You’ve Been Played

An Open Letter to Working-Class Democrats

There’s no easy, comforting way to say this. So, I’ll just come out with it.

You’ve been played.

I’m sure that’s hard to hear. But you’re not fools, drawn in by run-of-the-mill charlatans. No, you’ve been manipulated, expertly and persistently, by the best in the business.

Who are they, these people who have been playing you? The elites in the Democratic Party on whom you’ve always relied for truth and vision and direction.

Why have they been playing you? They’ve wanted you to hate us conservatives (not simply disagree with us), and engage us — on social media, verbally, and physically — in the most negative, abusive, vitriolic of ways, and then, finally, vote Donald Trump out of office. This, in turn, has all been meant to clear the path for your Party elites’ extreme, authoritarian leftist turn.

And they have succeeded on all counts.

It’s curious, however, that we conservatives are not the only ones who’ve noticed…you becoming radicalized, that is. On July 9, 2021, widely-read liberal commentator Andrew Sullivan published an essay entitled, “What Happened To You?”[1]. Here’s how he began:

“What happened to you?”

It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.

The real question is: what happened to you?

The CRT [critical race theory] debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.

But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.

Mr. Sullivan is right. But once they “ideologically transformed”, just how did “the American elites” transform you, a working-class Democrat?

First, you must accept that it wasn’t an accident. Nor was it a natural, logical transition from traditional liberal politics to a death spiral ideology that aggressively promotes anti-Americanism, segregation, racial discrimination, censorship and recrimination, medical totalitarianism, and Marxism (with one mid-2021 poll showing that 59% of Democrats prefer socialism to capitalism[2]), along with a heavy dose of American job-killing globalism.

The answer to “how”, then, is that they used battle-tested tactics to weaponize your aversion to Republicans as people. (After all, for decades, while Republicans have often seen Democrats as having bad ideas, Democrats have usually seen Republicans as being bad people. This ‘conservatives are evil’ mindset provided a great jumping off point for them to ‘ideologically transform’ you…especially when it came to the hated Donald Trump.) The elites knew that highly educated white-collar types in the party would be kept in line with the obligatory red meat falsehood or mockery every now and then, but that bringing you along for the ride would require them to dig deeper into the well of loathing in a more sustained and strenuous way. They settled on a strategy of non-stop emotional carpet-bombing because they understood an important truth explained by C. S. Lewis in his book, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH:

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him.”

The actual mechanics of this reconditioning have been rooted in well-defined, disciplined operations, planned and carried out by Democrat elites since before Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and continuing to this day. They are a combination of “information operations” (IO) and “psychological operations” (PSYOP) grounded in principles, strategies, and tactics that our military has used on other countries and populations for years. Only, in this case, the ‘other country’ is the United States itself, and the targeted population is…you.

Here is the definition of IO from a military operational manual on the subject:

IO: “Information Operations (IO) is the integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision-making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”

Reflect on how your feelings and actions have changed over the past five years, and you’ll begin to recognize the ‘influence, disruption, corruption, and usurpation’ of you and your own decision-making that the Democratic Party IO has achieved. Yet, this definition assumes two things that might initially seem far-fetched.

First, it states that IO are used “during military operations.” But Democrats haven’t been waging military operations, for goodness’ sake! Or have they?

Actually, yes, they have. In the days following Mr. Trump’s 2016 election win, coordinated ‘Resistance protests’ (riots) ‘somehow’ sprang up, literally overnight, all over the country. And in its braggadocios self-glorification in the February 2021 Time magazine article, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”[3], the managers of the operation candidly revealed that they had managed hundreds of armed assaults (i.e., “mostly peaceful” protests) on American cities and citizens during the 2020 election cycle. As reported by the article’s author, Molly Ball, “The racial-justice uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing in May was not primarily a political movement. The organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election without allowing it to be co-opted by politicians. Many of those organizers were part of [Mike] Podhorzer’s [the election IO/PSYOP overseer’s] network, from the activists in battleground states who partnered with the Democracy Defense Coalition to organizations with leading roles in the Movement for Black Lives.” And they had “400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4” had President Trump won [emphasis added].

