RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-elections-big-loser-is-the-democrats-narrative/

On Tuesday Donald Trump’s “shellacking,” to borrow a word from Barack Obama––winning not just the electoral college, but also the popular vote and the Senate majority–– is a definitive repudiation not just of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, but of a political narrative over a century in the making. As always, bad policies are the fruit of bad ideas, but arrogance about the superiority of those ideas carries within them nemesis, the punisher of hubris that may be delayed, but never escaped.

Today’s Democrats have embraced a narrative––call it “left,” “progressive,” “socialist,” “woke,” or what you will–– which rejects holding people accountable for their actions. Instead, a crude determinism shapes and governs their behavior. Hence, we’re told that poverty, capitalism, injustice, racism, sexism, and all the other -isms and -phobias explain people’s crimes and failures. So we get Democrat policies that ignore or legitimize illegal border crossings, shoplifters, bums and addicts befouling our cities, repeat felons, no bail release for arrestees, and numerous other dangerous absurdities.

Since the ordinary law-abiding “moral majority” have to suffer the physical and economic consequences of these policies, which increased significantly under the Democrats, it’s no wonder they voted for a president who promises to restore law and order.

Another bad idea that harms our economy and pocketbooks is green “climate change” policies that ignore the laws of physics and wage war on fossil fuels, which have created the West’s unprecedented wealth and quality of life for billions of people worldwide. This bad policy reflects the scientism of self-styled “bright” Democrats, who “follow the science” and yet resort to pseudo-science for gratifying their fundamentalist cult of environmentalism, and their need to signal their superior virtue.

Again, the citizens are hit with expensive energy prices and intrusive regulations. Meanwhile, the forced switch to intermittent “renewable energy” like windmills and solar panels makes producers dependent on fossil fuels for their construction, and for providing electricity for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

Then there is the “transgender” cult that believes the biological sexes are cultural constructs, and that chemical and unnecessary permanent surgical interventions can restore children to their actual “gender.” Moreover, aggressive promotion of this unscientific idea is encouraged in schools, polices our free speech, and subjects girls and women to “trans” males occupying women’s restrooms and sports. Democrats have endorsed these farcical programs, as Kamala Harris did during her campaign.

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.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.