Woke Democrats are heading for disaster

“Let’s go, Brandon!” has become the unofficial, but highly effective, slogan of the multifarious forces now in coalition against Joe Biden and his dysfunctional, kamikaze Democratic Party. 

Last week we witnessed the first effects of voter revulsion against the extravagant spending policies of the Biden White House and the impositions of the Marxist – in British terms, Corbynista – faction of the Democratic Party that has dedicatedly set about destroying American culture and alienating the public on an industrial scale.

If anyone wanted a snapshot of the mounting disillusionment with the Democrats, its epitome was last week’s electoral revolution in New Jersey, where Ed Durr, a conservative truck driver, defeated the long-serving President of the New Jersey Senate, after spending $135 on his campaign. Already, the mainstream media are demanding Durr’s resignation, after an exercise in offence archaeology unearthed a couple of old tweets expressing scepticism regarding “trans” persons and aspects of Islam. What these woke censors are actually claiming is that, because Durr does not share their orthodoxy, his election is somehow invalid.

If New Jersey was bad for the Democrats, Virginia was worse. The Republicans took the posts of governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general from the Democrats, as well as winning a majority in the previously Democrat-held House of Delegates. The election of Glenn Youngkin as governor was traumatic for Democrats; but the victory of Winsome Sears as first woman lieutenant governor was even more ominous for them. In her victory speech she described how her father came from Jamaica in 1963, with just $1.75 in his pocket, and built a new life. Now his daughter is lieutenant governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

“What you are looking at is the American dream,” she told her audience. It also looked like the Democrats’ worst nightmare. When a woman of Winsome Sears’ ethnicity, like so many others, embraces the values of self-help and patriotism (she married a Marine) and ejects a Democrat from a senior political position while carrying the GOP standard, she tears up the entire woke play-book. The ambition of BLM, Antifa and other Marxist-inspired organisations to split society along racial lines is being frustrated by members of those minorities who see themselves as Americans, as strivers and as parents, not as victims.

The parental revolt, across ethnic lines, against the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools provoked arrogant Democrats to denounce parents as “domestic terrorists”. Suddenly, to object to one’s children being taught race hate is “terrorism”; ditto any objections to anti-scientific “trans” indoctrination and the admission of men to previously private women’s and girls’ spaces. Every school board meeting in America is now a battleground; but it is a battle that Democrats cannot win.

Psephological analysis of the Virginia results showed a trend, not seismic but significant, across both red and blue counties, for women and African-American voters to switch allegiance from Democrat to Republican. What Biden, Harris and Pelosi, ably assisted by the barking-mad “progressive” wing of their party, have done to their prospects of retaining power is exactly what Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell et al. did to the Labour Party in Britain. For UK observers, the meltdown of the Democratic Party is not a challenging phenomenon, but déjà-vu all over again.

Americans are waking up to the fact they no longer own their country. The US public’s scepticism regarding all establishment claims – patronisingly derided in this country and by the American elites as a propensity for fake news and conspiracy theories – is the long-term consequence of a partisan stance by the mainstream media that automatically sanitises all faults on the left, while demonising everything on the right. 

The origin of the “Brandon” political slogan, last month, was an NBC sports reporter at a NASCAR race in Alabama, interviewing a driver called Brandon Brown. The reporter claimed that the loud chanting from the spectators was encouragement: “Let’s go, Brandon!” In fact they were chanting “F*** Joe Biden!” Regardless whether the reporter was being naive or disingenuous, this obscuring of what the public was actually saying about Biden seemed to conservatives to epitomise the media’s protective attitude towards the president and his party, so that they adopted the satirical slogan with relish.

The media have whitewashed Biden’s record since taking office: a medley of fiscally insane policies, global humiliation in Afghanistan, a southern border open to all comers and a steady stream of stumble-mumble pronouncements that reflect the president’s declining cognitive faculties. 

Consider if the situation were reversed. If Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop had been the property of a Trump family member, would it not have commanded the front page of The New York Times and the news headlines on CBS, NBC, etc for days on end? Where Trump’s tweets were blown up out of all proportion, Biden’s decline into narcoleptic incoherence is sedulously obscured by mainstream media. If Trump had fallen asleep at COP26, how would the media have responded? Everybody knows how.

But there is more than media bias causing Americans unease. Since 1776, the United States has been governed by elections, the ballot has been its way of life, the essence of its constitution and the chief guarantee against tyranny. Yet today that totem has been rendered toxic; it is no longer trusted by a large proportion of the population. Again, the elites have their sneering, dismissive response: Trump was a bad loser, manufacturing conspiracy theories about Venezuelan voting machines, all quite mad and pathetic.

