Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian flew from his home in Silicon Valley, California, recently to Robeson County.
He’s a former state senator and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, which is the same School that rioted because a gay conservative was scheduled to speak recently. Joe was part of Berkeley during a more noble time, when Berkeley stood up for free speech even if students disagreed with it. Times have changed.
Joe simply wants to understand why Democrats lost the last election. We tried to save him a trip but he wants to visit several of the counties that Politico Magazine identified that mattered nationwide in the last election. Robeson, being a traditionally Democrat county that shifted its votes overwhelmingly in the other direction, made national news, so Joe wanted to see for himself.
Joe’s a decent guy and you’ve got to respect someone who just wants to talk rationally. It isn’t clear if the visit was productive. There really aren’t any huge secrets. While local Republicans have been working hard for the past decade it doesn’t explain why other Democratic counties flipped as well. The bottom line is the nation felt it was at a crossroads and didn’t like the direction liberals within the Democratic Party wanted to take it.
We told Joe average Americans, particularly Southerners, between California and New York don’t like two things — hypocrisy and insults. Hypocrisy is when anti-Trump protestors are called “concerned citizens,” but anti-Obama protestors within the Tea Party are called “bigots” by the same media. That’s both hypocrisy and insults in action.
Hypocrisy is also when immigration agents have annual raids during the Obama administration and there is silence. But a recent immigration raid resulted in protests, although they were planned before Trump took office and netted fewer than during Obama’s administration.
Trump isn’t necessarily anti-immigrant, but he is pro-American. It’s odd to think the election was a choice between traditional Americanism and a European liberal form of Americanism. But that was the choice of whom to put first.
Capitalism raises people from the poverty socialist systems created for immigrants fleeing those countries. The US accepts more legal immigrants than any country in the world, so it is hardly anti-immigrant. The UN estimates the US immigrant population is four times that of the world’s next largest immigrant destination, which is Germany. Americans wanted a candidate to put America first. It was a novel idea.
Romney foolishly discounted half of Americans with his 48 percent comment, writing off half of America during his campaign. Clinton did the same, calling Trump supporters deplorable. Americans simply want a united country with American values, not Third World socialist ideals. Any Trump personality flaws were secondary to putting old-fashioned American values first and not some new set of liberal values.
Americans see through the propaganda of hypocrisy and insults. If anything, voters retaliated against the perceived injustice from liberals and media.
Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez is the new Democratic National Committee chairman. He was considered the most liberal guy in Obama’s cabinet and barely won over the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison, who was selected as his dDeputy.
Prominent Democrat Alan Dershowitz said he’d leave the Democratic Party if Ellison had won. It’s unclear what he will do since Ellison is the No. 1 guy and very anti-Semitic, according to Dershowitz, who has been a Democrat for 60 years.
So it seems at the national level Democrats aren’t going to change directions. Liberals are going to keep pulling the party left. They still don’t understand every riot and every time they interrupt prayer before a town hall it hurts their own cause.
The media doesn’t understand biased attempts to aid Democrats hurt their credibility and only gets more conservatives elected.
Robeson isn’t a national aberration of something odd that happened. Instead, Robeson is simply a barometer of a national trend.
