As I endure the last few months of this election cycle, REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It,” has been playing on repeat in my mind.
From cable networks to talk radio, from my X feed to late night TV, partisans are working overtime to convince us that the world will never be the same if the candidate they oppose is elected.
It’s divisive…and exaggerated. They hurl invectives at one another and then they all scream that “we’ve never seen a political climate like this!” In fact, we have. This is a repeat of what typically happens every four years in a Presidential election.
“Nazi.” “Leftist crank.” “Baby Killer.” “Mush for brains.” These insults are as unoriginal as they are pernicious. They’re trotted out each election cycle.
Case in point, every Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater has been called a Nazi, a fascist, or Hitler—usually all three.
While every Democratic candidate since Johnson has been called a socialist, communist, or Marxist.
And yet through the six Republican presidents and five Democratic presidents we have had since 1964, we’ve remained a vibrant Democratic Republic, not a fascist state or a socialist hotbed.
But wait, “This is the most important election of our lifetime!” “This could be the last election in our nation’s history.” Well, until the next one.
Presidential elections are consequential. But this is the United States of America; one election is not going to make or break our union. Despite the dire warnings of civil war coming from both sides of the political spectrum, we will remain a free and prosperous people.
Might there be protests, unrest, maybe even riots after the election? Probably. But those engaged in these disruptions are a tiny fraction of the American public. Most people will wake up the next morning, get on with their lives, and continue working hard to better their future.
And isn’t that the beauty of our system? Our Founding Fathers were damn smart. To a person, they were better read on government, philosophy, language, and mathematics than the vast majority of today’s PhDs. They also cared deeply about creating a system of government that protects our God-given rights and allows us to pursue “a more perfect union.”
Their genius shines brightly in our three-branch system of government: Executive (President), Legislative (House and Senate), and Judicial (the Courts).
While partisans on either side always cry that their opponents will govern with “unchecked power,” the truth is considerably less dire. Just look at history.
When Trump was elected in 2016, the Left went into a panicked frenzy that he would be a dictator and imprison his political enemies. It didn’t happen.
When Biden won in 2020, the Right claimed that the election was stolen, that Biden would expand the Supreme Court, and that everyday Americans would lose all their rights. That didn’t happen either.
So, we must take these drastic predictions with a grain of salt. This is not new. It happens in every election. It was happening all the way back in our third Presidential election when John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson. According to Adams’ supporters, a Jefferson presidency would mean “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will all be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.” So, they may have been more elegant in their hyperbole, but it’s safe to say, not much has changed.
Despite this turmoil every four years, our nation endures.
The Founders knew that they were creating something special. The Declaration of Independence laid out the argument of self-government and that informed the debate that drafted the Constitution. By diffusing power among three separate branches, the Founders created a check on each branch against the other, and even checks within each branch.
We have seen multiple examples of this in action in just the last few years. The House of Representatives impeached Trump (twice), and the Senate failed to convict. The Executive branch attempted to prosecute a former President, and the Supreme Court ruled that Presidents have immunity while engaged in official actions.
Partisans wail and gnash teeth at the process, but it works and cooler heads prevail. Are there abuses that have yet to be rectified? Absolutely, but the system was designed to work slowly and deliberately. In this age of instant gratification, it is good for us to be reminded that we don’t want to live in a country where snap judgments by a government entity can forever change the trajectory of our nation.
If you feel anxiety creeping up as you watch the final days of the election unfold and the results come in on election night, just take a breath, and express gratitude to our Founders that we have a system that will work, despite the failings of the players in the game.
Sean Noble is the president of American Encore. You can follow him on X here.
One news network is shifting the status of the Grand Canyon State as the all-important November General Election inches closer to the nation.
Earlier this week, Fox News’ Power Rankings shifted Arizona from being a “Toss-Up” to a “Lean R” battleground state. If Arizona were to land in the Trump camp, he would capture its eleven electoral votes, which have proven critical to securing a victory for the White House in recent elections.
🚨 BREAKING: Arizona Moves from ‘Toss-Up’ to ‘Lean R’
In the final week before Election Day, Arizona has shifted from battleground to a likely win for President Trump and the @AZGOP!
According to the analysis from Fox News, “Immigration continues to be a highly important issue in Arizona, which shares a border with Mexico. In the latest Wall Street Journal survey, 25% of voters said immigration was the most important issue to their vote, higher than any other battleground. It was a ‘deal-breaker’ issue for 24% of voters. And Arizona voters preferred Trump on the issue by 10 points.”
