General. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat and acerbic critic of the intelligence community, has been named Director of National Intelligence. These nominees, among others Trump has offered, have generated tremendous consternation, in some cases running across party lines. Trump’s nominees have been called unqualified, partisan, and even threats to national security. But a significant and unnoticed thread unites the team that Trump is assembling around himself—their age, or rather, their youth.

Hegseth is 44. Matt Gaetz is 42. Tulsi Gabbard is 43. Vice President-elect J. D. Vance is 40, as is Trump’s proposed U.N. Ambassador Elise Stefanik. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency, is 44. Vivek Ramaswamy, who will work with Elon Musk in non-official, nongovernmental effort nevertheless named the Department of Governmental Efficiency, is 39. Other major appointees are slightly older: proposed Homeland Security nominee Kristi Noem is 52, and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio is 53, as is Musk. But it’s clear that Trump’s Cabinet-level staff skews young. In this respect it marks a departure from the Cabinet that Trump picked in 2016, when he chose an older, more conventionally qualified team. The average age of his picks for Defense, State, and Justice eight years ago was 67; the average age for those same roles today is 46.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/let_me_count_the_ways.html

On November 5, 2024, a gigantic red wave engulfed America, elevating everything politically red to great heights and largely obliterating everything politically blue in its path.
It’s been only a week since the presidential election, but let’s ask the following questions anyway:

WHAT DID RED GAIN?

The White House — Oval Office.
The U.S. Senate.
The U.S. House of Representatives.
The Electoral College.
The popular vote.
All seven swing states.
State governor majority.
State Legislature majority.
The stock market hit record highs.

And Pamela Geller reports:

Trump and Elon Musk told Zelenskyy that the war is over, to prepare for negotiations, no additional funds or weapons will be sent to Ukraine.

Hamas called for an immediate end to the war.
Trump Gave Hamas until Inauguration Day to return the hostages.
The Houthis surrendered just hours after Trump won the Presidency.
The EU said it will buy its oil from America not Russia.

Qatar told all Hamas officials in the country to leave immediately.
Iran’s currency crashed.

Additionally:

The Fed cut interest rates a quarter of a point after Trump’s election victory. 

China’s President Xi Jinping congratulated Donald Trump on his U.S. presidential win and urged both nations to find the “right way to get along,” as looming U.S. tariffs threatened to return, as they did years ago.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/15/the-coming-era-of-maga-dominance/

Only Donald Trump could have pulled off the kind of victory we witnessed just over one week ago. The victory achieved by, and for, the man himself is already the greatest political comeback in American history.

But it is entirely possible that his win now could set up an equally unprecedented comeback, but not for any one particular individual. If the Republican Party plays its cards right this time, it could build off of the massive coalition that President Trump has built for himself and ride this wave of momentum to a new era of dominance in American politics.

The Old Map and the New Map

Just as importantly as 2016, the 2024 election perfectly displays the best path forward for the new Republican Party when it comes to establishing and maintaining an electoral majority every four years.

Prior to the entrance of Donald Trump onto the political stage, the GOP’s best hope for victory was to win virtually all of the states that were once considered “swing states” just two decades ago. This is best represented by the 2004 map when George W. Bush narrowly defeated John Kerry.

Bush managed to win the then-swing states of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida. The only swing state Bush lost that year was New Hampshire, even though he had won it four years prior against Al Gore. Kerry won the three Rust Belt states that have become much more important in recent years.

After winning eight of the nine swing states, Bush wound up with a mere 286 electoral votes to Kerry’s 251.

By contrast, even though President Trump lost five of the nine swing states from the 2004 map, his victories in the three Rust Belt states were enough to net him a total of 306 electoral votes, substantially higher than Bush’s best performance. He then beat his own record with his historic comeback victory eight years later, with 312 electoral votes and picking up one more of Bush’s swing states. By trading out the smaller states of New Mexico, Colorado, and New Hampshire for the more heavily populated Rust Belt, President Trump made Republican victories at the national level much easier than they were under Bush.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/10/after-the-election-the-rage-against-white-women/

How quickly things change. At the start of this week, women voters were being feted as the voice of reason in America’s ‘gender-gap election’. To the Democratic elites, it was inconceivable that women would back Trump over a ‘joyful’ woman of colour. They assumed all they needed to do was remind women that in the privacy of the voting booth they alone choose who to endorse and the votes for Kamala Harris would come flooding in. It’s now clear that plenty of women took this advice to heart. But they voted for Trump, not Harris. As I wrote on spiked before the election, the idea that women would win it for Kamala was always likely to be ‘more hype than reality’.

