Without a doubt, 2020 has been one of the worst years in recent memory. It has been a legacy of disease, economic stagnation, ebbing and flowing lockdowns, loss of individual freedom, and the defeat of a president who did so much to Make America Great Again. While we don’t know what 2021 has in store for any of us, there is one way to ensure that the year gets off to a good start: keeping a Republican majority in the Senate with two victories in the Georgia runoff election necessitated by no Senate candidate getting more than 50% of the vote in the November elections
If America was not already viscerally divided by culture and politics, the events of 2020 have left that cleavage markedly obvious—and Georgia is on the faultline of that divide.
Georgia has become Ground Zero for America. I capitalize that because the effects of this election could indeed have the force of a nuclear bomb. These Senate runoff elections are, in fact, a referendum on what America is today and what it will become in the future. A Republican Senate has the ability to block more radical legislation coming from the Democratic-controlled House, or whatever else emerges from the bizarre inner sanctum of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
Pundit Ann Coulter recently described the election with the hyperbole that we’ve come to expect from her, as something deciding “the fate of Western civilization … If Republicans win, they will hold the U.S. Senate. Even with a handful of Mitt Romneys, the Democrats’ most psychotic plans will be dead on arrival. That means: No Green New Deal, no District of Columbia statehood, no court-packing and no mass amnesty.”
Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Republican strategist Karl Rove, never one to exaggerate, has called the Georgia race “the last line of defense for conservative values.”
Of course, a Democratic victory in Georgia might not mean the end of Western Civilization and we know it; sadly, we might already be on that path given a society that increasingly stamps any sexual orientation with the badge of normalcy and refuses to validate biological gender as real. And goodness knows, the coronavirus might still deal a fatal blow, if not through direct fatalities engendered by the disease, but as a consequence of economic lockdowns that have strangled a free enterprise economy and enfeebled our democratic freedoms. If America was not already viscerally divided by culture and politics, the events of 2020 have left that cleavage markedly obvious—and Georgia is on the faultline of that divide.
Republicans controlled the upper House 53-47 before the November elections, and were expecting a struggle to maintain that ascendancy. But, after winning some key seats in Alabama, Texas, and North Carolina, they did not anticipate that battle to come down to a safe state like Georgia. But that is precisely what happened, and the GOP needs to win at least one (preferably both) Georgia Senate seats to stay ahead of the Democrats by 52-48. (Note: a 50-50 gridlock will cast any deciding vote to the Vice President, who is also Speaker of the Senate—Kamala Harris.)
A Democratic Senate will indeed be the death knell for much of what President Donald Trump has accomplished in the last four years, and would also proffer the bedrock for dismantling America as we know it.
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Barry Goldwater.[/caption]
“DEMOCRATS IN GEORGIA! HOW DID THEY EVER GET HERE?”
How did Georgia—a Republican bastion for decades—become vulnerable to a Democratic takeover?
[L]iberals seem determined to end the Republican conservative hegemony in the state.
Although it has become politically incorrect to even vaguely cite either the novel or the film “Gone With the Wind,” I shall unabashedly do so in the hopes that our readers are not so easily swayed by the political passions and witless whims of the moment. In the film, there is a memorable scene as the Northern armies approach Atlanta in 1864. Aunt Pittypat Hamilton, a woman who has always been comfortably ensconced in the Georgia elite, bemoans the coming occupation by federal forces, imploring: “Yankees in Georgia! How did they ever get here?”
“Democrats in Georgia!” we might well echo today, as liberals seem determined to end the Republican conservative hegemony in the state.
But of course, there were Democrats in Georgia going back to President Andrew Jackson. The state became solidly Democratic after the Civil War and remained so until the rise of Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), whose presidential run in 1964 (exactly 100 years after Atlanta fell to the Yankees) may have been a catastrophe in the short term, but provided the means for a Republican “Sunbelt” victory four years later. The South, including Georgia, began to vote Republican for the first time in history.
The question today is how did Georgia suddenly become liberal in 2020? The answer is decidedly unnerving as much as it is inevitable. Former Florida Congressman Lt.-Col. Allen West argues that progressives everywhere are threatening to destroy conservative states across the nation; they are leaving failed Blue states with high taxes, chronic crime and social unrest (that their belief system caused), and exporting their bacillus to conservative bastions of the country where the existing population has preserved a more rational and tranquil way of life. Nothing like infecting those around you. Between 2010 and 2019, New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, and Michigan saw their populations decline by four million people. California alone lost 203,000 people between 2018 and 2019 to places like Texas and Arizona.
We should have perceived the gathering storm when Stacey Abrams narrowly lost the Georgia gubernatorial race in 2018. Abrams refused to concede that race. It was all high political comedy for some but for a progressive candidate like Abrams to almost win in Georgia; there had to have been something askew in the state for Republicans.
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Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.[/caption]
THE THREAT POSED BY OSSOFF AND WARNOCK
Even if the Georgia runoff doesn’t prove to be as momentous an occasion as it portends, the Democrats in the race stand alone as cause for alarm. The election for Georgia (and America’s future) features incumbent Republicans Sen. David Perdue and Sen. Kelly Loeffler against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
“I know you think that’s an oxymoron, but the early church was much closer to socialism than to capitalism. Go back and read the Bible.”
Ossoff appears to be too young to be running for high school class president, but is in fact 33-years-old. He’s spent a short career in media when he wasn’t at elite academic institutions like Georgetown and the London School of Economics. After graduating, Ossoff applied his talents in investigative journalism as the CEO of Insight TWI, a London-based production group that Ossoff acknowledges received $5,000 from Chinese-owned PCCW—the largest telecom outlet in Hong Kong.
