Some may be.

Doing some math the other day and discovered that the end of the Civil War is closer to my date of birth than I am. Consequently, in discussing things, I find that in mentioning various Items I have to explain them, not just refer to them.

However, most people have had, say, a quarter of my experience with various issues,
For example. My last year in the Army, I was in Air Defense. Terrible fate for a simple but honest grunt. But I learned the business. And some of our intel briefings included a map not in Mercator and not centered on Dubuque. So I don’t have a problem concerning something or other about Greenland.. But you don’t need my briefings to see that. Looking down on the North Pole of the classroom globe is good enough. Or maybe a world atlas you haul out for your kid’s geography homework.
Al Gore assures us the place is ice free and we don’t have to detour around polar bears,
Many years ago, a Public TV special assured us that the Navy wasn’t ready for the Third Battle of The North Atlantic. Couldn’t cover the Greenland-Iceland-UK cap, Obviously did a number on the Navy. Ran into a Navy guy who’d taught at the War College. Asked him about it. He commenced to swear, However, in order to do a job on the Navy, we had to BELIEVE the Greenland-Icelan-UK Gap was a real threat. Public tv wouldn’t lie and I expect there a number of folks who take that seriously, even if Trump says it is.

Point is, even in a life with half the adult time I have, lots of people must have encountered other issues to an extent that they thought about them. Maybe have some experience, direct or indirect.

Point is…you don’t need top secret briefings to have a clue and maybe some people do.
I was in a fraternity in college, so I know that social cohort. Not bad folks. I did civil rights work so I know the moderate campus leftists and through them the nutcase leftists. I know the former sort of believe what the say, for a while. The latter,,,,are lying through their teeth unless they are certain they’re only talking to a fellow traveler. Lots of folks went to college, with its late-adolescent population density and couldn’t have avoided a whiff of this stuff.
Some of my employment has taken me to crappy areas of various towns. Not many people have avoided that altogether and a good deal of local news concerns it, Can’t miss the good and bad about it.
Nobody’s missed the energy prices. Many people aren’t climate change freaks and don’t prefer the windmills and solar farms providing intermittent, expensive power while being particularly intrusive, You don’t need to get a degree in it. Nor can you miss it by looking the other way.
Groceries? We’re doing okay but still the sales are where it’s at, Day-old pastries don’t get much older. The difference between house brand and name brand, if discernible, isn’t worth paying for.

The directors of ostentatious outrage decide, based on the designated villain-designated victim lineup whether to unleash the Publc Virtue Signallers. George Floyd, yes. Justine Damond, nope. Matthew Shepard, yes, Jesse Dirkhising not at all. Tyree Nichols, YES….ooops, never mind. It’s obviously obvious and a whole bunch of people know it.

Point is, a whole bunch of people know this stuff, to a greater or lesser extent. Can’t not.

For example, under NAFTA, there was a quota and tariff on American dairy sold to Canada. The low-tariff quota was filled entirely by Canadian-owned dairies in the US, and then everything over that was tariffed in excess of 200%. (What do you mean that’s not free trade, it said “North American Free Trade Agreement” right on the label.)

Even St Reagan put a 100% tariff on Japanese electronics.

now theyre .88/ea

Tell me more about Tariffs.

The best course I ever took was probability and statistics.

I believe 0.00% of polls

You know, I was going to criticize Bauxite some more but lo and behold, you have managed to upstage him in basically every way. So prepare for some remedial history, foreign affairs, and economics.

I wouldn’t try it, if I were you.

Of course you wouldn’t, because you ignore how AntifA has actually been fought and crushed in the past by actually applying the law. Moreover I note that a lot of what R2L calls “Minnesota Antifa” are not in fact from Minnesota at all, as the misnamed Robin Good can attest.

But that pales in comparison to what you have to peddle here.

Ask Dark Age Britons how they did when the various Viking warships landed.

You can see for yourself. May I suggest the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles? The Welsh “Chronicles of the Princes”? The Treaty of Perth?

