Commentary Culture Investigations

“Michigan Choices,” editorial cartoon by Tom Stiglich for The American Spectator on Nov. 2, 2026.

Generic polls give generic results; they do not give specific outcomes. Obvious as this may seem, it bears remembering that each race is different and those differences matter. We may wake up on Wednesday to find these individual differences yielded an outcome very different from what we have been hearing for months.
By now everyone has heard that Democrats hold a big lead in generic polling going into Tuesday’s midterm elections. As of Oct. 30, Real Clear Politics’ average of national generic congressional polling showed Democrats are ahead by 8.2 percentage points. It has routinely been in this range since mid-September.
This is regularly reported as though the election’s outcome is a foregone conclusion, with the only question being how high the blue wave will crest. It is therefore worthwhile to step back and look at just how “generic” a generic congressional ballot question is. The latest Harvard CAPS/Harris poll’s generic ballot question to likely voters reads: “If the congressional election were held today would you be more likely to vote for a Democrat or a Republican for Congress?” (RELATED: The Weirdo Factor Quells the Blue Wave)
Again, rather straightforward. The problem comes when you also look at the 11 Senate and 11 gubernatorial races that RCP is featuring on their homepage: Few of these show margins reflecting the national generic polling average.
According to RCP’s Oct. 30 average of the top 11 Senate races, only one, Georgia’s Senate race, equals or exceeds the 8.2 percentage point national generic average. In RCP’s top 11 gubernatorial races (I substituted RCP’s Oct. 29 Nevada tie for RCP’s Oct. 30 inclusion of New York), only one equals or exceeds the 8.2 percentage point national generic average.
Do respondents have one response to a generic question about party preference, and then another when it comes to their specific member of Congress?
The specific races assumed to be the newsworthy show results very different from the generic polling.
Of course, the national generic polling average is not a universal outcome, where Democrats lead every race by 8.2 percentage points. It needs to be applied to a local baseline of some sort to have greater predictive value.
The most recent national election was the 2024 presidential election. While a presidential election is not a perfect comparison (presidential election turnout is far higher and driven by the nominees at the top of the ballot), it gives some semblance of a localized baseline against which to apply the national generic polling margin. Still, applying the national generic margin to 2024’s localized 2024 presidential margins produces interesting results.
To get a semblance of each state’s most recent political terrain, we use each state’s 2024 presidential margin and add the 8.2 national generic margin to it.
Taking Texas as an example, in 2024, Trump won the state by 13.6 percentage points; adding Democrats’ 8.2 percentage-point generic lead to this, and we get a projection that Democrats should be running at a 5.4 percentage-point deficit. Instead, RCP’s latest polling average has Republican Paxton trailing the Democrat Talarico by 1.8 percentage points: In the Texas Senate race, Democrats are polling ahead of what we could have expected.
According to RCP’s averages in the top 11 Senate races, Democrats are running ahead of where 2024’s presidential election results and the 8.2 national generic ballot margin would predict in six of the top 11 Senate races. In the top 11 gubernatorial races, Democrats are also running ahead in six.
Within this relatively even split, though, is a great divergence from the impression of a large Democratic lead. In RCP’s 11 top Senate races, Democrats’ average lead is 2.4 percentage points. In RCP’s top gubernatorial races, Democrats’ average lead is 1 percentage point.
This divergence raises another possibility for today’s generic polling. Do respondents have one response to a generic question about party preference, and then another when it comes to their specific member of Congress? Hard to believe as this may seem to be, it is a very common condition in voter behavior.
According to Gallup polling, overall approval of Congress is just 14 percent, and only 15 percent believe most members of Congress deserve reelection. Yet 43 percent of respondents believe their Member of Congress deserves reelection.
This dichotomy is not new. When asked about term limits, U.S. voters overwhelmingly back them. Yet at the same time, incumbent members of Congress overwhelmingly win reelection, and in that figure are many long-time members of Congress.
The same dichotomy of generic preferences and specific races appears to be occurring in today’s midterms.
Today’s average of generic ballot national polling is not a particularly good predictor of the polling that we see in specific races’ polls. It is not because the specific political terrain and the specific candidates contesting on it matter — they matter to the voters, and they therefore matter in our assumptions about what could occur in Tuesday’s actual outcomes. And those outcomes may be quite different from what many are now being led to expect.
READ MORE from J.T. Young:
What Happened to John Cleese Isn’t Funny
Philly Fraud: What Woke Wrought
The Left’s Victimhood Is About Strategy not Sympathy
J.T. Young is the author of the recent book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing.  Follow him on Substack.  

