Posts Tagged → conservative
Central PA candidates on the ballot
Because I am a “politico” actively involved in politics, friends, family, and strangers ask my opinion on candidates running for political office.
Here are the people I am voting for on next week’s Republican primary election ballot:
President: Donald J. Trump, of course. President Trump is all that stands between We, The People and chaos and the forced failure of America as the representative constitutional republic we have enjoyed since 1789.
Attorney General: Dave Sunday. He has a strong 2A background and is endorsed by Gun Owners of America, whereas his opponent has a very poor 2A record.
Congress: Scott Perry. Scott continues to reliably do what an elected official is supposed to do. He has gotten a lot quieter since the lawless Democrat Party thugs known as “FBI agents” stopped his car and stole his cell phone from him at gunpoint last year. Nonetheless, Scott continues to vote for We, The People, like voting against the FISA renewal. FISA has been used by the FBI to conduct lawless, warrantless domestic spying against everyday American citizens.
US Senator: Mickey Mouse. I literally wrote in Mickey Mouse because the GOPe endorsed and orchestrated puppet strings candidate whose name appears on the ballot spent time and money to knock off the ballot several other candidates who would have competed with him in this primary race. What a scumbag.
Auditor General: Tim DeFoor. Tim is a solid citizen and one of the very few now career politicians I can support. I have watched him work his way through the political process, and though he is not ideological, he comes to his traditional views honestly, from the way he grew up, which I can respect.
State Senator: Nick DiFrancesco. This is a newer version of the state senate district seat I ran for in 2012 and 2015, and I have a lot of familiarity with its voters. Nick is an all-around politico who has been a Dauphin County commissioner and has held other publicly visible positions of trust. Nick is presently Dauphin County treasurer, and I believe he represents the only chance normal taxpaying citizens in our region have to stop far-left radical Patty Kim from inheriting this seat in a heavily gerrymandered district made just for her. The other candidate is Ken Stambaugh, who I have had the pleasure of speaking with at length and staying in touch with. Heck of a nice man, good intentions, and not a political animal. My opinion is Ken would stand zero chance against Patty Kim. I yearn for the days when America would naturally and easily elect good people like Ken to office, but unfortunately spring 2024 is as far away from those old days as America can get. We need political warriors.
State Treasurer: Stacy Garrity. Wish we had a primary opponent just for voter choice.
Representative in General Assembly (State House 103rd district): Cindi Ward. Wish we had a primary opponent just for voter choice.
Representative in General Assembly (State House 100th district): Dave Nissley. Failed incumbent and career political hack Bryan Cutler has been a disaster for central Pennsylvania voters who care about good policy and clean politics. Cutler got into elected politics at a very young age, and he just learned bad habit after bad habit along the way. Dave Nissley is by far the better man and the better candidate, and he has been endorsed by Gun Owners of America.
Delegate to the Republican National Convention: Jeff Haste, Sue Helm, George Margetas, and Charlie Gerow. Both Jeff and Sue are well known central PA pro 2A advocates. George Margetas is a local attorney who like so many of us went along with the covid tyranny mask nonsense in 2020, but who then bucked it publicly afterwards when it was clearly evident that covid was about political control and not about public health. I like a strong man who stands up for freedom. Last but not least is well known local politico and lobbyist Charlie Gerow, who I have known for many years and who is one of the few lobbyists I actually like.
The other RNC candidates have either zero about them available online, which tells us they are hiding, fakes, RINOs, or Democrats, or they have something about being “a fiscal conservative,” which is always a red flag for social conservatives looking for strong candidates who will represent traditional values and meritocracy. So-called “fiscal conservatives” rarely are, and they are always social liberals. No thanks.
Your political action in 2024, like voting and volunteering for candidates, is as important as 1776
Hanuka 2023, every USA conservative is a Jew
The past seven years have seen increasingly aggressive censorship and violence against American conservatives, especially on college campuses. Since the October 7th Hamas massacre of Israelis, American Jews find themselves under violent attack, especially on college campuses. Conservatives and American Jews don’t often occupy the same space, but now they do, and they should support each other.