If you stretch the definition of “Briton” and are willing to dabble in even more overtly fantasy stuff you could go with the propagandistic “War of the Irish and the Foreigners.” Suffice it to say, this isn’t going to go well for you or the claim you are trying to make. I would know, I’ve actually studied, written, and wargamed in this period and era, and even worked as a consultant or playtester.

The smart Brits ran and hid. The dumb ones became Viking thralls, or worse yet, fertilizer for British farmland.

Only for a time. Even Aelfred the Great had to alternatively run and hide or pay off the “Danes”, but only as a means to an end as he gathered strength to fight them off. Indeed, too much running and hiding or paying off was a bad idea, just ask the Franks across the Channel or King Edmund of East Anglia, better known as St. Edmund the Martyr.

In truth, while the “Great Heathen Host/Army” (Host is closer to the original meaning of the term) did strike Britain like a sledgehammer and rolled up all but one, maybe one and a half of the Saxon Kings and a host of smaller Brythonic polities inside of a decade, Aelfred and the West Saxon and Mercian gentry rallied and resisted, and from 875-8 they so turned the tide they killed off one of the major Viking leaders (Ubba) and destroyed his army, then pursued one of the others so far they actually shut him up in his fort and forced him to convert and make peace, hence Wedmore and the conversion of Guthrum/”Aethelstan”, ensuing about a generation of RELATIVE peace between the consolidating Wessex and the Brythonic groups on one side and the former Vikings/Norse settlers. And when it was broken in the early 900s, it was as a result of a succession crisis after Aelfred’s death between Aelfred’s son and his deceased elder brother’s with the Norse interfering on behalf of the rebellious cousin, only to (admittedly) narrowly lose in a “Won the battle lost the war” kind where their claimant died after a victory.

Edmund, Aelfred’s successor, retaliated by conquering about half of the territory that his father’s treaty and fending off attempts to make headway there while the Scots united with what was left of the Picts after the latter suffered a devastating defeat to the Norse and began driving the Norse out of the lowlands. A generation later, Aethelstan finished reconquering the Norse held territories, fought off several Viking attacks, and in fact pushed things so far that the Norse rulers of Dublin, the Norse pretenders to York/Jorvik, and the Celtic kings of Strathclyde and Scotland united to try and stop the surging English at Brunaburh. And failed, with the Norse being driven out of Britain or forced to bend the knee while Strathclyde and Scotland accepted English vassalage.

There’d be a few decades more drama in the North with the likes of Erik Bloodaxe trying to reclaim a hold to little avail before the major British polities consolidated, suffering little more than Scandinavian raids. Again, all of this happening within a century of the Great Heathen Host’s arrival on Britain.

To be fair, there WERE still raids (even if increasingly ineffectual ones) and some limited intrigue in the North. But it wouldn’t be until about a century after the Great Heathen Host and a half a century after Brunaburh before the Norse actually had much success in Britain again. And that owed to a really unfortunate matchup/

A: One of the worst British Kings (easily, EASILY in the top five, possibly a worse human being and ruler than even the justly hated John), Aethelraed the Unraed/poorly counseled/unready of England, who “suspiciously benefitted from” the murder of his brother the sitting King, and then imposed a brutal rule over England elevating corrupt and brutal favorites like Eadric Streona to power, while being unable to mount effective opposition to the opportunistic Norse raids. Which he made worse first by excessively paying them off after gutting his own military due to the aforementioned purges and favoritism, and then doing an about face and trying to basically Final Solution the Norse in Britain on St. Brice’s Day in a world where much of the population had mixed Scandinavian ancestry and they were overwhelmingly Christian, with St. Brice’s Day Massacre going down in infamy in history.

B: The dynamic father-son duo of Sweyn Forkbeard and Cnut (the famous “Canute” off the much-misunderstood tides parable), who were among the best rulers and warriors of their time or that Scandinavia ever produced, and who were accomplished Christian Viking warlords. Who among other things had a relative killed in the aforementioned massacre by Aethelraed.