Whatever else you might call them, those riots were planned, destructive “military operations” intended to destabilize the country in an effort to effect regime change. In IO-speak, they were purposely designed and carried out ‘to influence and disrupt’ your ‘decision-making.’ (When one reads IO and PSYOP military literature, it becomes clear that the above-referenced “Shadow Campaign”, as a subset of the broader Democratic Party IO/PSYOP effort, closely followed well-healed Army strategy and tactics where the ‘battlefield’ so required. It was a military-style operation from conception to planning to structure to reporting to decision-making to execution. Unfortunately, rather than ‘save democracy’ as gaslighted by Ms. Ball, it severely damaged it in myriad ways, perhaps the most egregious of which was the Democratic Party’s perverse willingness to abandon all pretense of civility and literally wage a calculated, if limited, war against the United States to gain power it likely could not otherwise have achieved.)

Second, the above IO definition talks about “adversaries” and “potential adversaries”. Certainly, the Democratic Party did not view you as its adversary…or did it?

Mr. Trump was something of a crossover candidate during the 2016 campaign, and his policies while president had achieved very significant successes over his four years in office, from historically-low minority unemployment, to energy independence, to virtually non-existent inflation, to more secure borders, to lower taxes for working people. All of these resonated with — and threatened to sway the votes of — working class people in both parties. A Republican landslide along the lines of 1972 and 1984 was seen as increasingly plausible as positive Trump policy results became more obvious and tangible in the closing months of 2019. Something had to be done, as Trump was creating a new populist coalition of working-class conservatives and liberals. Elite Democrats knew they wouldn’t be able to pry the conservatives away from Trump (a fact confirmed by his nearly 75 million-vote performance in the November 2020 election); so, you — the Party’s historical working-class base — became the ‘adversary’ targeted by its massive, multi-faceted IO. The operation had to energize and insulate you against Trump, and do so incessantly and aggressively over time (for instance, in the form of well over 90% negative reporting about the president by the corporate media, regardless of reality, throughout his time in office; non-stop lying about Mr. Trump; devaluation of his achievements; and one of the most ludicrous impeachments in presidential history), or power could be lost for another four years and the hard-left agenda delayed.

With that understanding of IO in hand, we come to the definition of a PSYOP:

PSYOP: “Planned operations that convey selected information and indicators to foreign target audiences (TAs) to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of all PSYOP is to create in neutral, friendly, or hostile foreign groups the emotions, attitudes, or desired behavior that support the achievement of U.S. national objectives and the military mission. In doing so, PSYOP influence not only policy and decisions, but also the ability to govern, the ability to command, the will to fight, the will to obey, and the will to support. The combination of PSYOP products and actions create in the selected TAs a behavior that supports U.S. national policy objectives and the theater commander’s intentions at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.”

If you remove the reference to foreign TAs and governments, and swap out “U.S. national policy objectives” with “Democratic Party objectives”, this is a perfect description of the approach used by Mr. Trump’s elite adversaries from the moment he announced his candidacy prior to the 2016 election. We know this from a variety of sources, including the increasing number of revelations from the ongoing investigation by Independent Council John Durham into Hillary Clinton’s and the Democrat Party’s Russia collusion hoax that began before the 2016 election and continued nearly well into the Trump presidency.

Now, military strategy makes clear that optimally successful PSYOP must be integrated with IO. Here, then, is how the definition of a combined IO/PSYOP Democrat strategy over the past five years would read with these changes included:

“The anti-Trump IO is the integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities in concert with PSYOP to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision-making of the traditional Democratic working-class Base. The PSYOP components are planned operations that convey selected information and indicators to the working class to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, their behavior. The purpose of this IO/PSYOP is to create in the working class the emotions, attitudes, and desired behavior that support the achievement of Democratic Party objectives. In doing so, this operation is intended to influence not only policy and decisions, but also Trump’s ability to govern, his ability to command, and the will of susceptible Democratic voters to support him. The combination of IO and PSYOP products and actions is designed to create in the Base a behavior that supports Democratic Party objectives and its intentions at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.”

To carry out this coordinated strategy, the Democrat elites’ IO/PSYOP employed and repeated a never-ending string of carefully-crafted and choreographed activities (such as the aforementioned riots and the never-ending disinformation campaign) for maximum effect in influencing you, your emotions, and your decision-making. Here are just a few from a list of hundreds of examples that you would surely recognize…except you’ve always heard the stories differently if you’ve listened only to the Democrat elites and their force-multipliers in the corporate press and social media:

• The IO/PSYOP Lie: Donald Trump colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. What’s more, he was an agent of Vladimir Putin, and did his bidding, jeopardizing America’s interests and security.