Democrats are absolutely furious that Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens endorsed Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers and made known her opposition to the hatred and antisemitism emanating from Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer went so far as to call Stevens’ endorsement of Rogers a “despicable betrayal,” and a large number of Democrats are trying to kick her out of the caucus. The Michigan Democratic Party even removed her from its website and said she is no longer a member.
But many Democrats are going much further, alleging that Stevens turned against Abdul El-Sayed not because she has a mind of her own and made a decision about the danger El-Sayed presents for the state of Michigan, but because she is controlled by her fiancé, disability rights lawyer Jason Turkish.
Former Democrat Michigan Governor Jim Blanchard said in an interview with Gongwer News Service that he believes Turkish manipulated Stevens into turning against El-Sayed.
In the minds of Democrats, Haley Stevens became a mindless damsel controlled by her romantic partner the second she turned against one radical Democrat…
“[Turkish] was working her over. The way he was saying it was, ‘Everyone is disappointed in you, they did everything they could to help you and then immediately after you lose the primary, you endorsed him,’” Blanchard theorized.
Turkish, said Blanchard, was “strung out” over El-Sayed, and then Stevens had a “sudden change.” Blanchard said, “This is not the Haley I know…. Something snapped in her. And it snapped in 24 hours.”
The allegation is that, since Jason Turkish is Jewish, he carried out a manipulation campaign on Haley Stevens to convince her that El-Sayed represents a threat to Michigan’s Jewish community, and that it worked. (RELATED: Michigan AG Dana Nessel to Jewish Democrats: Sacrifice Yourself for the Cause)
Democrats have come to this conclusion about Stevens’ supposed lack of agency in part because she recently revealed in interviews that she is considering converting to Judaism ahead of her summer 2027 wedding to Turkish.
But Stevens, a sitting U.S. representative, has been clear in interviews that she is her own woman and that she has come to her own conclusion on Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign. She told the New York Times last week that what began her realization that El-Sayed had gone off the rails was El-Sayed’s refusal to state whether Iran or Israel posed a bigger threat to the United States in his debate with Mike Rogers. At this point, Stevens stood up out of her chair in shock.
She told the New York Times of this moment, “He’s an orator. He is gifted. Then how does that happen? Come on!”
Stevens further explained why she “felt compelled to speak out for Jewish constituents who are scared of the prospect of Dr. El-Sayed in the Senate.” (RELATED: 10 Times Abdul El-Sayed Was Absolutely Wacked Out)
“Someone in the Jewish community said — six months ago, it was during the primary — safety is our affordability issue because of attacks on Jewish elected officials’ homes, attacks to their lives, attacks on the synagogues,” Stevens explained.
Stevens even responded directly to the allegation that she is being puppeteered by her fiancé.
“I think I’ve changed his opinion,” Stevens said. “He goes, ‘You’re more Jewish than me.’”
There you have it: Haley Stevens said she is the one who convinced her longtime Democrat fiancé to be concerned about Abdul El-Sayed’s posture toward the Jewish state and Jewish Michiganders, and he followed suit.
But more and more Democrats are coming out to say that Turkish is the brains and force behind all of her decisions.
University of Michigan regent Jordan Acker, a Democrat, alleged that Turkish was controlling Stevens to the extent that he confiscated her phone from her like she is a child.
“Her fiancé took her phone away,” Acker wrote on X.
Turkish has denied this allegation, saying that Stevens turned off her own phone because of the large volume of communications she was receiving after endorsing Rogers.
Acker stated his theory that Turkish is controlling Stevens in the clearest of terms.
“It is painful to watch someone you care about go through something like this,” said Acker of Stevens. “It is even more painful to worry about the influence of those closest to her,” he said, in reference to Turkish.
Former Democratic Rep. Susan Wild has also joined those suggesting Haley Stevens has lost her agency because of her Jewish fiancé.
“So many people in the Democratic Party have shown so much support to Haley over the years, and she has betrayed them all. If this is because of her new relationship (about which many of us were so happy for her after she lost the primary), all I can say is that any woman who abandons her friends when a new guy comes along is no friend at all,” Wild said on X Monday.
Additionally, Caitlin Legacki, a former spokesperson for Stevens, said Turkish was the reason Stevens lost her primary. Legacki alleged that Turkish had asked her to be more vocal in her defense of Israel and had wielded too much influence over her campaign.
“Jason is vaporizing Haley’s future so that he can be a main character in this moment and it is sad to watch her participate in that. He was an extraordinarily toxic presence, was verbally abusive to staff and had some of the worst political instincts I’ve ever witnessed,” Legacki said on X.
Of course, Haley Stevens is 100 percent correct in her concerns about El-Sayed. As explained by the American Jewish Congress: “El-Sayed said he would withdraw both offensive and defensive U.S. military aid to Israel, characterized the Israeli government as being as evil as Hamas, described Israeli policy as apartheid, and rebuffed the premise that Israel has a right to exist specifically as a Jewish state, arguing that such a definition is incompatible with equal rights.”
In the minds of Democrats, Haley Stevens became a mindless damsel controlled by her romantic partner the second she turned against one radical Democrat, who already happens to be at the center of a Democrat civil war over his extreme stance on Israel.
The misogyny — and antisemitism — starts as soon as you don’t do everything Democrats want you to do.
The control is coming from the party, not Haley Stevens’s romantic relationship.
READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes:
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Last Friday, I published the final installment of The Five Black Pills, a series on the tools of civilizational destruction and societal demoralization that the post-Soviet Left has unleashed on the world.
If you’ve got the time, I suggest reading them all. They can be found here…

The 5QT Presents: The Five Black Pills, Part 1 — Feminism
The 5QT Presents: The Five Black Pills, Part 2 — Islam, Islamization, and Third-Worldism
The 5QT Presents: The Five Black Pills, Part 3 — The Burgeoning Illegitimacy of the Managerial Elite
The 5QT Presents: The Five Black Pills, Part 4 — The Left Weaponized the Weather to Bring Down the West
The 5QT Presents: The Five Black Pills, Part 5 — What You Hate About AI Is Not Really About AI

In the series, I tried to get across the fact that our cultural and political institutions, dominated by the globalist international leftists, perhaps best personified by the corrupt elitists of the World Economic Forum in Davos and at our supposedly elite institutions of learning like Harvard and Yale, have engaged in a project of tearing down traditional Western society. This is, of course, nothing new; they’ve been at it since before World War I. (RELATED: The West Is a Superior Civilization (And I Don’t Care If That Offends You))
What’s new, at least somewhat, are the tools which have been refined to create the demoralization they need in order to bring down the West.
I didn’t talk about race, per se, though the important parts of the race conversation can be found in Part 2, which discusses third-world identity politics. I didn’t include a racial category for a specific reason — race isn’t what matters. Culture is what matters. Democrats want to make everything about race not because it’s about race, but because race is a good mask for the things they’re actually doing, and it’s bad for business when those are the things that are out in the open.
So, no — race is only a black pill if you let it be one, and you letting it be one is a reflection of the culture you choose.
And the culture the Left is inflicting on this and all the other Western countries is utterly poisonous.
Take Michigan, for example. This is what happens when Turning Point USA goes to college campuses not named Hillsdale in that state (warning, the language here is awfully salty)…

At the University of Michigan, a woman confronted students at a Turning Point USA debate table, demanding to see their permit before slapping one of them across the face on camera.
Campus police tackled and handcuffed her moments later. As she was led away, she shouted, “I should have killed you while I had the chance.”
— Semper Raw ™️ (@SemperRaw) November 2, 2026

If you watch that video all the way to the end, you’ll hear one of the onlookers tell that nose-ringed Chinese Cultural Revolution reject (I’m not saying that because of her ethnicity; I’m saying it because she’s the classic indoctrinated psychopathic young female that the Cultural Revolution weaponized against its victims) that she ought to be in a mental institution, and as she’s being stuffed into a police car after physically attacking two different people, she responds, proudly, that she’s already been in one.
How do you get into, and stay in, the University of Michigan if you’re an institutionalized lunatic? That’s a question which didn’t bring laughter not so long ago.
But it’s where we are.
You probably saw this, from another Turning Point campus appearance, this one at the University of Texas, San Antonio…

At @UTSA for Pick Up the Mic, a student read a poem celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk with such glee, then told me I was brave to be out here without my neck covered.
I told her I’d pray for her.
This is the climate. We pick up the mic anyway. https://t.co/ZfipQsosaF
— Christian Collins (@CollinsforTX) October 27, 2026

The perpetrator of that outrage is the daughter of Brazilian immigrants, and after the internet made her famous, she posted a decidedly insincere apology meant to stave off the consequences of what she’d done on camera.

