The Realignment - 8/27/2024

Today's blog post is primarily directed at my Democratic Party friends, if I still have any. Please read it with as much an open mind as you can. I guess what I have to say is also a message for some of my friends on the right, too, but I say it's for you on the left because it's you I see going off the rails. Way off the rails.

Before I go further, let me make this simple statement: we all, left, right, and center, tend to see ourselves as positioned in the righteous center of the political spectrum. Where we all are individually seems to each of us to be justified, normal, correct. We see people to our left and to our right, but in our own minds, at least we know we've got it right, and we're reasonably, logically, and morally justified positioned right where we're at. That probably is true for everyone reading this, no matter your politics.

About 10 years ago, I was talking a liberal Democrat friend of mine, someone whose intelligence and heart are both extraordinary and whom I hold in the highest respect and affection. I casually told him I saw myself as a moderate, and he quickly corrected that I am actually very conservative. At first I was quite taken back. I didn't take him on in debate, but his comment did shake me a little and made me think. I always saw myself as reasonable. On taxes, military, abortion, immigration, death penalty, and other issues, I felt I was moderate and not extreme at all. As I reflected on his words, though, I realized he was right. It wasn't that my views on life and political issues had changed much in the preceding 20 or so years. It was because there had been a significant shift the sands of pubic opinion leftward, leaving me further to the right of the center of the spectrum than I had been, even though I hadn't moved at all.

Not too long afterward one by one I saw the left going further and further leftward on issue after issue. The leftward lurch was accelerating. I saw that in the age of Trump, Trump's personality was used as a springboard by the left to get their portion of the electorate to abandon moderation and veer left. The biggest example I can think of as I type, I know there are others, is immigration. Democrats sat back and allowed a globalist, anti-American wave of unmanaged, uncontrolled, harmful immigration overwhelm our border cities and spread. Human trafficking, fentanyl, and violent criminals were waved in like the bull in a bullfight, passing the matador's red cloth, full speed and passing unharmed. Hatred of Trump was very cleverly posited as the counterpoint. To agree with Trump is to be a racist and a xenophobe. This kind of thing happened on issue after issue, each lurch left justified by pointing at Trump and knowing how bad the orange man really is.

A relentless leftward shift continued and continues. It is dangerous for our country.

Elon Musk, Bill Ackmann, both billionaire Democrats, have finally said enough is enough. The move to the left has become a bridge too far, and have come out in favor of Trump. 

The Democratic Party has been ruthless and unscrupulous in it's march to power and control. They have sought and agressively employed every legal means imaginable in ways we've not before seen. They've gone after Trump on absolute bullshit that's NEVER been done before in our history. We've all known this, but it was when Bobby Kennedy Jr. talked last Friday about what they did to him that I realized what is going on is bigger than Trump. Bigger and worse in every way. Democrat operatives have tried every single thing they can to get Trump, Kennedy, and Jill Stein off of ballots to clear a path for a Democratic Party win in November. Democrat legal action has cost Kennedy over $10 million. Most Democrats (and I do mean YOU, reading this) have been willfully blind, even supportive, to these malicious and evil efforts to undermine democracy. You've watched as an old man with dementia (you knew it, DO NOT LIE) was propped up as a capable leader, all the while our country run by an invisible, unnamed, unelected, insatiably power hungry cabal.

Yesterday, another Democrat, former Congressperson Tulsi Gabbard, a National Guard Lieutenant Colonel, endorsed Trump at a National Guard Association event. Like Kennedy, Musk, Ackman, and a few others, she sees what I do: that the Democratic Party has moved so far left that the center was nearly abandoned. Except it wasn't. All four of the aforementioned recognize something that your television propagandists aren't telling you: Donald Trump is NOT a far right conservative. I really don't care that Joe Biden called us over and over "far right MAGA extremists". It's a lie. Trump supporters may appear to be far to the right, but only because you've been led so far to the left that you need binoculars to see the middle. I have come to believe that Democrats literally hate our country and hate the U.S. Constitution. Do you or don't you? How about that Democrat Primary though? You voted for Kamala, right?

How much is Trump in the middle? The GOP establishment is up in arms, calling him a Democrat and bemoaning his abandonment of traditional right wing positions on abortion, for example, where he is far from an absolutist, instead supporting something pretty reasonable. On issue after issue, he is nowhere near as far right as the media and Democrat machine would have you think. He has moved to the middle for two reasons, in my opinion: 1) Because that is his natural political inclination. He is not a staunch conservative, but a moderate. Let's not forget, he was a New York Democrat. His sin was taking on Hillary Clinton. Let there be no doubt, He's not far right. 2) The second reason he has shifted to the center is because he sees the void in the middle left by the giant Democratic move to the left. Millions and millions of voters in the middle have been left abandoned by the Democrats. These people aren't conservatives, but Trump is appealing to them not with conservatism, but with pragmatism: strong military and no wars. A strong economy that helps everyone, no matter what color, religion, or place of residence.

Elon Musk, Bill Ackmann, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard aren't far right extremists. They're Democrats who woke up to see how far off the rails the Democratic Party has gone, not just in it's political positions, but also in it's undemocratic, unacceptable, extraordinary efforts to seize and maintain power. Why are you pretending to be blind to all that? Blind to Biden's dementia. Blind to how your nominee was installed WITHOUT giving YOU, the Democrat voters, a say. Blind to how insane, immoral, and dangerous the legal challenges to Trump have been. Blind to how badly propagandized your sources of information have become. You may as well call them Pravda. Blind to what it is Musk, Ackman, Kennedy, and Gabbard see.

The times they are a changin'. I do recognize that the entire spectrum has shifted to the left. I can live with something in the middle or just right of the middle. Democrats, help me to understand... how in the hell did you get so far out there, and how the hell do you ever walk it back? Kamala Harris' voting record in the Senate was to the left of Bernie Sanders. It was. As a Presidential candidate in 2020, then Senator Harris advocated for every far left position on every issue. Now she cleverly won't say what her positions are. There are unnamed whisperers saying what it is they think the electorate wants to hear, but Harris has NOT come out and made plain what her vision of our country is. Maybe I shouldn't care, but I do. If she's elected, the same power hungry, unelected cabal that operates the Biden Administration in his cognitive absence, will pull Kamala'a strings, too. We are headed toward globalist, authoritarianism in which the government presumes to know what's in my best interest and in yours, our opinions, dreams, and goals be damned.

It's time, Democrats. It's time to move back away from the far left ledge. Take it upon yourself to learn why Elon Musk, Bill Ackmann, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard have abandoned your party. It's time. Find out what Trump's position is on your most important 10 issues. Are you really that far off the charts to the left? Maybe, just maybe there was more "orange man bad" than actual analysis of the issues that has driven your support of the extreme leftward lurch. And you, Republicans conservatives: I know Trump isn't the conservative stalwart you were hoping for. He's not. But the pendulum has swung way, way left. How in the hell can you stay on the sidelines and watch the Democrats take us to God knows where? It's a binary choice. Wake up.

By the way, I think the root cause of the Democrat leftward lurch is intersectionality, but that is another complicated story I may or may not write about on another day.