Dakota Beacon

After a long and tumultuous and dramatic campaign season, we are now at election eve, and we all have doubts, fears, hopes and theories.  Some of us have voted already - I would say the wiser ones, because who knows from one day to the next what might occur to prevent it?  Every year we do learn and become wiser.  Many traditionalists have held out for “one election day” rather than “election season”, and they have a point.  Unfortunately, it is better to have a vote than to have a point, so I joined those who voted early.  We should also have learned by now to vote IN PERSON, not via a drop box.  

As we look over the political landscape and history, some previous years come to mind - 1980, for one.  After four (long) years of the Carter administration, the “misery index” included the Iran hostage crisis and economic slowing bordering on depression.  People who decided to take a chance on Carter rather than have to see Ford for another four years had got their bellies full, as it were, of his austerity program, his inflation and his inability to deal with Iran.  The overthrow of the Shah there doomed America to decades of strife with Iran, and it was Carter and his government who provided assistance to the Ayatollah Khomeni in his violent takeover.  Carter’s generous assistance to the Ayatollah was repaid by the ransacking of our embassy and the taking of hostages - government representatives of the United States.   It was obviously time for change, and Reagan was there and boldly ready to provide the leadership.

Today we still have Iran, on the cusp of perhaps a return to its previous government, i.e., not an Islamist theocracy, and at the moment engaged in its perpetual mischief of inciting violence and attacking Israel.  Despite Carter’s best efforts, they are not our friends.  We once again have economic distress.  The cost of living which sort of corresponds to the “misery index” is reeling out of control.  So the stage would seem to be set for a repeat of 1980.  But there is more.

In addition to our dismal relations with Iran, which have prevailed since 1979, and our economic failure, we also have a few more burdens for the Biden/Harris administration to take responsibility for.

Our border with Mexico is wide open and migrants are pouring in, unvetted, unaccounted for, undocumented.  With the many who just want an easier life and perhaps avoid trying to fix the mess in their own countries, we also find there are many criminals coming in with them.  We have ordinary criminals like shoplifters, car thieves, murderers, etc., and we have some who come in with children not related to them as cover, and to be trafficked later.  We have gangs coming in - first we had the dreaded MS-13 gang(s) and now we have the “Tren de Aragua” from Venezuela.  These gangs are terrorizing apartment complexes and whole neighborhoods across America.  First we heard of them in Colorado, but now we know they are operating in other cities as far as Chicago and beyond.  Our immigration “system” is not only allowing this independent mass migration through Mexico, but we are permitting NGOs to “partner” with government agencies and big employers to import cheap labor from places like Haiti, bringing in tens of thousands of unassimilated immigrants into small towns throughout the midwest - towns without the ability to cope with the challenges they present.  Immigration is a huge problem beyond that which Carter had to deal with.

Our culture has been under attack as never before.  Whereas Carter and his family were ostentatiously religious and self-righteous the current crop of Democrat occupiers of the White House and the Vice President have thrown that to the four winds.  Just take a look at the annual Christmas displays put together by Jill Biden.  The new climate is one of abortion on demand, and up to nine months out.  Transgender “care” is now defined - at least under Tim Walz - as sanctuary states where children under the age of consent can be persuaded to have hormonal and surgical “care” against the will or even without the knowledge of parents - “care” which will permanently disfigure them and sterilize them, and these kids can be brought into these state (such as Minnesota) and made wards of the state for this express purpose.  This would not have gotten so far under Carter.  We have a much deeper and wider divide now in this area than we did in 1980.

Crime is off the charts today and race relations have worsened distinctly since the election of Barack Obama.  Previous to his ascension to power, race relations had been steadily improving.  In the United States race and racial unrest ties into crime.  Tim Walz’s wife, Gwen, remarked that she loved the smell of burning tires so much that she threw open her windows just to take it in.  Does this sound at all rational?  Walz oversaw the burning and destruction of much of inner city Minneapolis.  Who got hurt there?  I have relatives in outlying communities who were untouched by the massive riots centered in Minneapolis.  They are still in denial that anything bad happened there.  So - who got hurt?  The minority populations in the city of Minneapolis.  People who usually shopped in their own neighborhoods found themselves without any businesses to shop at - pharmacies were shut down, stores closed.  Major outlets across the nation have closed because states under Democrat legislatures have, for all intents and purposes, legalized shoplifting.  It is no longer a surreptitious snatching and attempting to sneak an item out of a store - it now entails wheelbarrows, shopping carts, large size garbage bags, filled with merchandise of every kind, just hauled out, and even moving vans.  Many stores cannot cope with this lawlessness.