🇧🇷🇺🇸🚨 AGORA: Isa Casahuga (Isabela Casahuga-Lemgruber), estudante da UTSA, é brasileira. Filha de Paula Lemgruber Casahuga, nascida no Rio de Janeiro, e de pai espanhol. A família é de origem brasileira e viveu em vários países.
Num evento do Turning Point USA na universidade, ela se apresentou como socialista de esquerda e leu um poema zombando do assassinato de Charlie Kirk.
O texto falava de “Kirkiversary” e de “a shot to the neck” um tiro no pescoço. Ela ainda disse ao organizador Christian Collins que ele era “corajoso” por estar ali sem proteção no pescoço e se apresentou como “Pamper Baby”.
Agora ela gravou um vídeo de desculpas se declarando cristã e que tudo não passou de um equívoco.
No vídeo, pede desculpas à família de Charlie Kirk, a Christian Collins e a todos que se sentiram ofendidos.
— Conservatism And Elegance 🇺🇲 (@ThayzzySmith) November 1, 2026

This is the world the Left has made. When Shout Your Institutionalization! is married to an open embrace of political violence (at least, until the adults notice and you have to squeeze out the crocodile tears for a few minutes), and then put into the service of feminism, Third-Worldism with a Muslim face (and it doesn’t matter that this is incompatible with feminism; they’ll figure that out later), a commanded obeisance to a corrupt managerial elite, the fraud of anthropogenic global warming used as a brake on capitalistic economic growth, and finally the fear of technological progress spread through technological means, what you have is a turbocharged mass psychosis disguised as a political movement. (RELATED: The French Revolution of the 21st Century: From the Guillotine to the Suicide Vest)
Queers For Palestine, meet Abdul El-Sayed, your nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan.

🚨 OMG. Abdul El Sayed just embroiled himself in national scandal by saying we should let girls see men in their locker room because they can SEE IT ANYWAY on the internet
“The notion somehow that you are going to prevent your child from being exposed to something that you may find disagreeable… is so profoundly outdated.”
“The most important thing you can do is not try to protect a person from seeing a thing.”
This is the 3RD WORLDER talking!
This is batsht crazy…he wants men in girls bathrooms 🤯
Abdul thinks it’s outdated to say men should not be around little girls in the bathroom
Tomorrow, Michigan gets to tell him what it thinks by voting red! https://t.co/6bqMOqV3Pp
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 2, 2026

Well, that’s very inclusive, isn’t it? Except El-Sayed isn’t so inclusive, it turns out…

Haley Stevens was going to do a Democratic unity rally with Abdul El-Sayed and James Clyburn where she was going to encourage her supporters, many of whom have serious reservations about El-Sayed, to vote for him.
This was very important for El-Sayed, because Stevens is popular among Jewish and black Michigan Democrats and Clyburn is an icon among black voters nationwide. El-Sayed has weakness with both of these groups and needs to shore them up going into election day.
Stevens’s condition was that he make an unambiguous, unqualified condemnation of the antisemitic rhetoric his friends, supporters and surrogates have been using, including in ads run in Michigan.
El-Sayed refused to do this, and instead asked Stevens not to appear at the event. At that point, Stevens realized that he was not interested in unity with her or her supporters and that she could no longer support him for Senate.
El-Sayed is an antisemite. He is friends with antisemites Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur. He will not condemn them. He will not condemn the awful things they say.
He has had multiple opportunities to condemn their hateful rhetoric, and he always says: “He is not part of a campaign, nobody speaks for me but me, and I’m not here to talk about that.”
That’s not good enough. If that is how a Republican talked about Nick Fuentes or Richard Spencer, it would be the biggest controversy in the race. The fact that so many Democrats are willing to tolerate this from Abdul El-Sayed is an indictment of the entire party.
There is no coalition that can include both the Jewish Democratic members of Temple Israel and supporters of the Hezbollah terrorist who tried to murder their preschool children. Abdul El-Sayed made a decision about who he wanted in his tent.
Haley Stevens was late to realize it, but it is admirable that she finally decided to be an upstander instead of a bystander. No Nazis in the US Senate.
— Daniel Friedman (@DanFriedman81) November 1, 2026

The key piece to this is under the fold…
Stevens’s condition was that he make an unambiguous, unqualified condemnation of the antisemitic rhetoric his friends, supporters and surrogates have been using, including in ads run in Michigan.
El-Sayed refused to do this, and instead asked Stevens not to appear at the event. At that point, Stevens realized that he was not interested in unity with her or her supporters and that she could no longer support him for Senate.
Which led to…

I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today. https://t.co/pQgfSBuhOJ
— Haley Stevens (@HaleyforMI) November 1, 2026

And that led to…

Haley Stevens should have no future in the Democratic Party https://t.co/iGTloOj3vC
— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) November 1, 2026

El-Sayed’s friends would throw Harry Sisson off a building if they got a chance, but that’s neither here nor there. More important was this…

Haley Stevens turned her back on Michigan families, her supposed values and all Americans who are in desperate need of a Senate majority who will fight to lower costs rather than surrender to Donald Trump.
Democrats are united behind Abdul El-Sayed, the leader Michigan deserves. https://t.co/VIOLtepXav
— Tammy Duckworth (@TammyDuckworth) November 1, 2026

And this…

@abdulelsayed has spent decades fighting for communities of color, for black people in this country, to have equitable access to healthcare. Now we have Democrat leaders who claim to care about the future of our democracy going on TV to spread lies about him. What Haley Stevens has done is unforgivable. And it won’t work.
— Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) November 1, 2026

Plus this…

Rep. Haley Stevens’ staff is right to resign in disgust. They understand that the election in Michigan is far more important than Haley’s fragile ego and that all of us must stand together to elect Abdul, defeat Rogers and end the Republican rubber-stamp control of the Senate.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 1, 2026

Not to mention this…

Carville is having an unhinged crash out over Haley Stevens:
“If you think that these Republicans are going to treat you as anything other than what they view you as…a used condom. The Democrats don’t even think you’re worth a used condom.”
They’re coming completely unglued. https://t.co/HnT96m0k20
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) November 1, 2026

And especially this…

Congresswoman Stevens is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.
— Curtis Hertel (@CurtisHertelJr) November 1, 2026

That’s the chair of the Michigan Democrat Party.
Now, we don’t need to go overboard here. When Republican politicians jump overboard to endorse Democrats like a few of the NeverTrumpers did — though you might notice that most of those people tried to preserve their standing in the party by trashing President Trump without going fully over to the other side — it’s commonplace for them to get thrown off the island. What’s happening to Haley Stevens isn’t shocking or surprising, regardless of what side of the aisle it happens on. (RELATED: Black Enthusiasm Gap Haunts Far Left Democrats)
But the level of vitriol, and particularly from people who are supposed to be sober, responsible leaders on the national stage, is notable.
Because it’s so performative.
It comes off as fear. Better stay in the collective. And if that means participating in the collective’s Two Minute Hate against Haley Stevens, then by all means you’d better do it.
Forget about the fact that a Jewish woman who’s very nervous about publicly supporting somebody who won’t distance himself from Hasan Piker couldn’t get a single consideration from El-Sayed in return for his endorsement. She refused to surrender to the collective, and for that she must be annihilated. (RELATED: Hasan Piker and the Democrats Who Embrace His Violent Rhetoric)
Just like John Fetterman must be annihilated. And Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were annihilated.
A lot of that is partisan politics. But this is not the partisan politics you’re used to. These Democrats are not just the flip side of the GOP within the same basic political alignment. The partisan politics of old was about who got to sit at the levers of the machinery, whose friends got to rake off the contracts and the grant money, and whose pet projects would take priority.
This is about swallowing all five of the black pills, and willing yourself not to vomit them back up, in order to make the world into what history refused to make of it in the last century.
It requires a kind of political discipline which is not matched by the personal discipline of its followers. The kind of political discipline which can only come from groupthink and mass hysteria.
That crazy noseringed woman in Ann Arbor was made that way through medication and indoctrination. Very few people allow themselves to be triggered into violence at the mere suggestion of a differing political opinion. As we’ve noted, there is a full-on campaign to create as many people like her as possible on those college campuses.
And while the people at Turning Point USA are perhaps the best of all Americans for doing what they can to counter the mass psychosis being spread in our cultural institutions, they aren’t winning, and they don’t have enough muscle behind them. This is sadly quite correct…

@kaukosaataja You have to think in caveman terms. These debates are two tribes recruiting allies. TPUSA’s argument is “The other tribe is mean.” The other tribe’s argument is “We outnumber them. We’re organizing to kill them. We tell them to their face and they do nothing.” Who’d you join?
— Roman Helmet Guy (@romanhelmetguy) October 29, 2026

We want the traditional approach to work. We want to reason with people and change their minds through logic and persuasion and rationality.
But views not formed through reason and rational thought will not be dispelled through reason and rationality alone. Remember what we’re dealing with…

@C_3C_3 56% of liberal women 29-18 yr formally diagnosed with mental illness.
43% of liberal women under 40 diagnosed with mental illness.
34% of ALL liberal women diagnosed with mental illness.
29% of liberal women are medicated due to mental illness. https://t.co/7SrNjEWRQv
— Fibonacci112358 (@DaVinci132134) September 4, 2026

The Left disciplines their people harshly through ostracism and worse. Haley Stevens is almost certainly under multiple credible death threats today. Supposed leaders on the Left won’t even speak out against political violence for fear of what the collective might do should they stray too far. (RELATED: Why So Many Political Pyromaniacs, Assassins, and Other Scary Types?)
Devon Eriksen explained how we got here…

Working at Oculus would have been an utter waste of my time except for one thing.
While I was there, I realized what’s wrong with leftists.
Not that they have been programmed, that’s obvious. Not why they have been programmed. For power, that’s obvious, too.
But how they have been programmed.
The exact method that their moral compass has been destroyed works like this:
Target a bunch of people with very few deeds and accomplishments, such as young people or incompetent people, or incompetent young people.
Create for them an environment where they are rewarded with moral approval, not for what they do, but for believing certain ideas.
The ideas don’t have to be outrageous, or absurd, or have anything to do with what you actually need them to believe. In fact, it’s better to start with something innocuous.
Why? Because the goal isn’t to install those beliefs at all. The goal is to repeat this process until you create a person who measures his moral worth by what he believes, not what he does.
Keep at this until you have created a mass of people who not only reward themselves with a feeling of moral superiority for believing the right things, but who will reward each other for believing orthodox things, and who will compete with each other, not to do the most good, but to have the most orthodox beliefs.
Now, change one of the propositions you have programmed them with to a slightly more radical version of itself, and hold this up as a more correct version of the old belief, which has been newly discovered by scholarly investigations into culture and moral philosophy.
Sit back, watch, and give them a few weeks to compete with each other to adopt the new belief, and to condemn the “evil” of anyone who believes the old belief, the very thing they believed last month.
Repeat this process until they are used to rapidly changing their entire belief system in response to an external cue.
Congratulations, you have a population of entirely programmable people whose moral compass is not just broken, but entirely non-existent.
They don’t care what any person in front of them actually does. Only that he believe the orthodox thing, which they just learned about in last week’s memo.
They are willing to do anything, so long as it is done in support of their current belief system, which can be replaced whenever it’s convenient to do so.
They are willing to burn down an entire city with no qualms whatsoever if they are doing it in support of the idea that black lives matter.
They are willing to murder a man in front of his children, and it doesn’t matter if his actions were entirely peaceful and good, because all that matters to them is whether he believes the correct things or not.
And a man who builds cheap spaceflight for the human race, develops viable electric cars to save the environment, restores voices to the voiceless, and plans, for his next trick, to heal the blind… well, all those are deeds, so none of them matter. The only thing that matters is that he told people to vote republican once, which is wrongthink.
So what you have a horde of communist zombies, who can be steered to shuffle in any direction and attack the living, eat their brains, and turn them into more zombies.
Once someone becomes one of the zombies, you can’t cure him, because a moral compass can only be repaired by understanding the consequences of actions in a new way… and they don’t care about actions or consequences. They only care about beliefs, and not about consequences at all.
Their moral compasses aren’t just broken. They are absent. There’s nothing to repair.
You have to understand that the zombies are zombies now.
— Devon Eriksen (@Devon_Eriksen_) November 1, 2026

