Life After 2024 and the VRA

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

There was a time, a time not so long ago, in which the entire American electorate were white men. It’s not an exaggeration, and maybe only a tiny embellishment- Only around 95 years ago, Jim Crow laws were still on the books and women weren’t allowed to vote. It would be over 30 years after that until de-segregation really began, over 35 years until the first Civil Rights legislation passed, and 45 years until LBJ pushed through the last of his Civil Rights legislation. Even after 1965, America’s electorate remained majority male and overwhelmingly white for a while. In 1988 the electorate was 85% white. Even in 2024 the electorate is 71% white, and that plays out a lot more drastically than you’d think. Outside of the 148 majority-minority districts, the electorate is probably still 80-85% white nationally. Democrats hold 122 of their 212 seats in those majority-minority districts.

The truth is that Democrats were benefitting from the Voting Rights Act and it’s future interpretations, which forced the creation of majority-minority seats, especially Black seats, to improve representation. If only 29% of the 2024 electorate was non-white, and we assume that’s fairly standard, one could say that just based on math that only around 126 seats should have been majority-minority, or about 22 less than exist in the current House. Given that Democrats were winning 82% of these seats, Democrats were probably winning an extra 18 seats simply because these seats existed. So under the current House math, if we adjusted the number of majority-minority districts down by 22 and made those districts majority white (where Democrats win 31% of seats, almost all of which are in the north and West), Democrats would lose a net of 11 seats. They would have 201 seats, and probably not be in a position to take the House back in 2026, given the success of today’s partisan gerrymanders.

Of course, we have to be realistic about yesterday’s ruling and the direction the courts have been moving since at least Roberts took over, if not frankly earlier. Mandatory majority-minority districts are on their way to extinction, as even just today Louisiana delayed their primaries so they can re-district. Republican states, especially in the South, will begin dividing up deeply blue areas and putting them into seats where they can never win, and you will see majority-minority seats in places like Memphis, New Orleans, and Charlotte begin being cut to pieces, as happened in Nashville already, and states like Mississippi and Alabama drawing Democrats down to one or no seats they should ever win in the House. The reality is that it won’t just be a reduction from 148 to 126 majority-minority seats, but likely much more. The reality is that you should assume they will cut as many seats as you can imagine from a block of seats that they do not win, particularly with no threat of the court stopping them.

Here’s the thing though- it won’t just be Republicans in the South doing this. Democrats are not going to simply surrender and give up the political fight for good, and accept being a 180 seat minority caucus for eternity. So what will they do to fight back? The only thing they’ll think they can do strategically. Whereas you have seats like Dwight Evans in Philadelphia’s PA-3 that are majority-minority and 90% Democratic, they are just one seat. Why leave NJ-10 as one blue seat when you can carve it up and combine it up with NJ-11, NJ-7, and probably a couple more, and have five seats the GOP can’t even win on their best year? Democrats in Blue states will start carving up safe majority-minority seats to gerrymander Republicans completely out of their states forever. And of course, this will make Black, Latino, and Asian populations in those districts less powerful in every one of those new seats than they were in the single old seat. These new seats will have increased white voting power, even if they are white Democrats. Statistics tell us that majority white districts don’t very often (although not never) elect minority members of Congress. And so the Congressional Black Caucus will not only lose members in deep red states that want to get rid of them. They will also lose members in deeply BLUE states and areas that actually don’t mind electing them now. The Democratic Party’s elected members of Congress will increasingly be white, or at a minimum be made up of members whose politics have to cater to their majority suburban white electorates. It will re-center Democratic politics in this way. It will also have a profound impact on Presidential primary math, where a large bulk of delegates are elected at the district level. Increasingly, Black voters will not be as determinative over that process either. The last time Democrats nominated someone with weak or tepid Black support for President was 1988, for reference.

