Is Biden's House of Cards Finally on the Road to Collapse?
Obama and Clinton-era Democrats have been manipulating the public for almost 20 years. New polling shows that Americans are finally tired of it.
Perhaps it is fitting that the presidency of Joe Biden is collapsing into a heap of anger and confusion. Not that Biden is doing much to inspire it — but that Biden’s octogenarian ravings seem emblematic of the demise of the Obama-Clinton era manipulation of public sentiment.
Recent polling by Harvard/Harris shows that the Democrats aren’t just in a little bit of trouble. Plagued by infighting between liberals and progressives, Democrats writ large have consumed too much of their own product. Drinking your own Kool-Aid, getting high on their own supply, or more metaphorically the tail wagging the poor dog to death.
Hence the problem with manipulating the public via media. At some point, it stops feeding what people want to believe about the world and starts sounding a bit more Soviet. People nod, but secretly they know better.
Hence my thoughts below.
Now for the record, plagiarism as defined is any intentional act of lying, cheating or stealing in order to pass off someone else’s work as your own. Yet if it is brazen and comes with a link, when you steal it from Chris Saxman over at Virginia FREE then it doesn’t feel like stealing all that much — right???
Let’s start with the toplines here, namely the generic ballot and the absolutely no-good very bad situation the Democrats find themselves in nationally:
A couple of things to pull from this:
Black support for Republicans is at 27%. That’s huge.
Suburban voters are with the GOP at 56%.
RealClearPolitics puts the differential at R+2.9 with Rassmussen having the differential as high as R+11 in March. Which means that even with concern over the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and potential NATO involvement, Biden isn’t getting any sort of wartime bump.
What is getting a wartime bump? INFLATION.
Noticeably sticky is the question of immigration, with 21% of voters continuing to make this one of their top three issues. Jobs and the economy is a perennial favorite; COVID-19 seems to be waning but strong. But inflation is a newcomer indeed with 32% of Americans signaling the rising price of everything to be their top concern.
Democrats are going to flip this back on Russia, stating that the ongoing conflict there is going to raise a lot more than just energy prices.
In this they are right — food prices, fertilizers, oil and gas, lumber and a whole host of intangibles are going to go north as sanctions cut both ways and the developing world — Brazil, Russia, India and China — remain cool to siding with the European Union and United States against the Russian Federation.
Yet given the pace of spending in Washington, the influx of cheap dollars due to the COVID pandemic combined with Democratic spending priorities means that there is simply more dollar than the supply. Thus the price for scarce goods goes up thanks to both the scarcity of the good and the amount of dollars warehoused by corporations, banks, local governments and individual saving accounts — making your nest egg and investments worth less over time.
Which makes this graph all the more interesting:
Who is the most trusted politician in America right now?
Donald J. Trump — and not by small margins either.
Yet check out who is right there alongside Trump in terms of popularity. Former VP Mike Pence is riding shotgun with Trump at the moment, but it’s the disruptors who are leading the pack — not the peacemakers. Ted Cruz remains a favorite among evangelicals. Bernie Sanders remains a favorite among progressives. Ron Desantis remains a favorite back up to Donald Trump.
Now granted, much of this is pure name ID. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo isn’t precisely a household name (he ought to be).
But in terms of pure branding?
Trump isn’t just leading the pack. Trump is defining the pack.
Which leads us to the institutions…
Longtime readers will have heard me bang on about the seven institutions and how five are owned by the left, one is contested, and the other remains firmly in the hands of the right:
Bureaucracy
Entertainment
Media
Academia
Education
Churches
Military and First Responders
The top five are entirely possessed by the political left. Churches are at present being raided, while the military and first responders — police, fire, rescue — remain utterly resistant to the noise.
There’s good reasons for that. In most of the institutions, they have the latitude to get things wrong. Yet when you consider what first responders do? Their results are tactile. Get it wrong, and the police show up to the wrong door. Or someone dies. Or someone gets hurt. Or someone on your team gets hurt.
Get it wrong in academia? Edit it later.
Of the top five? Four of them are related to either military or legal profession in some way. Americans love their soldiers and LEOs. Americans love their 6-3 conservative US Supreme Court. Americans love ordering things from Amazon…
Americans tend to hate their existential enemies, whether it was the British Empire, the Confederacy, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and now Communist China and the Russian Federation. Americans almost need that outside force to compete against.
Yet there’s one thing that Americans seem to resent.
Manipulators.
Black Lives Matter.
Antifa.
Twitter.
Even the CDC.
People trust Facebook a bit more, but even then the censorship becomes grating after awhile, though in all candor I find that medium far more tolerable than the middle school cafeteria that is Twitter.
Yet there’s a trend in all of this — and you see it even among those who continue to insist that they should be able to teach transgenderism to kindergartners and then scream bloody murder when they are discovered. Or teach CRT to high schools and then hide it behind DEI requirements. Another topic for another time, perhaps.
In effect, people are getting sick and tired of the political left. Yet there’s something else happening here, because while in the past the political left would take a stride and watch as the political right merely cemented their gains, one is starting to see how most Americans are pushing back in a serious way — even despite the statesmanlike (sic) leadership of the political elites in their own party.
Facts are that most Americans are tired of being told they are racist by BLM. They are certainly tired of Antifa burning their cities while treating January 6th as some sort of Reichstag fire. They are tired of the collaboration of Twitter mobs and legacy media where news stories are manufactured because some random account said X and brave Y stood up against the haters — nevermind that the same PR firm held both ends of the string. Even the CDC with mask mandates, wait no masks, wait all the masks, wait that doesn’t poll well so stop using them — even that has become stale and old.
In short, Americans are tired of being scolded by a pack of cubicle-dwelling credentialed pajama boy elites who couldn’t change their own oil if there was an eight-dollar latte and tickets to the next Arcade Fire concert on the line.
See the trap?
Now some snooty millennial just read that, set down their soy latte and sniffed, “Moron, my Toyota Prius doesn’t need an oil change so I don’t have to consider anything this guy has to say!”
This is the problem with a whole generation that was never spanked but overloaded with 4th place trophies and stickers as a child.
AND THEY VOTE!
But this is what they do. They scold but they cannot argue. They emote but cannot think. They were raised by parents who scold and emote but can neither hold forth a thought rationally nor explain why they believe what they believe much less make the other person’s argument. So what do they do instead?
They maniuplate.
The good news at least is that America seems to be waking up and becoming wise to the play. Yet one does notice that many of the divides are generational. The further away from the simulacrum of public education and academia a person is, the more likely they are to be grounded in certain realities that no amount of protest, screaming, scolding or shaming is going to undo.
All the more reason to stick to our guns on public education reform. More on this as Virginia localities are struggling to meet with the double whammy of state mandates on education vs. local school boards setting outrageous budgets and then whining about funding cuts while administrators pad their numbers. What the system could use is a good auditor…
Meanwhile, don’t get terribly discouraged by the orchestration of legacy media and social media, especially as woke corporations attempt to bully their customers into an agenda. Boycotts are a marvelous thing in an era where a tiny fraction of the market can wipe out a quarterly earnings report in a heartbeat.
Hang in there, stay strong, and mind your mind.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.