The crux…
Target a bunch of people with very few deeds and accomplishments, such as young people or incompetent people, or incompetent young people.
Create for them an environment where they are rewarded with moral approval, not for what they do, but for believing certain ideas.
The ideas don’t have to be outrageous, or absurd, or have anything to do with what you actually need them to believe. In fact, it’s better to start with something innocuous.
Why? Because the goal isn’t to install those beliefs at all. The goal is to repeat this process until you create a person who measures his moral worth by what he believes, not what he does.
Keep at this until you have created a mass of people who not only reward themselves with a feeling of moral superiority for believing the right things, but who will reward each other for believing orthodox things, and who will compete with each other, not to do the most good, but to have the most orthodox beliefs.
Now, change one of the propositions you have programmed them with to a slightly more radical version of itself, and hold this up as a more correct version of the old belief, which has been newly discovered by scholarly investigations into culture and moral philosophy.
Sit back, watch, and give them a few weeks to compete with each other to adopt the new belief, and to condemn the “evil” of anyone who believes the old belief, the very thing they believed last month.
That’s the indoctrination. It’s how you go from “safe, legal and rare” to “Shout Your Abortion!” It’s how you go from outrage over Abu Ghraib to openly rooting for the IRGC. It’s how you go from “affordable health care” to “Medicare for all.”
And it’s how you go from presenting center-left politics as Jesus’s teachings made into public policy to claiming Abdul El-Sayed, spawn of the Muslim Brotherhood, is the candidate of the U.S. Constitution. (RELATED: Abdul El-Sayed: A Muslim Brotherhood Puppet and a Grave National Security Threat)
You can choose to believe the polls, and you can worry over the midterm election. Those are all items worthy of debate. But they aren’t the fundamental issue.
The fundamental issue is that we have a political movement which has fully embraced not just revolutionary Marxism as a foundational political ideology but has manufactured and weaponized mental illness as an activating factor.
And the Right has not yet internalized this, nor has it settled on an appropriate response it’s willing to buy into.
This is a problem a lot bigger than a midterm cycle which can be reversed in two years. It had better be tackled, and soon.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
The Left Is Jealous of Elon’s Success
The 5QT Presents: The Five Black Pills, Part 5 — What You Hate About AI Is Not Really About AI
The Spookiest Interview in American Political History

MRC Graphic

Election Day beckons, and there’s a November Surprise. Democrats and their media enablers were outraged that Democrat Rep. Haley Stevens offered a last-minute endorsement of Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race. Abdul-boosting journalists sounded like MS NOW host Jacob Soboroff, who denounced Rogers for “the incredible amount of Islamophobia and bigotry that has been put forward in this race, including by him himself.”Or his fellow MS NOW host Joe Scarborough, who bitterly tweeted: “Today, Haley Stevens endorsed Donald Trump’s most savage policies—the brutalizing of Hispanics, the killing of US citizens in American streets, the launching of endless wars, the gutting of Michigander’s health care, his war on civil rights, higher gas prices, more expensive groceries, less health care, and endless corruption. A vote for Mike Rogers is a vote for Donald Trump. End of story.”The New York Times first went after Stevens on Saturday in an article headlined “Why Haley Stevens Can’t Stop Talking About Abdul El-Sayed,” in which Times reporter Reid Epstein referred to as “Dr. El-Sayed” 24 times in the article. The paper treated the Stevens turnaround with a flurry of campaign stories gathered under the blunt headline, “Democratic Senate Primary Loser Endorses Republican in Michigan.” Loser! The Free Press reminded readers on Monday that two years ago in Michigan, Elissa Slotkin welcomed in Liz Cheney and the Democrats held up signs reading “Country Over Party.” The parties love to hug a defector, but that “country over party” line only goes one way. If you leave the Democrats, you’re just a cynical “traitor.” On NBC’s Saturday Night Live, fake-news anchor Michael Che mocked Ted Cruz for suggesting a Senator El-Sayed could endanger people’s lives, and then the comedian joked “Then he went back to the Senate to cut health care and food stamps.” Then came the anti-Israel joke: “This week, a record number of people voted in Israel’s election, which is great to see regardless of if you’re on the right side, or the left side, or the genocide.”Speaking of political comedy, Alex Christy found the weeknight late-night shows devoted 87 percent of their jokes about Senate candidates to the Republicans.  The few jokes they made about Democrats were gentle, except a couple about Maine’s Troy Jackson having kids with his second cousin. Ronny Chieng at Comedy Central joked: “Troy Jackson has been elected senator in Mississippi.” Jimmy Fallon used an actress for routines mocking Susan Collins AND Darline Graham.Finally, the network Sunday shows energetically downplayed the “Decoy Dan” Sullivan scandal in Alaska. David Becker on CBS said both sides do it: “We’ve seen Elon Musk bankroll Cornel West’s presidential campaign in 2024.”Trevor Ault on ABC noted “reporting by The New York Times allegedly claimed that the Peltola campaign recruited that second Dan Sullivan to get on the ballot to try to siphon some votes away from the incumbent.” He said “pretty much all the legal experts that we spoke to said it would not be illegal to recruit another Dan Sullivan to join the ballot. He added” it doesn’t seem to really be swinging the needle a ton…they’re not really treating this as a massive scandal.”Enjoy the podcast on video below. The audio is here. 

This looks like a big blue wave — maybe a huge one. That’s no cause for despair just yet. But brace yourselves, because a bumpy ride might be coming.

In a surprising turn of events, Michigan Democrat Haley Stevens revoked her endorsement for Abdul El-Sayed, instead supporting El-Sayed’s rival, Mike Rogers. (RELATED: A Time for Choosing: Reagan’s Warning for Republicans and Democrats in 2026)

I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today. https://t.co/pQgfSBuhOJ
— Haley Stevens (@HaleyforMI) November 1, 2026

The Spectator P.M. Podcast hosts Madelynn Gondy, Ellie Gardey Holmes, and Lyrah Margo discuss Stevens’ shocking switch and how it reveals a deeper issue within the Democratic Party. They also discuss a viral video from a high school teacher who shared her student’s poorly written responses about The Great Gatsby, highlighting the public school system’s major education issue. (READ MORE: Abdul El-Sayed: A Muslim Brotherhood Puppet and a Grave National Security Threat)
Tune in to hear their discussion!

Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Spotify.

Watch the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Rumble.