With most votes now counted, we know this week’s result was not even close. At time of writing, Trump has almost five million more votes than Harris and has convincingly won both the popular vote and the Electoral College. This feat would be impossible without the votes of a huge number of women. Exit polls suggest the gender gap did exist but – at around 10 per cent – was far lower than Team Harris had expected. Women split 53 per cent for Harris, 45 per cent for Trump. This means that a smaller proportion of women voted for Harris this election than voted for either Clinton in 2016 or Biden in 2020. Younger women were more likely to have voted for Trump this time around than they did in 2020 and Hispanic women swung massively towards Trump. But there’s another group that backed Trump decisively: white women. More white women voted for Trump than Harris.

Now looking to apportion blame for Harris’s defeat, Democrats have these white women in the firing line. The very same women they courted so assiduously just days ago are now being chastised and insulted. The overarching sense is one of disappointment. Bloomberg contemplates with an almost audible sigh the ‘irony of women voting for abortion rights’, in many state referendums held on the same day as the national election, while also voting for Trump. ‘For millions, it didn’t matter that he was the man who bragged about overturning Roe vs Wade’, its columnist concludes. ‘White women doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats – again’, notes the New Republic. The LA Times has the same take: ‘Democrats keep expecting white women to save them, and they keep getting burned.’ In other words: typical white women, always letting the side down. The ‘free to vote for who you like’ message did not age well.

The ‘white women who voted for Trump’ phenomenon has, inevitably, led to the rehabilitation of ‘Karen’ – the slur reserved for middle-class soccer moms.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/11/the-fault-dear-democrats-is-in-yourselves/

“Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

“They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” – Often attributed to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand

The Democratic election postmortem immediately descended into public blame-gaming—as expected. When Joe Biden was forced off the ticket in late July, the conspirators issued a party line that he was to be praised as a veritable George Washington—in the spirit of Washington’s farewell address of 1796 about why it was a good thing for the first president not to run for a third term.

So, we were lied to that Joe, the sitting President of the United States, was not forced out by Nancy Pelosi, the Obamas, George Clooney and the celebs, and the billionaire class. We instead were lectured that Biden, magnanimously as the neo-father of our country, selflessly bowed out to ensure Kamala Harris’s elevation as the nominee and, with it, a sure Democratic victory.

But now? After the Democratic train wreck, half the party is suddenly damning George Washington Joe for sticking around too long, even though party grandees cooked up the scheme in the first place of nominating the cognitively challenged Biden in 2020 to shut out his radical (and supposedly unelectable) primary rivals.

Now that his successor Harris has bombed, in the leftist mind, Joe has gone from a Washingtonian Olympian to a veritable selfish Richard Nixon who clung to office far too long and supposedly ensured his party’s defeat.

Yet still, others now blame incumbent Vice President Kamala herself. The once “joyful” candidate, after the coup to remove Biden, was once praised to the skies as a “turn the page”/”move forward”/“change” candidate—only then to be damned as an insipid loser.

So, one postelection narrative was that Harris—we were told to recall—was always known as inept and thus originally picked as Joe Biden’s Spiro Agnew insurance policy, who would prevent his indictment, impeachment, or medical removal.

But never mind blaming either Biden or Harris or both. The left cannot fault either a lack of funds; they raised a billion dollars more than Trump. Leftists also cannot complain about 95 percent favorable media coverage, supposedly worth billions of dollars in free advertising.

They cannot regret that they did not do everything imaginable to destroy the Trump monster—given they had impeached him twice and tried him as a private citizen. They cooked up the Russian collusion and laptop disinformation hoaxes, raided his home with a SWAT team, and unleashed five criminal and civil suits designed to bankrupt, demonize, and jail him. They tried to remove him from at least 16 state ballots and daily smeared him as a fascist, dictator, and Hitler—even as two would-be assassins tried to shoot him.