The Truth: Factual findings make clear that this lie was perpetrated and facilitated through many synchronized elements, including the Democrat National Committee, the 2016 Clinton campaign, the FBI, the CIA, foreign actors in both the UK and Russia, the very top levels of the outgoing Obama administration (including Obama himself), corporate and social media in the US, and others. In the end, through the official report of special prosecutor Robert Mueller (after a $30+ million, two-year investigation) and through every other factual piece of evidence, the lie about Trump-Russia collusion was fully disproven. Among other things, the FBI lied to get FISA court permission to spy on Mr. Trump’s campaign; the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign paid for the Steele Dossier on which the lies were premised; and that dossier was ultimately proven false from cover to cover. (Unfathomably, you probably haven’t heard any of this yet, even in light of the especially damaging revelations from Mr. Durham’s investigation over the past few days, because the Democrat elites are fully supported by corporate and social media whose sole mission over the past five to six years has been to work as integrated participants in the elites’ IO/PSYOP. Indeed, in the days immediately following the most recent revelations, NBC, CBS, ABC, and MSNBC gave the story exactly ZERO air time, and CNN only a couple of minutes, even though the old Watergate story that took down President Nixon pales in comparison and magnitude.) Not only has this operational element engendered wrongful but enduring hatred of President Trump among those in the Democratic base, it clearly damaged his ability while president to engage fruitfully, on America’s behalf, with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

• The IO/PSYOP Lie: Donald Trump is a racist as evidenced by his comments immediately following the riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. (This in spite of his remarkable and extensive record of outreach to the Black community during his administration and his success in supporting their education through, for example, his financial commitment to historically black colleges and universities — HBCUs — and in reducing Black unemployment to record low levels.)

The Truth: During a press conference following the riot, the president said, “You had some very bad people in that group [the neo-Nazis]. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. … You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.” Moments later, he clarified his reference to “very fine people” and unequivocally stated his condemnation of white supremacists: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists [as being very fine people] because they should be condemned totally.” Then, in a formal speech a couple of days later, he said, “Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans. We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our creator, we are equal under the law, and we are equal under our constitution. Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.” Yet, the Democrat elites, in concert with corporate and social media, dishonestly focused only on Mr. Trump’s “very fine people” phrase and perpetuated the lie that Trump was racist. They hammered it home and they never swerved from that false narrative, with Joe Biden using it continuously during the 2020 presidential campaign. Their lie was an IO/PSYOP gold mine that maliciously turned people against Mr. Trump, and they continue to push it to this day.

• The IO/PSYOP Lie: During the riots of the summer of 2020, the supposedly authoritarian Donald Trump ordered Lafayette Square next to the White House violently cleared to prepare for a photo op for him.

The Truth: The inspector general Mark Greenblatt, after an extensive investigation, found that federal police officers had cleared the Square so that a contractor could install fencing. Further, the decision to clear the Square was made hours before it was known that President Trump planned to walk through the Square to a nearby church.

• The IO/PSYOP Lie: Late in the 2020 presidential campaign, The Atlantic magazine published a claim, supposedly (and conveniently) based on four anonymous sources who were never named, that President Trump, during a 2018 visit to France, had cancelled a trip to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris to keep his hair from getting messed up in the rain, and then disparaged our troops by saying, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump also supposedly referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

The Truth: Official emails of the event show that the weather was absolutely the reason the trip had been cancelled. More astounding, at least sixteen named members of President Trump’s Paris group who were with him the whole time (including Trump-hater John Bolton) strenuously denied The Atlantic’s allegations, including the one about his supposedly derogatory comments, on the record. Indeed, Mr. Bolton said, “I didn’t hear either of those comments or anything resembling them. I was there at the point in time that morning when it was decided that he would not go. It was an entirely weather-related decision and, I thought, the proper thing to do.”

Remember that a successful IO/PSYOP is designed to “influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision-making” of the target audience and, further, to “influence not only policy and decisions, but also [Trump’s] ability to govern, the ability to command, and the will [of the rank and file] to fight, the will to obey, and the will to support.” Along with the many other IO/PSYOP fabrications wrapped around President Trump by the elites, those detailed above were initiated and perpetuated expressly for those purposes, and they worked remarkably well, regardless of the fact that they were utterly dishonest.