If you had asked me over the last few months about the Republicans’ chances in the midterm elections, I would have told you I am cautiously optimistic, but ask me a week out, and I will have a better answer. Election day is now upon us, and while I cannot be certain of what will happen, I am positive it will not be a blue wave. I still think Republicans can pull off something that has not happened in nearly 25 years and maintain power in both chambers of Congress while also holding the presidency. Of course, this relies on one thing, and that one thing is the American voter.
The seeds are there for Republicans to hold Congress: favorable new electoral maps, a growing economy, and polls that undervalue Republican voters. The biggest threat to victory is not the Democrats; it is Republican voters deciding to stay home. Let’s dive into the numbers.
Starting with the Senate, the race is tight. Republicans hold a 53–47 majority. Democrats need to flip four seats to regain the majority. In Texas, Ken Paxton (R) is locked in a dead heat with state Rep. James Talarico (D) over Sen. John Cornyn’s seat. The University of Houston’s Hobby School surveyed 2,000 likely Texas voters between October 10-14 and found Talarico at 48 percent, Paxton at 46 percent, Libertarian Ted Brown at 3 percent, and 3 percent undecided. Democrats have not won a Senate race in Texas since 1993.
In Michigan, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) is running again for the open Senate seat, this time against Abdul El-Sayed (D). In his 2024 Senate run, Rogers lost to Sen. Elissa Slotkin by just 19,000 votes. The Real Clear Politics average shows El-Sayed ahead 48.8 percent to 45.6 percent. However, an Insider Advantage poll of 1,200 likely voters conducted from October 21-22 had El-Sayed up 47.2 percent to 46 percent, within the poll’s margin of error. Republicans have not won a Senate race in Michigan since 1994, but this race is close.
Then there is Iowa, where Rep. Ashley Hinson (R) is running against state Rep. Josh Turek (D) for the open seat left by retiring Sen. Joni Ernst (R). The Cook Political Report now rates the race a toss-up. Emerson has Hinson up 47 percent to 45 percent, while Fox News has Turek ahead 49 percent to 47 percent. Democrats have not won a Senate race in Iowa since 2008.
I have not even begun to discuss Alaska, Maine, Kansas, or South Carolina yet, but for the sake of brevity, they are all toss-ups, seven in total.
If Democrats flip only three Senate seats, the chamber will be split 50–50; Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote would keep Republicans in the majority, but it would open the door to negotiations for a power-sharing agreement, which has not happened since the 117th Congress. In other words, Democrats need to win nearly every close race to take full control of the Senate, and six of them are in states Trump carried in 2024. President Trump also won one elector in Maine due to the state’s Congressional District Method
When it comes to the House, Fox News predicts it is already over for the Republicans. To take the majority in the House of Representatives, you need 218 seats. Fox News projects 223 seats for the Democrats, 195 for the Republicans, and 17 toss-ups. According to Fox, even if Republicans take all 17 toss-ups, they will be 6 seats short of the majority.
Let’s dig into the lean-Democrat seats, starting with the seats Republicans could lose.
Republicans previously held two open seats in the lean-Democrat section: Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ-1) and Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC-11). Without incumbency, the Arizona seat is vulnerable, especially since Schweikert has won by slim margins in the past. Edwards’s seat (R-NC-11), formerly held by Rep. Mark Meadows, is only vulnerable because Edwards dropped out late in the campaign due to allegations of sexual harassment, leaving Republican nominee Jennifer Balkcom to run a short-notice campaign. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA-1) is also in a lean-Democrat district, but do not count this scrappy congresswoman as down for the count; she has a knack for squeezing out electoral victories.
Redistricting will also play a role, as there are roughly 16 new Republican-leaning seats this cycle. Four of those 16 seats are in Florida, and five are in Texas. Looking at Fox’s numbers, Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL-14) is in one of those Republican-leaning districts, so that could be better labeled a toss-up. The same goes for Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX-32) and Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX-34), whose seats have become redder after redistricting. In North Carolina, Rep. Don Davis (D-NC-1) is also considered to be in one of the new Republican-leaning districts. Yet Fox still labels all four of these seats as lean-Democrat. Flip those four, sweep the toss-ups, and Republicans reach 216; hold Miller-Meeks’s seat and pull off one more upset, and the majority is back within reach.
So why are Republicans not performing as well as they should? The answer could be voter apathy. (RELATED: Winning the Election Shouldn’t Be This Hard for Republicans)
A recent Gallup poll shows that Republicans’ approval of Congress has dropped from 53 percent in February 2025 to 29 percent today. That is up only slightly from a low of 23 percent last November, and overall, 14 percent of Americans approve of Congress, the lowest pre-midterm reading since 1974. According to a senior Republican House staffer that I spoke with, it’s understandable why Republican voters feel dejected with the party. “Republicans overpromised with the idea of a trifecta,” they told me, “and now voters have apathy over the lack of action that was promised by both pundits and politicians.”
On paper, the economy is doing well: the United States is experiencing the lowest poverty rate in its modern history, the highest household income on record, oil and gas production is at an all-time high, and GDP growth in Q3 was a healthy 3.4 percent (and if sources in the administration are correct, Q4 could be yuge). Inflation, however, is running at 3.7 percent, gas prices are averaging over $4 a gallon, and an administration that ran on no new wars and lower costs is eight months into a conflict with Iran, which is disrupting global shipping of oil. It is no surprise the average Republican feels deflated, and the mood is even worse on Capitol Hill.
President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Speaker Mike Johnson have been traveling the country in hopes of fixing this. In October alone, the trio has done nearly 100 rallies, campaign stops, and district visits combined. These events tend to focus on two themes. The first is keeping the president’s agenda going. Should Democrats win in the midterms, they plan to tie the administration down with investigations. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the likely nominee for Speaker should the Democrats take the House, told ABC’s This Week, “We haven’t ruled anything in, and we haven’t ruled anything out in terms of impeachment.”
Another focus of these Republican campaign events is the theme of fighting back against the scourge of democratic socialism. Even with a strong economy, an August Gallup survey showed 43 percent of Americans have a positive view of socialism, a record high. Among independents, positive views of socialism jumped from 37 percent to 45 percent in a single year. This may also explain the rise in popularity of candidates like El-Sayed and Talarico, who call themselves capitalists, but whose agendas align more with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
That is the message that Trump, Vance, and Johnson are delivering while barnstorming the nation: if Republican voters sit this election out, left-wing candidates will head to Congress and work to halt the America First agenda.
A final factor to keep in mind is the polls. On October 21, a fake polling firm, Wedgewood Polling, posted on X that its polling data was mostly fabricated, after media companies like MS Now and The New York Times had already reported its numbers. Wedgewood Polling’s numbers boosted far-left candidates for major races across the country. (RELATED: Election Smorgasbord: Wedgewood’s Fake Polls, Flanagan’s Minnesota Flop, and Midterm Unrest)
Beyond the fake polls, the real ones have a habit of underselling Republicans. CNN’s Harry Enten notes that early-October generic-ballot polls have underestimated the GOP in 14 of the last 16 elections, by an average of about four points, more than enough to swing these toss-up races. As someone who has volunteered on a few campaigns over the years, let me tell you, voters hate answering surveys, and I cannot blame them; frankly, I hate them too. “I already know how I’m going to vote and I don’t need to share that with you,” I recall one lovely person yelling at me before they hung up. I also almost got mauled by a dog while door-knocking, but that is a fun conversation for another day. The point is that it is hard to get accurate information when people do not want to share what they think. That said, given the many tight races this cycle, Republicans could overperform, take races within the margin of error, and win in historic fashion. (RELATED: From Truman to Trump: Why Election Polls Keep Getting It Wrong)
The election is this Tuesday, and while I do not know with certainty what will happen, I do not believe Republicans will get demolished. I believe Republicans will hold onto the Senate, but the House remains the big question. As anyone who studies politics knows, whenever one party controls the White House, the opposing party is almost guaranteed to take control of Congress in the midterms. Given this cycle’s redistricting, I believe the days of huge House sweeps for either party are over… for now.
My election-night predictions for the House are this: if Donald Trump can defy history once again, Republicans will hold the House of Representatives, but only by the slimmest of margins. If the Doomers on Capitol Hill are correct and Democrats take back the House, I predict, at worst, they will have only a 10-seat majority. President Trump is a political anomaly; the country has not seen a man like him in quite some time, if ever. He is an X-factor that affects both Republican and Democrat voters alike.
Ultimately, this midterm will come down to one person, and that is the American voter. Staying home to send Republican leaders a message will not fix short-term problems that could be resolved in a matter of weeks; it will only hand the gavel over to Democrats for the next two years. Now is a time for choosing, for those voters and for Republicans.
READ MORE:
A Republican Victory Could Drive the Left to Bedlam
The Spookiest Interview in American Political History
Black Enthusiasm Gap Haunts Far Left Democrats
Zach Wilson is a member of The American Spectator development team and has spent several years working on Capitol Hill. He is currently a graduate student at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel School of Government in Washington, D.C., and earned his bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Grove City College in 2020.

