The Left sees Youngkin’s win as proof of white supremacy. The Right takes it as a sign that the System can work. They’re both wrong.
As Democrats lick their wounds from an electoral shellacking and Republicans gloat over their near-certain victory in the 2022 midterms, two different narratives have emerged about what happened on Tuesday and what it signifies.
Progressives hyper-sensitized to race saw a red wave overtake a state they’d long assumed was safe and bemoaned its fall into the clutches of deplorable white supremacists (because whenever anything goes wrong for Democrats these days, white supremacy is the insta-answer). On cue, professional race baiters like Joy Reid wasted no time taking to social media to condemn Glenn Youngkin for running a campaign based on “racial hysteria” (never mind that Virginia also elected its first woman and woman of color — born in Jamaica — as its lieutenant governor that same night).
And the pity party only got worse from there.
A few hundred miles up the seaboard, white supremacy continued its roll.
Long-held Democratic bastions were lost or were in serious jeopardy of being lost. In New Jersey, a state with more than more than 6 million registered voters, Democratic Mayor Phil Murphy clung to his seat by less than 40,000 votes. The state’s longest-running Senate President, Democrat Steve Sweeney, lost to Edward Durr, a commercial truck driver who spent a whopping $153 on his campaign. And in New York, Republicans made stunning inroads in suburbs and bedroom communities considered the country’s liberal strongholds. It was as if millions of voters flocked to the polls and looked for any name on ballots that didn’t have a “D” next to them.
This shouldn’t have happened to a party whose president won an election a year ago with more votes than any other candidate in history. But it did, and the bigger problem for Democrats is that they either can’t see (or don’t want to see) why it happened.
If they dared to look beyond threadbare soundbites and catchphrases the media have been recycling for the past decade, they would see something that might shock them more than Tuesday night's results: millions of voters who bolted to Republican candidates this week aren’t white supremacists. Many of them are Democrats and independents, and they’re freaking terrified.
I think Tuesday’s elections had very little to do with race; they were a referendum on government control. And one party — the one that currently dominates all branches of government — seems to be pushing that control a LOT harder than the other one. This week, voters in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York sent a clear message: they’re fed up with the control, and they’re pushing back.
Democrats blame their loss in Virginia on Republicans who exploited fears about exposing children to critical race theory (CRT), and to be fair, there is some truth in that. Old Dominion parents and school boards have waged an ugly war with verbal and physical confrontations routinely caught on camera. Much of that rage centers on perceptions and understandings of race and how they should be being incorporated into school curricula.
But what progressives don’t seem to get is that CRT was merely one aspect of the acrimony; parents were also outraged about how schools have been addressing sexual assault, transgender students sharing bathrooms and locker rooms, and vaccine and mask mandates. On a wide range of issues, Virginia parents and the people charged with teaching their children simply aren’t on the same page. They aren’t even reading from the same book. To reduce these concerns to a single issue — race — not only misses the point, but trivializes the much bigger issue: parents deserve a say in how their kids are educated and what they are exposed to. They may not have advanced degrees in education, but their property taxes pay teachers’ salaries and they, not teachers, have to live with the consequences of whatever their children are (or aren’t) taught.
Yet even if CRT were the single issue that drove many Virginia voters to the polls, the assumption that only racists oppose adopting this type of scholarship into school curricula simply isn’t born out by the facts.
In Loudon County, the flashpoint for Virginia’s battle over CRT, the highest rate of population growth has been among Asians and Latinos, who, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, oppose critical race theory by a two-to-one margin — the same as white voters. In May, a black parent lashed out at the board because she believed CRT is “racist, abusive and discriminates against one’s color.” An Indian-American blamed CRT for reducing academic standards and discriminating against high-performing Asians. Moreover, new data from Manhattan Institute and Echelon Insights shows that parents oppose CRT in the public school curriculum by a massive 42-point margin, and a solid majority of black and Hispanic parents oppose CRT and support removing “concepts such as white privilege and systemic racism” from the curriculum.
Whether these parents are right or wrong about CRT is irrelevant. The point is that Democrats are missing an emerging phenomenon that manifested in this week’s elections: increasingly, even people of color aren’t on the same page with the agenda to “build back better.” Black, white, brown, or yellow, Americans don’t like what Democrats are building and clearly don't think it’s better than what they had. (When four of the most downloaded songs on iTunes are by black rappers openly mocking Joe Biden and his economic and pandemic policies, that speaks volumes).
So even though I’m a political agnostic, I welcome the outcome of Tuesday’s elections because it showed that Americans are awakening. A critical mass of people — from all walks of life and on all points of the political spectrum — are sitting up and paying attention. And that’s extremely encouraging.
