Countdown to the US Mid-Terms -- We the People are Winning in America and Around the World

ONE WEEK TO THE MID-TERMS. Where do we conservatives and Republicans stand with the American electorate? There are several ways to measure and estimate where the mid-term results are headed. • • • CROWD SIZE AT CAMPAIGN EVENTS. American Thinker's Monica Showalter wrote on Sunday : "Way back when, the left and its media allies made a huge stink over President Trump's supposedly small crowd sizes during his inauguration. The story went on for days and days as the media tried to parse whether Kellyanne Conway was really lying or not in saying that the crowd was big. The photos were examined in microscopic detail, while inconvenient facts, such as when the pictures were taken, were skimmed over. The press particularly liked to compare Trump's inaugural crowd size to President Obama's inaugural crowd size as a means of making themselves feel better about losing the election....Well, now the press hacks are at it again from the other end, exaggerating the sizes of the crowds President Obama is drawing in today, which don't hold a candle to the sizes of crowds President Trump is now drawing, given his tax cuts and other presidential successes. Gateway Pundit has a gleeful summary : 'Hah-Hah! Former President Obama was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin Friday and he couldn’t fill a high school gymnasium. But this didn’t stop a far left Daily Beast hack from claiming the line was a mile long to get into the event! Never trust the liberal media. Never! The Daily Beast does it again -- their National Security writer, Erin Banco, claimed that the line to see former President Barack Obama in Milwaukee today was a mile long...' • Showalter says : "Trump and other Republicans really are pulling in the arena-sized crowds in a way the Democrats are not. Joe Biden, remember, couldn't even fill a union hall last week. But among Republicans, there were the big Beto rallies in Texas and the even bigger Ted Cruz rallies in Texas. There were the huge crowds Trump drew throughout his trips to the Midwest and in North Carolina. RealClearPolitics wondered if the arena dynamics were actually changing the dynamics of the midterms. But then we have the sorry little mainstream press, some of its sorrier elements trying to claim Obama is filling a stadium, too, as Gateway Pundit pointed out. This, if nothing else, may signal that the blue wave is not coming this time. Sorry pals, you're not popular." • Fox News reported last week that attendance at President Trump's Nevada rally quadrupled the Obama event total at University of Las Vegas arena. Fox said : "The Elko Daily Free Press reported that Trump spoke to roughly 8,500 supporters at a regional airport in the northeastern Nevada mining town." Two days later, former President Obama took credit for the nation's soaring economy and bashed President Trump before a crowd of only 2,000, ABC News reported. The venue, the Cox Pavilion at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, seats between 2,154 and 3,286 people, depending on its configuration. And, online media reported that the Obama advance party put up a partition behind the audience area to hide the fact that Obama didn't fill the venue. • Meanwhile, the Trump campaign announced that it had received more than 100,000 requests for tickets for its packed rally in Houston last Monday night in support of incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who is now polling several points ahead of rival Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke. That rally initially was slated for the 10,000-capacity NRG Arena, before the campaign moved it to the much larger Toyota Center in Houston, which can seat nearly 20,000. Thousands tailgated before the event on Monday night in a gameday-style atmosphere in the city, which leans Democratic in a deeply red state. • The Trump Houston rally actually tallied 77,000 against Obama's 2,100 at UNLV. That tells us why the Democrats avoid talking about crowd size as they use screens to try to make their rally attendance seem larger. • • • FRANTIC RHETORIC TO COVER THE COMING LOSSES. But, it was surely Obama's UNLV remarks about the Trump economic miracle that stunned the media : "When you hear all this talk about economic miracles, remember who started it. I hope people realize there's a pattern that every time [Republicans] run things into the ground and we've got to clean it up." • Can we ever believe Barack Obama about anything?? The short answer is 'NO.' He drove the American economy into a stagflation of low to zero growth, disappearance of jobs, and strangulation of business through socialist-inspired regulations and high taxes. President Trump has turned that Obama disaster around, and to hear the former President blatantly lie about it is stunning, even coming from the master of leading through lies. • Not