Now, before you go and make a presumption about how Democrats feel about this, I want you to stop for a second and look around. The PodSave America bros spent yesterday crowing about Ken Martin not releasing an autopsy from the 2024 election because they think it will show that Gaza was “the factor” in that election. Janet Mills was forced to drop out of the Senate race in Maine, handing the Democratic nomination there to a white guy who looks and talks like a Nazi. Here in the Lehigh Valley, Elizabeth Warren is swooping in from out of state to endorse a deadbeat who has no core Democratic values. Bernie Sanders has talked more about oligarchy in the last 24 hours than Civil Rights. I think we have to call some things for what they are- Democrats were turning away from their core Civil Rights message anyway. Democrats felt that their two most loyal groups of voters, Black voters and Jewish voters, were too far from the median of the electorate when picking Democratic nominees. Democrats were already moving this way, and the response of some of them to this potentially ground shifting court decision gives away the game- they were ready and fine with this happening. No, they probably don’t love that voting rights are being gutted, but this does make the strategic move they wanted to make a lot easier. Now when they crack many of these majority-minority districts and dilute their voting power, they can say they were forced to by reality, not because it was a choice over the kind of party they wanted. Sure, there will still be some non-white folks winning Democratic elections, a portion of the base feels good about voting that way, but they will be candidates who cater to white liberal/progressive activists, which is exactly what the DC Democratic establishment had already decided was where they wanted to be. Now they can get there without spilling any blood on their own.

Really the only two guardrails on Democratic politics and keeping the party somewhat sane are organized labor (particularly the building trades) and Black and Latino voters. They are the two groups who were the most steadfast behind Joe Biden in the 2020 Primaries and represent the groups that are actually most moderate in the party. One has been shrinking in numbers and has been harmed by numerous Supreme Court decisions in recent years, and now the other is simply going to be bleeding political power from now until 2031, at the least. Then things will begin to settle into the new norm I describe above. Democrats will increasingly begin re-centering white activists over Black and Latino base voters. Messaging will change. The kinds of candidates who win will change. Democrats will look and sound a lot more like Jennifer Welch than Jim Clyburn. The Democratic Party will be fundamentally different.

I’ve been very critical of the Democratic Party in recent years for perhaps leaning too hard on the 48% of the vote we get now. This would be a course correction that would actually make things worse. One of the presumptions many white Democrats have is that if we talked more about class, and less about identity, we’d win more elections. You may have a point about identity costing us as many votes as we get, but the first part is silly and completely misguided. White Republicans only hate one thing more than Democratic minorities- white Democrats. The entire Republican Party at this point splits into two groups- folks that hate everything liberalism/progressivism stands for and want it eradicated, and people who know their party has a good few lunatics, but think the Democratic Party is batshit crazy. None of them are clamoring for the socialist revolution. People voting Republican right now aren’t coming over to the Democratic Party because we re-brand a bit. Here’s the thing though, some of the folks voting for us now will either flip on us or just not vote. It doesn’t take much to insure we’re a minority party for the foreseeable future. One out of every twenty might be enough, 15% is a sure thing. Much of the argument for the party going populist has been that “almost all” of the Democratic voters would stay. Sure, maybe. Almost all means 20 more years of losses. It’s kind of funny, because we last went through a puritanical reformation after Civil Rights passed and we lost the 1968 election. We moved far left/anti-war left in 1972 and got absolutely throttled. In fact we got blown out in every Presidential election but one after 1968 for the next 20 years. And then we moderated towards our current version and won the popular vote in all but two Presidential election for 32 years. When a white dominated electorate is faced with a purely ideological question, why would they pick leftism? Let’s be honest, they never have in our history. Who is to say that some of the *white* Democratic voters we have right now will even like a Euro-populist left political party. Again, we were founded on a tax revolt.

Let’s be honest. Most of the DC Democratic Party thinks after Hillary and Kamala that women who unapologetically talk about Civil Rights and social issues are going to lose. That is the legacy of 2024, and at least for a while it will guide how much of the “braintrust” down there operates. They’ll look for every mediocre, just-good-enough white guy Governor they can find to run in 2028 and try to convince us we want them. Before yesterday, they were likely to lose. Now I can’t predict 2028 for sure, but I think we can see the longer term trend. Perhaps Joe Biden’s administration was not something we could sell to America, so it was bad for the country. Where we’re almost certainly going now though is likely to be just as bad, and have far less positive outcomes. Democrats will become as unserious and unhelpful as the GOP, and probably begin following carnival sideshow freaks in cult like fashion too. In a word, this is the hell we have waited for. Welcome to the show.

Deadbeat Bob “Crooksy” Brooks: Screw my Former Mother-In-Law, We Cheated and We Ran Out the Clock

/ Rich Wilkins / 1 Comment

Bob “Crooksy” Brooks was briefly in court today. His former mother-in-law is suing him again, since he still hasn’t paid her back any money that two courts found that he owed her. His basic argument against paying up is “tough shit.” From Lehigh Valley News:

Wiley sued the Moore Township couple in February, alleging they are trying to hide assets to avoid paying her more than $162,000 from a previous lawsuit.