The analysis added that “statewide polling has been directionally consistent and immigration reigns supreme.”
Both the Trump and Harris campaigns have targeted Arizona repeatedly over the past few months, spending large sums of money on advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts and making several trips to the state to encourage men and women to vote for their candidate in the closing days of the contest. Both Trump and his Vice-Presidential nominee, Senator J.D. Vance, were in Arizona last week, and they are returning this week. Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, have made a handful of stops in communities around the state in recent weeks as well.
A recent poll from Atlas Intel shows that President Trump has opened up an almost four-point lead on Harris in Arizona, when the full field of candidates is included in the survey. Almost fifty-seven percent of respondents disapprove of President Joe Biden’s performance over the past four years, compared to just thirty-nine percent who approve, assisting in Trump’s ascent to the top of the polls in the Grand Canyon State. Almost fifty-four percent of respondents believe that Biden’s performance has been “bad / terrible” compared to twenty-eight percent who selected “excellent / good.”
As of Wednesday, Arizona Republicans continue to outpace their Democrat counterparts in early ballot returns, giving cautious optimism to many in the party around the state that, should the trend continue, Election Night on Tuesday, November 5, could be a very good night for them as they watch the results roll in from around the country.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
A new poll shows that former President Donald J. Trump is maintaining his lead in the Grand Canyon State with less than two weeks until the pivotal General Election.
InsiderAdvantage released the results of a survey of 800 likely voters, that had Trump leading his Democrat opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, by three percent (50-47).
The Republican nominee for President leads Harris with Male voters (53.6-42.2), White voters (50.3-45.8), Hispanic voters (50.2-48.6), and Independent voters (49.5-43.5).
According to the poll, when individuals were asked about how the majority of their neighbors would vote in the race for President, almost half (47.7) responded that those around them would vote for Trump. Only 23.1% believe that their neighbors would vote for Harris.
President Trump is leading Harris in the RealClearPolitics polling average for Arizona, with a 1.8% spread with the results over the past month (49.1-47.3).
Arizona has proven to be a critical battleground state in the race for the White House, leading to the candidates and their surrogates flooding the airwaves and campaigning repeatedly in the state during these presidential election years. Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Senator J.D. Vance, was just in Arizona on Tuesday, stopping in Peoria and Tucson to rally support for his ticket. Trump was in Tempe on Thursday, making a curious pitstop in a region that is usually dominated by college and left-leaning voters. Another just-announced event by Trump and Tucker Carlson is for Glendale on October 31.
Democrats, led by Harris and her surrogates, have also barnstormed the state in recent weeks and months.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
Federal bureaucrats don’t get a lot of love, but there is at least one — or perhaps a small group — at the FBI who deserve your thanks. Why? Did you see the story about the FBI revising its crime data?
The FBI’s original release of 2022 crime statistics showed a 2.1% decline in violent crime when compared to 2021. This figure never seemed right and was widely questioned, but FBI data is presumed authoritative. Former President Donald Trump often insists crime is rising and the legacy media delighted in throwing the FBI figures back at him.
Whoops. The FBI very quietly released a correction. Crime didn’t fall 2.1%. Violent crime actually rose 4.5%. That’s right, crime rose, just as Trump said. Further, the combined correction of nearly 7%, reversing a 2.1% decline to a 4.5% increase is too large just to be passed off as simple error. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark (Hamlet, Act I, Scene IV).”
Quite properly, most of the attention given to this bombshell is directed at the rise in crime, the validation of Trump’s claims and the perfidy of the FBI.
Consider that last item. The FBI is vital to national security, yet its leadership down through a few layers of the org chart have been revealed repeatedly as bad. They see what’s going on around the country. They see the crime, yet they allowed that obviously flawed report to go out knowing it would benefit whoever became the Democratic nominee.
If Trump wins, then it is time for the trash to meet the broom.
But there’s another aspect of this story. The corrected figures showing a rise in crime came out just a few weeks before the election, hitting the Harris campaign with yet another mighty gut punch. The FBI could have waited until after the election. Heck, they could have waited until next year.
How did this happen? How did the new truth get past FBI leadership?