satisfied with his Las Vegas lies, former President Obama continued his frontal attack on President Trump in Milwaukee last Friday. In what was surely the most vicious attack by a former President on a sitting President in the modern era, Obama called Trump a liar : "Who are we? What kind of politics do we want to see? What kind of accountability do we expect from of our elected officials?” Obama asked. “What we have not seen before -- in our recent public life, at least -- is politicians just blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly lying. Making stuff up!” he exclaimed. “Calling up down! Calling black white! The President said he’d pass a middle-class tax cut before the next election," Obama later noted. “Congress isn’t even in session! He just makes it up!” [Actually, Trump said the 10% cut would be “put in next year.”]....“He says, ‘I’m going to protect your pre-existing conditions,’ while his Justice Department is in court right now trying to strike down those protections,” Obama continued, trying his hand at a Trump impression. "That is not spin,” he said. “That’s not exaggeration. That’s not trying to put a positive glow on things. That’s lying!” RIGHT, OBAMA. We all know about healthcare lies -- “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.“ • "Of course," said Western Journal Conservative Tribune : "that’s not the most egregious takeaway from the speech. Nor is it the fact that Obama is accusing the President of 'blatantly, repeatedly, baldly, shamelessly lying' with his long record of doing just that in office. Rather, it’s the fact that Obama’s remarks came on the same day that the media went after Trump, implying that his 'incivility' caused suspected explosive devices to be sent to Democrats and related figures. I’m one of those individuals who has a hard time believing, unless there’s an actual exhortation to incivility (see: Waters, Maxine), that a 1:1 relationship between a politician’s words and uncivil acts exists. However, if the media is going to posit that, there has to be some level of consistency. Insisting that Trump deserves some blame for the mail bombs and then -- on the selfsame day -- calling Obama’s speech merely 'fiery' is an abdication of journalistic responsibility....these outlets actually believe Trump is perpetuating an unspeakable awfulness by noting that the press is biased against Republicans. The implication that the press is responsible for any violence is just as specious as the implication that Trump is, mind you. However, denying the bias at this point simply won’t fly -- particularly when Obama gets a pass." When Western Journal asked its readers to answer the question "Do you think Obama's remarks crossed the line?" the online poll came back at YES 98% (1565 Votes) and NO 2% (24 Votes). Sure, they were Trump supporters voting , but it does give us an idea of just how strong Trump's support is, and how much those Trump supporters dislike Obama and the Democrats. • • • POLLS AS AN INDICATOR OF MID-TERM RESULTS. American Thinker"s Thomas Lifson wrote on Monday : "We've been hearing about the inevitable 'blue wave' handing control of the House of Representatives to Democrats since before President Trump was inaugurated. Maxine Waters, for one, gained the sobriquet 'Auntie Maxine' for offering the political equivalent of bedtime stories promising impeachment on the come, once voters corrected the obvious error they committed by electing Trump. History, after all, dictates that the President's party loses support, and the GOP's margin in the House is smaller than the historic average. Polls continue to predict a blue wave, albeit one that might be too small for surfers. But polls depend on constructing a model of the expected turnout and then finding respondents to match the model : a certain percentage of Republicans, independents, and Democrats. If the pollsters fail to accurately predict which kinds of voters will be motivated in an off- year election, their polls are useless." BUT, as Lifson says : "That hasn't stopped them from offering their own versions of the odds favoring the Democrats to take over the lower chamber. Nate Silver, who remains the media's favorite polling guru despite offering odds well north of 90% favoring a Hillary Clinton win in 2016, puts the odds of a Democrat Speaker of the House next year at nearly the same level of certainty : 85%." So, Lifson decided to try another sort of poll -- bettors and oddsmakers -- because : "The pollsters may be right this time, unlike 2016. Maybe they have reflected on their errors and honestly appraised what they missed last time with an appropriate level of self-criticism. If that is your impression of what the journalistic community (which employs the pollsters whose results are made public) has done, then you should have more confidence in the pollsters. But people who put their money on the line in making predictions question