RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/11/16/who-will-be-the-party-of-the-parents-in-2022-n1533288

It’s no secret that the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and electoral contests elsewhere came down to the “parent vote” — a bloc that Democrats felt they’ve controlled for decades. The Dems are the “party of education” after all, and the tens of thousands of politically active teachers never let us forget it.

But something happened on Nov. 2 that altered the ground rules and helped the Republicans dominate. And Democrats only have themselves to blame.

The party of lockdowns and school closings didn’t count on parents getting an eyeful of what public schools had been putting into the heads of their children during the pandemic. And parents of all races, all creeds were, in many cases, flabbergasted.

And now that schools are reopening — mostly — parents are being instructed to once again, sit on the sidelines and let the “experts” get back to propagandizing their children.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

Meanwhile, Democrats see the results of elections in Virginia and New Jersey as a fluke and that once parents come to their senses, they will reject the Republicans because of all the “free” goodies that Joe Biden is going to give them.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2021/11/15/patrick-leahy-will-not-run-for-the-senate-again-n1533034

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has announced that he will not run for a ninth term in the Senate in 2022.Leahy is the longest-serving sitting senator and has the fourth-longest senatorial tenure of all time. He’s also the only Democrat ever to represent Vermont in the Senate (don’t forget that Bernie Sanders is technically an independent).

In his announcement, Leahy touted his accomplishments: pressing for standards for organic food and banning land mines. He also chaired various committees, including the Appropriations Committee he currently oversees.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/my_ringside_seat_on_a_crooked_new_jersey_election.html

Watching the shenanigans in the still contested New Jersey gubernatorial election, I have to wonder whether there has ever been a truly honest election in state history. From my own experience, I would say probably not and, as I also learned, there are a thousand ways to cheat.

In 1982, through an odd sequence of events, I found myself with a ringside seat on a routinely crooked Newark mayoral election. I had been offered a job as “associate director” of the 1,000-employee Newark Housing and Redevelopment Authority. This being a recession year, and I needing to finish my Ph.D. dissertation, I took it.  This was not a career move.

I had two qualifications that endeared me to the Philippine-born woman who ran the show: I lived in Newark public housing growing up, and I aced her borderline illegal IQ test. An elitist whose role model was the then little-known Imelda Marcos, my “Imelda” took me under her wing.

I put “associate director” in quotes because I was actually the shadow associate director. Imelda hired me to intimidate the real associate director, a political enemy that Imelda and her boss – Judge Milton Buck, a Black politico — could not fire. This was the only time in my life I kept a journal. My notes from day two on the job:

Met late in the day with Imelda. Very candid about self. Style “combative,” learned in trenches. Very smart. Needs to talk about it. Met Judge. Discussed role. Purposely keeping me in dark to confuse opposition, keep them on their toes.

Welcome to Newark, the gateway to Third World living. In a way, my timing was excellent. I arrived in January just in time to witness the mayoral campaign. Ignoring all election laws, Imelda and the Judge threw the whole weight of the Housing Authority behind the incumbent mayor, Ken Gibson, a political ally of the Judge.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/hear-winsome-sears-virginia-lieutentant-governor/

Of all the improbable outcomes in this week’s elections, a couple struck me as worthy of a Hollywood movie script. Ed Durr, the truck driver who toppled the New Jersey State Senate president after spending just $153 was one.

But an even more inspirational, and almost as implausible, script could be fashioned from the story of Winsome Earle Sears, a 57-year-old Virginia mother of three, who by being elected Virginia’s lieutenant governor became the first female minority and naturalized citizen ever elected statewide. CNN and MSNBC ignored her memorable Election Night victory statement, but Fox didn’t:

Her “Winsome vs Goliath” story will no doubt now make her a fixture on the lecture circuit. Devoutly religious, an aimless Sears was born in Jamaica and grew up in the Bronx. When she was 18 her Jamaican grandmother died and she took it as a sign she had to make something of herself. She joined the Marines, became an electrician and diesel mechanic, and learned that “you don’t get respect there unless you dig your own ditch.”

After three years she left with many commendations and then married a Marine first lieutenant, moving back with him to his home town of Norfolk, Virginia. She began raising three children. After a job in banking, she had another sign that she should help others, and she became director of the Hope Center, a Salvation Army homeless shelter for mothers and their children. After two years, she left to become a graduate student at Regent University. Then in 2001, Republicans had no candidate to run in a redrawn 58 percent black House district in Norfolk that was represented by Delegate William P. Robison, an incumbent who had served 20 years in office.

Robinson, a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, was flush with cash from special interests. Two months before the election, his campaign had $34,000 in the bank; she had $77. Then Robinson, a Harvard-educated criminal-defense lawyer, was found in contempt of court for missing a criminal hearing and sentenced to five days in jail. He served one day and was freed pending appeal. He also faced contempt-of-court hearings in at least two other cases.

Sears walked much of her district to meet voters, by all accounts more than living up to her first name.

But her views quickly came under attack. She says she lost the endorsement of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot when she told them she was “a Christian first and a Republican second.” Then the campaign turned ugly, with threats and intimidation. “Because I was a Republican, I was told I wasn’t black enough,” says the richly dark-skinned Sears. Phone calls featuring the sound of military boots would be made to her home late at night. She says that Michael F. Muhammad, head of the New Black Panthers Party, cursed and threatened her.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/watch-winsome-searss-victory-speech/

As Alexandra DeSanctis pointed out this morning, progressives are still sticking to the racism narrative to explain their loss in Virginia last night. She notes that along with Glenn Youngkin, Virginians elected Winsome Sears, a black woman, as lieutenant governor and Jason Miyares, a Cuban American, as attorney general. She writes, “It’s hard to imagine why Virginians voting en masse for the GOP out of thinly veiled racial animus would throw in their lot with this ticket.”