So the result was not a very fair fight, in large part due to large swaths of the English and Welsh leadership defecting from Aethelraed to the Dano-Norweigians due to believing (correctly on the whole) they’d be better rulers. Not helped by an ongoing civil war between Aethelraed and his own son Edmund the Ironsided. For a time it seemed like Edmund might actually be able to overcome the hole his father had dug but then he also-conveniently died, with the result being that Cnut was recognized as King of England, forming a triple empire of three crowns (England, Norway, and Denmark) across the North Sea.

And even then it only lasted about 30 years before Cnut’s sons died off and in England were replaced by a younger son of Aethelraed who cleverly played off Cnut’s sons against each other and waited for them to die off. Ironically had you wanted a better example you’d have picked France (which suffered even more from Viking attacks and ultimately ceded far more of its territory to the Norse on a more permanent basis, though still as vassals rather than the relative equals of Wedmore) or Russia. But that would require knowing history.

In any case, the Vikings, the “Northmen”, were justifiably feared and cast a long and formidable shadow over Europe, North Africa, and even the Middle East in their heyday as adventurers, mercenaries, pirates, explorers, and even conquerors. But they suffered from major glass jaws in that they rarely managed to outright conquer the territories they harried, and even when they did they tended to be booted out or forced to assimilate inside of a generation or two due to things like tactical inflexibility, low population numbers leading to them being dominated by either locals or inflowing foreigners/thralls (gee, where might that be relevant here?) or so on.

Suffice it to say, the last great Vikings got wiped out over the course of the early 1000s, with Harald Hardrada falling at Stamford Bridge in 1066, the Norse being driven out of the Scottish isles in 1263, and conversion happening steadily at the time eroding the religious and economic basis for the Vikings. Heavy losses probably didn’t help either.

The Viking toast “Skoal!” comes from the word “skull”, due to their habit of drinking mead from the skulls of their enemies.

Tell me you know Farq All about the Old Norse or Vikings without saying that.

Firstly: You’re using the term “Viking” wrong. Viking isn’t a nationality. It isn’t even a cultural identity. It is an activity. One is not a “Viking” properly, one GOES A VIKING, as in goes out to be a raider or pirate from the bay (Vik in old Norse). And while many of those were of course Norse, a majority of Scandinavians/Norse would probably never have been a Viking in their LIVES, while actual Viking crews could include plenty of Scandinavians but also others such as renegade Franks/English/Frisians or others like Lithuanians or Balts.

Secondly: This sounds about right until you actually do the arcane method of “Asking why the Farq Old Norse warriors would be screaming something about a SKULL in what is not merely English but MODERN ENGLISH (which unlike Old English – which was closely related and mutually intelligible with old Norse, had several centuries of Latin and Celtic influences and linguistic drift)” and “Asking what the Etymologies of Skull in English are.”

In reality the thing the Norse would have shouted, Skoal/skål, has a very, VERY different if distantly related etymology to both the Old English and Old Norse “Skalle/Sculle” meaning Skull. In reality Skoal derives from the Old Norse/Germanic “skaal” or “husk/shell”, which later went on to mean bowl, cup, or so on. And while they LOOK way similar to us when we write them out like that, they are pronounced and written significantly differently, as you might guess from the different transliterations I’ve tried and how one emphasizes the long aaa sound that evolved into an o-a, and the other emphasizes an l-l-e.

Now, are these words and languages related? Yeah, probably though distantly. And it’s not hard to see how a word that means “Husk, Shell” would gradually diverge into children to both mean “Skull” and “Bowl/Goblet.” But they’re far more different and distant in that relationship than what you’re claiming.

To put it in simple terms, this would be akin to listening to knowing “Mort/Mord” in French means Death or Kill, hearing the nickname “Mort’, and concluding it originates from a title for a brutal killer of men, perhaps an executioner caste or a feared warrior elite.

When in reality the name “Mortimer” – Still Pond – has basically nothing to do with “Mort as Death” and it is just a trick of linguistics, as false a friend as “Gift Haus” would be to a tourist in a German speaking country.

Why do I mention this in such autistic detail that is at best tangential to the “points” you were trying to make? Do I just like seeing myself write?

Firstly: Yes, to a point.

