Well, the Cadet is home for Christmas.  Her last official act at West Point was cheering on the Army football team’s rout of Navy during the Army-Navy football game.

With Carolyn firmly ensconced in our Artemis European headquarters (a safe house in London), and the United States Army once again violating my Third Amendment rights by quartering a solider in my home, I can finally take a breath and catch up on my reading.

What that means in translation is that I can start scribbling notes in the margins of the books I read, taking to task the author’s assumptions and conclusions.  Hey… it’s what I do.

While I am still reading my biography of Napoleon, I decided to do a bit of essay reading in foreign affairs.  

A couple of thoughts:

The first article was The Party that Failed, An Insider Breaks with Beijing by Cai Xia.

Ms. Xia was, until recently, an academic in China and a high-level member of the PRC Communist Party.  She is now a dissident living here in the U.S.  Her article is interesting and shows the story arc of someone who was early-on a devout Marxist, but saw the wizard behind the curtain, and has now seen the utter failure of totalitarianism.  

Cool… not much margin writing here.

The second article:  Reconstruction of America, Justice Power, and the Civil War’s Unfinished Business, by David W. Blight.

Mr. Blight is a professor at Yale and starts out his article on the concept of Reconstruction following the end of the Civil War and relations between the Southern Democrats, Blacks, and White Republicans.  For reasons that seem somewhat inexplicable in his opening paragraphs, he compares Reconstruction Southern Democrats to modern-day Trump Supporters.  Because, why not?  After all… all Trump supporters are racist, are they not?  There is little need to provide any evidentiary support for this.  They are, and that is simply all there is to it.  Why not reiterate it in an article that literally has nothing to do with Trump supporters.

Margin writing started getting somewhat fast-paced here.

Then I read a review of a book called The Securitarian Personality:  What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post Trump Era, by Jessica T. Mathews.

So… What really does motivate Trump’s base according to Ms. Mathews?  Well, white supremacy, of course!   What else could it be?!?

What have we really learned?  The Left still doesn’t get it and this will, ultimately, leave them twisting in the wind.

(If you have arrived here from our newsletter, continue reading here…)

Was Woodrow Wilson a racist?

Yes.  There is little to suggest that his statements were taken out of context or that he was not generally seen by most to be a racist and an anti-semite.  

Was he a Democrat?  

Yes.

Is it therefore safe to assume that all of the Democratic Party and all of Wilson’s supporters during the early part of the twentieth century were racists and anti-semites?

Of course not.  

The same holds true for Trump supporters.  (Or, perhaps more aptly called:  Anti-Hillary and Anti-Joe / Anti-Kamala voters.)

Are some of Trump’s voters racist?  

100% yep.  

Are some of Joe Biden’s voters racist?

You betcha.

The fringe elements never define the party nor the candidate.  If they did, agent provocateurs could simply attach extremist racist parties to opposing candidates and be done with them straightaway.  I can absolutely guarantee that something I have said or written in the past would be agreeable to a Marxist.  Does that make me a Marxist?  

Unequivocally no.

Calling Trump a racist, or for that matter calling his voters racist, is lazy, bigoted, and dishonest.  Saying that a Trump voter is distrustful of government?  Yeah… that is for the most part true… extrapolating that to racism… a little more problematic.  

And here is the thing that many Democrats will never accept… In 2016 many people voted for Trump as a protest against Hillary.  Just as many people voted for Biden this time around as a protest against Trump himself.  

Voter irregularity and subterfuge notwithstanding… (something that I know occurred but, frankly, probably far less than most Republicans would like)… there were many votes that were cast for Biden, then the voter split and voted for Republican congressional candidates and state office candidates.  

Sac re blu!  

Yet Democrats are having a tough time accepting this.  From Biden calling his win a “mandate”  (A mandate?  Are you kidding me??), to the political chattering class calling Republicans the tired, lazy phrase “racist”… the Democrats and their water bearers are still having a tough time processing what has just taken place.

What we do know is that they did lose ground among the voting base, and one of the starkest shifts to the Republican column came from racial minority voters.

Clearly… they must be racists.