Identity politics

Bye bye, DEI

By Steve Woodward

When the end is near, when the gig is up, and when the blinding light of truth pierces the darkest recesses, entrenched keepers of the status quo are reduced to tantrums and fear mongering.

Recall combative House Democrats, including unhinged Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), recently showing up at the Department of Education, demanding entry and a meeting with the acting secretary, and becoming agitated when access was flatly denied.

Why did Waters and fellow Democrats march over to the Department of Education? It seems that the Left is really quite concerned about Donald Trump’s pledge to weaken their grip on the Educational Industrial Complex.

At the core of their hysteria is the imminent demise of the ever pervasive phenomenon known as “diversity, equity and inclusion”. While American corporations have begun a rapid phase-out of DEI in their hiring and advertising — acknowledging that promoting unqualified people up the ladder and alienating customers eventually impacts the bottom line (did someone say Bud Light?) — academic institutions in some cases have doubled down on devotion to DEI infiltration.

But then along came the ascendance of Donald Trump and a tsunami of common sense executive orders during the opening hours of his second term as president. He first ordered DEI (and thinly veiled DEI programs with benign sounding names) abolished within all federal agencies, then turned his attention to federally funded institutions, including colleges and universities.

Other than its illegality under the Constitution, DEI is a vestige of affirmative action which has been nullified as a college admissions standard by a Supreme Court decision. A more accurate interpretation of the DEI acronym is: “Destroying Educational Integrity”.

Trump’s executive order laid bare why DEI must be DOA on college campuses: “Illegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity … undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement … (and promote a) pernicious identity-based spoils system.”

Even before the DEI death knell began to toll, defenders were complaining that “political influences” were becoming too burdensome for college faculty members to bear. A study referenced in a late 2024 article published by the academic journal Nature blamed crackdowns on DEI doctrine as the cause of declining “morale” within faculty lounges at Southern universities. Those darn conservative politicians who think federally funded schools should prioritize academic rigor are, instead, now threats to “academic freedom”.

Moore County’s local and heavily biased newspaper, The Pilot, ever the reliable mouthpiece for Leftist wrist wringing, recently published a letter submitted by a reader who laments that too many professors are being run out of southern schools or quitting academia altogether. The author fears “brain drain”. Yet, it’s unclear if an already damaged organ can be drained.

If so-called political interference is such a deterring force on southern campuses, what explains openly anti-Israel voices among faculty at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack in Israeli soil? Less than a month after the attack killed 1,200 Israelis and others, the Duke Academics and Staff for Justice in Palestine (DASJP) was quickly formed and had launched a web site.

All of the manufactured hysteria about the assault on DEI is merely posturing. What the academic elites really worry about is Trump making good on threats to shut down federal funding spigots and the many grants that coast along on autopilot.

An author who was among the first to expose entrenched woke agendas on college campuses, Christopher Rufo, is pulling for massive reform advanced by Trump’s edicts and under the leadership of his nominee for secretary of the Department of Education, Linda McMahon (whose first act would be to terminate her own department). But Rufo acknowledges it will not be easy to derail $50 billion in federal grants that universities receive annually.

“The Trump administration must renegotiate the deal between the citizens and the universities,” Rufo writes in a February 8, 2025, post at Substack.com (and accessible on X, where he has 782,000 followers), “conditioning federal funding on three popular demands: first, that the schools contribute to solving the student-debt crisis; second, that they adhere to the standard of colorblind equality, under both federal civil rights law and the Constitution; and third, that they pursue knowledge rather than ideological activism.”

The plot became a bit thicker when the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a letter on Valentine’s Day establishing a 14-day compliance deadline and issuing a clear reminder that federally funded institutions must adhere to civil rights laws.

“Under any banner (including DEI),” the letter cautions, “discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is, has been, and will continue to be illegal.”

Has it come to this? The radical Left, always and relentlessly accusing its ideological foes of systemic racism at every turn, facing a deadline to denounce systemic racism?

What a time to be alive.

