The Blue Northeast

It never ceases to amaze me, living immersed as I am in the deep blue Northeast when the great unwashed regale me with their take on the political parties and the partisan political landscape in general. On one hand, they lament the sorry state of contemporary American politics and often go so far as to compare our current crisis in government with the kind of corruption on display in autocratic socialist Latin American countries. You know, those third-world despots that rule over what we so often disparagingly refer to as banana republics. Those guys. Then, on the other hand, with me poised to expect a condemnation of the corrupt Biden family money-making enterprise operating at the top level of government, they take a sharp left turn off the obvious path and launch into parroting the mainstream media talking points that Donald Trump is destroying our democracy and seeks to control everything through corruption and collusion…… just like our Latin American neighbors to the south. Huh?  They continue: in their opinion, the Democrat Party has remained consistently true to their cause of supporting the working man, the middle class, and minorities, and President Biden represents those values and commitments and “means well.”  Uh-huh. The Republican Party, however, has morphed into the party of radical right-wing zealots, intent on destroying democracy, stripping us of our freedoms, and controlling the people of this nation in perpetuity. Wow. Where to start the rebuttal, as I stand mouth agape, mind racing, having just purchased a handful of groceries for $200, filled my tank at nearly 4 bucks a gallon, unable to find employees with an artificially enhanced unemployment report  paradoxically in a county with a third of the population collecting some form of government assistance, a wide open southern border streaming millions of unskilled welfare recipients into my country, having paid an ever increasing tax bill knowing only pennies are going to my fellow Americans in East Palestine, Ohio and Lahai, Hawaii while billions go to Ukraine and more tax dollars slated to forgive student loans to privileged gender studies majors from elite universities, public school education producing the lowest achievement scores in decades while they try to recover from absurd Covid restrictions yet are intent on supplanting essential studies with CRT and instilling gender confusion into young minds warped from the influence of social media and an epidemic of depression and anxiety, universities, medical schools and airline pilot training programs dropping the requirements for achievement-based admissions in favor of “lived experience ” and race-based quotas, commercial real estate teetering on the brink of collapse, having seen my regional bank downgraded and the local branch closing, the inner city vacant with failing businesses and empty office buildings after work from home policies decimated the foot traffic that supported those businesses and then liberal DAs with their bail reform, so called equitable application of the law, and defund the police policies turned a trip to the mall into a  potentially life threatening adventure in urban warfare, and my government using its legal powers to harrass and attempt to imprison the leading opposition candidate in a national election…….I snap back to reality as the liberals drone on. But I come to a realization: The democrat-controlled mainstream media has proven effective beyond their wildest dreams when their propaganda is unleashed on an unwitting public.