Turnout, I Expect

Apparently, this election day has brought good news in Mississippi. At least somebody got some good news, because from coast to coast, this place looks like Beirut. Well, that's a dated reference. Maybe Mariupol. Or Gaza. Man, it's hard to keep up.

So in the wake of our ass-kicking, it's hard to sit down, which makes a cocktail party difficult. I imagine we'll be more like too many addicts crowded around a barrel fire with too little Night Train. They stopped making that stuff, you know. Got my commemorative bottle. Let's fight over it.

@EJHill has a short, tart post up laying defeat at the indicted feet on the golden escalator. Commenters disagree, some in even more tart terms. Hill says, "Donald Trump’s endorsement continues to be the kiss of death." Well, I don't know about that, but I'm hard-pressed to support disagreeing. What we do know is that it's not exactly the breath of life. I don't know how much influence we should expect from anybody in this party.

The very real deep-state cabal, with its overtly weaponized legal system and media, have done a number on us, and the hits keep coming. Remember when Biden said this? "We just have to demonstrate that he will not take power by, if we, if he does run. I'm making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next President again." The laughable fact-checkers busily explain how this means only the best things, and how anyway a conviction would not necessarily bar him from running or taking office, so nothing to see here! Except that this obvious lawfare is not intended to gain convictions, certainly not ones that would stand up to an appeal.

This political prosecution is designed to sandbag the 60-70% Republican favorite, preventing him from running an effective campaign. Being overturned on appeal some time down the road is just fine with the corrupt prosecutors like, uh, whatever her name is out there chanting that some government body is "Too male, too pale, and too stale!" which her audience ate up like free hamburgers, with bacon, double sauce, curly fries, a mega-sized sugar drink, and about nineteen packets of sugary ketchup. You know it's sugar in the burgers too, right? Now look at these prosecutors again.

So this suppression campaign being waged against us doesn't only work at the top. It's hitting all of us. Trump is right when he (and his meme-tards) say that it's not Trump that "they" are after -- "they" are really after the rest of us, and he's just in the way. Truer words were rarely spoken, as a particular office is but a means to enact policy and exact retribution upon the population in general -- that's us. We really are the target, and it is working.

I'm going to guess that Republican turnout lagged in this off-year election, with the peculiar specter of an indicted hands-down frontrunner heading into the primaries. If you feel boxed in by this stuff, don't be surprised -- that's the goal. It's definitely voter suppression, although it would be hard to make a case stick. Same way that when twenty years ago we said that unrestricted, unassimilating immigration was guaranteed to lead to disaster, we nonetheless could not "prove it" to the left. Back when we were still stupid enough to argue with these wasps, these vermin, this cancerous Marxism eating our country away. We were right then, and we are right now, and there's not a court in the world that will hear this case. Politics is that court.

So we also have the pernicious effects of over a decade of Democrat domestic terrorism. Occupy, OFA, Antifa, BLM, and now Free Palestine -- this is all terror in the streets for political purposes. Most of the people out there chanting genocidal Jew-hating slogans have no idea what they're talking about and could not explain any of the history without either shouting or crying, because those are shortcuts out of a hopeless conversation. Convert the talking to fighting and you don't have to explain your ridiculous position.

That brings us right back to where we are today. Terrorism, like propaganda, simply works because it works. Even when you see it for what it is, it still works. So there is no talking to these people. There will be fighting, or there will be an utter collapse, but there will not be negotiation. Hard to get excited about lacing up one's boots and marching down to vote. I suspect that voter turnout will be the key to this year's disaster, and I don't think it has much to do with Trumpy endorsements one way or another.

Things are changing, quickly, and I think that the real trap here is to keep trying to do politics the old way, when there's a new way coming (yet again). I have no clue what that is, but the Democrats are inside our OODA loop. Know why? Because they understand the battle. They are the ones driving the change -- we are being herded onto their desired ground for a fight, in which they will burn down cities and jam up freeways and call for genocide with hundreds of thousands in the streets, and steal elections, and run a shadow government with a former President and the world's most sophisticated intelligence agency, and flood the border with unassimilating mouths with fists, cut the genitals off children, and how dare we object. So, no, talking is not on the menu.

Meanwhile, another factor I suppose would suppress Republican turnout is the miserable economy. Bidenomics may just have worked out for these bargain-bin Pol-Pots. Tiny, marginal differences across vast numbers have significant effects. Republicans are traditionally the ones who don't have time to organize various marches and die-ins and street signs and whatnot because we have to go to work. I'm laying out a guess here that there's a differential effect (one might say a "disproportionate impact") with inflation crushing American households, and that it works against Republicans. Easy to say, "Just go vote, man, there's too much at stake!" Less easy to arrange some time off (or to go when you need to sleep) for a lot of people, and I'm betting that through some combination of likely voters and those in the pinch, it's Republicans who take it in the shorts.

Gee, it would be nice if we had a candidate other than Trump. Gee, it would be nice if things were going better for Trump. Either way. I'm not against either Trump or DeSantis, and hell, even Ramaswamy would be better than Biden, although Haley probably has a better chance than Ramaswamy, which is still to say zilch. Gee, it would be nice if a lot of things, and none of them are happening.

This administration, which began by stealing an election and turning DC into a razor-wire military occupation, is not about to exit on reasonable terms, Trump or no Trump. Remember when DeSantis peaked in the polls and for a week he was "worse than Trump" and all of that? If DeSantis were the leading candidate, he would be the one under multiple indictments! We could run Abraham Delano Jefferson and still the freeways will be shutdown if we poll high, and cities will burn if we win. Our choice of candidate matters less than we think. We learned in the first half of this administration (Obama's third) that Americans are much more ready to dehumanize and imprison one another than we thought, and in the second half, we learned that Americans are much closer to 1937 Germany than we could imagine.

It's not the "right" putting on swastikas and Lugers, just as it wasn't back then.

I think that we are more deeply screwed than many of us consciously admit, and that our biggest danger lies in not recognizing that things have changed, and we have not. I said in 2014 (to a friend of mine, a political consultant in NY state) that the next election would be about anger, not politics, and I was right. God only knows what 2024 will be about, but we had better figure it out fast. We're not voting our way out of this. This is that point in the history of every country taken over by Marxists when there is still something to do about it, but we cannot see it in real-time.

Oh, I'm sorry - were we still talking about Trump?

p.s. What does Ronna McDaniel do?