Rogan’s heroes

“It may be that this present system, with no modifications and no experiments, can survive. Perhaps the money-making machine has some kind of built-in perpetual motion, but I do not think so. To a very considerable extent, the media of mass communications in a given country reflects the political, economic and social climate in which it grows and flourishes. That is the reason our system differs from the British and the French, and also from the Russian and the Chinese. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. And our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.” — Edward R. Murrow, October 15, 1958, speaking to the Radio and Television News Association’s annual convention

By Steve Woodward

Distilled to its essence, CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow’s speech delivered to broadcasting colleagues 66 years ago warned that television, then in its infancy, already had begun to betray its audiences and imperil its long-term viability. There is no one even remotely similar to Murrow remaining in the 21st century corporate media. Murrow cared about truth, substance and an informed population, all now obsolete.

Murrow also said this during his remarks in 1958 in Chicago: “I have decided to express my concern about what I believe to be happening to radio and television. … I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.”

The Democrat Party’s precipitous march to the ideological Left likely began long before Murrow’s speech, around the time Woodrow Wilson ascended to the U.S. presidency in 1912 espousing “progressivism”. It ebbed and flowed in the decades ahead, revived by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

But the Democrats soon entered a period of near extinction in presidential politics, putting forth presidential aspirants named George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Carter was the only one who actually made it to the Oval Office as president but his gain was the Democrat’s loss. His ineptitude assured Carter will be remembered among the most failed presidents.

Then, in 1992, along came William Jefferson Clinton, the youthful but obscure governor of Arkansas. It is notable that his ascension to the presidency coincided with the first cracks in network television’s absolute information dominance. Cable TV’s CNN cemented its legitimacy during riveting coverage of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The internet was coming into its own with 10 web sites up and running (including the Raleigh News & Observer’s Nando.net, one of the first digital platforms adopted by a newspaper). There would be nearly 3,000 functional web sites by 1995. And a former disc jockey named Rush Limbaugh was conducting an experiment that would become a genre — conservative talk radio, of which he would be king for 30 years.

Deep beneath the surface, something else was happening that would influence and corrupt mainstream media in ways Murrow could not have foreseen. Public schools and institutions of higher education pulled away the veil. Educators devolved into indoctrinators committed to diminishing American exceptionalism, severing the connective tissue of Judeo-Christian values that defined its citizens, and challenging every societal boundary by seeking to normalize transgenderism, relativism (the end of delineating between right and wrong) and climate-change hysteria. Despite progress toward diminishing racial inequality made by the civil rights movement, the mantra among educators increasingly was moving toward dismissing the U.S. as irredeemably and systemically racist to its core.

This was the precursor of a cultural shift across mass media. Newsrooms and television studios gradually became infested by graduates of these institutions, today’s editors, producers and reporters who view journalism through an activist lens. As the Democrats moved further Left, the media went with them, no longer inspired by the objective nobility of their journalistic forefathers — Murrow, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Charles Kuralt, et al.

The election of Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 opened the floodgates of a newly emboldened state-run media, not beholden to scrutinizing the powerful but more prone than ever to fawning over Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America and enabling those in his orbit to increase their power.

The zenith of Obama’s iron boot control over a compliant and corrupt media came amid the 2012 election cycle during a debate between Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney, aka, the Candy Crowley debate. The media had spent weeks running interference for the Obama-Hillary Clinton debacle in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, when four Americans died amid a terror attack on the U.S. embassy. During an October debate moderated by CNN’s Crowley, Romney seized on the Obama administration’s refusal to acknowledge the coordinated assault as an act of terror. Crowley jumped to Obama’s defense on live television. “(Obama) did call it an act of terror,” she said. (In reality, Obama and Clinton shamelessly blamed the attack on a viral internet video beyond their control).

That debate, artfully choreographed by CNN, enabled Obama to move the race from a dead heat to a decisive victory (332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206) despite his tepid approval rating (46%), high unemployment (8.3%) and growing contempt toward ObamaCare. Of course to have used these realities against Obama would have been dismissed as “racist”, which is what the Left often said about Limbaugh and his millions of loyal listeners.

It is sadly ironic that Limbaugh passed away just as alternative media was beginning to take root in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 dismantling of Hillary Clinton’s coronation. Trump became the first president to recognize the utility of social media, going after his adversaries and corrupt media outlets with his so-called “mean tweets” using Twitter (before he was blackballed by the tech elites).

But this alternate media landscape was coming rapidly to the fore as critical thinkers (Conservatives) watched Trump Derangement Syndrome transform The Atlantic magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and, to a lesser degree, Fox News, into naked appendages of the Left. The corner was turned during pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and the ascension of Joe Biden to the White House by precise leveraging of COVID hysteria.

