Trump leaves his party in better shape than his previous two predecessors left theirs, but the GOP is still at war with itself.
By the time Barack Obama left office, his party had been decimated. Sure, Democrats gained two Senate seats and six House seats in 2016, but it wasn’t anywhere close enough to make up for historic losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. In the latter, Republicans won the largest Senate majority for either party since 1980, while gains in the House gave the GOP its largest majority since 1928. All told, Obama oversaw the net loss of 12 Senate seats and 64 House seats.
On the state level, Obama’s tenure was marked by the largest loss of power since Ike Eisenhower. When Obama took office in 2009, Democrats controlled both chambers in 27 states. When he left, it was only 13. Under Obama, Democrats lost 13 governorships and a total of 813 state legislative seats. Between the 2010 and 2014 midterms, Republicans gained control of 33 state legislatures.
By comparison, Trump is leaving his party in good shape. Yes, Democrats control the presidency, the House, and effectively control a split Senate. But Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s majority is razor-thin—and about to get thinner. President-elect Joe Biden has picked three Democratic House members to serve in his administration, which means Pelosi will have only a three-seat majority when the next Congress convenes.
Democrats failed to unseat a single House Republican in 2020 while losing Democratic incumbents nationwide. Democrats failed to gain control of a single state legislature, while Republicans netted about 60 state House seats and more than a dozen state Senate seats across the country. Democrats failed to gain any governorships, and in fact lost one in Montana, the only governorship to change party hands in 2020. . . .
Instead of being beholden to a wealthy donor class and the exhausted ideas and slogans of the Reagan era, Republicans could embrace populism and become a right-of-center, multiracial, working-class party. Studies of the 2016 electorate indicated GOP voters were more economically liberal and socially conservative than anyone had thought, while Democrats were moving steadily to the left on both counts. . . .
A certain segment of the GOP establishment was never going to go along with a populist movement on the right, whether Trump was connected to it or not. . . . But Trump’s loss and the loss of the Senate, bad as it might seem for an emergent GOP populism, aren’t going to bring back the pre-Trump Republican status quo. Simply put, the failure of the Republican establishment was responsible for Trump’s rise, and Trump’s fall will not undo that decades-long failure—nothing will. That party, such as it was, is gone forever.
Under the guise of planning for right-wing violence if Trump loses, Democrats are gaming out how to steal the election if Trump wins.
It’s been hard to miss the steady drumbeat of articles and think-pieces over the past few months about Election Day war games and post-election planning underway on the left, rooted in obsessive fears that President Trump will refuse to accept an electoral loss, triggering a constitutional crisis and maybe even widespread civic unrest, all in a desperate attempt to cling to power.
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The news hook for most of these articles is a series of elaborate election war games hosted in June by a newly formed organization called the Transition Integrity Project, touted by the media as a bipartisan group of experts consisting of former elected officials, high-level government staffers, consultants, and journalists like David Frum, who wrote the Atlantic piece referenced above.
In other words, the Transition Integrity Project is a cross-section of our elite ruling class. In its own executive summary of the war games, the group states it was founded “out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process” — never mind the many ways Democrats in Congress and the executive bureaucracy, aided by the media, have been doing just that since before Trump won the 2016 election.
The exercise mimicked the kind of war games sometimes conducted for foreign policy crises, only this time the format was applied to the presidential election, with one team playing the Biden campaign and the other the Trump campaign. The outlandish outcome of these simulations—that in the event of a close election, Trump might “federalize the National Guard and take military control of state voting sites,” as Frum writes — tells us less about what is likely to happen in the real world and more about the mendacious worldview, toxic prejudices, and treasonous imaginings of the elites themselves.
In one of the simulations, a scenario similar to 2016 was gamed out, with Trump losing the popular vote but winning the right combination of states for an Electoral College victory. John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman and a top adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, played the role of Biden. According to Ben Smith’s account of the simulation in the New York Times, Podesta-as-Biden refused to concede, saying his party wouldn’t let him and instead alleged voter suppression, persuading the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send Biden electors to the Electoral College.
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Whether they realize it or not, Podesta and Frum and the others are acting out a present-day version of the election of 1860, only they’re playing the role of the secessionist South. Indeed, well before Abraham Lincoln won the election, even moderate “unionist” southern leaders warned that their states would secede if the vote didn’t go their way. It amounted to mass political blackmail, and after Lincoln’s decisive victory the South followed through on its threat. For slave states, the Union was conditional, not perpetual, and Lincoln’s election violated their conditions.
