It's not about racism 

The attack on the Electoral College, on conservatives in general, and the refusal by the hard left to accept the results of the presidential election is not surprising. After all, we were lectured and solemnly warned for weeks that Trump and Trump supporters had better not attempt to undermine the legitimacy of a Hillary Clinton presidency. When the results came in producing an opposite result, the hypocrisy of the left was in full bloom. Just as they did throughout the presidential campaign, they unleashed their “storm troopers” upon urban centers, which ironically, were usually bastions of liberalism anyway; there’s nothing like fouling your own nest.

The violence perpetrated against the Trump campaign was mischaracterized by Clinton’s media allies as “Trump instigated violence.” Thanks to videos released during the campaign, we now know (taking a page from Nazi agitators in the 1920s) that a leftist organization connected with the Democratic National Committee sent agitators to Trump rallies to instigate violence that would then be duly reported as the fault of Trump. Since election night, the national media has engaged in much introspection regarding their now admitted bias against Trump and blatant effort to influence voters in favor of Clinton.

In large part, they succeeded. The popular vote has gone for Clinton with large margins of victory from the blue coastal states and the interior red states mostly for Trump. So far, the count is about 1.5 million in Clinton’s favor. However, conservative voter fraud watchdog organizations have made allegations that when voter fraud is accounted for, Clinton’s popular vote lead is dramatically reduced if not eliminated. They are alleging that as many as 4 million fraudulent votes were cast, but those allegations are not fully substantiated to the satisfaction of mainstream media. An example is allegations that voting machines changed votes from Trump to Clinton in Philadelphia due to an algorithm in the machine’s software that made it possible. When Romney ran against Obama in 2012, there were whole sections of Philadelphia where Romney didn’t receive a single vote. Yet when challenged, the courts yawned and looked the other way. 

The attack on the Electoral College is an attack upon the core of our constitutional system as the Electoral College provides a degree of stability to our system of government not normally found in many democratic systems. The Electoral College also ensures that the nation is not governed by a small segment of the population clustered on the East and West coasts but requires those seeking the presidency to solicit support from all 50 states and the geographical and cultural areas they represent. If you want to render a presidency as illegitimate, eliminate the Electoral College and any pretense of a president representing all of America. It’s also a prescription for political instability and the violence that plagues so many countries in the world when geographical areas and minority groups are excluded from effective representation in the political process. If you doubt this ask the Kurds of Iraq or the Igbo tribesmen of Biafra, Nigeria, what it’s like to be governed by a hostile majority.

Then there is the slander that Trump is a racist and anyone who supported Trump is a racist, which is wrong on both counts. You’d think the left would come up with something more original as they’ve been touting this argument since Obama first ran for President. For eight years any criticism of Obama was prima facie evidence of racism, which has the intended effect of silencing most critics or effective resistance to his absolutely terrible policies, be they in foreign or domestic affairs. I would argue the opposite: To not criticize Obama was racist and condescending as it required treating him differently than one would treat any other president solely because of his race. Accordingly, I criticized him mercilessly because he deserved it and ignored the slurs hurled by his defenders. Using the charge of racism is the first and last card of the left; it represents the shield for a weak argument and a lazy intellect.

What happened in this election was the blowback expected when a major political party spends most of its time demonizing large segments of the American electorate as if they are deaf to the insults. It is also a result of ignoring the severe impact their radical environmental policies were having upon the economies of the Midwest, be it in manufacturing, energy, or resource extraction. On the West Coast these policies are being blindly pursued to the detriment of thousands of unionized workers in the trades, in energy, and construction along with the fishing, agriculture, and forestry industries. Each of those economic segments provides real head-of-household incomes that allow non-college grads to enjoy a portion of the American dream. That dream is being shattered by the economic policies of the left, especially in California as the coastal elites who govern this state stopped listening to the common man a long time ago.

The Clinton campaign openly boasted of shutting down the coal industry and then attempted to backtrack. Ironically, Appalachia, which was the original focus of the War on Poverty in the 1960s, has lost thousands of jobs in the coal industry, destroyed by government regulation under Obama. The workers in the steel industry, automotive, and manufacturing of the upper-Midwest took note and listened to a man who could name the factories, the towns, and the numbers of lost jobs, and they voted to give him a chance. That’s why Trump won. 

Al Fonzi is the chairman of the Republican Party of SLO County and an Army lieutenant colonel of military intelligence who had a 35-year military career, serving in both the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Send comments through the editor at [email protected].

-- Al Fonzi - Atascadero