In a court filing this month, the Brookses denied the allegations and argued that Wiley has missed her window to bring new litigation.

Sounds familiar. His argument against her when he lost the initial lawsuit for not paying was that she waited too long to sue him. Not that he didn’t sign the promissory note in 2008, not that he tried to pay her back and she declined, not even that he couldn’t afford to pay her back at any point from 2004 until 2018. His argument was that she waited too long to collect. Basically tough shit, you old hag. Bob “Crooksy” Brooks ain’t paying her a dime, too late.

Of course the courts laughed at Crooksy and awarded her not only the initial $55k, but all the interest and other costs and ran that number up over $162,000. So Deadbeat Bob had a master plan- quitclaim the property to his new wife, who has the same name as his old wife, and hope no one notices. And for a while, apparently no one did.

Here’s the facts, as told by Lehigh Valley News, again:

Bob Brooks and Wiley have been entangled in litigation since 2018 over a 2008 promissory note.

Brooks and his first wife, Jennifer Lynn, had agreed to pay her parents $55,000 at 6% annual interest, but paid only about $100 over 10 years.

In 2018, Wiley sued her daughter and Bob Brooks, who had divorced by then, for the overdue payment.

A Northampton County judge ruled in Wiley’s favor in 2020, and an appellate court upheld the ruling in 2022. In the newest suit, Wiley said Brooks has yet to pay her and now owes her $162,586.

Wiley also accused Brooks and his second wife, Jennifer Lynne, of creating a fraudulent deed over a Moore Township property.

After Bob Brooks and his first wife divorced, he took sole ownership possession of their 1-acre property. However, Jennifer Lynn never signed the paperwork that would have removed her name from the deed.

In 2022, Brooks and his second wife Jennifer Lynne transferred the property solely to Jennifer Lynne Brooks.

Wiley contended in the latest lawsuit that Jennifer Lynne Brooks shouldn’t have been able to sign away Jennifer Lynn’s claim on the property.

Confusion over the two women’s names likely allowed the document to slip past county officials, Wiley argued. She is asking the court to throw out the quitclaim deed and award her punitive damages for the Brookses’ alleged misdeeds.

In a response filed this month, attorney Moore called on the court to dismiss the lawsuit. Wiley had a five-year period to file a lien or seek her damages, which he argued ended in September 2025.

In addition, Ryan argued that the Brookses are within their legal rights to put the home in Jennifer Lynne Brooks’ name.

While the paperwork over the property’s ownership has lagged, Bob Brooks was effectively the property’s only owner following the divorce.

Jennifer Lynne Brooks gained a right to the property after she married him, and the quitclaim deed showed the couple transferring the rights from the two of them to solely Jennifer Lynne Brooks.

“We stand by the defenses asserted in our preliminary objections,” Moore said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. “We believe that they are strong and that we will prevail.”

Deadbeat Bob got one over on everyone here. It seems logically possible that if his ex-wife literally gave up her claim to the house in the divorce, Crooksy may have a legal right to give it his new wife entirely. Of course, he initially lost the lawsuit in 2020 and quitclaimed the house over to his new wife in 2022, so for two years he held the property and wasn’t paying his debt, but he was appealing the case at the time. At a minimum though, it appears that Deadbeat Bob quitclaimed the property in 2022, as he was losing the appeal, in an effort to shield the property from the court’s order to pay up. I’m not a lawyer and have no idea if he can actually shield the property this way from a court order. At least not from a legal stand point. I also don’t know exactly when the five year clock for her to sue over this misleading act began or ended.

I do know this though- Bob “Crooksy” Brooks signed a promissory note to pay money back to his family. He basically paid none of it, only paying $100 on $55,000. He got sued. Deadbeat Bob lost. Deadbeat Crooksy then tried to hide his assets in an effort to evade a court ruling that he lost. He may legally get away with that, I’ll let the people making the big bucks figure it out. Deadbeat Bob is absolutely truthfully, if not legally, a deadbeat crook for not paying his court ordered debts to another person.

I also know this- this case will not be over before the primary. Crooksy’s next day in court over this is in June. It probably won’t end then. In fact, this lawsuit probably won’t end before November. I also know that a Republican is the Pennsylvania Attorney General and a Republican appointee is the U.S. Attorney. If Deadbeat Bob gets nominated for Congress in swing PA-7, they will probably open investigations into whether he is committing fraud or mortgage crimes here. And the House Ethics Committee will almost certainly investigate the claim filed against Crooksy if he’s the nominee. This will hang over the race all the way through, and if he somehow became Congressman, probably beyond that.