It is indeed hard to imagine, yet progressives are imagining it anyway. They have an academic theory to justify it in critical race theory, which asserts that even if nobody is being intentionally racist, systems can still be racist. They view the modern Republican Party as supportive of (or at least sympathetic to) white supremacy, so Republicans’ winning, no matter what race they are, perpetuates white supremacy in a country that was, in progressives’ view, founded on prejudice and slavery.

If you accept the premises of the argument, there’s a certain logical sense to it. Of course, the premises of the argument are exactly what conservatives contest, and rightly so. This is not a racist country; it was not founded on slavery; and as David Harsanyi has written persuasively, the evidence shows it is the most tolerant place on earth. But in the context of academic theory, even very smart, evidence-driven people can come to believe some truly strange things.

The problem is that most voters don’t buy the theory.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/04/2021s-big-election-lesson-its-the-culture-stupid/

By any reasonable measure, Tuesday’s off-year elections around the country were a sweeping repudiation of the Democratic Party, as the defeat of Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe by virtually unknown Republican Glenn Youngkin shows. The donkey party’s extreme-left vision for America has suffered what could be a fatal blow, but only if the GOP is smart enough to take advantage of this great opportunity.

A quick look around the country on Wednesday morning led to an inescapable conclusion: Average Americans are fed up with the Democrats’ woke agenda and are eager to escape it.

After four years of Donald Trump, Americans in 2020 handed the reins of national government over to the Joe Biden Democrats. And what do they have to show for it?

Rising inflation, an unprecedented flood of 1.5 million illegal immigrants, radically politicized public education, soaring crime rates, the loss of our hard-won national energy independence, totalitarian federal government targeting concerned parents as possible “domestic terrorists,” the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan that left hundreds of Americans stranded, among many other things.

Wednesday’s headlines from the elections around the nation show just how badly the Dems fared:

Glenn Youngkin’s Win Officially Ends the Clinton Era in American Politics

Slate of conservative candidates declare victory in hotly contested Denver suburb school board race

Another Shocking Victory Happened in Texas Last Night and Suggests 2022 Doom for Democrats

Republicans made incredible gains in yesterday’s elections

Note to Dems: it’s not 2020 anymore

Incumbent Brown declares Buffalo mayor write-in win over socialist India Walton

Backfire: Minneapolis voters slam abolish-the-police proposal – and city council

Election day chaos: N.J. waits to see who will be governor while major upsets loom in Legislature

NY state ballot proposals demonstrate how badly Dems have misjudged public sentiments

We could go on, but you get the idea. Democrats did worse than expected across the country, while Republicans did better.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/halloween-comes-late-democrats-mcauliffe/

When a Republican wins in a reliably Democratic state, it’s big news. That’s exactly what happened in Virginia on Tuesday, where newcomer Glenn Youngkin defeated former governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin won even though McAuliffe had a well-oiled political machine and high name recognition, and was campaigning in a state Joe Biden won by 10 points only a year ago.

Yet all those advantages were for naught. The Commonwealth will have a Republican governor for the first time in over a decade. It is likely Republicans will win the other two statewide races as well, for lieutenant governor and attorney general. They could even win the House of Delegates, which had been under firm Democratic control.

For Democrats, fright night stretched beyond Virginia into New Jersey, where as of press time the incumbent Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, is struggling to keep his position. The race is still too close to call.

Since Democrats easily carried both states in the last presidential and gubernatorial races, these results must send a shiver through the party. The Virginia race was particularly important. To understand its implications for 2022, we need to understand how Youngkin won.

The key was independent voters, especially the suburban voters who rejected Trump in 2020. Youngkin persuaded many of them, as Trump could not. The vote also demonstrates that Virginians are none too pleased with the performance of Democrats, who control both the state and national governments.

McAuliffe’s loss shows his party cannot recapture those disaffected voters by constantly asserting that their every opponent is a Trump wannabe or white supremacist. Instead, what they should do is to break free of their far left and put forward a moderate agenda. And they have to deliver effective results on the ground. Yet so far, national Democrats have delivered only failure: inflation, onerous mandates, empty store shelves, racially divisive school lessons, and a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. Those are fierce headwinds for local candidates.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/another-american-revolution-virginia-daniel-greenfield/

“What happens in Virginia will in large part determine what happens in 2022, 2024, and on,” Kamala Harris had declared while campaigning for McAuliffe.

For the first time in her life, she’s right.

The American Revolution was won in Virginia. As General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown to the American armies commanded by George Washington, the British band played, “The World Turned Upside Down.” The world turned upside down again in Virginia with a new revolution against the tyrannical rule that has gripped the state and the nation.

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican rebel, repeatedly invoked the spirit of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, those storied Virginian rebels, on the campaign trail and in his victory speech celebrating the political world turning upside down with the fall of Terry McAuliffe.

It’s impossible to overstate the shadow cast by McAuliffe, Bill Clinton’s consigliere, DNC chair, Hillary’s campaign co-chair, and former governor. Not all that long ago McAuliffe was being tipped for a White House run. Now he couldn’t even manage to get his old job back.

Youngkin’s victory in the gubernatorial race slew one of the last giants of Clintonworld.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s bid to become the first Democrat re-elected to a second term in 44 years was proving to be a nailbiter as his Republican opponent led late Tuesday night with more than 90% of the votes counted.

The surprise battle was too close to call, and Murphy’s re-election hopes hinged on a late surge of votes from areas of the state that historically have voted Democratic.

As recently as last week, public polls showed Murphy with a substantial lead among registered voters over Jack Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman and businessman from central New Jersey. among registered voters. Still, political experts warned that Murphy’s lead had shrunk in recent months and the New Jersey electorate has a penchant for changing their minds.