Some may claim that this makes me a Republican sympathizer, but that’s not the case because I have no love for either party. At this point, I see elections the same way elites do: litmus tests. Glorified versions of the People’s Choice Awards that give us an indication of what the majority is thinking. Elections don’t change anything on a systemic level because the people we elect either lack the will or the power to make changes that would fundamentally alter the direction of our country and the condition of the masses.
At best, elections allow us to make small tweaks here and there. But as America descends full throttle into a biomedical authoritarian state (“Vaccine papers, please!”), this may be one of those rare occasions when tweaks can actually help us. Red waves could slow our descent into tyranny by a few weeks or months (it’s not a lot to work with, but when dystopia is looming in your windshield, you’re grateful for any time you can buy).
Which brings me to the other narrative unfolding in the wake of the Virginia-New Jersey-New York smackdown. I’ve noticed a fair amount of smugness among conservatives who are convinced the 2020 election was rigged in Biden’s favor, yet now believe the door has opened for them to reclaim America the old fashioned way: by heading to the polls.
I would caution against this kind of optimism.
Imagine for a moment that you are one of the imaginary oligarchs (you know, the ones mainstream media insist only exist in Russia, not the United States). As a member of this elite class, your goal is and always has been to consolidate as much political, economic, and social power as possible by shrinking the political, economic, and social power of everyone beneath you. This can only be accomplished by maintaining complete control of the System, and the foundation of that System requires one thing above all else: faith. Hundreds of millions of people must have unwavering trust and belief that the System works. The moment that trust and belief evaporate, the System fails and you lose.
Election 2020 posed one of the greatest threats to faith in the System in modern history. It created grave doubts about the integrity of the electoral process and — depending upon your perception of reality — even triggered a “siege” on the Capitol.
Given this, if you’re an oligarch you might be pleased by the outcome of this week’s elections. Why? Because the Red Wave (1) allowed Trump supporters, other Republicans and conservative independents to vent their frustrations over what they believe to be a stolen election; (2) diffused growing resentment over CRT, pandemic policies, and other issues driving their anger; and (3) “restored” conservatives’ belief in elections as a road to fixing the System.
If you’re an oligarch, you’re watching elated Republicans doing what you want them to do more than anything else right now: drop their guard and back off from challenging the System — because for the moment, it’s “working” again for them.
If you’re an oligarch, you know that as long as you control the System, and as long as it remains intact and unchallenged, nothing else really matters. You know that a newly-elected governor may seem like a breath of fresh air to suffocating Republicans, but you can also rest assured that a man who’s spent his entire career working at investment banks and private equity companies won’t oppose the System in ways that pose an existential threat to its existence.
If you’re an oligarch, you’d prefer to consolidate political, economic, and social power as quickly as possible, but you also know that if you move too quickly you might spook the sheep. So when necessary, you’re willing to pause your consolidation efforts to let the livestock take a breather. Relax a few vaccine mandates, allow them to wear masks a little less, maybe let them have some input on what their kids are taught. Throw them a bone here, another there.
If you’re an oligarch, you know that as long as you control the money that everyone trapped in the System needs to survive, and that money enables you to fund every “viable” candidate and also control the media that gives those candidates visibility and makes them relevant, it doesn’t matter who’s elected or appointed, or how often the players are inserted, removed, or rearranged in any branch of government.
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”
These words were uttered in the 19th century, not by a politician, but by a banker: Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of one of the most influential financial dynasties in Europe. More than two hundred years ago, Rothschild understood that money was the key to controlling every aspect of the System, and this is why nothing will ever change on the most fundamental levels as long as the current System remains operational.
So don’t think for a moment that voting will ever allow us to level the economic playing field, restore free speech on the platforms that killed it, or give us back the power to determine what we put in our bodies. But what voting can do is buy us time to awaken more minds.
After this week’s Red Wave, elites are expecting half the country (the one that’s thoroughly pissed off) to relax. They’re hoping millions of Americans, satisfied with a Democrat shellacking, will calm down, nod off and go back to asleep. That’s precisely why the System has survived as long as it has, despite the fact that it’s been enslaving most of us in slow motion for decades. Elections lull us into a false sense of security and give us hope precisely when we begin to lose faith. They’re blatantly transparent attempts to pacify the masses.
My friends: please don’t relax, nod off, or fall asleep.
We’re approaching a pivotal point in our battle against the creeping tentacles of tyranny, and we need to continue to resist it with all of our energy and might. We must never forget that fighting this tyranny will require us to take action beyond going to the polls; the fight against tyranny will ultimately require us to attack and dismantle the System — the Beast — itself.
Because the Beast is hungry and it’s relentless. And as long as it lives, we will all slowly die.
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