the pollsters. William Cummings, writing in USA Today, writes : 'The odds on MyBookie favor Republicans maintaining hold of their majority, even as political forecaster Nate Silver says there is an 84.9% chance of a Democratic victory. As of Sunday, the odds of the GOP keeping the House are at -140. That means you would need to bet $140 on the Republicans to win $100 if they stay in the majority. The Democrats are at +110, meaning a $100 bet would win you $110 if the Democrats manage to wrest control of the House. The site also has the Republicans favored to hold the White House in the 2020 presidential election. The GOP is at -170 in that race, compared to +130 for the Democrats. Nothing is certain, and the people wagering on the election don't necessarily have the best data. What they do have is an interest in winning....maybe the bettors have a better sense of what's ahead. Whom are you going to trust? The guys who got it wrong last time or the people who put their money where their mouths are?" • Another polling problem is showing up in the Florida governor race. American Thinker's Monica Showalter reported on Monday that Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, "while initially coming off as a nice guy and a possible historic first as a black governor," has some problems getting to that governor's chair. He's revealed himself to be a "big-city, Chicago-style politician, complete with big-city-style mayoral corruption. And, well, that, along with a nervous recognition of his socialist agenda, actually seems to be sinking him." Showalter reports that a Florida Politics blog states : "A new poll of the Florida gubernatorial race finds former congressman Ron DeSantis with a slim lead over Democratic rival Andrew Gillum. The internal poll, conducted by 1892 and obtained by Florida Politics, shows DeSantis with a 1-point lead over Gillum, 47-46%, with third-party candidates siphoning off 2% and 6% still undecided. Internals are always the most interesting of polls, because they are the ones the candidates themselves commission to find out how they're doing but don't release to the public. They're the least likely to be push polls designed to influence the public." As we know, public polls tend to "overcount Democrats" and get the cell phone-only users all messed up. Some are actually biased as well. Showalter says : "Florida Politics notes that Trump has a high above-water approval rating in Florida, so it's strange that Gillum should be so far ahead. The other thing it notes is that Gillum is ahead in all voter make-up races, except if the voter make-up matches 2014 (which is exactly what many political analysts are forecasting this year's midterms are). Much of this is pre-scandal reporting anyway. What's likely to be going on is that the former Tallahassee mayor's acceptance of free cruises and takings of free pricey and hard-to-get theater tickets, as well as now going along with illicitly paid for campaign events, which is the latest news story, aren't helping him. Why he wasn't busted for these things, after all the FBI effort to show for it, is a mystery. But it ends Gillum's momentum as a fresh face and a new look for Florida politics, given the seediness of it all. If Gillum's acts were too small to bust individually, what voters are seeing now is a pattern of small dishonesties, which brings the realization that if the guy can be bought on these many small things, what else will he be buyable on with greater powers as governor? His reaction hasn't helped, either, pulling out the race card for every instance where he was questioned about his ethics and character. It looks as though the corruption allegations are taking him down and will continue to push his momentum downward. If so, Florida will dodge a bullet, given his big socialist plans for the state. This would be a good thing for a state that includes so many refugees from socialism." • Senate polls are looking good for the GOP, too. Rick Moran of American Thinker, reports : "The CBS Battleground Poll of three key Senate races shows Republicans leading in two contests while the Democrat leads in another. Polls from Arizona, Florida, and Indiana all show tight races. But in Indiana and Florida, Democratic incumbents are in trouble, as GOP enthusiasm and a roaring economy could make election day a nightmare for Senators Joe Donnelly and Bill Nelson." Here's the Daily Caller's take : "It's anyone's game in three key Senate races, where the outcomes could decide which party controls the upper chamber of Congress, according to a CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday. Republican challenger Mike Braun leads Indiana Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly, 46% to 43%. In Arizona, GOP Representative Martha McSally trails Democratic Representative Kyrsten Sinema, 44% to 47%. In Florida, Democratic Senator Bill Nelson is tied with Republican Governor Rick