RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/06/victor_davis_hanson_never_trumpers_told_us_trump_would_be_liberal_he_wasnt_no_alternative_agenda.html

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution is interviewed by FOX News’ Tucker Carlson on the lack of agenda from the left and how the anti-Trump faction was wrong about him.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Barack Obama got elected twice but he was an ungodly disaster for the Democratic party. They lost the supermajority, they lost the Senate, they lost the House, they lost 1,000 local state and local offices, they’re going to lose the Supreme Court. And they can’t come to grips with the fact that they control popular cultural — sports, universities, the media — but that turns into this type of street theater you referenced. It doesn’t transfer into actual political power and they’re very frustrated.

The Never Trumpers told us that Trump would be a moderate or a liberal. He wasn’t. The Heritage Foundation said he was more conservative in his first 2 years than Ronald Reagan. The left said he was going to implode or that the Mueller investigation, or impeachment, or the emoluments clause, or they were going to sue under the 25th Amendment. None of that happened. So Trump is almost 50% approval rating.

And the final thing is there’s no alternative agenda. We don’t know what your speaker, your guest, what do they feel about taxes? Do they want more government? More regulation? Less? Is the Iran deal good or bad? We don’t hear any of that. Instead, they fixate on somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, kind of an obscure 28-year-old who won an election with 20% turnout and suddenly that’s a metaphor for a brave new world. So it’s a frustration that they don’t translate their cultural influence into raw political power.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/the_coming_democratic_crackup.html
Despite media-inflated stories of the popularity of Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers, the radicalized Democratic Party is heading for a major crackup.

The signs are there for anyone with eyes to see. Despite media-inflated stories of the popularity of Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers, the radicalized Democratic Party is heading for a major crackup.

The trend started with the rise of the Tea Party (2009), followed by the Democratic loss of the House (2010) and the Senate (2014) and then Donald Trump’s stunning election in 2016. At each stage of this progression, left-wingers have dialed up their hysteria, their lies, their hate, and even their violence. Now it is reaching a fever pitch.

But it has been to no avail. Indeed, all the rage has been, if anything, counterproductive. Could be that this November will be a climax, forcing, among other things, George Soros to go to his grave a defeated and frustrated old man?

The media paints a picture of the left being full of fight and determination to continue Barack Hussein Obama’s transformation of America into a European-type socialistic paradise with a multicultural emphasis. This may be true for the hardcore activists, but they are relatively few in number. So what might be the dominant mood of the run-of-the-mill Democratic voter? It is one of depression and a feeling of hopelessness. They’ve seen their side throw absolutely everything at the conservative resurgence and President Trump in particular and watched as one event after another went against them. Even the media, with their fake news stories and skewed polls, can’t snap liberals out of their funk. The party’s only option seems to be doubling down on the losing hand it has been playing.

Some examples: the liberal media’s drumbeat message is that Trump and his supporters are racists, yet the president’s approval rating with minorities continues to grow. Every Democrat in Congress voted against the Trump tax cuts, predicting they would tank the economy, yet GNP growth is exploding to levels that President Obama repeatedly stated were impossible. Black unemployment is at a record low, and the overall economy is at near full employment. The Trump tax cuts have put more money in people’s pockets and confidence in America is rising.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270618/dsaer-wins-seat-congress-matthew-vadum

A radical leftist upstart’s unexpected primary trouncing of a key member of the House Democratic leadership is sending shockwaves through the Democratic Party establishment.

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and first-time candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old of Puerto Rican ancestry, crushed longtime U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley, a 56-year Irish-American Catholic, in the primary election June 26 for the 14th congressional district in New York, covering parts of the boroughs of Queens and The Bronx. Ocasio-Cortez, who previously worked as an organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid, garnered 57.5 percent of the vote compared to the 42.5 percent Crowley earned.

Of course, democratic socialism is a profoundly dishonest euphemism calculated to make the horrors of communism more palatable.

As I’ve written before,

Karl Marx thought of socialism as a necessary way station on the road to the supposed utopia of communism. The question of socialism versus communism is a never-ending debate in academic circles, and it is one that is too involved to get into here. Suffice it to say that socialists and communists all want government or the collective to be master. They all subscribe to bad, un-American ideas, are all in the same ideological camp, and all tend to believe that the ends justify the means. In ideological terms, there is no bright line or safe harbor that neatly separates socialism from communism. They overlap and blend into each other.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270614/its-not-socialism-its-racism-daniel-greenfield

After the ’10 census, New York lost two congressional seats. Overpriced, lacking any growth industries except tourism and community organizing, the state just couldn’t keep up with the rest of the country.

New York had been bleeding congressional seats since the rise of the suburbs. After the massacre of ’10, its congressional delegation was the smallest since 1823. And it’ll lose more seats after the next census.

But the ’10 massacre also forced Rep. Joe Crowley out of the 7th Congressional District and into the 14th. The 7th became a gerrymandered a district built like a Frankenstein’s monster out of parts of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens that had nothing geographically in common except Puerto Rican populations who will keep voting for Rep. Nydia Velázquez, a Democrat, until the city sinks beneath the waves.

