Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

There is a dangerous and irresponsible strain of opinion telling the Democratic Party today that when they lose, it’s because they aren’t fighting hard enough…The thesis goes something like this: the left has total dominance of the culture, and total dominance of the popular vote, so the answer to why they lose not infrequently is that the system is rigged against them, and they must fight all the harder and “take the gloves off” or something like that to achieve their ends.

The gloves have been off for a very long time in American politics. How quickly we forget the attempted murder of multiple Republican politicians including Steve Scalise, who may never walk normally again. Just this past week we saw a Democratic staffer who doxxed multiple Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee indicted, facing nearly 50 years in federal prison for his crimes. We saw Cory Gardner revealing his wife had received graphic texts of a beheading after his vote for Kavanaugh, along with their home address. And in Washington, we saw whatever all this is.

And this is not new, of course – it stretches back a long time. The gloves were off for the American Left in the late 1960s, when campus and activist violence became normalized. They were off in the 1970s when the outgrowth of that spirit of protest led to the sequence of Weathermen bombings that crisscrossed the nation.

Snip.

What this whole “we’re the wet rag party” talk really translates too is: we, the abidingly secular Americans who were repeatedly promised we were the ethnically and sexually diverse and dominant coalition during the Obama years, now feel frustrated by being merely ascendant and feel instead entitled to absolute and immediate victory. And that justifies the “we’re coming for you” attitude today. Because any roadblocks or speedbumps for that agenda are now viewed as the vestiges of dead old white men protecting the interests of modern old white men.

This was a surprisingly dominant viewpoint as recently as a few years ago, accepted even among intelligent people on the right. Then a surprising group of people came along willing to say: No. And that has made all the difference.

Even the gimpiest of conservagimps can’t pretend that the attack on Kavanaugh isn’t an attack on us. The last few weeks has made it impossible for them to live in denial any longer. Hell, when Bret Stephens wakes the hell up you know the alarm is going off. At this rate, next we will see anti-Trump sex symbol George Will announce that the Democrats have been “unsporting.”

Snip.

But the rest of us are woke, and getting woker . We are red-pilled, and getting red-pillier. We are getting, you might say, militant.

See, we Normals get that if they can do this to Brett Kavanaugh, they can do this to anyone. If they win, they can destroy anyone Normal, or Normal-friendly, by a mere accusation (Notice how none of this applies to the elite – since they really don’t care about sexual abuse, their own gross collection of woman beaters, abusers, and pervs get a pass). This is the left’s dream tool. They don’t have to prove anything. They simply have to point, screech “Witch!” and their enemy disappears like in that bizarro universe Star Trek episode where Spock had a beard.

But it has become clear that we are not accepting this, because to accept this is to accept our own submission to these goofs in perpetuity. At first, the response was anecdotal. Hugh Hewitt had a bunch of women callers dial in, all of them irate, in what he described to me as an unprecedented “avalanche.” I personally got emails from center right folks, Normals, who do not like politics. In fact, they hate politics. But now they are paying attention. And they are mad. Every man knows he has a bull’s-eye on his back. Every woman knows her husband, brother, or son could be next. These people aren’t afraid of men being held accountable for things they did, but of false accusations that liberals would strip them of their ability to defend themselves against.

he attempted human sacrifice of Brett Kavanaugh on the altar of unrestricted abortion is too much for them. And now the polls are making it clear that that they are angry, ticked off, and ready to low crawl over jagged glass shards to vote against the Democrats who instigated this atrocity.

Sure, anecdotes are tricky. But the polls are less so. Heidi Heitkamp is gone. She’s toast. Claire McCaskill, toast. That goofy guy in Indiana, looking bad. Manchin? He knows what time it is, so he might weasel through.

We are not going to forget what happened here. And this is going to have a lasting impact, but not one the Democrats are going to like.

Several public polls have shown a fading “enthusiasm gap” between Democratic and Republican voters since the Kavanaugh fight escalated. The campaign arm for House Republicans reported an explosion in small-dollar donations. “[W]hat the Kavanaugh experience has done is gotten Republicans excited,” Rep. Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, chairman of the NRCC, told Fox News.

Other polls showed Republicans pulling away in red-state Senate races. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., both broke 50 percent in the CBS/YouGov polls. Blackburn is running to replace Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., who voted against Kavanaugh, is down by nearly 9 points in the RealClearPolitics average. The Cook Political Report has shifted the Montana Senate race in the GOP’s favor.

(Hat tip: Director Blue.)