RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/muslim-congressional-candidate-accepts-money-joe-kaufman/

Broward County Commissioner Barbara Sharief is one of many Democrats vying for the congressional seat (Florida CD20) previously held by now-deceased US Representative Alcee Hastings. Whoever wins the November 2nd Democratic Primary will most likely be the district’s next officeholder, and Sharief has placed herself in a good position for victory. Her support is a matter of controversy, though, as part of it has come from radical mosques and terror-related groups. This includes money contributions, as her latest campaign financial disclosure reveals funds from Islamist leaders. Will Sharief allow her votes in office to be bought by extremists?

Since Barbara Muhammad Sharief has been running for US Congress, she has made it a point to visit all of the radical mosques in the area. During a candidate forum in September, she said she was “extremely blessed” to be able to do so. Sharief spoke at the Islamic Center of Boca Raton (ICBR), which was co-founded by a Hamas website designer and a former assistant to Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian, and she spoke at Pembroke Pines-based Darul Uloom, which has been a haven for al-Qaeda operatives and whose imam was thrown off a number of community boards for his public vitriol against homosexuals.

In August, Sharief was the “Special Guest” at an event sponsored by ICNA Relief USA, the US social services division of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). ICNA has numerous links to South Asian terror. For over three decades, the group has harbored former death squad commander Ashrafuz Zaman Khan, allowing Khan to serve in ICNA’s top leadership positions. ICNA has sponsored events promoting the terrorist groups Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hamas. Sharief has taken numerous photos at various events with ICNA Relief USA Chief Operating Officer Abdul Rauf Khan, an individual who has used social media to target Jews and gays.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/the_lincoln_project_and_democrats_crudely_conspire_against_glenn_youngkin.html

In one of the dirtiest tricks ever, The Lincoln Project (a collection of hard-left people masquerading as “Republicans”) and Democrat activists conspired to paint Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate now leading in the Virginia gubernatorial race, as a magnet for White Supremacists. Thankfully, the hoax was quickly exposed, meaning that it should reflect worse on Democrats than Republicans. Were it not for the internet, though, this vicious dirty trick could have caused lasting harm to Youngkin’s candidacy and opened the way for the execrable, racist, parent-hating Terry McAuliffe to get a second term as Virginia governor.

The day-long saga started when journalist Elizabeth Holmes tweeted a photo showing “men” who pulled up in front of Glenn Younkin’s campaign bus, saying “We’re all in for Glenn.” Wearing white shirts and khaki pants, with Tiki torches in their hands, they were obviously intended to look like the White Supremacists at Charlottesville in 2017:

Had anyone looked closely at the photo, they might have noticed something a bit peculiar about these “White supremacist men”:

Yup, there’s a Black guy there and a White woman. Something’s fishy, right?

Thankfully, the internet sleuths were instantly on it. They soon determined that one of the people looked like a Democrat operative named Camden Layton, who quickly protected his Twitter account from prying eyes. Of course, Eric Swalwell, without looking closely at the picture, fell hard for the hoax. Frankly, if he can’t spot a Chinese spy, who really expects him to balk at calling a Black man a “White supremacist”?