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We now seem to be on the cusp of relitigating the question, only instead of slaveholding southerners blackmailing the country with secession, it’s anti-Trump Democrats and left-wing radicals threatening to tear the country apart if Trump wins in November. For them, the Union is conditional, and Trump’s reelection will violate their conditions.
What do they have in mind? Not exactly an 1860-style secession, state-by-state, but something more immediately disruptive. Depending on the circumstances the day after the election, they might contest the results and trigger lengthy litigations and ballot recounts, working in the meantime to come up with enough absentee ballots to put Biden over the edge. In that case, while the lawsuits and recounts are underway, the left plans to do what it’s been doing for months now: take to the streets.
Last week, an initiative called the Fight Back Table, a coalition of more than 50 left-wing groups that got together after the 2016 election, met to formulate a plan of action in case no clear winner emerges after Election Day. Of course, “no clear winner” is something for which the left has been rhetorically preparing the country under the guise of ensuring all the mail-in ballots are properly counted.
The group “began charting out what it would take to stand up a multi-state communications arm to fight disinformation, a training program for nonviolent civil disobedience, and the underpinnings of what one official described as ‘mass public unrest,’” according to a report by The Daily Beast. One person familiar with the discussion said the goal was to figure out how to “occupy shit, hold space, and shut things down, not just on Election Day but for weeks.” By now, we all know what that means.
Perhaps more disturbing than the possibility of organized mass riots and looting is the open fantasizing among Democrats, including Biden himself, about the role the military might play in a contested election. Biden has felt free to ruminate, more than once, on the possibility of soldiers dragging Trump out of the White House if he tries to “steal the election.”
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Indeed, paranoia and an assumption that any action by the Trump administration to ensure the integrity of the election is tantamount to stealing it pervades our elite class. The Transition Integrity Project’s war games played out various scenarios, utterly divorced from reality, in which team Trump “succeeded in invoking the Insurrection Act and sending active-duty military troops into US cities to ‘restore order,’ ‘protect’ voting places, or confiscate ‘fraudulent’ ballots.” In another scenario, Attorney General Bill Barr ordered “the seizure of mail-in ballots to ensure that vote counting would stop.”
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All this tells us much more about the mindset of the people running the simulations than it does about what Barr or Trump are likely to do in November. The left simply cannot imagine an election in which Trump doesn’t win by cheating, hence they’ve decided they will accept only one outcome. Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn and a participant in the Fight Back Table discussions, told The Daily Beast, “It is very obvious that Trump is laying the groundwork for claiming victory no matter what.”
This is doublespeak. What should be obvious by now is that a broad coalition of left-wing groups is laying the groundwork to reject the results of the November election if Trump wins and claim victory, no matter what. The same left-wing groups that have been fomenting riots and street violence for months will again mobilize, only this time they won’t be calling for the abolishment of the police but the effective abolishment of popular government—an end to our constitutional system, and with it, an end to the republic.
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Most northerners thought this was just bluster, that Lincoln’s election would never lead to actual war and bloodshed. They badly underestimated how lightly the South regarded the Union, and what southerners would do to the country to be rid of it. They should have taken the South at its word.
Now, 160 years later, we face what could be a similar crisis. There’s a rich irony in the elite assumption that post-election violence will come from “right-wing militias” or “vigilante groups,” when the last three months of rioting and looting by Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists have in some ways been a dress rehearsal for what the left is planning in November. You don’t need to read between the lines to understand this, you just need to take these people at their word.
On the right and the left, pseudo-religious cults are ensnaring a growing number of Americans as traditional religions decline.
by John Daniel Davidson | For years now, pollsters and demographers have been chronicling the decline of religion in America. And it’s not just religious affiliation that’s declining. Along with lower rates of church attendance, religious weddings and religious activities in the household are also waning...
The mainstream media will spend a lot of effort this year reporting on Trump voters, but very little effort trying to understand or empathize with them.
Because I work for a right-of-center publication, that means talking to people all day long who fundamentally disagree with me about politics, and often much else. In some cases, I know that my views are repugnant to the person I’m talking to, and that if they knew what I thought they would openly despise me, maybe call me a bigot. Maybe worse.
But because my job is to report on the Democratic primary, the onus is on me to be generous and empathetic with Democratic voters. I want to know what they think, and why, and it doesn’t matter whether I agree with them. It actually doesn’t matter what I think at all, even if I find some of their views repugnant. That means I have to defer to them, I have to be respectful, I have to be patient.
