OPINION:
With gas over $4 a gallon, an unpredictable president and an unpopular war, some Republicans are giving in to panic.
Instead, they should see the November midterms as a chance to increase their congressional majorities. Gas prices will likely come down, and Democrats are putting up anti-American, socialist/Islamist candidates.
However, there is a caveat: The Republican Party must conduct a bold branding campaign, without apology.
People need to be reminded of the way things were under President Biden. That was when gas rose to $5 a gallon, inflation soared as high as 9%, millions of unvetted illegals poured across the border, Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro was thumbing his nose at the U.S. and Iran was weeks away from getting the bomb.
The message: If you vote Democratic at any level, you are summoning back the bad old days. You are also enabling Democratic Socialists of America, which is taking over the party and pushing a bizarre, anti-American agenda.
A recent Washington Post poll showed that 75% of Democrats said they could vote for a DSA candidate. The Democratic Party already supports illegal immigration, no voter IDs, noncitizen voting, confiscatory taxation, bigger government, limitless abortions, drugging and mutilating sexually confused teens, anti-Zionism and openly siding with America’s enemies.
DSA’s platform calls for all that, plus tearing up the U.S. Constitution, abolishing prisons, defunding police, ending capitalism and imposing liberty-crushing collectivism.
Democrats are at a crossroads. Disowning DSA would split their coalition. If not, they could credibly be accused of abetting national suicide. Republicans hold the high cards and need to play them.
Sen. Tim Kaine, Virginia Democrat, could have distanced his party from DSA during a recent Fox News interview. Instead, he welcomed its members inside the “big tent.” Fine, you now own them.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member, is the Democratic Party’s poster boy. An Islamist and communist, he has openly embraced antisemitic figures such as online streamer Hasan Piker. Wearing a Mao-style suit, Mr. Piker told College Democrats of America at their summer convention that Democrats who “fund Israel” or “fund ICE” are “fascists” with whom the left should no longer cooperate.
Mr. Mamdani’s class warfare is aimed at New York’s private sector, the world’s free market fountainhead.
He has frozen rents in 1 million housing units while threatening to seize properties that fall behind in maintenance. Last week, his staff posted a searchable database of 960,000 people who own a pied-a-terre — an expensive second home that will be taxed more heavily. This is basically an “enemies list” for doxing in a city where a healthcare CEO was murdered on the street by an assassin whom the left has crowned as a folk hero.
Mr. Mamdani is building five city-owned supermarkets. A core basket of goods will be priced at 30% below typical retail prices and recalibrated each month. This will drive privately owned stores out of business, leaving “food deserts.” The government will become the monopoly supplier, setting the stage for rationing.
It will not be enough for Republicans to cry, “The socialists are coming!” or even “The communists are coming!” Millions of brainwashed young people equate socialism and communism with fairness and compassion. They need a crash course in how these poisonous, envy-based systems create misery and tyranny.
A national campaign could start with excerpts from Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent speech at an anti-terrorism conference. Echoing President Reagan, he called communism “a distinctive and unique evil,” an anti-God philosophy that “has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, for civilization itself.”
Political ads this fall should illustrate the stark moral contrast between the parties.
The most effective Trump 2024 campaign ad showed Vice President Kamala Harris supporting sex changes for inmates. It represented so much that is wrong with the Democratic Party, including favoring criminals over victims and subsidizing depravity.
Republican ads could expose what the Democrats under Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have done to that state. The Justice Department is uncovering billions of dollars in fraud, much of it in the Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Somali community, of whom 81% are on some form of welfare.
An even more shocking item has surfaced. Starting this fall, Minnesota teachers will introduce children as young as 4 to MyGender Dolls, which feature removable, interchangeable sexual organs.
“Prototypes of the dolls were shown in a 2024 conference where one named ‘Sam’ can be seen in what appears to be some phase of a gender transition, with a detachable penis off to the side, and a dress and girls’ underwear within reach,” the New York Post reported.
Mr. Walz was the 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate who famously ordered tampon dispensers in boys’ restrooms.
If a strange man outside the schoolyard slipped MyGender Dolls out from under his raincoat and showed them to schoolchildren, he would be arrested and charged with child abuse.
Democrats cannot explain their way out of this, nor can they justify Mr. Mamdani’s inflicting communism and Islamism on New Yorkers. This September will mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which Mr. Piker said “America deserved.”
While we are at it, Democrats went along with all of Anthony Fauci’s pandemic dictates, including masking children, suppressing effective alternative treatments, censoring critics, forcing people to take shots and mandating closings and lockdowns except when it came to antifa/Black Lives Matter rioters or illegal border crossers.
Make the Democrats own it all, even for candidates running for school board.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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