State of Monday | LOVE THY NEIGHBOR

There’s a very thin, almost indiscernible line between justice and vengeance. Justice takes work, time, community and effort. Vengeance is when all four of those things have either broken down or have been abandoned. LOVE THEY NEIGHBOR Good morning, Fellow Callers, I’m going to ask you to do something tough today. Today’s election eve. Tomorrow is going to be nuts. It could be a nuts week, or a nuts month. It could even be a nuts year, who knows. Probably all three. But I hope to give you at least a moment’s pause for introspection. As an agnostic man, I’m going to ask you to … LOVE THY NEIGHBOR There’s a very thin, almost indiscernible line between justice and vengeance. Justice takes work, time, community and effort. Vengeance is when all four of those things have either broken down or have been abandoned. It’s times like these that I think of my mother. She was a vicious protector of our family. The drive behind all that we did. The matriarch. She was also very, very liberal. I mean like watched Keith Olbermann’s show on MSNBC religiously-level liberal. She was just beginning to write about politics under the pseudonym “rage on the page” when a distracted driver in an SUV ran a red light in the intersection in the center of my sleepy Pennsylvania town and rendered my mother’s used Ford sedan unrecognizable. She was gone instantly, but she didn’t die right away. That took months. The five of us, my two brothers, my sister and my stepfather, watched her writhe around on a hospital bed spastically for several weeks, hoping for some glimmer she’d recover. She never did, and I knew she wouldn’t. I had seen traumatic brain injuries in the war. I knew what the repetitive, rhythmic movements meant – like a slowed down and distorted record skipping every 11 seconds, on loop forever. The final intervention was obvious. Her physical body passed in the early hours, but she had been gone months earlier, the instant her head made contact with the glass, that much was clear. One of my brothers returned to active duty and the other went on to bootcamp eventually. She, odd for a liberal at the time, had insisted we join the Corps. So we had, although I had just gotten out at that point. And that was one of her favorite topics to write about, the war, its illegality, the crooks behind it. It’s also one of the reasons I’m near certain she’d be MAGA right now, were she still alive. I think at this point we should remember the pole shift we’ve lived through in the last eight years. Whether he wins or loses, it’s indisputably true that Donald Trump realigned politics. Whether he did it himself or simply sensed it and capitalized on it, well, books could be written about that. Many of you reading this have probably abandoned or reconsidered previous positions. And that’s okay. The cliche about becoming more conservative with age is probably true, after all. I’m sure many of you supported Bush’s wars. I’m sure many of you once believed in the Reaganite free market approach to immigration and trade deals. I used to truly pickle people’s minds in right-wing politics when I told them I voted for Obama for the same reasons I voted for Trump: Immigration, trade and ending the damned wars. We had one guy saying we needed to be in Iraq for “100 years” and another guy saying let’s get the hell out of there. Choice seemed clear to me at the time … My eyes were red with vengeance when I heard the details of my mother’s accident. The wife of a very wealthy dental surgeon with several kids in the car, likely texting, had blown one of the only lights in a long strip of road. What’s more, it was really difficult motivating local law enforcement to look into the details, for whatever reason. I wanted to know if she was texting and driving, if she had even hit the brakes. More darkly, I wanted her to be ruined. Financially, socially, perhaps even I wanted her freedom taken from her. Prison. Destruction. That’s what I wanted. But at the very least, accountability. So much of it felt to me like a metaphor of the last 30 years. Mega-wealthy people running red lights, flooring the gas into policies that had no second thought for everyday Americans caught in the resulting crash. My father became conversational in Spanish so he could train the new factory foreman who would ultimately take over his textile plant when it moved to Mexico due to NAFTA. When the stock market crashed and the big banks got bailed out, he sat in unemployment for years. It ultimately wrecked my other family, my father’s family, I’m convinced. Republicans are indisputably as responsible for these things, if not more so, than Democrats. We should remember this as we try to heal from tomorrow, dear readers. I think it’s obvious the prevailing sickness in politics, and I hesitate to even call it that, emanates more than ever from the power centers of the left than it does from the right. The pole shift, call it populism, call it whatever you want, has made that as clear to me as voting against McCain was in 2008. It’s demonstrably true now that the left’s obsession with neo-Marxist race and gender politics is bad for the country. We know the fever is breaking, however, because even one of the [hackiest reporters at the NYT wrote an opus]( about how bad it is for academia; once a jewel of American exceptionalism, now a never ending struggle session that has thoroughly sidelined concepts as primary as “merit.” Obviously I think Trump and Vance could help cure a lot of this sickness if they win. But, I also think Harris winning would accelerate it as well. As I wrote last week, the rank incompetence, bigotry, and anti-Americanism at the heart of this ideology would burst wide open under the sun, for all to see. Regardless of how the election plays out though, victories against this harmful ideology are starting to stack up. Academia is abandoning “diversity” statements. The corporate world is ditching DEI initiatives or straight up firing entire DEI staffs. This is a shocking turn: NYT teamed up with Media Matters to try to pressure YouTube to censor Tucker, Ben Shapiro, even the Babylon Bee. Five years ago, they might have obliged. This time? Google told the most influential newspaper in the world to go pound sand. Wild, amirite? Whether Trump wins or not tomorrow, dear reader, never forget that we, the normal people, are winning. And we will win in the end. But it’s going to take more work than simply voting at the booth, that much is for sure. If we care about this country like we say we do, we need to love it and the people in it. The guy with the Harris flag in his yard across the street isn’t evil. He’s just mistaken. What’s more, he, like you from 20 years ago, is likely to change his mind in the future. That takes work. That takes community. It’s the hardest of all the commandments, I’m convinced, but you have to love your neighbor, you really do. In the end, I let the justice process play out. I didn’t get what my feverish dreams deeply wanted, but I’m not sure that really would have been justice. It certainly wouldn’t have brought my mother back. I know even as she viciously attacked politics she found at odds with the interests of her family, she loved her family above all, she loved the community within which it resided, and she loved the country that made it all happen. Ladies and gents, outside of loving your family, there is no more patriotic an act than loving your neighbor. Remember that tomorrow. Our forefathers will look down and thank us for it. WHAT I’M READING Let’s check in on those small border towns Democrats expected to turn Texas blue, shall we? [Lifelong Hispanic Democrats Are Tired Of The Party’s Rule. Now, They’re Striving To Make History]( — I knew it! [High Number Of Liberal Men Admit What We Knew All Along]( — Kind of a weird thing happened over the weekend … [CNN Casts Some Doubt On Poll Showing Kamala Surprisingly Ahead In Red State](   [Privacy Policy]( | [Terms of Use]( [Feedback]( [Unsubscribe]( [About Us]( 2024 THE DAILY CALLER INC. | 1775 EYE ST, NW STE 1150-290 WASHINGTON, DC 20006 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.