Your Party’s elites carried out their IO/PSYOP so perfectly leading up to the 2020 general election, in fact, that they achieved the power they wanted. But, as a working-class Democrat, chances are pretty good you’re not getting what you thought you’d be getting as a reward for your loyalty and energy. To date, here are some of the fruits of the IO/PSYOP labor (and they affect all of us, not just you):

• Tens of thousands of jobs lost (remember the Keystone Pipeline that Biden shut down?), and a cratering of the post-COVID job-creating recovery started by President Trump;
• A return to energy dependence on foreign sources (reversing Trump’s energy independence achievement) with its resulting job losses, gas shortages, and price increases (and note that Biden has begged OPEC countries to produce more oil);
• Violent crime spiraling out of control in our largest cities (all Democrat-controlled and focused on ‘defunding the police’);
• Government spending out of control as well, with its predictable result: rampant inflation, at a level higher than it’s been for 40 years;
• An uncontrolled southern border allowing in approximately two million illegal aliens, tens of thousands of whom are carrying COVID (and the Biden administration is then shipping them — almost always secretly — around the country to cities of its choosing to maximize electoral advantage for Democrats);
• Continuous politicizing and demagoguing of COVID, including the invocation of unconstitutional vaccine mandates, with its attendant damage to liberty, livelihoods, families, and especially school-age children (if this weren’t so tragic, it would be insanely comical to watch all the Democrats — elites and otherwise — who said in 2020 they would never take a ‘Trump vaccine’, but have been incessantly virtue-shaming those who won’t get vaccinated under the Biden regime; the hypocrisy is mind-boggling);
• Radically-increased race-based division, acrimony, discrimination, and segregation energized by Critical Race Theory, weakening all institutions in the process, most notably the military and K-12 education (colleges and universities were already largely Marxist havens…that cult was more a contributor to the elite cultural upheaval than it was a result);
• National teachers’ unions fully supported by the Democrat regime as they aggressively fight against capitalism (meaning your job, your employer, and your kids’ economic future) and for Marxism (principally through Critical Race Theory and the Zinn Education Project);
• The Department of Justice and the FBI labeling concerned parents as “domestic terrorists” and targeting them for surveillance and action simply because they’re finally speaking out in school board meetings against woke, anti-democracy policies, practices, and school curricula;
• January 6 protestors interminably held and abused as political prisoners, many without access to attorneys or to critical mitigating evidence held by the Department of Justice (this as more and more evidence comes to light suggesting a Fed set-up of Trump supporters at the Capitol Building);
• The Biden administration’s use of a false January 6 insurrection narrative as a pretext for turning America’s intelligence and judicial assets against its own citizens (i.e., conservatives) who don’t fall in line with its policies (study up on the 1933 German Reichstag fire if you don’t believe this or don’t understand its potential implications…and not just for those conservative political prisoners, but for you, too);
• Tyrannical, coordinated, unconstitutional censorship — orchestrated by the Biden regime in concert with Big Tech — of all who express conservative views, or even give voice to opinions that might remotely align with conservative views (as does former Bernie Bro Joe Rogan on his podcasts). This extends even to well-healed liberals such as Bill Maher who have begun calling out the Democrat regime’s excesses and anti-freedom policies and behaviors;
• Biden’s deadly, humiliating, chaotic process of withdrawing US personnel from Afghanistan after twenty years’ presence with no planned consequence for Taliban misbehavior, resulting in those terrorists retaking the entire country in a matter of days, along with an enormous cache of US weaponry, including helicopters, personnel carriers, rifles, and munitions…all of which Biden, predictably, then blamed on Mr. Trump.

As a working-class Democrat, perhaps a lifelong working-class Democrat descended from a long, proud line of working-class Democrats, it should be sobering to you that the elites of your party think so little of you that they’ve gone to massive, dishonest lengths to not just get your vote but to weaponize you, in the process destroying community and national unity, the national psyche, your children, your livelihood, even your very life, all to achieve their ends. (This is what Socialism — the elites’ end game — always brings, by the way. So, while this should be sobering, it should not be surprising.)

(Now, in fairness, I’d forgive you for trying to make some of these same claims against the Republican “elites”, but the fact is those establishment party “leaders” are just not that clever or energetic. The old phrase “country club Republicans” as a description of many in the GOP executive class was never more appropriate than it is now, and it has infuriated and frustrated Republican working-class voters rather than energize them. The Democrat elite IO/PSYOP strategy works because it increases your hatred of Republicans and your passionate engagement against them. The Republican elite strategy — what there is of it — is as listless as it is unidentifiable, meaning that the only people who loathe that Party’s managers and congressional leadership more than you, my Democrat friends, are conservatives. So, blame away if you must, but there’s no there there.)