Homelessness, also related to some kinds of crime, and certainly contributing to the precipitous decline of our great cities, is also a relatively recent phenomenon.  Of course it is fed to some extent by the flow of migrants, but it is also very closely related to the epidemic of drug addiction.   I spoke with a young woman who came to the business where I work to ask for financial support for the homeless.  I assume she got it, but in the meantime I had an interesting conversation with her.  “I would imagine that drug addiction plays a large part in homelessness,” I began.  “Oh, yes!  It does.”  I ventured to guess that the kids in school who are put on “ADHD” drugs contribute to that problem.  She said something interesting at this point.  She told me that when these kids, who have been on drugs since primary school, graduate from high school and are no longer getting these supplied to them, they find that they must turn to street drugs such as meth because they are affordable.  These kids have never been drug-free before.  This is a newer problem we did not have to this degree in 1980.  So our cities, which were still thriving and beautiful in 1980, are a wreckage in 2024.

With this plus a threatening new surveillance state, which many are finding frightening and oppressive, a recent “pandemic” which was used to enforce shutdowns, forced vaccination, masking and social distancing - all of which were pointless and did nothing to combat illness - together with a truly pathetic education system, people are finding life just downright depressing in 2024.  Our education system wasn’t great in 1980, but it was Carter who created the federal Department of Education, and the result has been dismal.  And concurrent with the surveillance, we are now seeing the voicding of our First Amendment.  The Democrat party is collding with  - or actually coercing - media of all kinds to censor our speech.  

Add to the above concerns proliferation of foreign wars such as that in Ukraine, fomented and fueled by our government under Biden - coupled with a threat of deliberate ceding of our national sovereignty to international cabals such as WHO and other UN organizations, and you have a recipe for desired change.  Our military is at an all-time low in that recruitment is almost nil, and morale is down, partly due to the disastrous and reckless disorderly retreat from Afghanistan.  In the years since Carter, Democrats have been dabbling in “nation building”, an unfortunate concept promoted also by the Bush dynasty.  In every case it has resulted in a net loss for our foreign relations and our pocketbook, not to mention our reputation on the world stage.  On election eve, 2024, we are involved peripherally at least, in two major wars with the potential for massive destruction up to and including the possibility of world war.  

Our bureaucracies have grown to gigantic proportions, another expense and means of oppression.  At the eleventh hour this was demonstrated dramatically by the euthanasia of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon, formerly living happy and peaceful lives in a citizen’s private rescue sanctuary for abandoned and orphaned animals.  Just a little peek into the evil of the bureaucratization of America.  We don’t elect these “officials” but they have life and death power over us and our lives.  Change would be good here too.

We could go on, but I will conclude with the loss of faith in our electoral process.  Hardly anything can be as destructive of our nation, our peace, our future, our prosperity, as this loss of faith.  Our last election was challenged.  That should not have been news.  Hillary Clinton denied the Trump election of 2016.  There were questions about the 1960 election.  It is almost a tradition for someone to question the outcome.  Never before has this questioning been used as grounds for criminal prosecution.  “America’s Mayor”, Rudi Giuliani, a week ago, lost his home and everything in it for advocating for the Trump case.  Trump himself has been dragged through courts.

In short, it looks like 1980 on steroids as we enter the end zone of Election Year 2024.  We are seeing some fascinating realignments - Democrats Tulsi Gabbard, once a contender for the Presidency herself, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., are two high-profile former Democrats who have found it impossible to maintain their Democrat ties and have changed sides, while Liz Cheney and her infamous father, Dick, have endorsed Harris.  Also of great interest is the endorsement of Trump by the Somali community of Minnesota and the Arab community of Michigan - even Rashida Tlaib, their Senator, refuses to endorse Harris.  Many Black and Hispanic voters are defecting to Trump because they value a sense of law and order and have had enough of the economic downturn.

There is likely to be an earthquake in our body politic tomorrow night.  Already, some 77 million votes have been cast early.  Let us hope that our election process is better protected this time out.  I have my doubts because many locations are still utilizing voting tabulation technology such as Dominion and similar systems and we know that this is not reliable.  Let’s hope that counting this year does not involve papered-over windows, vans full of ballots pulling up at 2:00 a.m., bins of ballots under tables, interrupted counting and the rest.  We need to restore our faith in our elections’ integrity starting now.    The polls - traditional ones, cookie ones, random, casual ones, appear to strongly favor change this year.  Change, that is, from the Biden/Harris years.   If there was a rising up against the Carter administration over 45 years ago, given the expanded set of challenges and problems facing the American people today, we should expect nothing less than a Reagan type of vote tomorrow.  Let us hope that the vote is way too decisive to question this time around.  We need to move forward with a fresh outlook and not become mired in dispute.