Jerry Shenk: The political pendulum swings decisively in 2024 election
In 2019, ordinary Americans were prospering, and the world was at peace.
Then, in January 2021, a former president's former vice president was inaugurated following a strange election in a strange year that featured a global pandemic, economic lockdowns, a recession, and widespread urban violence.
Stranger yet, the "winner" did little campaigning, and on most days, there was none. Never before had a presidential candidate shared less physical presence and governing philosophy.
Elderly, doddering and cognitively impaired, Joe Biden exploited COVID-19 public health protocols to sequester in his Delaware basement and avoid the press/public interviews, rallies and town hall events that nearly cost him his nomination.
However, Biden had the full resources of the Democrat/Media/Silicon Valley Complex to conduct his campaign, vilify his opponent, over-hype a pandemic, prolong shutdowns, soft-pedal/ignore/censor his political/medical/personal histories and suppress evidence of his/his family's corruption and venality.
The 2020 election featured oddities other than media cheerleading, censorship and psyops, not the least of which was that, while the Republican incumbent increased his share of the black vote by fifty percent and his 2016 vote total, an uninspiring, uncharismatic, elderly white man allegedly received ten million more total votes than America's first black president.
Late Election Day night, President Donald Trump enjoyed comfortable leads in every state needed to win reelection until, without warning, many large cities in critical states stopped counting. Before counting resumed, huge numbers of mail-in ballots appeared in each.
Curiously, every dump overwhelmingly contained "Biden" ballots, some lacking votes for down-ticket offices.
Furthermore, machine "glitches" in certain jurisdictions were caught changing Trump's votes. In some swing-state cities, the number of votes cast allegedly exceeded the number of eligible voters.
Questions about the source codes, management oversight and access security of the Smartmatic/Dominion machines and software used to tabulate votes in thirty states including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin went unanswered.
Nothing that happened after cities interrupted counting favored Mr. Trump. Every "coincidence" defied statistical analyses, math, logic, historical patterns – and belief.
However, deadlines and, in some jurisdictions, judicial indifference prevented determining if fraudulent ballots were counted, legitimate ones switched or discarded, so Joe Biden was "certified."
Once in office, Biden was a windsock to his party's and left-wing special interests. The executive branch's responsibility to faithfully enforce existing laws suffered.
Construction of America's southern border wall was halted, portions removed, the border opened, and Biden's party sought "comprehensive immigration reform" (read: amnesty for illegal aliens) to create what they believed would be millions of new Democrats, many relocated to Republican-dominated jurisdictions.
Biden obscured the Chinese origin of COVID-19 and excused China from honoring international trade agreements, costing American jobs. Biden effectively dropped sanctions, released frozen Iranian assets, and supported restoring the disastrous Iran Nuclear Deal. He restored aid to the Palestinian Liberation Army, froze weapons sales to Middle Eastern nations that opposed Iran's regional ambitions, and abandoned $billions in weapons and military equipment to Afghani mountain tribesmen.
At home, Biden signed spending bills that spiked inflation and the national debt. Under Biden, public health and safety suffered; crime soared; federal agencies were politicized; the strategic oil reserve was depleted; the First and Second Amendments came under assault; and civic and national pride declined. Finally, Biden called half of American voters "existential threats to democracy," and then "garbage."
When it became clear Biden could not win reelection, party elders staged an undemocratic coup, and replaced him with Kamala Harris, a California hyper-liberal who had been chosen as Vice President for her gender and skin color.
But, Harris, Biden's designated "border czar," was complicit in and defended every Biden policy. She and her boss went all in on identity politics, social "justice," LGBTQ+ issues and other "woke" cultural anomalies.
Furthermore, Harris had expressed support for slavery reparations, bailing out violent, destructive BLM rioters, defunding the police, and for taxpayer-funded transgender surgery for prisoners, including detained illegal immigrants.
Harris proposed decriminalizing illegal immigration ("an undocumented immigrant is not a criminal."), and abolishing ICE.
She said she would ban fracking, offshore drilling and gasoline-powered automobiles, enforce a mandatory buyback program for "assault weapons," and abolish private health insurance.
Ultimately, Kamala Harris was a tough sell to suffering Americans.
In America, the political pendulum eventually swings.
For four years, Biden and Harris pushed the pendulum farther and farther left. On November 5, fed-up voters swung it back – decisively.
Contact columnist Jerry Shenk at