The mainstream media overlords were dismissive of Steve Bannon’s War Room, and the Joe Rogans, Dinesh D’Souzas, Charlie Kirks, Sebastian Gorkas and Dan Bonginos expanding audience across the live streaming spectrum. By the time Trump launched his bid for re-election, millions of MAGA faithful were tuning into Newsmax, the Real America’s Voice network, Rumble and, more recently, the Tucker Carlson Network, where the likes of Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat down for lengthy, granular interviews.

Trump’s campaign recognized the influence of alternative outlets, most notably Rogan’s vast audience. A three-hour interview with Rogan attracted a seismic 45 million views on You Tube, and 25 millions across Spotify and other platforms (The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2024). Trump also did 90 minutes of live-streamed chat with a video gamer phenom named Adin Ross (at the behest of Trump’s teen son, Barron). Across all of 2024, Trump was a guest on 20 podcasts, the Journal reports. (Kamala Harris dodged Rogan altogether).

The net effect of this dramatic shift raises a question future Republican presidential candidates must ask: Why would I consent to a network controlled, prime time television debate with a Democrat ever again? Answer: You wouldn’t. You shouldn’t. Consider this stunning data point. The Journal, citing the Associated Press VoteCast survey, notes that Trump got the support of 56% of male voters ages 18 to 29. Where do these youngsters go for news and analysis? TikTok and podcasts. Period.

The TV networks are bleeding viewers and that erosion was bad news for the Harris-Biden bid for reelection. CNN’s prime time lineup does not even reach one million households (it has fallen to 792,000), and its viewers’ median age is 69. MSNBC’s 1.3 million prime time household audience has a median age of 70. These folks have likely never have heard of Rogan, Kirk and their media peers.

The Journal’s Kimberley Strassel observes that the media’s fierce defense of the Left backfired this time because “a narrative full of fantasy enabled Democrats to live in a world disconnected from the mood and worries of the country”, which were laser focused on the economy, illegal immigration and the absurdity of men competing in women’s sports.

In the aftermath of Trump’s resounding comeback win on November 5, there is something else to celebrate (and relish). Think about it. The smug network bastards who despise 80 million-plus Americans who voted for Trump/MAGA — Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Anderson Cooper, Margaret Brennan and David Muir, along with many others — are hurtling toward complete irrelevance. It’s over.

Morrow foresaw this moment coming.

“This instrument (television) can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire,” he said in 1958. “But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.”

The Harris file

By Steve Woodward

The ascension into public life and political power by Kamala Harris makes Barack Obama’s improbable rise seem noble and inspiring by comparison. That’s quite a statement considering Obama’s sordid path to the White House.

He was “the least experienced politician in at least one hundred years to obtain a major party nomination for President of the United States,” wrote David Freddoso in his 2008 book, “The Case Against Barack Obama”. “He (was) the product of a marriage between two of the least attractive parts of Democratic politics – the hard-core radicalism of the 1960s era and Chicago’s Machine politics.”

While Obama was artfully positioning himself to become a U.S. Senator from Illinois in 2003, Harris was navigating her way through the San Francisco political scene after earning a degree from the University of California’s Hastings School of Law and working for several district attorneys. Her mentor was also her periodic romantic interest, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (photo nearby), a married man who had been opening doors for Harris for the better part of a decade.

An attorney who often crossed paths with Harris was Harmeet Dhillon, who arrived in the Bay Area as Harris was becoming more politically connected. In the ensuing years, Dhillon, an active member of the San Francisco Republican Party (who knew it existed?) marveled at Harris’ ability to move from one job to another while accomplishing very little and working minimal hours.

During a fascinating 110-minute interview by Tucker Carlson on his streaming Tucker Carlson Network (home of many such in-depth interviews, and, as of October 10, 2024, James O’Keefe’s intense documentary exposing the extreme crisis ongoing along the U.S.-Mexico border), Dhillon describes in detail what The Wall Street Journal aptly described as “the lightness of being Kamala Harris”. These are among the most revealing of Dhillon’s memories:

“(Harris) really has been kind of a shapeshifter throughout her entire career and existence,” Dhillon tells Carlson.