Crowley, who is paler than birch trees, had no shot at the new 7th. But he settled down comfortably in the 14th, winning 70% of the vote by just showing up, without the fuss of a primary challenge. While representing a Hispanic district in Queens, he was allegedly living comfortably in Arlington, Virginia.

That was never going to last.

New York City’s working class white population is an endangered species. If you’re not on welfare or earning well in the six figures, you can’t afford to live there. Crowley’s district was 46% Hispanic. It had the second highest share of Latino voters in New York. The machine pol was living on borrowed time.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/02/the-democratic-party-is-killing-itsel

What does America’s political climate bode for us in the next 25-50 years? What if I told you the Democratic Party will fracture into multiple parties and the Republican Party will grow stronger? And what if I said changing demographics and the normalization of identity politics would be the reason?

The Democratic Party has redoubled its embrace of identity politics. Whether it be Mexican-American, African-American, Chinese-American, Muslim-American or any of the two-dozen hyphenated American groups out there, these ethno-religious-cultural groups have by and large used the Democratic Party to further their group interests. Why wouldn’t they? Human beings are tribal creatures and more often than not flock to those who act like them, speak like them, pray like them, and, yes, look like them.

As America’s non-Hispanic White population shrinks due to the influx of non-European immigration and low white birth rates, cultural enclaves have begun to form all over the nation. Starting in the late 1960s and accelerating over the past decade, the Democratic Party has abandoned its traditional base of working-class white voters to embrace minority immigrant groups. Although this has boded well for them in places like California, it won’t last.

Growing Republican Support

Working-class white voters feel abandoned by the Democratic Party. The party went from a platform of being center-left economically and socially/culturally conservative to a platform that is far to the left economically and socially/culturally degenerate. Consider how the South went from blue to red in the 1990s, as Southern Evangelicals embraced the Republican Party platform.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/trump_is_winning_over_blacks_hispanics_millennials_and_even_gays.html

Democrat hate speech targeting deplorables has always worked — on their own voters. Libeling Republicans as racist, homophobic morons has kept Democrat voters in line. President Trump laughs at their insults, and just gets stronger. Suddenly, one more Trump success. The Democrat line is breaking. Our minorities are breaking free.

President Trump’s off the charts achievements on jobs and security are improving the lives of every single Democrat identity voting bloc. A small, but increasingly significant number are noticing. With his MAGA gains on the economy and foreign affairs, President Trump is slowly chipping away at the Democrat Party’s foundations. The white working class already belongs to Trump. Fed up blacks, Hispanics, millennials and gays are starting to follow.

Ordinary people, including our minorities, are focused on the reality of their lives. Most Americans actually care about exactly the two big issues Trump cares about: jobs and personal safety. They notice more money in their paychecks. They notice when they get off food stamps and the unemployment line. They notice when they move from flipping hamburgers to a high-paying construction or assembly-line jobs. Securing our border, supporting cops, defeating ISIS in Syria, pressuring North Korea to “denuke” — ordinary people get that we are safer than we were under Obama. Democrats can scream as loud as they want, but they cannot drown out reality.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/convinced_shes_churchill_hillary_clinton_is_ready_for_her_comeback.html

Hillary Clinton is convinced she’s Winston Churchill.

Get a load of what her adoring media say, from Front Page Magazine, quoting the Guardian:

Hillary Clinton, in an interview with a British newspaper this week, appeared to compare herself to wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill while responding to a question about being a polarizing figure.

“I’m sure they said that about Churchill between the wars, didn’t they?” she told The Guardian when asked if she should withdraw from public life to help heal divisions in the U.S., given her reputation.

What a pathetic picture: a washed up presidential candidate who was convinced she had it in the bag and who up until now has been otherwise blaming everyone but herself for it (as President Trump has noticed), now delving into the history books in search of delusions of grandeur. “Between the wars”? Like, out in the political wilderness, you know, before the big comeback?

For a while there, the séances were all about channeling Eleanor Roosevelt (why didn’t that ever become a campaign issue?), but now, it looks as though she’s moved on, moved to a bigger league, moved to channel Churchill. Must be some séances…

It must make sense from her point of view. Aren’t President Trump’s “deplorables” really just Nazis? That’s the word from the denizens of the left. So of course they are, too, in her leftist mind…Nazis, Churchill…it all clicks together.

Beyond Churchill himself, there’s also the Churchill narrative, and there it must make even more sense. Churchill warned about Nazis, got thrown out of power, and then the U.K. ended up with Neville Chamberlain, who tried to cut deals with Hitler at Munich. The result of that mess was that the U.K. went right back and brought him in again.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/democrats-done-pretending-to-be-moderate/They think they’re unpopular because they aren’t left-wing enough.