Historically, Jews have been the canary in the coalmine for civilizational health. Countries where Jews have enjoyed freedom have done exceedingly well, and countries that murdered, robbed, raped, and expelled their Jews have fallen by the wayside. The proofs for this assertion are legion, and they include ancient Rome (what is Italy today?), 15th century Spain (what is Spain today?), modern Germany, Soviet Russia, and almost every single Muslim country today. And yes, modern Germany is rapidly swirling down the toilet. England is swaying wildly on the fence, and America is not far behind.
Western civilization is failing, and one of the victims, the beleaguered Jew, is the most prominent symbol of the evil forces that are tearing our western nations apart.
As a result of Hamas’ October 7th massacre of Israelis and their still unending rocket barrages on Israeli civilians, and then Israel’s just response to that blitzkrieg, the world has been engulfed by a mostly Islamic movement to dehumanize Jews and delegitimize Israel and Western Civilization. A bunch of white sadists and envious losers have joined in the pro-Hamas, pro-genocide, pro-Apartheid marches.
In case you have not been paying attention, Jewish-owned restaurants in Australia, Britain, Canada, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have been targeted by violent mobs chanting about Israel and killing Jews. This same effort has also engulfed nearly every single American university, where conservatives and free speech have been aggressively banned for the past seven years. It has been interesting to see this intersection of Jew haters against freedom of speech, because their actions have shined a bright light on the plight of all American conservatives.
Turns out, American conservatives share the same fox hole as American Jews. Both are subject to unfair and unconstitutional vilification, dehumanization, and suppression of their basic human rights by the very people who claim to be the most tolerant, most open minded, most caring. Ahem.
The other day three major university presidents (UPenn, MIT, Harvard) sat before Congress and each testified that people calling for the genocide of Jews on their college campuses was not necessarily against their college policies. What a disgrace. It was shocking to see these cookie cutter leftist women presidents smirking and being coy while playing their word games. Had the words black, Hispanic, gay, transgender, lesbian, Muslim etc. been substituted for the word Jew in this policy discussion, well my gosh, of course that would have violated their college policies against hate, bullying, and harassment.
But not Jews. Nope. With Jews, these very sophisticated and exclusive women leaders had to judge the “context” in which the calls for genocide happened. Was the Jewish student actually being genocided on MIT or Harvard’s campus, like hanging from a lamp post with a rope around his neck? Well, that would certainly violate their school policy against hate, harassment, and bullying. But up until that physical violence, why, calls for genocide against Jews is just free speech, they said.
University presidents who never gave a hoot about free speech, but who rather inflicted un-American McCarthy-esque speech codes against their ideological opponents are suddenly all for free speech when it comes to calling for massacring the Jews. And this strange thing has naturally and refreshingly caused quite a backlash.
What is happening here is that the Jew is the breakwater for the American conservative, who has been illegally pounded into dust for years by the same racist , Stalinist, Hitlerite Diversity-Iniquity-Equity university/ media/ government people as were testifying before Congress the other day.
If America can agree that treating Jews differently and much worse than everyone else is wrong, then I think we are also about to agree that the evil Stalinist Diversity-Inclusivity-Equity critical race theory nonsense that put both Jews and conservatives on the chopping block was a huge un-American mistake. It is time for this nonsense to end, and for the rule of law and constitution to return.
Tonight is the first night of Hanuka, a 2,300-year-old Jewish festival that is about religious freedom in Israel earned by the edge of the sword. There is nothing joyful or miraculous or oily about Hanuka. This holiday was and still is only about the need to fight like hell with everything you have if you want to survive. The ancient Jews prevailed militarily against the enemies of all that is good, in the land of Israel, and this is what is celebrated this week.
Sounds like a good message to American conservatives and Jews alike: Fight back against the evil that is engulfing America, including the college campuses that are supposed to be beacons for learning, or you will lose everything. Firing these three evil university presidents at UPenn, MIT, and Harvard will be a good step forward.
Twitter staff are attacking conservatives again
We all thought that Elon Musk had brought great change to Twitter. More openness, more transparency, more fairness, more balance, less hostility to inconvenient facts that some people in power don’t like, less censorship.