Secondly: To underline how absolutely little you have actually done the research on these people or this history, as shown furthermore with your attempts to paint the “Viking Master Race” nonsense on Dark Age Britons, in spite of the fact that said Dark Age Britons ultimately came to grips with said Vikings and beat the tar out of them inside of a century, and indeed had broken the high point of Viking conquests inside of a decade.

Thirdly: To emphasize how while you want to make a grand point about how in touch with the common people you are by appealing to references of tariffs cascading onto our groceries and how you know how tariffs work, you apparently have so little understanding of how common people actually live.

Apparently at no point in this entire misbegotten trash heap of a paragraph did it EVER Occur to you to think that MOST OLD NORSE PEOPLE WOULD NOT BE VIKINGS and EVEN MOST VIKINGS WOULD NOT BE A-VIKING FULL TIME, and that even the most hardy of iron age pirates and mercenaries – to say nothing of more weekend warriors or their families – would spend EXPOENTIALLY MORE TIME getting a drink like – you know – humans kind of need to do than cleaving skulls or viking across the coast, and that it’d be EXPONENTIALLY UNLIKELY that such a common phrase would come down to us as the result of some bigwig ring-giver cutting off some notable’s head, cleaning it out to use as a goblet, and then toasting themselves and the gods to their hall, presumably full of people who had to make use of less noteworthy skulls for their drinks or – Vanir and Aesir forbid! – normal, non-fatal drinks like wooden or stone goblets.

But please, please tell me how you, BJ the Learned Everything You Know About Car Physics From TV Shows or How the demand for Drinking Vessels even in Scandinavia would vastly outstrip the supply of Skulls, comprehend how normal people live and what the real world is like.

And the descendants of those Vikings? They crossed an ocean and battled their way thousands of miles through blizzards, famine, and hardship…so they could live in a place just as cold and miserable as the one they left (ie Wisconsin and Minnesota).

Lol. Lmao. Lmaof. No. No they did not.

Firstly: Most of the descendants of those Vikings that actually did cross an ocean and battled their way across thousands of miles though blizzards, famine, and hardship to places like Iceland, Greenland, or Vinland either went back to Scandinavia or DIED as the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age, with the locals driving off or forcibly assimilating the few people from the Greenland Colony that stopped off at L’Anse aux Meadows and other North American continental timber and hunting stations, while the Greenland colony got hit with a mixture of its own logistical isolation and outright famine and ice that would see what few survivors assimilate with the Thule and other Amerindian peoples, forming a passing genetic imprint that would be all that would be left of them when Scandinavians finally regained contact with Greenland decades later. While Iceland combusted into anarcho-feudal civil war and then Norwegian autocracy that so hollowed things out when the British started picking on them in 1807 there was no gunpowder on the entire island to ward off their raids.

The descendants of the Vikings and other Old Norse that ACTUALLY SETTLED Minnesota overwhelmingly came meekly and law abidingly over the course of the 1800s and especially 1900s as poor farmers or at best middle class professionals seeking a better life, checking in in legal checkpoints like Ellis Island and having to prove themselves. This is not surprising considering that after the Viking Age the power of the Scandinavian states in general waned heavily for about 300 years before the 1500s, and this sort of last great flourishing of Scandinavian power in the 1500s-1700s seeing things like the Kalmar Union and its collapse, Denmark-Norway, the Swedish Empire and its Lion of the North and Deluge of Poland, and so on before it all combusted in a mixture of fratricidal wars and defeat from the emerging powers in Germany, Britain, and especially Russia, with the last great conquering army in Scandinavian history being wiped out in the years long aftermath of Poltava while what Scandinavian overseas colonies were sniped by other powers (New Sweden for instance being conquered by the Dutch with little fanfare) or left to wither (like the Danish West Indies). You see periodic ghosts of Scandinavian possible resurgences with things like the brief Danish victory over a united Germany in 1848, the Norwegian push for independence or war from Sweden, and the old North’s attempts to ward off Nazi Germany and the Soviets in WWII, but these were ultimately fleeting, mostly failed, and short lived, much like the desperate 19th century Swedish re-adoption of the Tricorne as part of a military uniform as kind of a desperate LARP of when they were a great power to be reckoned with.