I know one more thing- Republicans. While Crooksy was agreeing with them on Obama, guns, racism, political violence, and God know’s what else, I was working for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Republicans run brutal campaigns, and they’re effective too. They are going to remind voters every single day that he stiffed his mother-in-law, that he is being sued for not paying her, and that he’ll be under investigation, not to mention the stuff he’s apologized for online. Here’s the thing too, a lot of times Republicans embellish things, as they did against Susan Wild in 2024, in unfair attacks. They don’t have to do that to Deadbeat Bob. A court already found that Deadbeat Bob Brooks deserves the name “Crooksy.” All they have to do is repeat that.

The Point of Crooksy’s Campaign is to Nominate a Bald White Guy

/ Rich Wilkins / 1 Comment

Yesterday a Lehigh Valley politician text me quite upset that Bob “Crooksy” Brooks was being endorsed by the Blue Dogs. They said to me incredulously, “So we have a Bernie-endorsed, Medicare For All supporting and Progressive Caucus candidate, who the BLUE DOGS are endorsing?? They’re about as conservative as the Dem caucus gets. This guy is all over the place.”

Yep, we’re getting warmer here.

The entire plan to get Bob “Crooksy” Brooks to run for Congress was the most cynical kind of politics possible on the part of the people who talked him into it and endorsed him. They didn’t vet the guy at all before telling him it’s a great idea, because they knew he would cash in his union leadership position for enough money to pay some consultants a healthy pay day, which would help the careers of the youthful staffers who pushed this scheme. So they ignored that he stiffed his mother-in-law, that he hated Barack Obama, he’s a racist, he’s a gun and religion nut, and he’s oblivious to political violence. They knew that some heavy-hitters in the Democratic Party would ignore all of these flaws too, because endorsing him would be good for their ambitions. They knew that once those heavy-hitters were on board, many in the political class would fall in line with them and defend a guy who holds none of their values, because they’re sheeple. And with money, endorsers, and completely establishment creatures spinning a guy taking money from his mother-in-law, they might be able to get him across the line in the primary, and then they could pray that it’s a wave year and no one will care that we nominated a literally awful human being.

Ok, so now why?

It’s not like Crooksy is a big thinker. It’s not like this tree trunk is Machiavelli. As PoliticsPA more politely put it, the guy can barely put together a coherent sentence on his feet. I hate to compare him to John Fetterman, given Fetterman’s issues, but the shoe fits. The guy just goes out and repeats slogans and buzzwords, like “working class,” “Medicare for All,” and “Blue Collar.” As I said before, it’s a noun, a verb, and Josh Shapiro out of this guy’s mouth. He’s bringing about as much intellectual thought to government and politics as my one legged ass is bringing to a 100 meter dash race.

So let’s be honest about this- a bunch of DC consultants have decided the Democrats have a blue collar white guy problem to fix. Their theory is that as long as Trump is around they really don’t need to appeal to their actual base voters- people of color and college educated, white collar moderates that have been moving their way dating back to Trump’s arrival. Those married women with masters degrees in Upper Macungie and the Black woman who is a leader in her church will never vote for Trump’s GOP, at least in these smart DC types’ minds. So don’t worry about them. Nominate a bald white guy who has no real ideas and has spent most of his life disagreeing with what the Democratic Party has become, and try to win back the mythical white unicorn with a sub-mediocre IQ and a ton of opinions about “how the world has changed.” Maybe as an added bonus if he hits all of the buzzwords that are cool with the terminally online crowd he can appeal to people that find the Democratic Party’s longstanding battles for equality and Civil Rights boring compared to some mythological revolution. It’s so dumb that it can appeal to all of the really dumb people at once, and well, we’ve seen how that works.

This approach is not only insulting to actual Democratic base voters, but it’s actually deeply insulting to voters who haven’t been voting for us too. So basically you’re saying to the former Democratic voter in Whitehall or Northampton that works in a blue collar job that you think this thoughtless drone is what they want to see? Give me a break. Republicans are not going to buy into this guy who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Literally all of them fit into two camps at this point- people that are voting Republic because they think Democrats have lost their minds, or people that are voting Republican because they want some sort of cultural inquisition to purge our politics of liberal thought. The guy endorsed by Bernie Sanders appeases neither of those groups and disappoints the people who have been with us for a while now.