Somewhere some likely lifer FBI bureaucrat must have learned the truth. Knowing it would surely destroy their career this person may have told their superiors that if the report weren’t revised and released, if the truth didn’t come out through official channels, then they would go to the press with the correct data and the coverup.
Our hero was likely called to multiple meetings by ever-higher-ups to persuade, dissuade and threaten him or her into getting in line. They would have heard variations of “This isn’t how we do things at the FBI” and “This will destroy your career,” and “By the way, how do your kids like Springfield Elementary?”
Plenty of federal bureaucrats are lazy and useless. Sometimes they are in positions where there is just nothing to do and sometimes they are malicious.
It is a big government. There are bad apples in every barrel. As my former boss used to say: “Bureaucrats are like cockroaches. The trouble is not what they eat, but what they get into.”
But there are also plenty of fine professionals just trying to do a good job often in impossible conditions. They can be found in every department, agency and bureau. I’ve even met them at the Internal Revenue Service, good people struggling to make an incredibly bad system work.
One of those fine professionals is apparently at the FBI. A dedicated stalwart who wouldn’t be bullied, wouldn’t remain silent, who forced the FBI to release the corrected crime statistics before the election. We will likely never know who this person is.
But tonight, when hefting a pint or saying your prayers, speak a few words of thanks that we have such people.
J.D. Foster is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation. He is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.
Former Ambassador and Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) wrote a post to X on Sunday in which he reiterated his support for Democrat Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, extolling the virtue of the “rule of law.” In a scathing response to the post, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio refuted Flake’s stance based in the “rule of law” by hearkening back to a 2014 scandal that nearly ended Flake’s career.
In his post, Flake wrote, “I’m voting for Kamala Harris not in spite of being a conservative, but because I’m a conservative. Conservatives believe in the rule of law.”
In reply, an evidently unamused Arpaio wrote, “Your son Austin and his wife killed 23 dogs, and then sued me and the Sheriff’s Office for prosecuting them. You tried to destroy me and my detectives, you don’t believe in the rule of law!”
Your son Austin and his wife killed 23 dogs, and then sued me and the Sheriff's Office for prosecuting them. You tried to destroy me and my detectives, you don't believe in the rule of law!
Arpaio was referring to an incident which found Flake’s son Austin Flake and wife Logan Flake (née Hughes) indicted on multiple felony charges in connection with the deaths of 23 dogs at the Green Acre dog-boarding facility, owned by his in-laws Jesse Todd and MaLeisa Hughes. Arpaio, then-Sheriff, was the public face of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department which led the investigation and told the public during a press conference, “The caretakers were the Senator’s son and his wife.”
As reported by ABC15, the case against the Flakes was dismissed and the Hughes pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges in 2014. As the saga unfolded, the Flake family launched a lawsuit, alleging malicious prosecution against Arpaio and his now-late wife Ava personally, along with Maricopa County, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, and Deputy Sheriff Marie Trombi and her husband.
The legal battle raged for three years until its resolution, largely in Arpaio’s, Trombi’s, and the county’s favor in 2018. That’s when a final effort to revive the lawsuit and a civil trial was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Neil Wake, according to AZCentral.
During the ongoing litigation, then-Senator Flake announced that he would not seek re-election. Flake was facing collapsing populariaty, had vocally set himself against the sitting President Trump, and faced primary defeat from pro-Trump Republicans. At the time, Politico reported that a top GOP strategist “said Flake’s team had been polling the race since the beginning of the year and had repeatedly found no path to victory in either the GOP primary or the general election.”
“He basically lost to all comers,” the GOP strategist told the outlet. “There wasn’t a Republican or a Democrat you could put next to him on the ballot who he wouldn’t lose to.”
Since his public fall from grace with the Arizona GOP, Flake has become a minor surrogate for the Biden administration, attracting a small cohort of anti-Trump Arizona Republicans. He was rewarded for siding against Trump with a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Türkiye. The 61-year-old ex-Senator stood down from his post in Ankara in September and has since aligned himself with the Biden campaign at first, and now the Harris campaign as previously reported by AZ Free News.
Flake’s enthusiastic advocacy for Harris has left many in Arizona wondering what a future under Harris could hold for the Snowflake-born politician. When asked by AZ Free News if he received any policy concessions for his endorsement, such as protecting the filibuster, religious liberty, or SCOTUS; or if he was promised another ambassadorship or a cabinet post, Flake did not reply.