Which is why the Scandinavians that came to Minnesota and elsewhere in the American Midwest were not only more like the dependents that came in the wake of the Vikings – the land hungry, poor civilians like wives and children – but if anything generally even more desperate than they had been, with moderately better life expectancies but little hope of things getting better in their home countries. Why they were overwhelmingly civilians rather than soldiers, checked in the border checkpoints at customs, and generally from countries that had not won a war in decades and which were stagnating at the time technologically and economically. Which may be hard to believe especially for someone like you, but no less true especially if you study the accounts of those that came.

So you are trying to convince us not to take on domestic terrorists that may or may not be from Minnesota because they MAY be descendants from a bunch of peasants and townsfolk that emigrated in the 1800s and 1900s, who in turn may be descended from Vikings. While ignoring the possible ancestry of say the Minnesota Army units or ICE.

Ok champ. Your logic is unimpeachable. Now kindly go with the doctor to check yourself in to the padded room.

Skoal! ?

Yeah yeah yeah, come back when you actually understand what the heck that term means or where it comes from rather than “It vaguely sounds like something, so therefore let’s go with that.”

But seriously, folks, just remember Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

That’s not what Occam’s Razor says, BJ.

What Occam actually wrote was “Plurality must never be posited without necessity.” Which sounds similar to what you phrase, but is not. “Plurality must never be posited without necessity” is different from “the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.” It is closer but more accurate to say that the simplest explanation ACCORDING WITH THE EVIDENCE GIVEN/that has the fewest pluralities according with the evidence is more likely to be the correct explanation.

I can postulate that riot police use shields the way they do because they copied them from the High Roman period. This would be a very simple explanation. It would also be more than 98% wrong with it mostly being parallel evolutions with the modern riot police realizing the similarities late in the game and cribbing some notes from the Romans much later in the development.

In reality, Occam’s Razor tells us that plurality must never be posited without necessity. But the track record of biased and inaccurate polling, oversampling of leftists relative to conservatives, and narrative pushing in American polling is well documented and represents a necessity that demands explanation and consideration, even if pluralities must be involved.

There’s no media conspiracy. There’s no left wing cabal.

Spare me. Anybody on here either should have seen the likes of Journolist or be able to dig it up quickly. We all saw simultaneous censorship of things like the Hunter Biden laptop and the Lab Leak Theory for Covid-19. These were actual, provable media conspiracies, much like the cycling of doctored images on Pretti and the suppression of footage like that for Robin Good just before she tried to accelerate over an ICE agent.

But even nonwithstanding direct, actual conspiracies there can also be conspiracies of silence or connivance. Ones where there was no smoky room where people met, but the aggregate of preferences being played out. The overweening biases of the MSM reporters and staff is undeniable by anybody sane, even by the reporters themselves, and their slant is overwhelmingly leftist.

There is no rational or justified explanation for why Trump obtains such universally negative coverage from the media when the likes of *Kim Yo Jong*, Xi Jinping, and in a previous decade Vladimir Putin did not receive such uniformly negative coverage. So either you have to believe the coverage of Trump is more negative than Kim Jong Un’s torturing propagandist sister and Xi Jinping because he is provably worse than they are, or you have to concede that the coverage has more due to personal and ideological gripes against Trump that skew reporting.

Normally this is the point where I’d say that if you have an alternate explanation I’d like to hear it. But you’re a proven fool who screwed up the origins of the Skoal, the origins of the Scandinavian diasporas in Minnesota, car physics, and a host of others. I am pretty sure any attempt by you to come up with an alternate explanation would be a monumental waste of all our times and an exercise in either malicious gaslighting or abject delusion on your part. Possibly both at the same time.

The voters chose Trump in 2024 because they thought he could make “the groceries” (how he loves that word!) prices go down.

Correct, among other things.

They didn’t vote for him to start a war over Greenland.

And guess what? HE DID NOT.

He engaged in what I admit was impolitic posturing over Greenland, but then cut a deal and got NATO leadership to admit HE WAS RIGHT, resulting in further NATO commitments to militarize and a deal with the US being given expanded concessions on Greenland.

THAT is the kind of thing Trump’s base voted for, even if they did not focus on it.

They didn’t vote for him to slap his name on the Kennedy Center.

Honestly I think much of Trump’s base would be at most agnostic to that or even supportive of it.

They didn’t vote for him to tear down the West Wing so he could build a ballroom bigger than the White House itself.

Translation: you’re a fool who doesn’t understand the actual renovations to the West Wing, how this was far from a teardown of the entire West Wing, and how the BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS FOR SEVERAL PAST ADMINISTRATIONS was that a larger ball room was NECESSARY.

So yes, it does represent part of what Trump was elected for: to actually act while previous administrations spoke, and to make what reforms and structural overhauls to the physical or metaphorical structures of the republic are needed.

They voted for him to bring food prices down. Period.

“Period.” Nevermind things like economic employment, violent crime from illegals, energy independence, asserting the rights of Americans against DIE, and so on.

Has he done so?

Check out your grocery bill: everything is up across the board.

We are obviously looking at different grocery bills, BJ. Which isn’t surprising because we seem to be looking at different things in general.

Which is why you are trying to appeal to the supposed Continent Crossing Viking Ancestors of Minnesota AntifA while I roll my eyes, point to things like the dieoff of Norse Greenland, and the documents at Ellis Island.

You are delusional. And I do not merely say that as a trite insult. I mean you are actually, seriously, possibly clinically delusional. You cite TV Shows as “evidence” on how ICE should have acted when nearly run over by Robin Good, ignoring a host of things including physics. You almost fantasize about continent crossing Viking Ancestors of Minnesota AntifA that never existed because the Vikings never got that deep into North America. You apparently believe Aelfred the Great united England by continuing to stay in the legendary peasant hut burning food rather than mustering a response and defeating the Norse so hard he made their leader convert and establishing a dynasty that would subjugate the rest. You believe that the wall to wall politicized coverage and provably flawed polling are nothing and that there is no left wing cabal or conspiracy in spite of how we can point to several such cases.

You need help I frankly do not think you can get here.

Coffee prices alone have nearly doubled. And why?

I admit I do not drink coffee and my household has drunk less of it in general, but I would guess due to a lot of the traditional Coffee growing regions the US orders from like Colombia being under leftist governments that have been hit by tariffs or alternating with trade wars that Trump has been trying to negotiate down. On the other side, tea (which I do drink), hot chocolate, and a lot of other staples have seen their prices go down where I live.

Because Trump has slapped tariffs on everything.

Untrue. Moreover, he’s often negotiated down tariffs and un-slapped some of the tariffs he did impose due to the results of negotiations, as he used them as TOOLS with which to get other countries to negotiate new trade deals and limit their OWN tariffs on.

Think the tariffs don’t apply to your green beans? Think again: if they come in a can, they’re up in price because of the steel tariffs.

Yeah uh about that. That price was already higher due to pre-existing, often years or decades old tariffs on steel by the likes of the EU, Canada, and other US trade partners. Which Trump retaliated against with his own steel tariffs in order to use them as a negotiating leverage so that both sides would either discard their tariffs (thus eliminating the trade imbalance and the costs both sides pay), or lowering them to a level both sides can live with profitably.

But you don’t know that because to you, tariffs began existing the second Drumpf came up and started slapping them around, and you have literally no idea why. Which means you have trebly no idea why the likes of the EU and a host of other countries imposed them first and kept them up in spite of how your grade school economic moralizing would indicate they are such a bad idea.

And no, foreign countries aren’t paying the tariffs: we lucky grocery shoppers get to pay them.

This sounds wise until you start asking yourself why if this is so several countries maintain tariffs on goods like agricultural produce and steel, often to popular acclaim. In reality tariffs are more of a balance pitting the person-as-consumer versus the person-as-producer/employee, essentially raising the prices on the former in the hopes of incentivizing employment and wages for the latter. There’s a real discussion to be had there about what the right move to make is (or if that move is no tariffs), but you’re not going to start that by ignoring the very basic fact that Trump didn’t start the tariff business, as you’d know if you saw how the WTO has gone ballistic on Canada multiple times in the past quarter century.