Well, that honeymoon has ended as conservative Twitter accounts are being shut down this week in a brazenly partisan and double standard bloodbath. My own Twitter account, which I don’t use much, was locked without warning (see screenshot below) for supposedly violating the Twitter rules against “abusive behavior.”
What abusive behavior? When, against whom, under what circumstances?
And why lock an account without any warning?
Turns out my succinct, well-earned, and fair response on Twitter to an abusive leftist was misconstrued as “abusive behavior.” And bang, just like that, my account was locked. Oh, I was given the option of eventually re-opening it, if I delete the tweet I wrote back to someone who was abusing me. But I am not going to go through Twitter’s version of Mao’s re-education camp, and so my tweet will remain. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and the tweet is mild in comparison to the things the person it was aimed at was writing at the same time.
Commentator Dan Bongino is constantly harping on the liberal hypocrisy thing. He is constantly pointing out that liberals don’t care about being caught as brazen hypocrites. Rather, Bongino says, liberals like the raw, unadulterated, unlimited power they feel when they get to act unfairly and treat other people unfairly. He points out that when liberals hold themselves to zero standard, and then hold people like Josh First to an impossibly high standard, liberals don’t see a fairness problem. They see and really enjoy the raw exercise of power and hierarchy, the ability to simply crush someone’s free speech rights because of a made-up fake violation of some subjective rule that is never applied to one side of a debate and that is always mis-applied to the other side of the debate.
Liberals/ Leftists are at the top of the hierarchy, and people like Josh First are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Hierarchy and power, that is what the Josh First Twitter account lock is about. Talk about abusive behavior! Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I am now the powerless victim of a power-crazed corrupt absolutist tyrant, some person who works at Twitter named Ella Irwin. Apparently she has been going after the accounts of other conservatives, too, including activist Michael Knowles and congresswoman Marjorie T. Green.
Here’s the thing about this latest censorship of conservative voices at Twitter: The people doing it are unfair, mean, abusive, bullies, censorious, against free speech, against ideas that scare them, and tyrannical. Any and all of these characteristics are negative. You would not normally choose to be around or subject to individual people who have these sorts of negative traits and broken personalities. And yet here we are again, pushed back into sharing digital space with people from Silicon Valley, California, where the overwhelming majority of people in control of the digital town square are just pure bad crap like Ella Irwin.
And take note: Not one Democrat Party person or official objects to this. Which means that the Democrat Party people have the same intention for governing America as their allies govern Twitter, FaceBook, etc. They all believe in using massive coercive force against people who disagree with them.
Twitter gives us a view into the souls of the people who oppose us. No wonder they want to take away our guns! Then we would be completely helpless against them. Give these people a huge swastika to wear proudly, because that is what they are.
My body, my….self…?
My sense is that abortion was the issue of this week’s mid-term election. After all, all of the digital online advertising I received about Fetterman, Shapiro, and Mastriano was about that one issue. And Democrat Party poll workers confirmed their own belief that abortion would galvanize their voters. It seems to have worked, and fended off what was touted as a “red wave” of conservative response to failed governance in Washington DC.
My mind wanders back to 1972 or 1973, when I was a young kid, but old enough to become self aware. My hippie parents had the Our Bodies, Our Selves book laying out in the living room. When no adults were around I would look at this book and marvel at the array of hairy women parading their naked bodies in it. At an early age, then, I determined that naked woman was good, hairy was not good. One idea that sticks in my mind (having long ago eradicated the book’s “natural” images from my memory banks) is the novel concept that a person’s body is their own.
I think freedom-loving Americans can emphatically agree on this, that a person’s body is their own and nobody else’s. Where Americans diverge from one another is what is our body? Is it just the living, walking adult body, or does that also include young humans growing inside of it?