Bob “Crooksy” Brooks is a candidate with no political soul. Is he a Blue Dog now because they endorsed him? Is he a populist progressive because Bernie Sanders and SEIU endorsed him? The truth is, he’s neither. He’s just another consultant laboratory creation in DC and Harrisburg that is looking forward to having a good time in DC on someone else’s dime. I mean, I guess in a different time in my life I’d justify running a bucket of slop for Congress by saying he’ll vote for a Democratic Speaker, but given his views on Kaepernick and Obama I doubt he really likes Hakeem Jeffries. Basically if this works, it’s a big “F-U” to the people who have been voting for us, I guess we had to sell you out to get power, and if it doesn’t, we’ll go through this whole stupid process again in two years with a tougher electorate and a new cast of characters to repeat it with. What a stupid idea this was.

So Whose Money Are We Laundering On This Ballroom?

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

One thing that annoys me to no end is the nuthouse talk that liberals and progressives engage in about Trump. We both call him an ignorant moron and claim he has some scheme for world domination that he’s pulling on us right now. We explain bad things that happen to him as a part of some sort of scheme or plan, rather than attributing them to the fact that everyone in his orbit is incompetent. We engage in wild conspiracy theories, while saying the other side is a conspiracist cult. It’s exhausting, and it attributes literally everything in the world to this man. We literally pick which sports teams to cheer for and what actors to watch movies from based on politics. It’s exhausting, and it’s extremely off putting to anyone even 10% normal.

In doing so, we miss the point- Donald Trump is greedy and self-serving. He literally wants to be President to make money and make his legal problems go away, full stop. There’s not much more to it than that, and when they start doing something weird, we should view their behavior through that lense, rather than some grand conspiracy scheme to make his poll numbers go up. Like, when he started talking about his White House Ballroom project an hour after the White House Correspondents Dinner was interrupted by some unhinged nutbag trying to shoot it up.

Rather than taking my word for it, just do a little Googling and you’ll find what’s weird about this project. Up until this weekend, the proposal was to finance it entirely with private donations, which is entirely weird for a building that is 100% government owned. Type into Google “cost of the white house ballroom per square foot vs. normal costs.” Right off the bat, they give you the goods:

Based on 2025–2026 cost estimates, the planned White House East Wing ballroomrenovation is roughly $3,300 to $4,400 per square foot, placing it significantly higher than typical luxury or institutional construction costs.

White House Ballroom Costs

  • Total Project Scope: ~90,000 square feet (addition/modernization).
  • Initial Estimated Cost: $200 million (approx. $2,200/sq ft).
  • Revised Estimate (Oct 2025): $300 million (approx. $3,300/sq ft).
  • Later Estimate (Dec 2025/April 2026): $400 million (approx. $4,400/sq ft). olitico +4

Comparison to “Normal” Costs (Per Square Foot)

The $3,300–$4,400 per sq ft figure is exceptional, costing roughly three to five times more than high-end, complex construction projects.

Project Type Estimated Cost/Sq FtComparison
WH Ballroom (2026)~$3,300 – $4,400–
Top-tier Museums$1,000 – $1,600~3x lower
Life-Science Labs$1,100 – $1,500~3x lower
High-Rise (Manhattan)$600 – $1,000~4-5x lower
Luxury Custom Home$600 – $1,000~4-5x lower
Hospital (Standard)$400 – $600~6-8x lower

That’s astronomically high. Now, it goes on to note that there are some explanations for this, such as security, knocking down the old East Wing, and that the government is still involved, all of which are valid. But this valid? Not by a long shot. At best, it’s twice as much as any other similar project. And I bet it’s being built non-union (because it’s Trump), so it ain’t labor costs (or quality).

It is possible that the plans for a new bunker began before Trump took office again in 2025 (though no evidence has been shown of that), but the Ballroom idea itself came from Trump. So why? Rather than engaging in wild conspiracies about him wanting to stay beyond his term, or whatever else, let’s give the meat and potatoes answer here- they’re laundering money. They’re privately funding a project that is wildly overpriced, skipping any other branch of the government’s oversight or approval, and just started building the damn thing on their own. The only reason to do that is because someone in the inner circle is making money on the project. A President who released a meme coin to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars is also a President who would approve a massive privately funded project for himself or someone else to make hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s really not more complicated than that, nor do you need to project some crazy conspiracy into this. They want to make money, and they want to make it now.

Now wasn’t that simple?

Crosswell Accused of FEC Violation

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Interesting stuff here–

On or about March 17, 2026, an Allentown resident – John Santana – observed that Crosswell’s red box content was set to password-protected, rendering it inaccessible to the general public. Santana also followed up four days later, only to find the red box still private. According to the complaint filed with the FEC, it “created a situation in which any outside group accessing and using this content could only have done so through direct or indirect coordination with the campaign,” in violation of FEC regulations.

The complaint also states that Crosswell “potentially facilitated illegal in-kind contributions to (his) campaign from outside groups operating on non-public materials.”

Campaigns post specific messaging requests, video footage, and voter targeting information (e.g., demographics) on their websites, often using a distinctively marked red box, notes the Campaign Legal Center. Often times, coded language is used, such as “see” for TV ads, “hear” for radio, or “read” for direct mail, to guide the outside group.

Redboxing also commonly involves posting footage and photos of the candidate, as well as strategy tips about the race. A super PAC supporting the candidate then uses the footage and photos along with the campaign-requested messaging in its ads.

I’ll say two things here- red boxes are completely legal. Second, and probably more importantly, there’s no reason on God’s Green Earth to put a password on your red box. Campaigns don’t use their websites to store their content. The only reason to have a red box is to make the information available to your outside supporters via one way communication. I have no idea what Crosswell, or for that matter Carol, had a password on their red box. Maybe they weren’t meant to be public yet for some reason. Or maybe they were giving the password out, as the complaint suggests. I don’t know how you ask the FEC to go find probable cause to investigate that though. I thought you needed probable cause to investigate.

Another thing that just peaked my “spidey sense” a bit here- the individual filing the complaint is an operative. It’s not clear who he’d be working for though. He’s worked for the PA Dems (So maybe Brooks?), Working Families Party (Brooks), Make the Road (Brooks? I haven’t seen who they’re supporting), and interned for former Congresswoman Susan Wild. Regardless of who he did this on the behalf of, he caught something here. Putting a password on a red box is weird.

Sultana Seeks to Lose by Third World Dictator Numbers in PA Senate District 18

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Some people just don’t learn. In 2019, Taiba Sultana ran for Mayor. She lost by over 50% of the vote, with 23% and change. In 2024, she ran against Bob Freeman for the State House in District 136. Look, I’d tell you Jesus would lose to Bob in his district by 10%. The race was weird, with a lot of attention to Sultana’s campaign allegedly forging signatures and of course, her arrest for allegedly assaulting her son. Bob beat her with third-world dictator level margins, winning 77.4% to 22.5%, a mind numbing margin. So of course this election cycle she started blaming Lisa Boscola for ICE, before of course announcing she was challenging her for the 18th State Senate District. I called her candidacy “quixotic” and predicted a ridiculous loss. It went worse than that. Sultana was removed from the ballot by not just the Commonwealth Court, but then had that removal upheld by the Supreme Court. In other words, she can’t even run because she didn’t do her petitions right.

Apparently that wasn’t enough for Sultana. Losing to Sal Panto and Bob Freeman by over 50% just didn’t cut it. Now she’s apparently going to run as a write-in. Of course, this is going to go even worse yet. Her former supporters in the local Democratic Socialists are investigating misconduct towards staff, and are calling on members to pause all help for her campaign. Never mind the pattern here, I’ll stick to the mechanics- write-ins almost always fail, and to have any chance at all, require an army of volunteers. Where is she finding them? If DSA is out, that’s not an option. Lehigh Valley 4 All won’t even let her in meetings to speak, so it won’t be them. The Easton Democrats? Not happening.

Kim Jong Un recently got 99.93% of the vote in North Korea’s parliamentary leadership election. The only real question is how close to that Senator Boscola will finish. With Sultana not appearing on the ballot, not having volunteers, and having all kinds of negative coverage of her, there’s no way she won’t lose even worse than she did against Panto and Freeman. I only have two questions really- first, will she get more votes than she needed petition signatures (500) and second, will she crack 10%? Her losing streak is approaching that of the Philadelphia Phillies, but at least sometimes those games are close. This won’t be anything like that.

“Crooksy” Brooks Remained a Gunslinging Right-Winger After 2019?

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

I told you before how Bob “Crooksy” Brooks was a right-wing radical on gun control, even going so far as to say guns aren’t an issue just days after an El Paso, TX Walmart got shot up by a lunatic. Crooksy posted a III% Militia meme just days after that shooting, agreeing with the radical right-wing group. In addition to lacking ethics, he appears to not think political violence is an issue and supports guns on demand.

Of course Crooksy wants you to think that’s the past, and he doesn’t believe this stuff anymore. He’s a liar. He posted that before he became President of the Pennsylvania Professional Fire Fighters Association. Like his hatred of Barack Obama and Colin Kaepernick, he wants you to believe he had an epiphany. He did not. Apparently as President of his union, he used union dues to buy guns, including an AR-15, and raffled them off to the general public. Look, I’m fine with members of the public going into a gun shop and going through the standard procedure of purchasing a gun legally- but what the hell is this shit? Just a straight raffle to any jackass off the street? An AR-15 exists for the sole purpose to kill, it sure as hell shouldn’t be purchased with union dues and raffled off to anyone who is willing to buy it. It’s a waste of union dues and it’s just completely unsafe for the public.

I think we’ve reached the point where we have to ask if Bob “Crooksy” Brooks is really a Democrat at all? I’ve asked this about Ryan Crosswell, and I still have questions, but Crooksy seems more open and shut yet- he’s not. He pretends well because it’s good politics for him, but every unguarded moment where he has shown his values in life, his values are MAGA right-wing. Champion of the “working man?” Sure, the lunatic ones who want war in our streets.

Bob “Crooksy” Brooks Is Just Mad That He Got Caught

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

I’m going to lay this out pretty simply. Who is the real you? Absolutely none of us are exactly the person that we think we are in our minds. No one thinks *they* are a bad person when they’re doing bad things. They justify it to themselves, and sometimes there’s even logic to it. Life gets in the way of our better ideals sometimes. We take inconvenient, contradictory positions. That becomes even more true in the pursuit of power, riches, and fame. It’s why politics in general is full of a bunch of kiss asses who want important titles and positions. It’s not that they want to be kiss asses, but sometimes life gets in the way. I lived that life for like 22 years. Now I really don’t give a shit who hates me, or what blacklist they’re going to put me on. I’m just happy to be alive. I really don’t care if I’m never chairman of the committee on whatsha-muh-call-it, or get to speak at next year’s awards dinner. It’s small stuff.

Actions speak louder than words though. A guy sitting at the house his ex-in-laws helped him get, posting Oathkeeper memes is speaking his truth. A political candidate trying to convince voters to vote for him to be their Congressman will lie. Oh sure, they’ll tell you and themselves it’s not a lie, they’ll make up a reason they converted and saw the light. But they do that after how many years? It was 22 years ago that Bob “Crooksy” Brooks accepted help from his in-laws financially, it was 18 years ago that he signed a promissory note to pay it back, it was like 8 years ago that he was sued, and it was like four years ago that he lost his appeal in front of the Pennsylvania Superior Court, and for like all of that time he and his ex sat by and didn’t pay back the money they signed a contract to pay back. I’m sure he’s justified it in his own mind. I’m sure he thinks you should justify it as a bad divorce or “hard times,” or whatever too. But for a period of time longer than too many people’s lives, he didn’t do what he said he’d do.

In 2012, Bob wasn’t a Congressional candidate yet. He wasn’t the President of a statewide union yet. No Governors were calling him up and trying to be his friend, no Senators in Arizona knew who the hell he was, and certainly Bernie Sanders wasn’t too concerned about him yet. He was a normal guy, on the internet, stating his truth. His truth? He thought Barack Obama sucked. Why? Did he hate Obamacare? Did he wish Osama Bin Laden was still alive? Did he wish all those UAW jobs in Detroit that Obama saved were gone? Did he think passing modern banking regulations, or putting in place the first coherent strategy for fight climate change was bad? Maybe he wished the American economy had fully melted down in 2009? I don’t know. Now he has his “friends” Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, and Ruben Gallego telling you he’s some sort of progressive champion. He’s an every man. Does he mean “every” man, or does he mean every man that isn’t like Colin Kaepernick that wanted to protest inequities and biases in our society? What exactly made him say that Kaepernick was a douchebag? Listen, I don’t pretend to love that Kaepernick became a symbol of protest in our country while justifying not voting. Bob didn’t cite that though, kind of like he never told us why he disliked Obama at the time. The truth is that he did not agree with the majority of Democrats on Obama, or Kaepernick, but now wants you to know that he’s going to restore “true” Democratic values in Washington, if you just trust him. Kind of like he was going to pay back his mother-in-law, trust him.

Today Bob wants you to vote for him for Congress. In 2019 he was posting a “III%’er” meme saying we need school prayer and guns in our society. Today he’ll tell you he doesn’t mean that. Of course not, Democratic Primary voters don’t like that. Does Bob though? He will definitely tell you he didn’t mean it then, and especially that he didn’t mean it in the context of posting it days after an armed white nationalist lunatic shot up a bunch of people at an El Paso Walmart. Trust him, he’s telling you the truth now with his words, not with his 2019 actions. Trust him, like his mother-in-law should have.

You know, there’s a lot of people who express political views they come to regret later, some genuinely and some because it becomes a problem for them. There’s plenty of people who fight with their family and have money issues. There are literally millions of Democrats with mixed and even negative views about the direction their party has chosen to take, including the person you’re reading right now. I could almost give “Crooksy” a pass on it all today. Almost. He should have run as who he is, who he demonstrated he is by his actions over decades. Of course, he may not know who that is, since he originally endorsed one of his opponents and then decided to change his mind like a starf**ker once he got a little attention from some powerful people telling him he should run. But you see, that’s the thing- I get lying to yourself, anyone can be a hypocrite, but it’s that Bob lies to literally anyone. I mean, the guy’s argument for his 2022 appeal of the money he owed his ex-mother-in-law was mostly that she *waited too long* to try and collect it. Not that he didn’t sign it in the first place. He argued technicalities. But now he wants you to know that she never really wanted it anyway, even after having him sign a contract, and she’s not a great person. But you know, forget that he signed it, right?

Some people say we shouldn’t go negative in a primary. Still more say we should let candidates explain their past. Look guys, that’s just not how campaigns work. You either find out now and decide if you can accept a lying right-wing MAGA guy as your Congressman, or you find out in September and October when some shady super PAC pastes it on your eye balls with TV ads. Maybe you’re fine that he was funding election deniers and pro-lifers while not endorsing Kamala Harris from his post as a union leader. You should probably know that you need to be fine with that. All I’ve done about him here is tell you the truth, there’s nothing more I can do with it. As one family member said to me, “he’s the one that’s going to win.” And you know what, maybe he is. I mean look at all the people who initially said they’d support someone else, or were natural allies with the folks supporting another candidate, and now they’re all defending the indefensible because they’re afraid of retribution. As I said up top, it’s a business of kiss asses. People who want to keep their “important title/job” in the party. So they want people to keep quiet, in the hopes that they can ram him through the primary and hope that people are so sick and mad about Trump that they’ll still vote for this pile of slop. Then maybe sometime in the next couple of years before the guy loses when the political atmosphere evens out more, just maybe he’ll take a picture with them at a gala or endorse their candidacy for dog catcher in Podunk Township. That’s what it’s all about, right?

Forget all of that though, let’s just accept the obvious truth- Bob “Crooksy” Brooks believed everything he said online, everything he did in his life, and is exactly the person his actions suggest, he’s just sorry he got caught. Now that he’s a candidate he needs to be what John Fetterman’s consultants are telling him to be, to win this primary. I’m sure he won’t flip back to some of his old positions once he’s nominated though, it’s not like there’s other voters out there who do believe these things. There’s no way he was being honest as an actual “every man” citizen in 2019 or 2012, he’s being honest now as a candidate. I guess you could almost believe that if you’re just getting to know him now in 2026. Some folks knew him when he was the bartender he talks about on his commercials. They knew the real Bob “Crooksy” Brooks. The one he’s apologizing for now. They knew the “Crooksy” who wasn’t Congressional material. Be honest, you do too.

The Media is Finding Their Voice on Crooksy?

/ Rich Wilkins / 1 Comment

I spent months telling you all about Bob “Crooksy” Brooks. I told you how he stiffed his mother-in-law. I told you how he’s a religious radical and gun nut. I told you how he hates Barack Obama. I told you he’s a racist. I told you recently how his camp is getting aggressive lately with people. I’m going to be honest, this guy is by far the worst of the four people running. There were some people who said I was making things up or embellishing them. The truth was that I did neither.

Now the media is covering it too. MSN covered him being sued by his mother-in-law. Now the Washington Post is covering his racism and cultural radicalism. Last week, PoliticsPA covered how his campaign is hiding him because of his poor performances. Frankly, this should have happened months ago, but I’m glad they’re covering this.

There is a strain of thought that no one should say anything negative in a primary campaign. That’s stupid. There will be lots of negatives in a general election, regardless of how badly you don’t like that. It is better that these things reach the public early and are known ahead of nominating someone. If Bob wasn’t a candidate, none of this stuff would be relevant to public discussion. It’s relevant because he, and a few cynical folks who wanted him to run, got himself into this race. That was a mistake, and we need to make sure the public continues to hear about this information and knows it completely.