“One of the interesting things that I found when looking at her background is the first time she registered to vote was at age 29. … So, many years after coming to the United States (Harris lived in Montreal with her divorced mother, a professor, from age 12 through 18), and during the year that she dated … former mayor and (California state house) speaker Willie Brown is the year that she registered to vote (1993). … Well after she became an attorney, well after she became a prosecutor, she hadn’t registered to vote.”

Dhillon marvels at the flimsiness of Harris’ record as a prosecutor during those early years, first in Alameda County’s D.A. office, then San Francisco’s more visible D.A. office.

“In Alameda County she specialized in child sex crimes, an important job,” Dhillon said. “According to research that was done by some of her opposition when she ran for (San Francisco) district attorney in 2003, she tried something like eight cases that they can prove there, during her eight years as a prosecutor.”

Eight cases in eight years.

Two years in the San Francisco D.A.’s office failed to deliver the high-profile positions she wanted. Harris (photo nearby) abruptly quit and went to the city attorney’s office, a lateral move. During that time, Willie Brown appointed Harris to a pair of “patronage jobs” that required little work but helped Harris earn more than $400,000 during a five-year period on top of her prosecutor’s salary.

“She was marked out as privileged in her 20s and 30s, very early on,” said Dhillon, who recalls that Brown also provided Harris with a free car, a BMW no less.

Brown’s ultimate leveraging of his influence came with a dual objective. He was anxious to rid the city of a D.A. (Terrance Hallinan) who was launching too many investigations into corruption involving Brown’s cronies. And, he prioritized the D.A. job as Harris’s next move up the political ladder. Harris, despite an unremarkable career to date, was inaugurated as the city D.A. in 2004.

But the next move, the one that would facilitate the fast tracking of Harris to Vice President of the United States, remained on the horizon – Attorney General of California.

Dhillon well remembers that Harris sought to position herself as being against runaway spending on political campaigns when she launched her run for AG.

“If you agreed to cap your fund-raising and spending at $211,000 in 2003, you got a statement published in the voter guide that was mailed to all the almost half a million voters in San Francisco, registered voters, saying that you had voluntarily agreed to confine yourself to that spending cap. So it’s like (agreeing to) a level playing field and it’s a little bit of a gold star that you’re agreeing not to engage in corruption and wasteful spending and cronyism by raising money from all kinds of unknown sources. So she agreed to that. She filed a piece of paper. She signed it under penalty of perjury, saying I, Kamala Harris, agree to this voluntary spending limit.

“Most of the candidates running for office in California and San Francisco … agreed to that spending limit.”

In a three-way race for AG Harris trailed, a distant third, right out of the blocks and was gaining no ground. Willie Brown took note. This was to be the seminal moment when Harris demonstrated that she was a corrupt member of the San Francisco machine, even as a novice politician. It has defined Harris ever since and is the bedrock of her unlikely campaign for President of the United States in 2024.

“She realized,” Dhillon told Carlson, “she was going to have to really supercharge her spending. Willie Brown helped her with this. Willie Brown also helped raise money for independent expenditures to support her as well. One of her campaign themes was that she was going to be tough on drugs, tough on marijuana. In 2003, the recreational use of marijuana was not legal in California. She was very tough on pot.

“So apparently some pot activists who didn’t like this … were pouring over the campaign finance records. And it’s a pot activist who realized that Kamala Harris had raised over $300,000 and had spent over $300,000. So this person … let the other campaigns know; they filed an ethics complaint against her. And at the end of the election, she had spent over $600,000, so triple the amount that she was allowed.

“But thanks to hiring a good lawyer and making the excuse that, the form changed, I didn’t really understand the meaning of this, so please lift the cap, she got the San Francisco Ethics Commission (to look the other way). And by the way, many of those people on the Ethics Commission owed their positions to Willie Brown.

“It’s a crime, by the way. She could have been prosecuted for a misdemeanor had she been properly held accountable for this significant campaign finance violation and anybody else would have. But the Ethics Commission simply lifted the cap, which is not in the statute. So instead of disqualifying her, which would have been the normal punishment and prosecuting her, she simply got away with it. So in her first race for elected office, she ignored the campaign finance limits. She used corrupt patronage from her former lover to raise the money.”

Against this backdrop, Harris would run for U.S. Senate and win on her first try in 2016. She was selected by a two-term vice president, Joe Biden, to be his “person of color” running mate for VP when he ran and was installed in 2021.