Reasonable people can and should debate this subject, and if pro-Life advocates want to make headway politically and culturally, then they have got to do a much better job explaining their perspective on when human life begins, why it is sacred, and how abortion-on-demand is not a my body, my self policy issue, but rather an “our bodies intertwined together” humanity issue. They must do a much better job, as this week’s election results demonstrate (assuming no election fraud occurred, which in some states is once again already obvious and in-your-face to the point of training voters to regularly accept it from one political party).
To be fair to the pro-Life anti-abortion voters, advocates, and candidates like Doug Mastriano, a lot of Americans felt like the two-year Covid1984 plandemic was one gigantic official assault on the idea of Our Bodies, Our Selves. A lot of voters this week showed up to vote against the unconstitutional government overreach, official lies, official illegalities, and government personnel self-enrichment that characterized the past two years of Covid1984. They thought other Americans felt the same.
Draconian lockdowns to the point of absurdity (lone sea kayakers being surrounded by heavily armed police boats and arrested for violating a “public health code,” sunbathers sitting totally alone on a beach, and married couples sitting alone in their car at scenic overlooks being similarly mistreated by aggressive police officers etc.), pointless and highly damaging school closures, useless mask requirements, and dangerous fake vaccine requirements that are now yielding an enormous number of vaccine-caused injuries and deaths, all and every aspect of the Covid1984 experience was one huge pile of Our Bodies, Our Selves books being symbolically burned by government staffers and leftist political activists in a joyous ceremony to mark the end of the idea that your body is yours and yours alone, and to emphasize that the government, their government, can do to you whatever it wants whenever it wants.
Conservative voters and candidates mistakenly thought that leftists would be consistent in their body sovereignty thinking, that everyone else felt the same (logically consistent) as conservatives about this disaster, and that they would vote accordingly.
And this is the confusing part of this my body, my self as a public policy issue and debate subject. On the one hand we have a lot of Americans who were and still are being severely damaged by the government’s purposefully bad handling of Covid1984, and they are pushing back. (Despite the Biden DOJ’s designation of them as “domestic terrorists” for merely speaking out in official taxpayer-funded venues.)
And on the other hand we have a lot of Americans who think that not only is the government’s brutal and useless Covid1984 overreach into your body and your body choices great public policy, but that the use of crushing government coercive force to implement it and force you to comply or be destroyed was just great, too. And yet a lot of these same people are the pro abortion Our Bodies, Our Selves believers who were animated enough to show up to vote this week.
This is confusing because it is inconsistent. Choice should be choice…right?
If you spend time reading this blog, then you already know I am not enamored of liberal/ leftist thinking, because I cannot make it make sense. And to be fair, most leftists and liberals I speak with about this are quite honest about it: They don’t care about logic, reason, or being consistent. They want their political issues the way they want them, and to hell with your criticisms.
In a democratic nation and in a Western Civilization based on logic, reason, debate, and persuasion, we have a conundrum here. Americans are talking right past each other, and not just about our bodies being sovereign from outside forces. Americans are failing to communicate with each other on a whole array of political and cultural topics. I am firmly on the side of reason, logic, and reasoned debate being at the center of our governance process, and so I stand firmly with the dreaded “conservatives.”
But I will say this to the conservatives, like governor candidate Doug Mastriano: If you are going to make the elimination or regulation of abortion your main public policy goal, then you had damned well better explain it to the public very carefully, frame it in context of the 2020-2022 Covid1984 government assault on Americans’ bodies, and you had better not do any interviews where snippets of your public statements can be used to paint you into a corner. At least half of America is not able or willing to discuss this subject, and to them only the axe-murdering abortion of a helpless and sacred child is their singular and joyous right; what the government does to their bodies the other 99% of the time is the business of the government and none of their own. They are not thinking clearly about this, and candidates must work hard to connect the abortion dot to the Covid1984 dot for future voters. Or don’t work on it, and shut the hell up about it.
And I will also say this to the liberals/ leftists: Your apparent worshiping of abortion as an act, to the point of killing the living, viable child at birth, makes you look like a primitive bloodthirsty death cult. This is not civilized behavior by people who advocate for myriad other intrusive government policies “if it saves just one child.” So long as you inhabit this childish shadowland of disconnected and strongly contrasting public policies, your fellow Americans will understandably deride you as foolish children who actually hate children.