Scott, with both candidates polling at 46%. The surveys were conducted between Oct. 23-26 among likely voters, with all three being within the margin of error. The latest survey comes as welcome news for Braun, a former Republican state lawmaker who had previously trailed Donnelly in most of the recent polls out of Indiana. Donnelly led in three separate surveys earlier in October. However, Braun has since closed the gap and surpassed the Democratic senator, leading in the latest two polls." Rick Moran thinks the 76-year-old Florida Senator, Bill Nelson, may have reached the end of the road : "While Scott hasn't run the best campaign, he receives high marks from voters for his handling of the recent hurricane and scores well on the economy. Nelson has been trying to talk up health care, but it hasn't generated the kind of enthusiasm seen on the Republican side. Braun has been scoring points against Donnelly for the incumbent's hypocrisy on outsourcing and a backlash against the Kavanaugh nomination fight. The Republican is also benefiting from Trump's popularity in the state. In Arizona, Democrat Sinema has been exposed as a radical : "McSally, an Arizona GOP congresswoman, had trailed Sinema by as much as double digits over the summer. However, recent revelations into Sinema's past has made the race much more competitive. The RealClearPolitics average of recent polls shows McSally barely ahead by 0.7%. This is a competitive race despite the revelations about Sinema's antiwar past. Health care is a big issue in the state, and most observers believe that this is one race that may not be decided on election day." • And, if we look at our head honcho Trump -- as Obama hits the campaign trail for Democrat candidates, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday showed that President Trump’s approval ratings have increased to their highest point yet: 47%, with 49% disapproving. The number is higher than President Barack Obama's 45% approval rating at the same time in his first term, October 2010. • • • WHAT'S IN THE NEWS INFLUENCES ELECTIONS. In that regard, the TeaParty.org site has doubled down on the 'fakeness" and/or unanswered mysteries surrounding the mail bomb aftermath. Cesar Sayoc's arrst has in no way resolved anything. The FBI has not explained -- how a loner in Florida managed to get ALL of his "mailed" packages to arrive on the same day; how the bomber’s packages slipped through the mail with zero postmarks or cancelled stamps and not enough postage; how the Soros bomb was hand delivered; why the Post Office allowed these packages to continue to be sent through after the first 8 were discovered 3 days ago; OR why the bombs were not detected by the postal service? there is also the question about where a man living out of his van got the money or equipment to do this; or how he paid for the custom-designed full window decals. One commenter wrote on Twitter : "It’s the same folks that brought us the Benghazi video, Collusion, and Brett Kavanaugh rape allegations." Another twitter commenter said : "But it must be real because FBI Director Wray said these bombs were not fake -- And WE ALL KNOW the FBI NEVER LIES!" • • • THE SOUTHERN BORDER IS A PHOTO-OP FOR THE GOP. Fox News reported late last Thursday afternoon that : "Hundreds of US troops are set to make their way to the southern border to help Homeland Security and the National Guard as a caravan with thousands of migrants pushes north with the goal of crossing into America, a US official confirmed to Fox News on Thursday. The official said roughly 800 soldiers will be sent to the area to offer 'logistical support,' including providing tents and vehicles. It’s not immediately clear which units are being tasked with the mission as details are still being finalized. Defense Secretary James Mattis could sign the deployment orders as soon as today. There are currently 2,100 National Guard troops on the southern border assisting Homeland Security. President Trump tweeted Thursday morning that 'I am bringing out the military for this National Emergency. They will be stopped!' The migrant caravan as of Thursday is still in southern Mexico, more than 1,000 miles away from the nearest entry point into the US." • Fox News UPDATED that report on Monday -- "Roughly 5,000 US troops will be deploying to the southern border in response to the migrant caravan pushing north through Mexico, a US official confirmed to Fox News. Some of the troops will be deploying as early as Tuesday. The reinforcements headed to the US-Mexico border are [active duty] support troops -- not combat troops -- and will include engineers, as well as aviation and medical personnel. The troop deployment, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, had been expected after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis approved the request last week. But the number of troops is far higher than initial estimates." • Meanwhile, according to Fox News, President Trump has called for the caravan to turn back. The President tweeted Monday : “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border. Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!” Fox News has also learned that military police will be among those headed to the border, though they will not be acting in a law enforcement role -- but rather in a “force protection” mission, guarding any US military personnel supporting the Border Patrol, according to another official. Because they would not be performing law enforcement duties they would not be in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the federal government from using the armed forces in a domestic police role. Fox News says that with 5,000 additional troops headed south, "there will be roughly the same number of American forces positioned along the southern border as there are deployed to Iraq and Syria combined." While troops are being deployed, White House officials are continuing to discuss possible executive or regulatory action to prevent people in the caravan from coming across the border, including only allow asylum claims to be made at a port of entry or border crossing, so that anyone who tried to make an asylum claim by crossing the border illegally would be deemed inadmissible, and their claim would be denied. • Liberty Headlines talked about the real threat of terrorists lurking in the caravan. The article was titled "Homeland Security Experts Say Caravan Terrorism Concern Is Real." President Trump sparked a firestorm of controversy a week ago when he tweeted about the potential national security threat from terrorists, but Liberty Headlines wrote : "Much of the news media immediately accused Trump of fearmongering, but the Center for Immigration Studies, a pro-legal immigration research group, has begun compiling data points to back-up the terror claim. And there’s plenty to choose from. First, Univision reporter Francisco Santa Anna said on Friday that he saw people from Bangladesh traveling with the crowd when it crossed from Guatemala into Mexico. 'Can you imagine what they had to do to get here? They infiltrated themselves in this caravan and tried to cross with the crowd,' Santa Anna said in amazement. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens -- who patrols the Laredo, Texas area of the border -- told Fox News host Laura Ingraham this week that more than 650 Bangladeshis had been apprehended in his sector alone last year. The US State Department currently lists Bangladesh as having ISIS-affiliated terror groups. White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders went on the record at a recent press conference and further confirmed the terror threat, saying that suspected terrorists had reached the southern border from Mexico in high numbers during 2017. 'These kinds of details don’t ordinarily see light of day because they’ve always been regarded as too sensitive for public consumption, and are often classified,' said Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies....SIAs -- Special Interest Aliens -- are migrants that move along well-established Latin America smuggling routes from countries of the Middle East, and also from South Asia and North Africa. DHS has for years considered SIAs as posing a higher risk of committing terrorist acts because of the presence of Islamist terrorist organizations in some 30-plus Moslem-majority home countries. Even President Obama’s DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, warned about such dangers in 2016. Earlier in October, Liberty Headlines reported that the US State Department had begun tying illegal immigration to terrorism in its latest annual counter-terrorism report. America’s southern border is “vulnerable to terrorist transit,” the 340-page document concluded. “Many Latin American countries have porous borders, limited law enforcement capabilities, and established smuggling routes. These vulnerabilities offer opportunities to foreign terrorist groups,” the report said. Bensman weighed in at the time, in way that now appears prescient : “The report shows that smuggling routes through Latin America persist in providing the avenues for extremists, alongside benevolent migrants, to travel from nations where terrorist organizations plan and plot ways to harm the country,” Bensman said. On Wednesday, he said that as a journalist and national counter-terrorism expert that he’s quite aware of the dangers at hand : “If good for nothing else, the caravan at least made a few more Americans aware of this border threat,” he said. • • • SUMMING IT UP FOR THE MID-TERMS. American Thinker"s editor Thomas Lifson wrote on Sunday : "If you have been worried – like President Trump – that the GOP will suffer for being blamed for the violence, real and attempted, of the past week, relax. Three smart people -- two of them Lefties -- see beyond