In Poland, Nov. 1 marks All Saints’ Day, a national holiday in which Poles customarily visit the graves of deceased loved ones with candles and flowers. Many of the deceased visited this year would have lived through the 1981 imposition of martial law, the communist regime’s desperate attempt to restrict the power of the Solidarity movement in the face of a Soviet military threat.
Forty-five years later, Prime Minister Donald Tusk addressed the nation in a manner recalling General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s infamous 1981 martial-law speech and told his audience, “I would very much like us never to have to witness such scenes in Poland again.”
Opposition figures have called it a coup.
He was referring to Friday’s dramatic raid on the Constitutional Tribunal, an object of much political wrangling over the last decade. On Friday evening, an unconfirmed Tusk-appointed judge asserted for herself powers of “substitute” to the sitting Tribunal president and proclaimed a “suspension” of sitting judges. Police were deployed around the building and barred the sitting Tribunal president, vice president, Tribunal Guard, and staff from entering. Opposition figures have called it a coup.
President Karol Nawrocki, a conservative elected separately from Tusk’s liberal-leftist-centrist coalition, was en route to Senegal for a state visit but returned to Warsaw. Journalist Stanisław Janecki reported that the army personnel responsible for the military wing of Warsaw’s Okęcie Airport ignored instructions to refuse landing to the presidential plane and divert it to another Polish airport. Readers should note that this is unconfirmed at the time of writing, and various officials have denied this reporting. (RELATED: Poland’s Enemies, Foreign and Domestic)
Nawrocki rushed to the Tribunal building and forced his way through a police cordon, an image that circulated worldwide via social media. He attempted to broker a compromise throughout the weekend, but these efforts were, at least initially, unsuccessful.
“Last night, the constitutional order of the Republic of Poland was violated and a constitutional state body was taken over by force,” wrote President Nawrocki on Saturday. “In view of the threat to the internal security of the Republic of Poland, I am convening urgent consultations today with representatives of the parliamentary groupings, aimed at stabilising the political situation and restoring the constitutional order.”
Battles over the Tribunal’s composition have raged for over a decade, becoming especially prominent in 2015, a year that saw the Right sweep presidential and parliamentary elections. Poland, like its Central European neighbors, featured a judiciary comprised largely of a communist-era elite varnished with a coat of liberal paint, a phenomenon described in detail in Ryszard Legutko’s 2016 book The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies. (RELATED: What Next for Poland After Nawrocki Victory?)
From 2015-23, the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, bolstered by the confirmation power of the generally sympathetic President Andrzej Duda, was able to reshape the nation’s judiciary, incensing EU officials and forming one of the defining pillars of Tusk’s bid to return to Polish politics. Tusk formed a broad anti-PiS coalition government after the 2023 parliamentary elections but has not enjoyed the advantage of a presidential ally. When Duda’s term expired in 2025, Nawrocki prevailed in a mild upset over the impeccably credentialed liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski. One can say Polish voters elected a check on parliamentary power, a reality that has frustrated Tusk in the Sejm (Parliament) and in the courts. Though Tusk promised to depoliticize the court, he has nominated close allies, most notably Maciej Berek, a recent government minister whom Tusk has called his “right-hand man.”
The legal finer points are very technical, and an article of this length is insufficient to analyze them. Readers interested in the details of Polish constitutional law can find professional, up-to-date analysis from the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, which publishes all of its materials in English.
From an American perspective, bickering over the Tribunal’s recent history might be likened to that of gerrymandering in U.S. elections. It should be difficult to entertain claims that only the opposing camp has behaved badly (though many do). The court-composition battle can be likened to skirmishes over SCOTUS and court-packing, though this imperfect analogy lacks the dichotomy of a head of government (prime minister) and head of state (president) that exists in Poland and much of Europe, as well as the aforementioned communist-cum-liberal elite.
The situation is developing, and the fallout will take time to assess, but President Nawrocki looks to be bolstering his reputation at Prime Minister Tusk’s expense. Nawrocki gained personal-best favorability ratings earlier this year after clashing with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy when the latter commemorated a World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist partisan group that committed genocide against Poles, a course the Tusk camp was unwilling to take with any conviction.
One of the defining images from this weekend is that of the former boxer Nawrocki barreling through a sea of riot police. Nawrocki casts the figure of a leader defending Polish interests, while Tusk evokes the Polish-born servant of a foreign power, a well-worn archetype from Mickiewicz’s Major Płut to Jaruzelski. This image was strengthened further when the European Commission issued a statement in support of Tusk’s unconfirmed judges, and again when heads of major Polish police unions criticized the police deployment. “No policeman or policewoman wants to become an element of political games,” wrote Jacek Łukasik, chairman of the union Policyjna Solidarność. “The police have once again involuntarily become an element being used in the political dispute among our elites,” said Rafał Jankowski, chairman of the union Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy Policjantów.
Furthermore, observers have noted that Poland’s fragmented Right, represented by no fewer than four factions at this time, has seamlessly united behind Nawrocki. That is especially significant heading into the 2027 election year, in which the broad Right could win a majority of votes but struggle to form a coalition. At least for now, it has a common villain. Even some representatives of the Tusk government are appalled. The Polish ambassadors to China, Romania, and the United Nations resigned in protest, a personal blow to Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.
By any measure, Tusk emerges from this weekend looking the part of a petty authoritarian.
By any measure, Tusk emerges from this weekend looking the part of a petty authoritarian. Staging the raid while President Nawrocki was on an intercontinental flight and many Poles were leaving the capital for the All Saints’ Day weekend isn’t the behavior of one who has truth on his side. Expected chaos from the upcoming U.S. midterms might have been another timing consideration. Emerging investigations suggest politicians planned the action well in advance, with only three police commanders informed. During his national address, Tusk looked and sounded shaky. He even made the requisite references to shadowy Russian antagonists. A young warrior from the Solidarity days now plays the role of the beleaguered Jaruzelski.
Pundits will make extensive comparisons to recent events in Brazil, the United States, and other parts of Europe. Online discussion already highlights the machinations of President Obama, Senator Slotkin, the CIA, and the EU. These are all valid considerations. The media landscape, though, should not be lost in this noise. Western corporate media have been slow in reporting this weekend’s developments. The expected pro-Tusk, pro-EU narrative has ultimately materialized, but it has been lukewarm.
Now the prime minister looks to be a cornered animal, lashing out in defense of a liberal order that has a diminished capacity to assert its will. As students of 1980’s Poland are aware, a cornered animal can still be dangerous.
Tusk’s opponents have reason for optimism after the Tribunal crisis, but one jarring frustration is a perceived lack of American support. U.S. Ambassador Tom Rose was quick to address these developments, but the State Department and the White House have thus far been silent. Secretary Rubio was even photographed at the Florida-Georgia football game with Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and other foreign ministers, following a G20 summit. Tusk and Sikorski have weathered significant scandal in their careers, and they still enjoy unquestioned European institutional backing. The week’s events on this side of the Atlantic loom large.
READ MORE from Michael O’Shea:
Poland’s Enemies, Foreign and Domestic
Iceland Rushes Aboard the EU Sinking Ship
The ‘Black Insurgent’ and Americanization of Polish Society
Michael O’Shea is an American-Polish writer and translator. He is a former visiting fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest. 
This image is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Poland.