The higher the grocery prices go, the lower Trump’s approval falls.

Which raises the issue of what grocery prices are going and where you are.

He might get some breathing space if he took off the tariffs, but he will never do that.

Uh, he has taken off several tariffs as a result of negotiations or pledges. Indeed he is planning to rescind several steel and aluminum tariffs. The fact that you do not know this is striking, but not at all surprising.

Go back to your fantasy worlds of Viking Skull Drinker Ubermensch and Super Shot Police Officers. The adults are trying to talk.

The midterms are always uphill for the incumbent President’s party. However the exceptions are:

1934 – Democrats under FDR
1998 – Democrats under Clinton
2002 – Republicans under George W. Bush

These are exceptional times and Trump is an exceptional president.

Too early to call.

— Huxley

This^^.

The midterms are still 8 and half months away. A lot can happen in 8 and half months. This far out, a lot of voters aren’t even fully engaged.

So as between Trump and the continuation of Biden/Harris, many of these folks chose Trump as the lesser of two evils.

— Bauxite

This^^^.

There is a substantial pool of voters who vote primary against. They detest both parties, and so tend to favor whoever is out of power, because it’s the way to get rid of the current guy. This isn’t new, it’s true of every election.

There are also many voters who just want the culture wars, the disputes, the intractable arguments, to just go away already. They hate the Democrat ‘protests’ and they hate the GOP enforcement efforts. They want people to calm down and just get along. Which can’t happen, but they want it.

That said, it should be kept in mind that another truth is that ‘swing voters’ rarely decide Federal elections. Usually, the prime factor is turnout. Whichever side turns out their own voters better wins, or conversely, depending on how you want to look at it, whichever side motivates their own side less well loses. Swing voters decide elections when both parties turn out their base voters about equally well. This is doubly true in off-year elections, when many voters just aren’t engaged at all.

The left is the enemy. They want to destroy the country. I believe the average American would rather bury their head in the sand. The old saying preferring sweet lies to bitter truths applies.

— Richard Cook

Yep.

My own mother was a Republican and a conservative who detested Bill Clinton, and thought the Democrats were corrupt, but she used to criticize me for saying that they actually hated America and that the liberal left was a worse threat than the Islamists.

She did eventually come around, toward the end of her life she admitted that she had simply not been able to believe that they could be that bad. It was just alien to her. But eventually the evidence forced her to admit it, years later.

Republicans taking voter studies often found the same reaction with focus groups of independent voters, when told what the Biden Administration was doing regarding immigration, they refused to believe it. Not what the BA wanted to do, but what they had already factually done. It was just too alien, too weird and bizarre, they couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to do that.

I will speculate that even if these voters oppose open borders and support voter ID they will still vote for the democrat nominee.

— John Tyler

Absolutely, and in many cases their motivation is no puzzle. It’s easy to forget that a huge swath of reliable Democratic voters are voting for them in spite of their immigration and social positions. They’re voting against Republic economics.

It’s easy to overlook just how many people are terrified of the idea of ’19th century classical liberalism’ as an economic approach. And I do mean terrified.

I can still remember back in the eighties, when adult members of my family were turning against their life-long Democrat support because of the military, social, and other bad ideas. The same reasons most of us on this site oppose them. Nascent ‘Reagan Democrats’, people who would later become the GOP base.

But I also remember them saying, many of them and more than once, that they were scared of what the GOP would do to them economically. The GOP were the party of the employer, and perceived as hostile to employee interests. That fear is still in place.

I can still remember when NAFTA was being pushed through by a GOP/Democrat alliance under Clinton. I was hearing reliable Republican voters referring to their own Senators and Congressmen as ‘traitors’ for supporting it, and they meant ‘traitors to their country’, not the Party. That’s how intense the economic hostility is.

It doesn’t help that the Republicans who are squishiest on immigration are doing it precisely because of business interests.

Our side is losing the information war.

— Occasional Commenter

Maybe we are, and maybe we’re not. It’s hard to be sure in today’s wide-distributed media environment. Yeah, the former MsM is pounding hard on the narrative, but they just don’t have the audience power they did even five years ago.