the huge media hype ever since ineffective (if not fake) bombs began arriving at the homes and offices of Trump’s enemies. The suspect in custody was so perfect, with his van covered in graphics echoing Trump themes, that many suspected a false flag operation. The mainstream media wasted no time in endlessly pounding home to idea that Trump has, if not blood on his hands, responsibility for creating a toxic atmosphere that animated one of his followers to attempt what the Unabomber (a huge fan of Al Gore) succeeded at. The second pathetic, angry loser 'suspect' who succeeded hideously well in killing his intended victims is on the record hating Trump, calling Trump 'a globalist not a nationalist' in a recent tweet. But that hasn’t stopped Lefties from trying to pin his bigotry on Trump (and the Jews who support his move of the American embassy to, Israel’s capital city), [as in Julia Loffe's tweet : "And a word to my fellow American Jews : this president makes this possible. Here. Where you live. I hope the embassy move, over there where you don't live was worth it."]." • Michael Goodwin of the New York Post explains why blaming Trump for the violence won't help Democrats : "Here are three main reasons for my doubts. First, neither suspect was a solid citizen who suddenly turned to violence because of politics....Second, the speed of events these days means no one storyline dominates for long, even in the anti-Trump-obsessed media. The Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle looked as if it would determine the election -- until the caravan of Central American immigrants making their way toward the southern border vowed to get into the country, one way or another. The economy is the third reason for my doubts that last week will dramatically reshape the election. Most Americans in the workforce today have never seen anything like the jobs boom and the rising incomes that go with historic low unemployment." • In addition, Mad Maxine Waters has been urging harassment, and Republicans are experiencing it. The swing voters in the middle that are paying attention to the news know this very well. • AND, the caravan is not going away. • FINALLY, as James Carville famously instructed Bill Clinton, “It’s the economy, stupid.” That still is true. Especially in an environment in which a huge majority of the public disbelieves the media. • Lifson notes the comments of two famous "Lefties," as he calls them : "The two smart Lefties who see the caravan as decisive are Andrew Sullivan and Michael Moore (don’t be fooled by his dopiness -- he predicted Trump’s win, and understands working class Americans better than the Democrat intellectuals and elites). Sullivan writes in New York Magazine : 'It’s the optics that are fatal. The image of that caravan, crammed with thousands of desperate brown human beings, winding its way tortuously through Central America and Mexico, headed to a showdown at the US border....Moore is more effusive, as the Daily Wire reports : 'In a series of tweets that feature aerial shots of the massive caravan, Moore once again waxed prophetical about Trump steering the national narrative to electoral victory : "So here we have a beautiful aerial shot -- just in time 4 the Midterms! And everyone falls for it. This is one of the most remote areas of the Western Hemisphere. Try finding a helicopter/drone down there to film this. You can’t. Trump’s genius is how he once again outsmarts the Dems," wrote Moore. • • • DEAR READERS, America is not the only illegal immigrant target. Over 6,000 migrants have crossed into Melilla and a second Spanish territory nearby, Ceuta, so far this year, according to UNHCR figures. Melilla and Cuenta are Spanish enclaves on the North African coastline, and if migrants get into either enclave and claim asylum treatment, they cannot be summarily deported under EU laws. More than 40,000 people have arrived on the Andalusian mainland by sea in 2018, with the majority traveling from Guinea, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Algeria, and Mali. Europeans are reacting in ways similar to those of Americans. • Mainstream parties are losing elections -- the latest was on Sunday when German Chancellor Merkel's governing coalition suffered heavy losses in a regional election, with early results showing that her center-right CDU party and the center-left SPD were each 10% down on the previous election in Hesse state that includes Germanys financial center, Frankfurt. The defeat caused Merkel to tell German media on Monday morning : "For the next federal election, I will not stand as federal chancellor nor as a candidate for the Bundestag, and...I won’t seek any further political offices. Today I made a decision which should enable the federal government to do good work in the future. I have come to these conclusions not only through deliberation but through experience." Euronews, the official EU media