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Food for Thought, Towards 2020
Green shoots or suckers? Time will tell, but consider a few recent stories from diverse sources. Will this collection of dots end up forming a map to President Trump’s reelection in 2020? Perhaps.
We are told that the left has a lock on the minds of the youngest eligible voting cohorts, “Millennials or Generation Y” and “Generation Z.” Gen Y, the generation born near the turn of the millenium, is now 25-42. Gen Z, little talked of, like Gen X, is now 7-24. So, they are experiencing the craziness of the left’s cultural crusade first hand. Consider three articles on this latest voting-age generation.
John Hinderaker’s daughter, Kathryn Hinderaker, wrote of St. Olaf College, the small (il)liberal arts college from which she just graduated:
I just graduated from St. Olaf College after receiving an education I didn’t expect. That’s because as a conservative at my small, Minnesota-based liberal arts institution, I’ve spent the last four years defending myself against personal and political attacks from professors and peers alike.
Gen Z is not just taking this abuse and indoctrination. Despite Google’s worse efforts to fraudulently label Prager U videos so they are screened out by libraries and home child filters, they “can’t stop the signal.” A year ago, a recent college graduate, Max Diamond, wrote “I Was Liberated by the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’.” Diamond wrote:
During my time at my elite liberal arts alma mater—a school whose motto is the “Life of the mind,”—I only knew a single student who openly defended capitalism. It was assumed and expected that everyone believed in, and would act in accordance with, a certain social constructionist view of gender: the belief that one’s gender identity—male, female, or neither—is determined by personal experience. Men were not supposed to question many feminist ideas, and white people were not supposed to criticize people of color’s views on race.
[…]
The intellectual dark web influenced me less in regard to specific propositions and far more in my ability to reflect upon my own assumptions. That is, these thinkers have helped me become educated so that I can decide for myself what is reasonable without the aid of “guardians”—whether professors, mainstream journalists, college students, or Paul Krugman. When college protesters silence speakers, the concern is not they have the drawn boundary of reasonable speech too thin, but rather that they are undermining individuals’ ability to become educated: to learn, and to decide for themselves what are reasonable and unreasonable ideas.
Recently, Nate Hochman wrote of “The Intellectual Dark Web’s Quiet Revolution:”
The dominant assumption in conservative circles is that college campuses are left-wing echo chambers with little room for dissenting opinion. But this assumption misses a host of previously apolitical or liberal college students who are voluntarily seeking out conservative thought as an alternative to the contemporary liberal-arts curriculum.
[…]
As a collective, the IDW provides college students with an alternative to the intersectional narrative that is the foundation of the contemporary progressive belief system. Identity politics is not gospel, they say, and it is not mandatory to accept its premises as unquestionable truth. To be sure, so far there is no readily available evidence that demonstrates the ubiquity of this movement, but the explosive popularity of many IDW members — particularly among young people — makes it difficult to conclude that their influence is not significant.
[…]
There is ample historical precedent for this phenomenon; whenever youthful radicals become too powerful, they unwittingly create a new generation of conservatives. Earlier this month, Christian Gonzalez wrote that the IDW are the new neoconservatives, and this is an apt comparison in more ways than one. In the same way that neoconservatives were a group of previously liberal students and professors who moved rightwards in reaction to campus radicalism, the IDW and their followers are composed of many on the Left who find themselves identifying more with conservatives than with their previous political allies, who seem suddenly taken with moral relativism, postmodernism, and the elevation of gender and racial identity over honest intellectual combat and the pursuit of truth.
Now consider the battle ground states. Recall that candidate Trump made a late push in Minnesota, a state that conventional wisdom said belonged to the left. He drove the 2018 presidential vote in Minnesota to within two percentage points of victory:
Candidate Party Total Votes Percent Donald J. Trump and Michael R. Pence Republican 1,322,951 44.92% Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine Democratic-Farmer-Labor 1,367,716 46.44%
Yes, this is the state of Ilhan Omar, and all her red-green agenda, as well as possible criminality. See Power Line Blog for the best original reporting and summaries, starting at “Loose Threads in the Curious Case, (8).” Yet, there may well be sufficient numbers in a sensible center to reject the Democrat’s hard left march and red-green anti-American alliance. See John Hinderaker’s account of “A Day at the Ball Park.” He describes the overt patriotism and military participation in this Major League Baseball game between the Minnesota Twins and the Texas Rangers, in Minnesota:
My dominant impression, though, was of the unabashed patriotism of the near-sellout crowd. It renewed my confidence that the Democrats’ strategy of running against the USA will not end well for them.
Notice that Justin Amash has fled the field in Michigan, switching to independent on the pretense of principles, when the reality is that his district has completely rejected him in polling against possible primary opponents. Like Jeff Flake, his constituents have found him noxious. He jumped out before they could spit him out in the congressional primary, ending his personal brand’s money-making viability.