In fact, now that the dust has settled from the controversial 2020 presidential election, the spotlight that has been trained on American electoral practices has exposed many causes for concern by anyone who values an incorruptible voting process. Forget the mythology about sinister Dominion voting machines: the threat to democracy in America comes from human agencies. 

Long before voting takes place, the preliminary softening-up of the conservative vote takes the form of opinion polls significantly skewed to favour the Democrats. They are generally focused on the battleground states. One poll provoked hilarity among its competitors, 10 days before polling day, by placing Joe Biden 17 points ahead in Wisconsin; he won by a whisker, 0.6 per cent. In Florida, two polls put Biden ahead by five and six points respectively: Trump won by three points.

These distortions are most commonly found in surveys by organisations connected with universities: tenured academics are indifferent to getting the outcome wrong, unlike their commercial rivals, their object is to demoralise Republican supporters, in the hope they may not vote. These are known as “suppression polls” (“If Trump has no chance, why bother voting?”) and they are concocted by over-sampling minorities, polling registered voters rather than likely voters, all of which favours the Democrats. The Democrats were discussing this device as long ago as 2008.

But the serious trashing of democracy, as witnessed in 2020, was perpetrated by Democratic office-bearers acting totally ultra vires, illegally ignoring electoral law and distorting the democratic process on a massive scale. This was concentrated in the battleground states. 

In Georgia, the Republican (RINO) secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, in agreement with Democratic activist and failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, allowed absentee ballots to be counted with their signatures unverified; the number of rejected mail-in ballots in 2016 had amounted to 6.5 per cent, in 2020 they totalled just 0.37 per cent. Polling observers were not even present when some ballot boxes were counted in Fulton County. Biden won Georgia by 12,500 votes.

In Pennsylvania the Democratic secretary of state similarly defied state electoral law to loosen the verification rules. A total of 120,000 mail-in ballots were accepted without legal protocol and deadlines were extended to three days after polling day. The department of state, without giving any reason, removed all election data from the PA Open Data platform in mid-November. Before then, however, it had emerged that 1,532 mail-in votes had been cast by people over the age of 100 (clearly, Georgia is a very healthy state) and in Allegheny County, 41 ballots had been mailed out to people born on 1 January, 1800 and thus aged 220 years.

In Wisconsin, the election commission broke the law by allowing anonymous votes from almost 500 illegal unmanned drop-boxes. In Michigan, the Democratic secretary of state opened an illegal online mail-in facility, with no signatures required, in defiance of electoral law. A witness testified to seeing ballots run eight to 10 times through a tabulating machine. In Arizona, surprisingly won by Biden with a margin of 10,000 votes, only one county – Maricopa – was subsequently audited, when 2,500 bad signatures were found in that county alone.

Considering the surreal atmosphere of the 2020 presidential election, with veterans of the War of Independence casting their votes for Joe Biden, is it any wonder that millions of mainstream Americans – neither cranks nor conspiracy theorists – are gravely concerned about the integrity of the voting system and, by extension, the legitimacy of the government? So serious is that concern that new laws have been introduced in places such as Georgia, Florida and Texas to reduce the scope for election fraud. Yet that legitimate action by states has been denounced by leftist fanatics as “voter suppression”: to the more extreme Democrats, any attempt at regulating elections, even preventing non-citizens from voting, is “racist”. That party really ought to change its name.

The reaffirmation of electoral law, with office-bearers more constrained in their conduct at future elections, plus last week’s results, do not augur well for Democratic prospects at the approaching mid-term elections. Biden holds the Senate by the casting vote of Kamala Harris and the House by a narrow margin. A small swing would give the GOP both houses of Congress and leave sleepy Joe an even more lame-duck president than he already is. His $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill has been passed; his next, $3.5 trillion package designed to convert America into a dependency culture on the model of Scotland, circa 1970, will be mauled to death.

Joe Biden’s popularity rating has dropped to 38 per cent, Kamala Harris’s to 27.8 per cent – the worst vice-presidential rating in more than 50 years. The latest poll shows congressional voting intentions at 46 per cent for Republicans, 38 per cent for Democrats. Last week’s results in Virginia and New Jersey demonstrated that this is not a hypothetical crisis for Joe Biden and the Democrats, but an existential one. Biden’s reaction to the news from Virginia showed that even Brandon now realises he must soon let go.