Yes, Virginia: Taking Aim At The Woke Regency

Tuesday was the night the political zeitgeist may have flipped. Instead of Oz the Powerful there was suddenly a corrupt U.S. political class shouting, “Ignore that man behind the curtain!” The hype and bluster had faded to the apologetic figure of Joe Biden exposed, begging forgiveness.

It’s usually a mistake to read too much into any U.S. gubernatorial election during an electoral off-year. Newly elected presidents typically get a rebuke when the glitter of election night turns into the smeared mascara of governing. 

In part, that’s what happened in Virginia, New Jersey and other states holding elections for governor down to school boards. President Biden’s sheen wore off in the failure of his congressional agenda, the border crisis and the humiliation of Afghanistan. The GOP won almost every major office on offer Tuesday— and may yet get the New Jersey governorship. 

Hey, it happens.

Except this November night seemed different. Governing in the post-Donald Trump reality has transcended the norms: As seen from the COP26 conference in Glasgow, the anointed fly by private jet to meet other grandees to decide the future of the planet. They don’t care who is offended by their privilege. They’re worth it. It’s free-spending blue-check elites imposing double standards on the governed.

They assume their purity gives them the divine right to negotiate away the rights of the voters (capping emissions on the Alberta energy industry, for instance). They talk of “wars” on climate that are actually wars on people seeking an affordable lifestyle. "We need a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector," Prince Charles told the loyalists. "With trillions at its disposal.”

It will come as no surprise that the man with 210 servants thinks a one-world, unelected body to fight climate is the solution. To aid him in this “war” he has the Big Tech oligarchs in Glasgow to censor opposing messages and banish inconvenient facts. “It’s quite stunning to see liberals applauding censorship,” writes a disbelieving Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the Democrats’ martyred hero, “particularly the muzzling of bullied mothers of injured children, in order to protect pharmaceutical companies from criticism.”

But that’s the hubris of today’s Woke regency. Trust-fund poseurs like Justin Trudeau were born on third base and assume they hit a triple. Their constituency is Bill Gates, Al Gore and the other gladhanders who flew 400 private jets to Scotland to talk about cutting emissions. Their toughest job is masking their disdain for the people whose taxes support their lifestyle.

These lofty presumptions stretched all the way to Virginia, where a former governor and Clinton pal Terry McAuliffe thought he’d cake walk to the governor’s mansion again in a reliably Democratic state. 

But something novel happened. Despite influential friends like the Clintons and Obamas the powerful Oz was suddenly alone. The curtain was pulled back. McAuliffe was abandoned as suburban votes poured in for his opponent Glen Youngkin, a Republican business type who rode a wave of school-reform to the job. 

His denunciation of CRT and BLM in schools smashed cherished MSNBC/ CNN assumptions of the ruling class and the Media Party that everything be seen through Marxist prisms of privilege and race. And Youngkin won.

While Youngkin was the star attraction of the night, no one epitomized the pushback more than a former Marine named Winsome Sears, who won the Virgina lieutenant governor’s chair, the first black woman to do so. 

A self-made success story, her campaign signs featured a picture of a resolved Sears holding an AR15. “I’m telling you that what you are looking at is the American dream," Sears said during her victory speech. She took immediate aim at the MSNBC/ CNN race hustlers. “There are some who want to divide us, and we must not let that happen. They would like us to believe we are back in 1963 when my father came (from Jamaica)” she explained.

She sketched a different America from the one loathed by limousine liberals in Hollywood and New York. “We can live where we want, we can eat where we want. We own the water fountains … I am living proof. In case you haven’t noticed, I am black, and I have been black all my life, but that’s not what this is about.”  

“It’s a historic night, but I didn’t run to make history — I just wanted to leave it better than I found it. Hold on, Virginia, help is on the way — the cavalry has arrived.”

Naturally Sears was savaged by DC pundits who construed a win by a conservative black woman in Virginia as equivalent to racism. Or Donald Trump. Or both. Joy-less Reid of MSNBC hissed, “The Youngkin campaign discovered that this contingent of angry, willfully ignorant white people was the key ingredient needed to elect a GOP governor in Virginia for the first time since 2009.” 

CNN’s Van Jones sniffed that it was the “Delta variant of Trumpism… In other words… same disease, but spreads a lot faster and can get a lot more places." And so on. But the era of tossing racism around like pizza dough seems to have taken a hit.

And the era of Trump is tarnished, too. Youngkin/ Sears won without him. As conservative Kyle Becker tweeted, "No more riding a politician's coattails who claims to be doing the work for us. It's lazy and counter-productive. The only people we can depend on are ourselves.”

Watching it from Canada, where smugness about America is endemic, it was hard not to respect the American capacity for re-invention and self reliance. There is now a genuine chance that average Americans will slough off these leeches with their Marxist visions of world government.

Would that Canada find similar courage. Or a Winsome Spears to articulate a vision apart from our grandees sashaying around Europe. (Leslyn Lewis?) But then you realize it has just let the same crew of gormless Trudeau radicals and timeservers have another term of the same old/ same old. Pitting one side of the nation against the other. Races against each other. A “net-zero financial system”. (Doesn’t sound ominous in the least).

And to not concede: This country is as good as lost.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand has been nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx