Amber Duke

The American middle class is in a precarious position. After decades of decline — the percentage of Americans in the middle class fell by 10 points between 1971 and and 2011 — the most important income group in the country seemed to be stabilizing. That likely won't be the case much longer if the government-ordered economic shutdown continues to put the squeeze on everyday Americans. The middle class was largely left out of the conversation as politicians and pundits spent months debating a second round of COVID relief. Republicans re-discovered their fleeting affair with fiscal conservatism, advocating for slashing unemployment insurance bonuses and sneering at the idea of more substantial stimulus checks, both of which would provide huge benefit to middle income earners.

Tulsi Gabbard will retire from Congress at the end of the year. The Hawaii representative is going out with a bang, introducing several bills that show why she is so despised by her establishment Democratic counterparts — and why she could potentially become a very powerful broker in the American political realignment. Last week, Gabbard introduced the Protect Women's Sports Act, legislation that would prevent biological men from competing in women's sports. Gabbard understands that keeping men and women's sports separate is a question of basic fairness for female athletes — Chelsea Mitchell, a high-school track runner, for example, has lost out on four state titles because she's had to compete against two individuals who were born male.

Right-wingers on social media are calling for Trump supporters to refuse to vote for Republican candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the Georgia Senate race. Instead, tweets with the tag #boycottGArunoff are encouraging voters angry at alleged fraud in the presidential race to write in President Trump for both seats. The instruction is a bit confusing since Georgia law does not even accept write-in candidates for a runoff election. A protest vote in this case might make someone feel better, but it won’t be counted and we’ll have no idea how many people actually opted to ‘boycott’ the election. There is a reason Newsmax’s Joe Pinion dubbed the Georgia boycott his ‘whiff of the week’ on his show Saturday.

President Trump said Monday in a tweet that his administration is willing to start the formal transition of power to Joe Biden, even while asserting that he still intends to 'fight' and 'prevail' in his legal challenges against the results of the presidential election. 'I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our Country. She has been harassed, threatened, and abused — and I do not want to see this happen to her, her family, or employees of GSA. Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.

Washington DC Call me crazy for taking the man with hair dye dripping down his cheeks seriously, but I think it would be unfair to dismiss Rudy Giuliani. Amusingly shambolic he may be. That doesn’t mean he is wrong. The media has been claiming since the election ended that President Trump’s claims of voter fraud are 'baseless' and 'without evidence’. That just is not true. The President’s lawyer gave examples of it during today’s press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington DC. But everyone is too busy mocking him to pay attention. I tried to listen to what Giuliani actually said and not what he looked like or the characterization of him by the rest of the media.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo took the last can of Who-hash by announcing a ban on both indoor and outdoor private gatherings larger than 10 people. It is just the latest flash of insanity from our nation's leaders in trying to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, but it provoked an even larger backlash than usual because it attacks two sacred American institutions: Thanksgiving and the family. Cuomo's order is insulting to our intelligence and is disgustingly authoritarian. COVID science suggests gathering outdoors is relatively safe (it's why so many states have offered restaurants money to winterize their patio dining), yet Cuomo tells families they cannot do it for Turkey Day. What if you live in a rural area and have a large backyard that makes social distancing possible?

It's been a week and a half since Election Day and the results are still not certified — some votes counts, like in Georgia, are close enough to require a recount, and there are numerous legal challenges put forth by the Trump campaign. Still, because the mainstream media has 'called' the race for Joe Biden, the left has arrogantly told Trump supporters to just concede already. The allegations of voter fraud, fact checkers claim, are unsubstantiated and baseless. Some of them may very well be, but it was a pretty well accepted fact in America (until Donald Trump brought it up, that is) that people cheated in elections. In fact, Biden's newly minted chief of staff, Ron Klain, tweeted in 2014 that 68 percent of people believe elections are rigged 'because they are.

Former Vice President Joe Biden hasn't yet been officially certified as the winner of the 2020 presidential election and the Trump campaign has launched numerous legal challenges to the results. Nonetheless, Biden is moving ahead with his transition team under the assumption he will be the next president. On Monday, he announced that his coronavirus task force would include Dr Rick Bright, a whistleblower from the Trump administration. Bright was a high-ranking Health and Human Services official until he was demoted in May of this year. Bright alleged in a whistleblower complaint that he was ousted because he was critical of the Trump administration's response to COVID-19 and was resistant to efforts to fast-track the distribution of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus.

As of Wednesday morning, Joe Biden seems to have the easiest path to victory in the presidential election. He currently holds leads in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin with most of the remaining votes being mail-ins that should break in his favor. If Biden does pull it off, he may owe a big thank you to white men. Democrats claimed in 2016 that Trump’s shock victory was the result of white grievance politics. The President’s base, they said, was made up of white working-class voters railing against changing demographics in their country and getting payback for the country electing its first black president. Van Jones famously called it a ‘whitelash’.

The Biden campaign is far from confident heading into Tuesday's election and their behavior proves it. It's not uncommon for campaigns to blitz multiple states with television ads and rally appearances in the final few days before the election; Trump, for example, has been holding multiple rallies per day in key swing states. However, Biden's last minute rush to turn out the vote stands in stark contrast to his months-long strategy of sitting back and letting Trump talk his way out of victory. Clearly the campaign is feeling some serious unease with the latest polls and is second guessing keeping Joe in the basement for so long.

Rioters and looters in Philadelphia may have just paved Trump's road to victory in Pennsylvania. Biden helped last week when he admitted during the final presidential debate that he wanted to phase out US oil production. It was a boneheaded thing to say while trying to court blue-collar Americans in swing states, many of whom work in the energy sector. Now, Trump also has the 'law and order' narrative on his side. Walter Wallace Jr, a 27-year-old black man, was shot and killed by police in Philadelphia on Monday. It only took until that evening for protests to turn to looting and rioting. Just like in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland and other major cities, businesses were destroyed and individuals were harmed.

‘Trust the experts’ is the battle cry of America’s elitists. After President Trump’s shock election in 2016 showed that Americans are sick of hearing from politicians, the politicized classes adopted experts as their proxy for power. Climate change ‘experts’ justify AOC’s radical Green New Deal with prophecies of planetary extinction. Foreign policy ‘experts’ claim America will destabilize the Middle East if, as Trump wants, we withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan. Medical ‘experts’ are wheeled out to justify increasing control over the lives of everyday Americans through draconian lockdowns, mask mandates and stringent travel restrictions.

Mike Pompeo has ‘every reason to believe’ director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe’s assessment that the recent story about Hunter Biden and his emails is not the product of Russian disinformation. https://twitter.com/jseldin/status/1318933935007633410 'I have every reason to believe he's got it exactly right,' the secretary of state said during a Wednesday press briefing in response to a question from The Spectator. The New York Post's report contains emails purportedly from Hunter Biden in which he discusses setting up meetings between foreign business associates and vice president Joe Biden.

If Trump is reelected, prepare for Russiagate 2.0. This time it'll be even crazier. The Hunter Biden story has given the President's opponents an excuse to do what they do best: shout 'Russia' at any allegation they don't like. It sounds insane that they would double down on a strategy that has failed so miserably before. The Democratic party's obsession with the Trump-Russia conspiracy alienated average Americans and with very little payoff. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's multi-year investigation indicated that there was insufficient evidence to show collusion between Trump and Moscow, though it did find that Russia had attempted to hack the election.