The headline from CNN was as basic as it was bold. It read: “Trump ramps up attacks on Democrats as ‘godless Communists’ ahead of November’s midterms.”
CNN reported as follows:
President Donald Trump on Friday seized on the electoral success of several democratic socialist candidates to ramp up his attacks on the Democratic Party, claiming it was being taken over by “godless Communists” who pose an existential threat to the nation.
….“These are hard core, godless Communists,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post earlier on Friday, an accusation he repeated during remarks to a gathering of social conservatives. “This is the Greatest Threat to our Country since its Founding 250 years ago!”
Leave it to the plain-spoken president from the decidedly plain-spoken borough of Queens, New York City, to lay it on the line. There is no mistaking Trump’s point.
Which is, in short: That when an American political party from the Left ceases being a moderately left-mainstream Democrat in the tradition of Democrat heroes like FDR and JFK and instead goes full bore in a far-left direction, they should be called out for it. (RELATED: Paris Is Burning. Is Washington Next?)
In fact, no less than Ronald Reagan did exactly that in writing about the Democrats of his day. Writing this in his autobiography, Where’s the Rest of Me? (RELATED: Black Enthusiasm Gap Haunts Far Left Democrats)
Wrote the future president a couple of decades before becoming president in 1981:
Light was dawning in some obscure region in my head. I was beginning to see the seamy side of liberalism. Too many of the patches on the progressive coat were of a color I didn’t personally care for. Something the liberal will have to explain and stand trial for is his inability to see the Communist as he truly is and not as some kind of Peck’s Bad Boy of liberalism who is basically all right but just a bit overboard and rough-edged. This ideological myopia is even true of some who have met the Reds in philosophical combat and who should have learned something from crossing swords.
The interesting reality here is that Trump, like Reagan before him, has long ago come to realize that today’s Democrats have tilted so far left as to be around the political bend. And Trump today, like Reagan in his day, has not the least problem in bluntly calling them out.
There are, unsurprisingly, various milestones along the way of America’s political journey. Some may signal a conservative setback, others a conservative triumph.
Again, here is this regarding Trump:
President Donald Trump on Friday seized on the electoral success of several democratic socialist candidates to ramp up his attacks on the Democratic Party, claiming it was being taken over by “godless Communists” who pose an existential threat to the nation.
And again, there is this from Reagan years ago:
Light was dawning in some obscure region in my head. I was beginning to see the seamy side of liberalism. Too many of the patches on the progressive coat were of a color I didn’t personally care for. Something the liberal will have to explain and stand trial for is his inability to see the Communist as he truly is and not as some kind of Peck’s Bad Boy of liberalism who is basically all right but just a bit overboard and rough-edged.
The bottom line is clear. Both Reagan and Trump understood what was happening to the American Left of their day, and neither had the slightest hesitation in standing up and calling it out.
In today’s political world, Trump is doing for the country — whether the country yet realizes it or not — a huge political favor. Which is calling out the current American Left that has indeed become, in Trump’s words, “an existential threat to the nation.”
There were and are, both men believed, consequences for not speaking out against this. And in today’s world, the American people can be seriously grateful that President Trump recognizes the problem and refuses to be silent. Which is to say, the Trump era — like the Reagan era before it — marches on.
And an “Amen!” For that!
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