Does this book also apply to the victims of bad government policies on Covid? If not, then there is no body sovereignty for anyone
Joe Biden and his supporters are America’s biggest threat
There. I have crossed a barrier I never thought I would cross, which is criticizing registered Democrats who vote for bad people who destroy America, like Joe Biden.
Until today, with this blog post, I had never before laid blame on my fellow Americans for making their individual choices at the voting booth. Despite being the target myself of liberals, leftists, Democrats, all angered by my voting choices and political views, and always telling myself that they can change.
Traditionally, conservatives (what a laugh… conservatives… today’s conservative is 1980’s tolerant, open-minded, accepting liberal, while today’s liberals are a mob of bigoted Nazi Brown Shirts) see liberals as good people with bad ideas, while liberals see conservatives as just bad people, period. It is why conservatives agreeably hold onto their liberal Democrat friends even as those same people are reviling their conservative family and friends. These two groups see each other so differently. That is mostly due to the incessant drumbeat of dehumanization that liberals/ leftists have heaped on Republicans, conservatives, patriots, white people, etc. for five decades. Joe Biden did more of it today.
Well, after Joe Biden’s horrible public statements here in Pennsylvania, I don’t think it is possible for me to just let everyday Democrats off the hook any longer. They have empowered Biden’s cruelty and dangerousness, and they are accountable.
If you concur with Biden’s threat to law-abiding American gun owners that they will be bombed into submission by US government F-15 fighter jets, then you have divorced yourself from America as it was founded and run until 18 months ago, and you have separated yourself from the majority of people who live here. We conservatives and liberals really do inhabit two different worlds, and we really cannot live together. No wonder Biden’s supporters are gleeful about the open border and the millions of illegal migrants coming over it. Biden’s supporters have more in common with these illegals than they do with me, apparently.
Duly noted.
For the record, which political party is pushing civilian disarmament, the crushing and total censorship and elimination of opposing voices and arguments, an all-knowing, all-powerful, big and unaccountable government, $600 limits on cash expenditures from our personal accounts, the elimination of cash money and a transition to a Big Brother digital money, the blocking of transparent elections and the use of openly corrupted election machines, the centralizing of all decision making including all elections, the destruction of legal due process as the DOJ and FBI SWAT teams blow up and attack the homes of innocent Republicans simply because they are Republicans, the sexual grooming and political indoctrination of our children?
The Democrat Party.
This is all evil crap and it is all part and parcel of the new Democrat Party and its local adherents. Shame on every one of you. Shame, shame, shame.
I never thought I would write something like this, and I hope I am proven wrong by an old friend or some huge voter shift away from the rogue Democrat Party. But given how so many of my Democrat friends and even some family have simply walked away from me, it seems like a vain hope. I am purposefully late to the party of anger and division, but if that is what Joe Biden and his supporters are constantly serving, then I guess I will eventually take a swig from my own jug of it.
Dear Democrat voters, your double-standard lawlessness and your war against the Constitution and against law-abiding Americans is unsustainable. Your rotten un-American beliefs and your destructive actions are a direct threat to democracy in general and to America as a republic run by its citizens. Will America survive another Democrat Party insurrection? We barely survived the first one from 1861 to 1865. If America goes fifty-fifty, that is, even odds, then no, we won’t survive this latest Democrat assault on democracy.
And we know who to blame.
Two proofs in 24 hours that the 2020 election was stolen
Within a single 24-hour period we have just witnessed two glaring smoking gun proofs that the Biden Campaign stole the 2020 election, stole the presidency, and hijacked America.
The first smoking gun with flames coming out of the barrel is the passage of a US Senate bill, to be signed into law by Biden, that funds the hiring of an additional 83,000 (yes, eighty three thousand) armed IRS agents to investigate and criminally charge every single American who the political bosses of the IRS target. If the IRS Lois Lerner politically partisan debacle past is any indication of the likely future, political conservatives will be swarmed by this literal army of political operatives. These agents will use “the law” to destroy their political opponents. Imagine millions of conservatives being turned upside down and having the loose change shaken out of their pockets, and then criminally charged for literally penny ante mistakes.