Though the extent to which this investment influenced Insight TWI’s content remains unknown, Georgia Republicans did not miss the opportunity to paste the young challenger’s past to the wall. “Jon Ossoff tried to hide his connection to a media company with direct ties to the Communist Chinese government. We’re asking the Senate Ethics Committee to look into this further, because we believe this was an intentional effort to conceal information from the people of Georgia," Georgia GOP Executive Director Stewart Bragg said in a statement.
But if Ossoff appears to be a foppish and detached dilettante from the Democratic Party’s elite sector, Raphael Warnock. Warnock could not be a more polarizing figure, one who would not have had a prayer of winning a Senate seat from Georgia only a decade ago.
Prayer is the operative word for Rev. Warnock, who has pastored Atlanta’s storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta since 2005—the famed church where Dr. Martin Luther King led his civil rights campaign from. Warnock, however, has developed a peculiar theology that has infected some black—and yes, white—evangelical leaders over the years: the futile attempt to fuse Christianity with socialism or Marxist ideology.
“The early church was a socialist church,” Warnock said in 2016. “I know you think that’s an oxymoron, but the early church was much closer to socialism than to capitalism. Go back and read the Bible.”
In 1995, Warnock was the youth pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem when Cuban dictator Fidel Castro came to visit. According to a Fox News report, during the visit, Castro “blast[ed] the United States with the vigor that was missing from his speech to the United Nations earlier in the day and winding up the evening with a rousing rendition of the socialist hymn Internationale.”
When pressed on the subject, Warnock’s campaign has refused to say whether Warnock attended the event and sang the Internationale. Still, the pastor has had other things to say about Castro and Cuba’s peculiar form of government. When the despot died in 2016, Warnock suggested that Castro was perhaps a bit misunderstood by his hasty critics in the democratic world “remember Fidel Castro, whose legacy is complex.”
“Don’t let anybody tell you a simple story,” Warnock told his congregation. “Life usually isn’t very simple. His legacy is complex. Kind of like America’s legacy is complex.”
Warnock then suggested that America was no different than Cuba, which has a history of detaining political prisoners: “If some people get slapped on the hand for the same crime and others go to federal prison, then we too have our own political prisons. Many of us have sisters and brothers who are political prisoners.”
Then there’s Warnock’s assertion that America should “repent” for electing Donald Trump as well as for its “worship of whiteness”—whatever that is supposed to mean. (This is a typical misappropriation of the evangelical term for renouncing sin and making it into some social justice aphorism. Even Warnock should know that nations cannot repent—only individuals can.) He has also stated that Americans cannot serve God and be in the military, which, in a nation like America where so many elected representatives have done that very thing (think of the presidents alone who have served), is a reason to send Warnock to the benches.
Warnock is the kind of guy who, at one time, wouldn’t have gotten elected in San Francisco, but is now giving the Republicans a fight to the finish in Georgia. As bad as he is on his own, together he and Ossoff are symptoms of a growing flirtation by some Americans with radical politics. If elected, their rule will produce a political reaction of such toxicity and pain that it is difficult to tabulate the ramifications.
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Voting booth.[/caption]
JANUARY 5TH IS A CALL TO ACTION FOR ALL GEORGIANS
With a Democratic majority in the Senate, which losing Georgia portends, President-Elect Joe Biden will have maximum maneuverability on some key progressive issues—such as raising taxes, packing the Supreme Court, and adding states to the Union. Though the rise and fall of taxes might be described as a short-term phenomenon, altering the courts and adding new states would substantially change America. The first would politicize the judiciary—probably beyond repair—and ensure a tit-for-tat scenario of successive presidents reversing the decisions of the previous administration. That is, if the Republicans ever occupy the White House again. The additional states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, would ensure a Democratic majority in the Senate and probably one in the Electoral College. We might never see a Republican presidency or a Republican Senate Majority Leader again.
“Now we take Georgia, then we change the world.”
Still-Senate Minority Leader Sen.Chuck Schumer (D-NY) set the tone and established the stark stakes for this contest when he said after the presidential election, “Now we take Georgia, then we change the world.”
Change the world? Let’s start with America. And what kind of change was he referring to? Was it the Green New Deal and Medicare for All? These trillion dollar socialist policies are not fully embraced by President-elect Joe Biden, but that might not ultimately matter. Although as soon to be 78-year-old Biden doesn’t appear to be the man to open the floodgates of socialism in America, he could well have little choice and, as I’ve previously argued, the Democratic Party used Biden as a mechanism to seize the presidency and will probably show little compunction to throwing him into the political grinder in favor of the more politically-pliable Kamala Harris.
Having the Democrats in charge of the presidency and all of Congress would not just be an inconvenience for conservatives. It would be a disaster. The Republicans frankly fumbled the ball from 2017-2019 when they had control of the House; then-House Speaker Paul Ryan really did nothing to advance President Trump’s agenda, and the two ended up as bitter political foes. Ryan destroyed an opportunity for conservative growth. The Democrats, however, are much more adept at publicly hiding their differences and proceeding in tandem toward a political objective.
In short, the Democrats are serious. They have an agenda. They are playing hardball. They intend to make themselves the permanent majority party.
If they seize the Senate, they could well seize the future of America at the same time—be prepared for four years of radical legislation that will be difficult to roll back, even if the Republicans are able to survive the onslaught. Why would the effects be so arduous to reverse? Because socialist legislation quickly becomes a vested interest to voters who perceive that the government has “given” them something. Look at Obamacare and how difficult this “gift” from the state has been to repeal. Even a GOP presidency and Congress failed to do that.
Combine their enthusiasm for radical policies to appease their ever-more-radical base, the Democrats hopes of enlarging the state, the current Big Tech mania for stripping citizens of their rights to uncensored speech, and the health mantra about locking down American businesses and you have a veritable recipe for Bolshevism. I do not exaggerate.
Georgians: do your duty!