And here we are. To fully contemplate what an unqualified, unethical and unbearable individual Harris is as a U.S. vice president and would-be president, contrast her story and record with that of our nation’s first vice president, John Adams.

He was a farmer who would become a scholar, a political philosopher and a consequential foreign diplomat at a time in U.S. history when the nation’s viability depended on loans from bankers in Amsterdam. Adams secured them. Before that, he authored the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the oldest written constitution (emphasis added) in the world still in effect.

In David Rubenstein’s magnificent collection of interviews with master historians of our time, “The American Story”, he engages legendary historian David McCullough in a conversation about Adams, about whom McCullough published the quintessential biography in 2001 (“John Adams”, Simon & Schuster).

McCullough points to a clause in the Massachusetts Constitution, which Adams wrote in 1780. He “wrote the whole (constitution),” McCullough says. “It’s a clause that was never in any constitution up till then and is still not in any other constitution except New Hampshire’s.”

Imagine a San Francisco machine politician or one of its mutations, contemplating, let alone writing:

“Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among (all), it shall be the duty of the legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them in public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions … to inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.”

Today, Democrats like Harris reflexively tune out after the opening words, wisdom and knowledge. How very quaint. How very irrelevant.

Walk in light

By Steve Woodward

Which is more frustrating? The sense we are getting that Duke Energy thinks power grid security should be turned over to government solutions? Or, that the Raleigh drag queens who infiltrated Southern Pines on December 3 are doubling down, promising to perform here in Moore County frequently next year?

Take your pick. As a practical matter, I guess I’d rather have lights shining on the continued decline of American culture. In which case, confidence that proactive measures will be identified and implemented to secure electric stations, close to home and nationwide, deserves priority over delusional dragsters and their rainbow protest mobs.

What is whistling down the alleys is word that law enforcement at all levels, while undeterred from trying to find the source of attacks on two Moore County sub-stations, are left holding a bag full of firearm shell casings and little else. (Some have surmised that the perps must have been less than sophisticated terror merchants for having failed to collect their shell casing. But does anyone really believe that Antifa- trained ninjas walk around with registered firearms? The casings are about as useful as discarded granola bar wrappers).

Meanwhile, local and state elected officials are said to be underwhelmed by Duke Energy’s upper management and support staff. Apparently, the Dukies feel comfortable restoring power but are less than inclined to restore confidence. Duke certainly dares not complain that security is unaffordable. In November, Duke announced it would be selling its commercial renewable energy assets for $4 billion — only five percent of its operations.

Duke Energy on December 1 bragged about giving away $1 million in social justice and racial equity grants to 40 organizations across North Carolina. Yet another investment that does everything but keep the lights on.

Rep. Richard Hudson, who soon will be sworn in as the NC-9 U.S. congressman (and will once again represent Moore County after a two-year break), is right to suggest that the federal government is long overdue in launching a nationwide initiative to protect America’s antiquated power infrastructure. But it’s hard to believe it’s going to happen in a nation that can’t/won’t secure it’s Southern border, and has willfully farmed out all of it’s manufacturing, textiles, prescriptions drugs and energy producing equipment to China.

Yet we are learning that the attack on Moore’s grid was not as random or isolated as first believed As reported by Wired.com, ”Duke Energy, reported gunfire at another facility, a hydroelectric power plant in South Carolina. And combined with two more incidents of hands-on sabotage of U.S. power facilities that occurred in Oregon and Washington in October and November, the vulnerability of the U.S. grid to old-fashioned physical harm has begun to seem like a serious threat.”

Meanwhile, Triangle-area drag “celebrity” Naomi Dix says she, too, is worried about attacks on power: on the power of LGBTQ deviants to attack the moral fabric of small-town communities. During a December 8 forum in Durham, Dix said that suspicions that the Moore power outage targeted her cast’s performance at The Sunrise Theater inspires her to bring additional shows here in 2023.

While Dix claims that drag shows are under attack — in Southern Pines the “attackers” read scriptures and prayed for the community at large — these so-called threats do not seem to be much of a deterrent to the hijacking of more and more community events. A December 10 “Christmas parade” in Shallotte, N.C., reports independent journalist A.P. Dillon, was interrupted by a leotard clad dance team led by a transgender coach who donned gay apparel that was merely a thong.