The thing is, once you begin doing this, even for a little while, you find it’s easy. If you really listen and take people at their word, it’s not that hard to see where they’re coming from, how their experiences and circumstances inform their politics and worldview. Before long, being generous and empathetic toward them comes naturally, even if you still disagree with their politics.
Migrants generally pay smugglers and smuggling networks anywhere from $2,000 to $7,000 per person to get to America. A portion of that money ends up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels—TCOs—even though the cartels don’t directly participate in the smuggling.
One Guatemalan man, a farmer named Joaquin who was recently interviewed by the Dallas Morning News, sold all he had—“a small family plot of land, the three cows and four chickens”—and paid a smuggler to take him and his 10-year-old son to America. Because he was still short of the smuggler’s fee by a couple thousand dollars, he took out a loan to cover the cost, with a friend and cousin near Dallas co-signing his agreement with the smuggler.
Joaquin and his son eventually made it across the border, but it wasn’t like he was told it would be. Disillusioned with life in America and wanting to return to his wife and other children back in Guatemala, Joaquin is now saddled with ballooning debt and can’t afford to leave. “Had I known what I know now, I never would have made the decision,” he said. “Never.”
Joaquin just one among hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who are selling all they have and going into debt to finance illegal immigration to the United States. As the crisis drags on, we should be clear-eyed about who is benefiting from it.
Much of Central America is ruled by cartels, and until we come to terms with the role they play in migrant smuggling, the border crisis will worsen.
The effect of tougher immigration enforcement like Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy is that the coyotes, as the smugglers are called, increase their fees while often misleading migrants about what they can expect once they cross into the United States, promising them visas or some form of amnesty. The coyotes are notorious for abandoning migrants on either side of the Rio Grande once they get paid, or, for those who run out of money, raping or kidnapping helpless customers, some of whom are sold into human trafficking near the border.
Because migrants must often pay for each leg of their journey up from Central America, including bribes for various law enforcement officials along the way, by the time they reach the U.S.-Mexico border they’re often out of money and completely at smugglers’ mercy. Migrants who can’t pay are sometimes forced to carry large packs of drugs over as payment for their fare.
Ironically, the tougher immigration enforcement is on the U.S. side, the greater the potential profits from migrant smuggling—not just because coyotes charge more but also because migrants and recently deported illegal immigrants have no other way of getting into the United States, and are willing to take greater risks. The mainstream media doesn’t seem to grasp this connection, which is why the Washington Post can publish a lengthy feature on a couple trying to illegally cross the border and barely mention the role of smugglers or the connection they have to larger criminal syndicates.
All of this is to say that we can’t have a serious conversation about the border crisis without being clear-eyed about the role the cartels play in societies that are essentially collapsing. Pretending that illegal immigration isn’t really a problem, as liberals and libertarians tend to do, ignores the close connection between human smuggling, drug trafficking, and cartel violence on both sides of the border. Pretending that it’s an easily solvable problem, as conservatives tend to do, is like claiming there’s an easy way to defeat Islamic radicalism—as if the cartels will agree to stop smuggling and trafficking just because we put up some more border fencing or ramp up deportations. (emphasis added)
If you thought that cultural relativism on the Left would stop at the ritual slaughter of innocent children, you were wrong.
At issue is a law under consideration in Brazil that would outlaw ritual infanticide and child killings by native groups, known as “Muwaji’s Law,” named after an indigenous woman who rejected her tribe’s expectation that she kill her disabled daughter in 2005.
The Brazilian Association of Anthropology staunchly opposes Muwaji’s Law, and compared it to “the most repressive and lethal actions ever perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of the Americas, which were unfailingly justified through appeals to noble causes, humanitarian values and universal principles.” The association also called the law an attempt to put indigenous peoples “in the permanent condition of defendants before a tribunal tasked with determining their degree of savagery.”
That sentiment is shared by Brazil’s National Indian Foundation, known as Funai, which refuses to collect data on child-killing among indigenous tribes, resists even acknowledging its existence in public, and said in a 2016 press release that raising the issue at all “is in many cases an attempt to incriminate and express prejudice against indigenous peoples.”
Imagine a robot with spindly wire arms and a dozen ping pong balls for hands and it wants to tackle you to the ground in order to give you an anti-cancer vaccine. Sounds sort of fun actually.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at the right-wing The Federalist.
All Chinese are communists. They share the exact same ideology because they're individually almost indistinguishable. They're all programmed as sleeper cells waiting for the signal to act with the goal of overthrowing "The American way of life[TM]." I did my research.
So far, so good. But, are they going to take my Bible?