The Democratic love of socialism was for many years the love that dared not speak its name. No more. Now the party is figuratively jumping on Oprah’s couch shouting its love of socialism. You’d have to plug your ears not to hear it.

Socialist Bernie Sanders is unquestionably the spiritual leader of the Democratic party, which is radicalizing itself in his image, and on the strength of her blowout Democratic-primary win over liberal incumbent Joe Crowley in the party-ruled NY-14 congressional district, soon-to-be-congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now one of the most prominent faces in the Democratic party. A poll last fall put support for socialism at 44 percent among Millennials, and even more disturbingly, 23 percent of this group agreed that Joseph Stalin is a “hero.” Socialized medicine, i.e., Medicare for all, is the hottest issue on the Left (unless you count hating Trump as an “issue”).

In short, Democrats are who we thought they were. They’re just losing their inhibitions about it. As the woke-youth site Vox puts it, “Maybe Democrats should stop being afraid of the left” because “Ocasio-Cortez’s victory is a big sign that Democrats can run on socialist ideas and win.” Talk of revolution flows naturally. After Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said, “I tell you, the Democratic base is wired now for a revolt.”

It’s become a cliché to compare Washington politics to Wag the Dog (1997) or Idiocracy (2006), perhaps the two most-cited political movies of this era. A forgotten political film from the 1990s, though, deserves more attention for its prescience: Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, which appeared in theaters 20 years ago this spring. (Spoilers follow. The movie is streaming on the Starz pay-TV service.)

https://pjmedia.com/trending/socialists-like-ben-jealous-and-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-would-bring-back-the-dark-ages/
“Ben Jealous and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aren’t really “progressives.” Their big government platform is actually quite regressive. ”

On Tuesday, two veterans of the 2016 campaign launched by self-identified socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won important upsets in Democratic primaries. Sanders himself congratulated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and former NAACP Chair Ben Jealous, who each defeated rivals endorsed by the Democratic Party. Their victories have been hailed as “progressive,” but the socialist ideology they pursue is truly regressive, and would resurrect the age-old tragedy of a pre-free market command economy with fewer options and more poverty.

Sanders declared that Jealous’ victory “showed that running a progressive, issue-oriented campaign can bring all working people together in the fight for justice.”

What issues does Sanders consider “progressive”? An ever-increasing government control of the economy, heavy on redistributing wealth. But don’t take my word for it — examine Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign platform. Here it is, complete with some snarky explanations courtesy of America Rising.

Ocasio-Cortez promises “Medicare For All,” the standard Sanders approach to health care, “free” public universities and trade schools, guaranteed jobs for everyone, a 100 percent renewable “infrastructure overhaul,” and guaranteed housing. How would she pay for all this largess? “Taxing Wall Street.”

Riiiight. Even if you confiscated every single dollar in the stock exchange, that would not come close to covering the cost of all these programs. In the process, you would be killing the engine of growth that enables jobs, goods, and services to exist in the free market in the first place.

In short, full implementation of this plan is not only economically infeasible, it would derail America’s wealth-creating machine, bringing back a poverty and injustice all too familiar in human history. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/
As the midterm election season heats up, a mixed economic message is coming from Democratic congressional candidates as the progressive wing finds itself at odds with party moderates. Partly, this is a reflection of the difficulty the out-of-power party has getting traction during robust economic times. The 2018 midterms are taking place at a time when the unemployment rate is at its lowest point in 18 years. But this dichotomy is also indicative of the Democratic Party’s leftward movement. The moderate wing is in shock after 10-term New York Congressman Joe Crowley lost a primary battle Tuesday to Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old underfunded outsider candidate to the left of “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders.

Progressives have absorbed the Sanders playbook and are campaigning on platforms advocating free college tuition, free single-payer health care, and a jobs guarantee program for all. This is on top of calls for a $15 minimum wage and a new affordable housing mandate to address income and wealth inequality. They insist that this all can be done by taxing Wall Street, millionaires and rolling back the recent Republican tax cuts.

They will get a chance to test their liberal economic message in one of the most watched midterm races, a congressional election in Orange County, California, where Mimi Walters is the two-term Republican incumbent. This is an upscale swing voter district that Hillary Clinton won by five percentage points. Democrats have identified it as a key district to flip in their quest to retake the House. Facing Walters in the November general election is Katie Porter, a Democrat who finished a distant second to Walters in California’s “top-two” primary system.

Porter, a university professor and a protégé of Elizabeth Warren’s from her Harvard days, has been dubbed the “Elizabeth Warren of the West.” She has endorsed Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal, touts Nancy Pelosi’s plan to roll back the recently passed tax cuts, and insists that wealthy corporations “pay their fair share.”

However, her close association with Warren, which includes a fundraiser headlined by the Massachusetts liberal and numerous photos with her, are viewed as a vulnerability by some Republicans. “Katie Porter is out of touch with this district as a far-left progressive,” said Courtney Alexander, communications director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with the Republican House leadership. “Going into the fall, she will be a sharp contrast to the Republican message of less taxes.”