outlet, said : "Merkel's weakness at home may limit her capacity to lead in the European Union at a time when the bloc is dealing with Brexit, a budget crisis in Italy, and the prospect of populist parties making gains at European Parliament elections next May." • Meanwhile, NBC News' Think wrote on Monday morning about the victory of the populist Jai Bolsonaro in Brazil. The NBC article is both factually incorrect about fascism and badly tilted to the Progressive Left, but it tells us a lot about Progressive "Newspeak" and reveals, despite its agenda, that populisn -- we the people -- are winning the political battle for votes : "Brazil has elected a president far more dangerous than Trump. The election of neo-fascist presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro is raising fears that Brazil could be the latest country hit by a wave of far-right authoritarians. Bolsonaro, though, represents something scarier than Donald Trump, the politician he is most often compared to....Bolsonaro is a seven-term congressman who surged into the popular consciousness as a hardline law-and-order figure with outsider credibility because of the swirling crises that have engulfed Brazil over the past five years. His racist, misogynist, homophobic outrages are numerous and well-known....The widely discussed case for 'Bolsonarism' being a form of neo-fascism hinges not just on bigotry, violence and authoritarianism, but on the interests that have rallied to him. The nucleus of his support -- as per classic studies on fascism -- is a middle class made up of small business owners and independent professionals, plus members of the police and armed forces. Though sections of the poor have also voted for him -- mobilized by a worsening public security situation -- the rich and educated support him in much larger proportions; this has been a decisive factor in this success so far....Bolsonaro’s chief economic advisor, University of Chicago-educated Paulo Guedes, promises to privatize aggressively; the financial markets endorse this vision....Worryingly, existing levels of violent crime could justify -- and serve to mask -- bloody repression. There were over 60,000 murders in Brazil last year. Police contribute to the bloodshed, killing thousands each year. Bolsonaro promised the special forces, whose emblem and cri de guerre is a skull, that their people would be included in the government, possibly suggesting a ministerial position for a special forces commander....What unifies parties like the AfD in Germany, the Front National in France, the Sweden Democrats or the Italian Lega is that they all aim to politicize. For the past decades, Western societies have been ruled by 'post-political' forms of management. Politicians justified themselves by saying : the experts are in power, we know best. Populism is a reaction to that, that declares : we, the people have different interests from you, the elite. In contrast, Bolsonarism signifies an attempt, by the rich and powerful, to sweep away all political division and to potentially do away with a democracy that includes those they feel should be excluded. All of which is to say, Bolsonarismo stands alone when compared to its global far-right peers. And yet, if there is a unifying factor, it is that the new authoritarian right has gained prominence in the wake of the 2008 crisis. The reigning form of liberal democracy, triumphant after the Cold War, has become more difficult to sustain in turbulent times. The loss of legitimacy has not been capitalized on by the left, as one might have expected, but increasingly by the right. Traditional establishments have been complicit in this anti-democratic turn. Eager to bolster a system that many citizens support less and less, even moderate elites avail themselves of authoritarian and nationalist measures....In France, centrists fret about Marine Le Pen, but it is the great free-market liberal hope, Emmanuel Macron, who effectively maintains a draconian permanent state of emergency. The EU makes member-states vote again until they get the answer right. Obama deported more migrants and bombed at least as many countries as Trump....From China to Europe to Brazil, the link between free market capitalism and democracy may be breaking. If so, genuine democrats face a fork in the road : cling to an increasingly anti-popular neoliberal order or defend democracy, warts and all." • There we have it. Elitist "post-political" leaders are being ousted by "we the people." Calling "we the people" fascist or nazi or racist or homophobic will not save the Progressive Elites. It helps to defeat them -- because "populist" (read that, conservative) voters do not care what Progressives think about them or call them. They are interested only in taking back their countries and salvaging their democracies. And, in America, we will see a lot more of "We, the People" in the November 6 mid-term election results.