No wonder the IRS bought up millions of rounds of bullets in recent years; they anticipated this law, and guess who they are going to be shooting them at: YOU.
The Wall Street Journal just said that the IRS is “about to go into beast mode” against the American people, and only the most politically partisan anti-America authoritarians are cheering this on. President Donald Trump would never have signed this into law, because he would never support this kind of grotesquely big Sheriff of Nottingham- type intrusive government. An authoritarian was needed to sign this law, and only someone like Joe Biden would do it. So the election was stolen to get this kind of massive change on the American political and legal landscape. It is one more official weapon to be used against the political opponents of the Democrat Party.
The second smoking gun evidence is yesterday’s illegal FBI raid on President Donald Trump’s home, Mar-a-Lago, in Florida. This unwarranted forceful entry raid was illegal in so many ways, but its purpose was not meant to be legal. It is meant to send a message: No innocent American citizen is out of the reach of the lawless, rogue Biden FBI and DOJ. They will falsely accuse you and unjustly charge you just to hurt you. Because you are different than them.
The conflict of interest here is obvious. Biden is misusing the federal government’s monopoly on coercive force under color of law to politically damage his likely 2024 political challenger. Only under an unaccountable authoritarian government (like Cuba, Venezuela, a zillion African countries, Russia, the 1940s communist takeover of Eastern European nations etc) can something this egregious be done against political opponents. And so the 2020 election had to be stolen in order to blunt change-maker Trump.
Friends, if the Biden rogues had won legitimately in 2020, and if like normal politicians they were at all concerned about being held accountable through the voting system, they would be treading very lightly. Instead, we see the federal government being hyper aggressively used to commit the most egregious, violent illegalities perpetrated in America’s history against political opponents of the Democrat Party, beginning in January 2021 and ramping up daily ever since.
This is powerful evidence that the election thieves feel invincible, and unaccountable. They stole the 2020 election in order to hijack the American government, and they are implementing that hijacking right in front of our faces.
Ten take-aways from my Election Day experience
With the Kerwin men, quality people
Primary elections are more important than the general election every November, because voters choose who is going to be representing them at the November election. And in the case of Republican Party voters, if you don’t vote for constitutional America-First candidates, you are guaranteed to have a Republican In Name Only (RINO) liberal running against the Democrat Party liberal in the November election. There’s not a whole lot of philosophical difference between the Republican liberal and the Democrat liberal, and after that November election between a RINO and a Democrat it’s just a question of how rapidly America is destroyed under your feet, slowly or quickly.
On Tuesday I volunteered at four different election polls, handing out brochures for Kathy Barnette, and I spoke with a lot of voters. Here are some take-aways from my experience during and after Tuesday’s Primary Election here in PA:
- Unsurprisingly, voters make both simple and complicated choices in voting for candidates. Simple choices can be lazy or principled, and complicated choices can be bizarre or carefully thought out. Candidate selection is as complex as any other choice in life, and I think that is a good thing.
- Party establishment endorsement is a negative among Republican/ conservative voters, who appear to increasingly view the GOP as a force for bad and not for good. For example, Lou Barletta’s campaign unleashed a tidal wave of Republican establishment career politician endorsements in the days before Tuesday’s election, and if anything these endorsements seemed to hurt Barletta at the polls, not help him; Doug Mastriano crushed Barletta.
- On the other hand, Democrat voters seem highly attuned to and in synch with their establishment, as witnessed by political newcomer Justin Fleming’s trouncing of long time Democrat Party activist Eric Epstein in the newly created 105th Legislative District (PA House). For at least ten years, and probably closer to twenty years, independent-minded liberal Epstein has run for everything from dog catcher to school board to state senate, almost always unsuccessfully but always with close-call results. Not this time. Apparently ten unions and the House Democrat Campaign Committee aggressively weighed in to stop Epstein from finally capitalizing on his well-known household name in southcentral PA. Fleming the unprincipled “electoral pragmatist” won with 61% of the vote.