Consider the craziness of the Democrat-media complex’s response to President Trump’s plans for a great celebration of America and America’s military on Independence Day. Notice how a massive crowd showed up, despite the rain, and enjoyed a wonderful speech, punctuated with shout-outs to amazing American individuals and then a short telling of each armed service’s story, accompanied by that service’s aircraft flying over the crowd. Paul Mirengoff, no great fan of President Trump, wrote of President Trump’s Independence Day speech:
It was excellent. Even CNN, in a report to which Jim Acosta contributed, couldn’t find fault with anything Trump said, although it took the obligatory shots at the event itself. CNN acknowledged that Trump’s speech was not political, but rather “a message of national pride.”
[…] You have to dislike America to dislike what Trump said to the crowd on the Mall.
Consider that the Washington Post has taken the side of “Antifa,” a leftist organization dedicated to political monopoly through street violence. The WaPo telling is telling:
Hundreds of D.C. police officers descended on the area around Washington’s Freedom Plaza on Saturday, preventing antifascists from clashing with right-wing demonstrators during dueling rallies near the White House.
Police on bicycles and on foot quickly broke up skirmishes and prevented black-clad, hooded leftist antifascists, known as antifa, from erecting barricades in streets with toppled newspaper boxes and chairs.
Black-clad, hooded, erecting barricades… sounds like a real civil rights group there. Why grant them “antifascist” without scare quotes? Because the Washington Post approves of their results, if not entirely comfortable with their violent methods which have sent multiple victims to the hospital in multiple states on multiple occasions. [How have they not yet been put in the same federal law enforcement as the old Klan?]
Now, see all this from the perspective of the youngest Millennials and voting age Gen Z. These thugs, these bullies, are the creatures of the Democrat Party, which has not disavowed them. Democrats’ media organs have just endorsed these black-clad, masked, armed thugs as legitimate. There is going to be an alternative offered in November of 2020. In 1968 and 1972, the crazy left drove voters to support a particular candidate, running on the Republican ticket. He emphasized law and order, American strength without adventurism, and national pride. He won even with the voting age lowered, for the first time, to 18.
Green shoots or suckers? Time will tell, but I’m leaning towards America having another fruitful season or more before the fate of all human things claims her.
Published in Politics
Minnesota wasn’t the only state that was close but went to the Dems in 2016. New Hampshire was even tighter if memory serves, just a few thousand votes. Nevada was another that was close.
The media keep going on about seventy thousand odd votes in three states putting Trump over the line, but there were others they ignored that could have gone the other way.
However, aren’t you worried about Michigan and Arizona in 2020? Texas too by some reports…
Good points. And I’m not worried about Michigan, Arizona, or especially Texas.
You don’t see the contradiction between these two nuggets?
No. “Openly defended” and “assumed and expected” indicated the institutional and social pressures.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda — but they didn’t. The one significant thing we almost never hear referenced is the millions of votes Clinton received in the only two states primarily responsible for her winning the popular vote , California and New York. Compared to the percentages in the other states she won, those two are totally and completely out of proportion. Take a look at this map, and you’ll see what I mean.
Man, none of those cats ever show up here <sigh>. Probably because this is the 305. Act like an ass here, and everybody comes after you: the Cubans, the Haitians, the Crackers, the Venezuelans, the Colombians, the Snow Birds (if the misbehaviour is between JAN and APR). Oh, and they’re all armed.
Anyone else notice that antifa’s antics take place in regions/municipalities where the local population is forbidden to or unacculturated to concealed carry? Hmmm.
They don’t want to fight. They just want to beat people up. Losers.
Michigan will go Democrat in 2020. We are Stuck on Stupid. The republicans come out reliably year after year , and the elections depend on whether the democrats vote or stay home. The democrats are not going to nominate someone as incompetent and personally repellent as Hillary, and they seem to be pretty motivated by Trump. The republican’s two hopes in Michigan are that the democrat Governor is revealing herself to be a low energy arrogant idiot, and the democrat Attorney General is revealing herself to be a high energy social justice totalitarian Nazi. However, Michigan may be too stupid to notice or care.
The fraudulent DNC runs the vote count in California. It was determined in court in Jan 2017 that the DNC took Bernie Sanders’ Primary victory away from Bernie and handed it over to Hillary. Of course Bernie being the tool that he is did not even whimper or whine – it was activists who care about voters’ rights who took up the court battle.
So I very much agree with you that the vote count that was assigned to Hillary in California is totally out of proportion to the way the rest of the country voted. Fraudulent methods can accomplish fabulous election results, if the fraud is left to flourish unrestricted. I hope that Team Trump has their eye on the situation and can come up with a solution before Nov 2020.
I seem to remember listening to Rush pretty soon after the election and him saying that if you discounted a few counties in New York and California then Hillary would not have won the popular vote either…
I checked realclearpolitics (you can keep your commie rag @goldwaterwoman…) and Hillary did rack up a million more votes than Trump in LA County alone, and around half a million or so in Manhattan. A few others were similarly lopsided.