In Taylor, Texas, 35 miles northeast of Austin, Taylor Pride hoodwinked Christmas parade organizers when registering for a spot in the 2021 event. “The Taylor Area Ministerial Alliance … naively thought a group calling itself Taylor Pride was simply proud to be from Taylor,” wrote Taylor resident and political science professor Kevin Stuart in a December 9, 2022, op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

So what happened this year? A new parade was created by a woke city management staff, acting without Taylor’s city council’s input. The 2022 parade ”ran right behind the traditional parade on December 3. It featured even more drag performers than last year, including one called Sedonya Face.“

Stuart concludes, “civic and cultural battles are sure to become more frequent and more intense” as social norms dissolve. “For those who simply want to work, worship God and raise their families in peace, this news is unwelcome.”

When darkness visits our towns we have no choice but to walk in the light.

Domestic jihad

By Steve Woodward

It was striking that Election Day and Veterans’ Day fell 72 hours apart last week. Both events, one a duty, the other a sacred observance, have reliably and boldly reflected American priorities and values across the years.

There was indeed much to celebrate among values-based conservatives after November 8, Election Day 2022. There was much for which to be thankful and sobered on November 11, Veterans’ Day.

In Moore County, the conservative values wave sent the left crashing into the jagged rocks of irrelevance. Voters overwhelmingly chose morality and stewardship when offered the alternative – cultural secularism and reckless spending. More on these triumphs later. Let’s simply say that where public schools and the Moore County Board of Education are concerned the status quo rubber stamp has been placed permanently in a drawer, and citizens who attend future meetings can rest assured they will not be subjected to metal detectors, masks, and intimidation by security personnel.

But the bigger picture is disheartening, and not for reasons about which the corrupt mainstream media would dare pontificate.

Two examples. Republicans did not seize iron clad majorities in the U.S. House and Senate because they ran too many tainted, Trump-backed “election denier” candidates who are not, and never will be, electable. BS.

Are we to accept this absurd notion even as The Big Steal 2.0 plays out before our eyes in Arizona, California, Nevada and Oregon? Election integrity is taking another hit out West, where “officials” are complacent and, likely, complicit.

The Left is not a wing of the Democrat party in 2022. The Left IS the Democrat party. Its candidates and its voters are not fixated on the so-called insurrection of January 6, 2021. Their fixation is abortion on demand, climate change, LBGTQ rights and gender fluidity. They do not care about our “institutions”, and they are not Never Trumpers. They barely noticed Trump because they never cared about low unemployment, peace through strength abroad, energy independence and restoring the greatness of America. Trump’s foe was and is corporate-owned media.

We can no more understand the radical Left than can we understand that which drives Islamic jihadists to commit acts of unthinkable terror. But we must acknowledge what drives them to vote, what inclines them to go all-in for John Fetterman (PA), Gretchen Witmer (MI), Mark Kelly (AZ), et al, allies of the Left who have no obvious popular appeal.

It’s not about ideology. They have no ideology. They have a religion that is untethered from Christianity, or even common sense. Common sense tells us that citizens of all political stripes would reject unbridled inflation, rising urban crime spreading into formerly “safe” neighborhoods, energy dependence on our enemies and crippling prices for gasoline and heating oil, a military significantly weakened by vaccine mandates, and endless January 6 commissions that crucify Trump but seek no remedies for election fraud.

Second example. It is the default mode among Americans of a certain generation to honor and salute military veterans. But the aforementioned Left views the military industrial complex, alive and well, as a channel through which wokeness and transgenderism will be further engrained. Thus, we honor our veterans one day a year but, should we lose focus, we will witness the demise of the brotherhoods that sustained them in times of war and peace. The Left is in charge in the upper ranks. The faces of valor they see in the black-and-white photos from past World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, leave them cold. They are not moved by these men and women who fought unconditionally. The woke military brass of the 21^st Century prefers conditions for those who serve. They must be vaccinated, indoctrinated, and emancipated from the past. Duty is not inherent; it is irrelevant. Duty gets in the way.

Savor we must the victories gained this first week in November that will subdue the march of the Left. Treasure we must military valor of ages past. But the stark reality of this moment is that we no longer can take for granted the absolute certainty of Election Day “results”, or the sanctity of future missions of those sworn to defend our homeland from enemies foreign and domestic.

In fact, domestic enemies are thriving in a perpetual open season, and they know it.