- Money is not all that it used to be, but it can still matter in elections, no surprise. Case in point is a very small amount of money (like $157,000 total), old fashioned shoe leather, and reasonable social media networking got conservative grass roots favorite Kathy Barnette up to 25% of the vote in an eight-candidate race. This is a huge statement about the lack of importance of money. However, when the wildly false negative attacks against Barnette started pouring in during the last week from McCormick and Oz and their supporters, like Sean Hannity, Barnette lacked sufficient funds to get out her last-minute rebuttals on TV and radio that could have gotten her over the finish line to win. Enough confusion and obfuscation was created by the attacks to blunt Barnette’s position at the top, and allowed both Oz and McCormick to grow their own voter returns at her expense. Had Barnette possessed a million dollars to do last-minute TV and radio ads, she probably would have won the election.
- Negative advertising does work, and it also greatly suppresses voter turnout. At all of the five polls I was at yesterday, voting was down between 10% and 20%, and I believe many voters were just fed up and confused by all of the negative advertising. SO they stayed home and said “I will just vote in November for whoever wins this primary race.”
- Conservative voters are much more oriented toward ideology and principles than political party.
- Almost every primary election has one winner and some losers, and almost always the losers say they will take their ball and go home if they don’t win, and they won’t back the winner of their race. For weeks before and even after the election was over, I heard unceasing complaints from Republicans about how Mastriano is “too conservative” for Pennsylvania, and that his win will automatically hand the governorship to Komrade Josh Shapiro. I also heard unceasing complaints from Republican voters that Lou Barletta was too milquetoast to appeal to anyone in November, except for blue haired suburban GOPe Republicans. Folks, get used to these competitive races. They are good for us. This competition is just the nature of real and healthy primary races, something that Republicans really need, and something that the GOPe HATES. The Republican Country Club Party hates hates hates sharing decision making with the unwashed dirty masses, who keep gumming up GOPe dreams of easy ill gotten wealth and posh fundraisers. Sorry not sorry, GOPe, get used to ceding more and more decision making to the actual people you claim to represent. It is a good thing, and it is why Mastriano won by an enormous margin.
- For the most part, the GOPe got its ass kicked in PA and elsewhere in America. RINOs like Jake Corman (the sitting President Pro Tem of the PA Senate!!), Jeff Bartos, et al either dropped out or finished below 5%, while underdog candidates like Kathy Barnette and Dr. Oz scored big time vote returns against the establishment’s wishes. We are witnessing a power shift away from GOP party bosses, which is a good thing, because party bosses are corrupt and self-serving people.
- Charlie Gerow is still a good guy, and still not a catchy candidate. Once again, voters enjoy Charlie as an articulate proponent of conservative values, but not as a representative in government for their needs. Charlie is a salon intellectual in the mold of William F. Buckley, one of the 20th century’s great conservative crusaders. Not winning elections doesn’t mean Gerow isn’t relevant, it just means his strength is in policy debates and in the conservative salon of ideas. Nothing wrong with that.
- Finally, yard signs and road signs do not mean anything close to what they used to represent even ten years ago. At one time yard signs and roadside signs were a big part of electoral public outreach, but in this digital age, they are becoming less important. I would not say they are unimportant, because in some ways they can be used to get a sense of voter engagement. Like, lots of signs for Candidate X in a county or in a region probably means that Candidate X is well known there. But it does not mean that Candidate X is necessarily going to convert that name recognition into an Election Day win. Information is now moving so fast and so far across the political landscape, that just one gaffe or one slip-up by an otherwise reasonable candidate can mean the end of their lead or presumptive win. No amount of yard signs can counter a fifteen second video of a candidate doing or saying something ridiculous.
Thank you to all the voters who spent time talking with me on Tuesday. I promote candidates at polls on Election Day every year because these are people I believe in, and I believe in sharing the why and how I have arrived at my decision on whom to vote for. One thing that has not changed among voters at polls since I was a teenager is this: Liberal voters at polls are always surly, grumpy, dismissive, or disrespectful. Do not ask me why this is, but it does hint at how some people think.