A Fast-Turning Tide

When Biden swept into office, bringing a carload of sympathetic congress-critters and senators with him, it looked as if the Democrats had a clear mandate for their thank-god-Trump-is-gone agenda.  In fact, Trump's complaints about vote-fraud and his hijacked January 6th rally only consolidated the Dems' position.  Flushed with victory, backed enthusiastically by the media, Big Tech and academia, Biden & Co. pushed on with their soft-Socialist platform -- including the assorted Covid mandates and massive spending bills.  It seemed that the new administration and its backers could do no wrong.  And indeed BLM and Antifa kindly refrained from throwing any riots or burning large sections of any city, to show their approval. 
But success, it seems, brings excess.  With schools closed and the students stuck with online learning, a lot of parents -- who were necessary for the process -- got to see what the schools were really pushing at their kids, and were not amused.  Once the parents learned that there was a name for the indoctrination they were seeing, "Critical Race Theory" became a nationwide villain.  The school boards, teachers' unions and school administrations who piously denied that any such thing was being taught in the schools promptly became the enemy too, and the parents began voting accordingly.  
Academia itself fell under a cloud when concerned parents learned about the excesses of "woke" colleges, at both public and privately funded schools.  A particular example is Harvard Law School -- arguably the most "privileged" school in the US -- where the students and faculty jointly created the "Reclaim  Harvard Law Movement";  this gang pressured the school to include instruction in "privilege" as part of student orientation.  It also claimed that the school "promotes and sustains systems of systemic racism and exclusion of marginalized groups", and therefore must "provide adequate institutional support for an office of diversity and inclusion, hire critical race theorists, promote staff of color in the workplace to management positions...provide adequate contextualization in curricula, educate its professors, its staff and its students around cultural competency, (and) take the steps that are necessary to accord adequate and equal dignity to marginalized students".  This at a school whose population is 44% "students of color".
Other high-ranking (and expensive) universities have spawned demands for abolition of grades, abolition of tests, private "weeping spaces" for students who are so upset with what they learn in class that they need "safe spaces" in which to cry, and of course the firing of any professor who gives low grades to students "of color".  As such incidents are reported in growing numbers, a lot of parents prefer sending their kids to community colleges or trade schools -- for better skills and much less money -- and the universities are beginning to lose population.  More, an increasing number of parents are taking their underage kids out of public schools in favor of charter schools and homeschooling "pods".
Nor are Biden's corporate allies immune.  There are growing numbers of lawsuits and boycotts aimed at businesses that are discovered ordering their employees into "diversity, inclusion and equity" training sessions.  Even those companies that escape lawsuits and boycotts have noticed that those "woke" training sessions have not improved company morale, but rather the opposite.  Those businesses are now quietly expressing buyer's remorse.  Further, as more tales of excesses pile up, the concepts of "wokeness" and "cancel culture" have fallen into common parlance, and bad odor -- and they're inextricably tied to the reputation of the Democrats. 
Meanwhile, the problem of our beleaguered and porous southern border hasn't gone away -- despite the suspiciously sudden lack of "migrant caravans".  Biden & Co.'s response to this has been to ship "midnight express" bus-loads of unvetted border-crossers to various American cities after dark, which has been noted by local and minor news media if ignored by the major outlets, and has not endeared the administration to the police departments in those cities.  Likewise, the violent-crime rate remains a serious problem, for which various local governments have reversed their earlier "defund the police" policies.  Biden & Co.'s response has been to instigate new gun-control laws, which is not popular outside large Democrat-run cities.  Everyone has felt the pinch of fast-rising inflation, and most citizens relate it to the vast jump in the national debt.  The administration has been woefully silent about this, or else fallen back on blaming Trump for it, which is unconvincing at best.  
Then there's Russia's saber-rattling at Ukraine, which may or may not be serious.  It could be that, given our chaotic retreat from Afghanistan, Russia is teasing the US to show what it really has militarily.  To this the Biden administration has replied with much huffing and puffing and vague promises about heavier sanctions, as well as contradictory threats to "show force" if Russia actually invades Ukraine but also promises that the the US will not send "troops on the ground".  This might mean that the US military will shuck its preoccupation with "diversity" training and show the watching world what we can do with smart missiles and drones, but the voters aren't seeing any sign of that yet.  
