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Abortion Is Just A Symptom – The American Spectator


One of the more irritating reoccurrences in American politics is the rampant propensity of Republican elites to lecture the party’s voters about their outmoded or inconvenient values. This week we saw a truckload of that lecturing dumped on the pro-life movement in the person of Tudor Dixon, the somewhat promising 2022 Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate who was clobbered by Democrat incumbent Gretchen Whitmer.

According to Dixon, now a podcaster whose show has been picked up by iHeart radio, abortion was the reason she couldn’t beat Whitmer, and in promoting an interview she held with Donald Trump in her latest episode, she’s made the rounds warning Republican politicos that efforts to enforce abortion bans in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which tossed Roe v. Wade into the ash heap of history, will lose the party everything in 2024.

This got started after Nikki Haley’s rant during the debate last week about how Republicans won’t have the votes to do anything about abortion at the federal level:

What can we draw from this, other than that it’s pretty obvious that corporate media is hard at work promoting Dixon as the next media property to be introduced to America?

It ought to be remembered, after all, that while Tudor Dixon wasn’t a bad candidate, she wasn’t all that great of one, either. Dixon ended up the Republican nominee for governor in Michigan last year because Team Whitmer managed to knock out two of her better-known opponents — former Detroit police chief James Craig and a local official in Allendale Township named Ryan Kelley, who was a Jan. 6 protester. She had no background in government and no record of electoral success. Dixon instead was the anchor of the weekly program America’s Voice Live on the conservative streaming outlet Real America’s Voice.

None of this ought to be interpreted as a shot at Tudor Dixon. But let’s face it: as a gubernatorial candidate, she was a bit of a lightweight. As a congressional candidate, she might very well have been a winner.

So while Dixon’s current line is that she isn’t the governor of Michigan and Gretchen Whitmer is because she was too strong on abortion, and future Republican candidates in places like Michigan can’t win because of a pro-life stance, that isn’t the only reason.

Generally speaking, it helps to run somebody the voters know and trust as (1) a competent leader and (2) a relative political heavyweight.

Hell, I liked Tudor Dixon. I was rooting for her. She seemed like somebody who could maybe charm her way into pulling an upset and properly punishing Gretchen Whitmer for her atrocious COVID lockdowns.

But did Dixon run a campaign strong enough to knock Whitmer out?

Well, she was horrendously outspent, especially in the late stages of the campaign when Team Whitmer covered the airwaves with unanswered attack ads against her. Most of the Republican money didn’t play in the race because it wasn’t considered a real possibility that she could win. Polling as Election Day neared showed Dixon closing, a little, but Whitmer’s get-out-the-vote efforts annihilated Dixon’s. The national Democrat machine had already invested in Whitmer (you are entitled to consider whether it was mere happenstance that the FBI largely cooked up a kidnapping plot against her and fed it to a few reprobates dumb enough to play along right in the middle of a mini-scandal involving her attempts to ban boating during COVID while her husband was busily tooling around on the lakes), and she was not going to be allowed to lose.

And at the end of the day, it was a 54–43 blowout.

The main thrust of the argument that abortion was the reason Whitmer beat Dixon was that a ballot initiative ensconcing abortion rights in the Michigan Constitution was also in front of the voters, and it passed with a 57–43 margin.

So the contention here isn’t fully supported by the facts of the race.

We’re going to leave aside, for this discussion, some of the obvious things. Like for example whether the pro-life position is morally correct. And whether a party that abandons a morally correct position just to get a few votes actually deserves political power.

But is abortion a millstone around the GOP’s neck? Dixon isn’t the only one saying this. Certainly there are elements within right-of-center corporate media, whether at Fox News or on certain nationally syndicated talk shows and websites, who joined in to push this line.

And yes, there are reasons to believe that abortion is problematic in swing states. Ohio isn’t really one anymore, and yet a ballot initiative last month that sought to increase to 60 percent the majority of the vote needed to amend the state Constitution failed miserably because the voters knew that it had been put up in advance of another initiative, one just like Michigan’s constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights, which will be on the ballot in November.

Most people believe abortion is the single biggest reason for the mind-blowing partisan split among single and married men and women. In case you weren’t aware of this, the party split, as found in the 2022 electoral cycle, among married men is R+20. Among married women, it’s R+14. Among unmarried men, it’s R+7.

But among unmarried women, it’s D+37.

You should never give the benefit of the doubt to today’s Democrat Party — or, more simply, the modern Left — by the way. So when you see a number like that, you should deduce two things: first, it didn’t come about by accident, and second, preserving and expanding it will be the main focus of everything they do going forward.

And you should consider a couple of things as well.

Who out of those four groups listed above do you think are the people most likely to consume pop culture? Not the married people; they’re certainly consumers of pop culture, but they’re going to have a lot less time to park in front of the TV than single people do, and their interactions with pop culture are going to be colored by the fact that they have kids.

It’s single people.

And for a number of reasons we don’t need to bore ourselves with, pretty clearly pop culture is aimed at women more than men. Just consider the differential in consumer marketing between the sexes and it becomes obvious. Even the NFL, when it markets merchandise during games, is trying to sell to women as often as men, and it’s no longer a surprise to see things like tampon commercials running during college basketball games.

And all the action movies have women beating men to a pulp now. They’re not trying to attract male audiences with that kind of programming.

So women, and single women in particular, are the target audience for most of what corporate media — which is dominated by the Left; most of those media conglomerates who control pop culture are as woke or nearly so as Disney is — and what messaging is fed to them?

Certainly not that today’s single women should aspire to be wives and mothers, that’s for sure.

And yet who are the most unhappy people in America?

Single women.

Unhappy people are the Left’s stock in trade. The modern Left is built on the principles laid down by Saul Alinsky and the other titans of socialist community organizing, the people Barack Obama, for example, devoted his early adult life to emulating and whose lessons he built today’s Democrat Party on. And Alinsky and the other community organizers have always taught that the job is to agitate as many people into not just unhappiness but downright outrage as possible.

And we’ve gone in this country from “safe, legal and rare” as the Left’s position to “SHOUT YOUR ABORTION.” It isn’t old spinsters pushing that, by the way — it’s twentysomethings and women in the pop culture like Chelsea Handler.

What’s that done to American society? What’s the effect of radicalizing single women on abortion as birth control?

Well, John Hawkins had an interesting post at his Culturcidal blog attempting to explain a major disconnect going on in…



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