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Crime, Covid, the economy, immigration, foreign policy, education — Biden’s poor ratings show voters are starting to ask if Democrats have gotten any issue right in the last four years.
Last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered the National Guard to start patrolling the subways of New York City to deal with the city’s crime problem, which has been metastasizing for years now.
There was a lot of guffawing from the online peanut gallery, and understandably so. In the summer of 2020, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., had written a New York Times op-ed suggesting the deployment of the military to quell the rioting that destroyed dozens of cities and did billions of dollars in damage. Though polls showed Cotton’s suggestion had popular support, the Times’ own staff revolted against their employer, with several employees publicly reciting some version of the mantra that publishing Cotton’s op-ed put “black people in danger.”
But now? Mara Gay, a member of the Times’ editorial board who had been quite vocal in her opposition to publishing the Cotton op-ed, has now authored a column headlined, “The National Guard Might Help Subway Riders Feel Safer.” (For what it’s worth, Mara Gay is not related to disgraced former Harvard president Claudine Gay, though Times columnist Roxane Gay, who also opposed the Cotton op-ed, is.) In four years, we went from Democrats essentially saying we had to tolerate the lawless devastation of dozens of American city centers to fully endorsing armed 20-year-olds rifling through your bag before you use public transportation to deal with the ordinary criminality they allowed to fester.
And no, they do not care that this is profoundly hypocritical or that Cotton’s reason for deploying the National Guard was far more reasonable than Hochul’s. In this regard, the blasé attitude toward Hochul’s deployment of the National Guard is alarming — deliberately allowing a criminal underclass to undermine existing order and then using the resulting lawlessness as a pretext to extend government control over law-abiding citizens is textbook tyranny.
The murder rate during Covid lockdowns went down in nearly all of the Western world, but it spiked in America because Democrats actively supported political violence they perceived would help them win an election. At the same time, local political authorities defunded police departments, threatened citizens who tried to defend themselves in the absence of law and order, and even valorized despicable criminals by falsely claiming they were victims of racism. The current crime problem in America is a result of the fact that Democrats knowingly unleashed a crime wave and, four years later, can’t put the genie back in the bottle and have left Americans saddled with ultra-left-wing district attorneys who refuse to prosecute.
However, the more immediate context of this whole episode is pretty revealing. Democrats simply can’t wrap their heads around what’s happening in the current election. A lot can happen in eight months, but for some time now Trump has been definitively leading in the polls, which is a marked reversal from 2020. And this is not just about the fact that Joe Biden is feckless and senile.
Democrats are simultaneously hitting the panic button and desperately casting about for explanations as to why Trump is winning, but the answer is at once simple and overwhelming: They haven’t reckoned with the fact that the electorate, including a lot of traditionally Democrat constituencies, are starting to notice that in recent years the default right-of-center position on just about every major political issue has proven correct, where the left-wing ruling class has been quite definitively wrong.
The List Is Long
Obviously, making this broad observation is not necessarily an endorsement of Trump or the GOP, and there are probably some finer policy points where you can plausibly disagree. But on just about every issue that has dominated the public discourse post-Trump, the pro-Democrat establishment either staked out a fringe position or was proven wrong by subsequent events. It’s hard to even know where to begin.
On Covid, it’s abundantly clear that red states that refused mass shutdowns and excessive regulations didn’t see any worse health outcomes — and the damage from the shutdowns and Covid mandates is still lasting. The idea that our strained health care system was laying off people for refusing to take a “vaccine” that we now know doesn’t prevent you from getting the virus has been a disaster, to say nothing of our strained military, in the middle of a massive recruiting crisis, forcibly ejecting thousands over vaccine mandates.
Then there’s the fact that Covid killed off 200,000 businesses in just the first year. How many businesses could have been saved with more reasonable Covid regulations? Then there was the distrust sewn with the public through all of the coronavirus propaganda and social media censorship. Your posts could be banned from Facebook for even speculating that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an outcome that the government now acknowledges is more likely than not. --->READ MORE HERE
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