Then there are the stories, squeezing through scant mention in the major news media but still spreading, about the expos'e of BLM as a massive confidence racket which has collected billions of donated dollars -- and spent it on buying mansions for its own officers, not on the actual Black community.  There are more stories about legal filings against Hillary and the DNC wiretapping and spying on Trump, both during his campaign and while he was in the White House, which is potentially a far bigger scandal than Watergate.  The Democrats' reaction has been to speed up their efforts, and news reports, on getting Trump into court on various charges;  after the last five years of accusations which turned out to be hollow, this looks only vengeful, questionable, and boring.  
And then there's the Democrats' reaction to the Canadian truckers' convoy.  Biden, still supporting mask and vaccine mandates, cheerfully voiced support of Trudeau -- whose ham-fisted response couldn't have been more appalling, or revelatory.  Trudeau first used the major Canadian news media to paint the truckers and their supporters as "a small fringe minority" which sported "swastikas and Confederate flags" and of course was "white supremacist".  The rapidly-growing independent and Internet media promptly showed that to be a lie.  Then he leaned on crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe -- which locked up the donations for the truckers and promised to distribute the money to other causes that Trudeau approved of, until threatened with serious lawsuits and criminal charges.  Then he invoked the Emergency Act -- the Canadian equivalent of the War Powers Act -- to attack the truckers' bank accounts, insurance and licenses, to send out tow-trucks to haul the convoy-truckers' rigs away, and even mounted police to chase off the truckers and sympathizers on foot.  This backfired spectacularly when the ill-trained police publicly knocked an old lady off her mobility-scooter and trampled her -- and it was all caught on the witnesses' phone-cameras and uploaded to the Internet within the hour.
This seriously upset politicians all over Canada.  The governors of several provinces that the convoy had passed through quickly ended their mask and vaccine mandates, and legislators all over the country complained vigorously about the Emergency Act being "using a sledgehammer to swat a fly".  Trudeau's own party is edging away from him and the media are steadily turning on him.
Here in the US, where a similar "People's Convoy" is shaping up, the organizers looked long and hard at Trudeau's actions and considered that Biden will probably do the same to them.  They're adjusting their tactics accordingly -- starting with pulling their money out of the banks and relying on cash only.  What other defensive tactics they're planning they've kept close to their vests, but we can guess that they'll be relying on CB radios for communications, and those are not under any government or corporate control.  
What all this adds up to is plummeting approval ratings for the Democrats in general, for Biden's administration in particular, and for their corporate or political allies altogether.  Biden's approval rating according to Gallup is at 40% this week -- and Trudeau's is 38%.  This may be less of a problem for Trudeau, since Canada has a multi-party system where a party can win a national election with a minority of the vote, but I somehow doubt that he'll win the next time.  As for Biden, Democrats have begun sidling away from him, too.  Some DNC analysts worry that "our brand is toxic in rural areas", and the crime-suffering cities are grumbling too.  
What's really amazing about this turnaround is how fast it happened.  Democrats claimed a "landslide" in 2020, though it was actually a fairly close election given all the work that the DNC and its allies put into it.  Now, just over a year later, they're in serious danger of losing one or both houses of Congress.  Fortune magazine notes that: "Democrats just lost the most support in one year in Gallup poll history."  No doubt part of this is due to the ubiquity of cell-phones with videocameras, which can capture an incident and transmit it to friends -- or sympathetic news media -- in minutes.  Part of it, too, is due to the spread of minor broadcast and Internet news services, which aren't under the control/influence of the DNC -- a fact which should worry the Democrats.  
But the most of it is the longstanding and deep dissatisfaction of the voters with the corporate and government/bureaucratic oligarchy that has ruled our politics for so long.  There were warning rumbles of this as far back as the Vietnam War, but neither party would take it seriously -- at least until Trump was elected.  That, and not any "systemic racism", is the real reason why Trump won.  The DNC made a monstrous mistake in assuming that a long, loud, and thorough propaganda blitzkrieg -- the whole "Woke" agenda -- would save them.  
--Leslie <;)))><