So, yes…you’ve been played. More importantly, you’ve been changed.

But maybe you don’t care.

Maybe the IO/PSYOP has been so effective that you’ve crossed that bridge to where there is no room for principled and respectful, if sometimes spirited, dissent or discourse or compromise. Maybe the Democrat elites have you at level 15 on the 1–10 hate-o-meter, and you’re never going back. Maybe, like many other Democrats, you truly wish Trump had died from COVID, or otherwise been “offed” as so many from your tribe screamed out for. The depth of the rancor and the venom demonstrated by many in the self-defeating, radicalized, civically insensitive Democratic machine truly has been something to behold.

But take comfort in the fact that it’s not all your fault. It took some of the greatest military and strategic minds on the planet to figure out how to morph you from a responsible, informed citizen into a weapon, one that would gladly run interference (verbally, emotionally, and sometimes even physically) for them, turning off logic, discernment, and every civil instinct in your being — while willingly giving up freedoms — in the process.

Yet, for all its sophistication, underpinning the entire Democratic Party elite IO/PSYOP have been two very simple, age-old, Cain vs. Abel emotions: hatred and greed, coupled with a willingness to inflict the most egregious of penalties on the elites’ opponents in order to acquire and grow power. (If you want a living color example of this, take a few minutes and really study the peaceful truckers’ protest in Canada, and the elite liberal party’s authoritarian gaslighting and actions, including its invocation of martial law, targeted against those working-class truckers. President Trump once said the leftists weren’t really coming for him, they were coming for you…and he was just in the way. Canada’s liberal party is now showing just how that ‘coming for you’ principle works in real life.) And if, while you read this, you find yourself agreeing with the elites and their tactics, then you’ve chosen a course that, however perversely satisfying it might seem in the moment, will, undoubtedly, turn on you. Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sheds light here, in an excerpt from his book, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO:

“Universal innocence also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won’t take you? Maybe it will all blow over? A. I. Ladyzhensky was the chief teacher in a school in remote Kologriv. In 1937 a peasant approached him in an open market and passed him a message from a third person: “Aleksandr Ivanich, get out of town, you are on the list!” But he stayed. After all, the whole school rests on my shoulders, and their own children are pupils here. How can they arrest me? (Several days later he was arrested.)

Not everyone was so fortunate as to understand at the age of fourteen, as did Vanya Levitsky: “Every honest man is sure to go to prison. Right now my papa is serving time, and when I grow up they’ll put me in too.” (They put him in when he was twenty-three years old.) The majority sit quietly and dare to hope. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you still keep on exclaiming to yourself: “It’s a mistake! They’ll set things straight and let me out!”)

Remember that you, as a member of the Democratic Party working class, are the target of an elite class that doesn’t value you, as a person, any more than it values us conservatives. They know they can never have us; so, all of their focus and every bit of their manipulative energy is concentrated on you — the radicalized, weaponized “you” spoken of by Mr. Sullivan — no matter the extremes to which they have to go to ensure that outcome.

As their grand IO/PSYOP rolls on in the form of continuing Trump-hatred, the intense ‘conservatives are domestic terrorists’ ruse, and, ongoing COVID lockdowns, lies, and mandates, the elites and their allies in Big Tech, Big Business, academia, and the corporate media are doing it right before your eyes and with your permission, “dragging you along by the collar.”

Please pay attention.

Please don’t be taken in. Or, if you already have been, please reverse course.

Please recognize what’s being done to you under the pretense of doing something for you.

Please exercise what freedom you have left to fight the tyranny. (The elites always claimed — falsely, of course, and oh so cleverly — that Mr. Trump was authoritarian; yet, only now, under Mr. Biden and his Socialist regime, are you learning how real elite totalitarianism works, and how it rips apart the fabric of a nation and its people.)

Finally, please think your own thoughts…while you’re still allowed to think them.

If not for us because we’re repugnant conservatives, then do it for yourselves.

__________

1. What Happened To You? | Andrew Sullivan (https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-you-e5f)

2. Majority of registered Democratic voters now prefer socialism to capitalism, Fox News poll finds | Ronn Blitzer | foxbusiness.com | August 12, 2021 (https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/majority-registered-democratic-voters-prefer-socialism-to-capitalism-fox-news-poll)

3. The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election |Molly Ball | time.com (https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/)