The Left-Wing’s MAGA Folks

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Hamas is bad. Hezbollah is bad. Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Regime in Iran are bad. Maduro is bad. North Korea is bad. Cuba is bad. There’s a lot of bad with China. Russia’s government is outright rotten bad. Osama Bin Laden was bad. January 6th was bad. Nazi Germany and the Holocaust were bad, and real. Ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavian Republics is and was bad. African militants, both national armies and terroristic groups, seeking to commit atrocities and ethnic cleansing, are bad. Pinochet and Pol Pot were bad. I could go on all day. Bad people and groups are bad people and groups. There is no “but” after any of them.

Of course who is good is a lot more complicated and requires caveats often. The Western World is largely a free and safe place today because the United States sacrificed literally millions of our sons and daughters to the cause of freedom. We also had slavery for our first eight decades, committed the Trail of Tears, and built Japanese Internment Camps. The British and French fought side by side with us in keeping the world from fascism, but their colonial pasts aren’t great. Germany is probably one of the best two or three countries in the world today, and for that matter so is Japan, but we’re eighty years removed from the worst war in the history of man being fought to stop them from raping and killing huge percentages of the Earth’s population. Hell, Stalin’s Soviet Union and even Mao’s forces in Russia fought on the right side of that conflict, before killing tens of millions of their own people. Lincoln and Johnson both held deeply racist views on a number of matters, and did more for the cause of Civil Rights than any President in American history. Good can be a very, very relative term, in a way that bad just can’t be.

There is no world though where whitewashing away the Holocaust and declaring Hamas and Bin Laden as freedom fighters is in any way, however minor, good. October 7th was pure evil, period. So was Pearl Harbor. So was Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The Iranian Revolution was not justified by the removal of Mossadegh, it was just outright evil too. Down is not up. There are red lines. Even if previous Presidents and Administrations didn’t enforce them, Assad was a very bad guy for crossing the red line and killing his people with chemical weapons. Yes, ISIS fighting against him was also bad. Some things are really just unequivocal.

Many of us have criticized MAGA and Republicans for accepting trash people and moral relativism in the era of Trump simply because it’s from people “on their side.” We would be remiss to accept these people on our side while criticizing them. AOC criticized protestors in a Jewish neighborhood of Queens for voicing support for Hamas. So did Mamdani. She was criticized by those on the far left. So was Mamdani. Now look, there’s plenty of reason to say she’s full of shit, and so is he, but I think any morally responsible person at least has to defend them here. Part of why I hate the far left is their inability to say up is up and down is down, so it’s nice to see they’ll do the absolute bitter minimum when forced. Bad is bad.

We all need to realize though that we are housing some folks in our “camp” who will literally side with any crazy terroristic organization or government if they are against the United States. These people are completely unacceptable. Making a joke about the Holocaust and Iranian protestors being killed isn’t a “moderate” or “reasonable” position, it’s absolute cosmic levels of freak politics. Taking the side of a murderous, hard line lunatic regime that is killing it’s own people by the thousand, while denying the Holocaust used to get you relegated to the fringes of American and Western politics, right along side of the moon howling crowd. It still should. These people are rotten to their core.

Bad is still bad. You can question plenty of things about America and our allies while still acknowledging that some people are outright bad who stand against us. Putin’s war in Ukraine is wrong. Hamas needs to be eliminated. The Iranian regime is bad. It is a minimum to understand this, even if you are criticizing Netanyahu and the Israeli government, the conduct of the war in Ukraine, or the ability of the Shah’s son to lead. If you can’t tell the difference between the troubled but civilized and the murderers and zealots, you should be cast out of acceptable democratic politics. The Democratic Party should stop equivocating on whether we want these people around. Any decent party should not.

A New Candidate, Crosswell’s Pile of Money, and Bob “Crooksy” Brooks’ Shady Finances Highlight the PA-7 Race

/ Rich Wilkins / 1 Comment
Crosswell raising a pile of money in a DC Bar.

It’s 2026 now. The race for the Democratic nomination to face Ryan Mackenzie will begin to heat up now, and it appears to be expanding. According to Bernie O’Hare, we have two new candidates in the race- Independent Michael Ramon Granados Jr. and Democrat Aiden Alexander Gonzales are entering the fray. Bernie writes of Gonzales:

Gonzalez already has a website that sticks to bread-and-butter issues like jobs, the economy, housing and healthcare. He supports the American Health Act, which places all US citizens in a single-payer system. He also wants to incentivize real estate development (can you say tax breaks) and make it more difficult for foreign buyers to purchase real estate. 

I don’t have word yet that he is running on David Hogg’s Super Pac’s slate, but that is a rumor. He is running on “Medicare for All,” a currently unfinanced plan to put all Americans on a single health care plan together. So that’s possible. As for Granados, the word is that he’s a Republican hatched Trojan horse to crack the Latino vote in the Lehigh Valley even more than it already is. That’s also just a rumor for now.

What’s more than a rumor is Republican Ryan Crosswell’s Q4 fundraising numbers- he reportedly raised $440k in the fourth quarter. That will put him at $1.1 million plus raised to date, an impressive number. Crosswell had been spending almost 40% of his money though, so figure he spent around $160,000 in Q4 and should have around $610k on hand after this. That’s going to be the most money in the field. Is that enough to protect him from Crooksy’s oncoming attacks on Crosswell for being from out of the area and being a Republican? Maybe. Maybe not. Crosswell might be a Republican, a union buster, and- oh just forget it.

Then there’s Bob “Crooksy” Brooks. I have no idea what he raised yet, but he’s going to be substantially behind Crosswell in cash on hand is my bet. Bob’s not very good with money, especially other people’s money. He may not be very good with his own either. Bernie O’Hare reports on his very shady financial disclosure report, and boy, it fits the pattern-

Robert Brooks. –  reports assets and unearned income of at least $963,000. This includes a residential rental property valued at between $250,000 and $500,000 and the stocks in multiple mutual funds.  He reports salaries of $20,000 from Bethlehem and $50,000 from the Pa Professional Firefighter’s Ass’n, as well as business income of $15,000 from his lawn care business. 

He reports debt of between $380,000 and $850,000 based on a residential mortgage, an investment property mortgage, and outstanding debt to Darrell and Linda Crook. He failed to list a $130,000 judgment owed to Carol Wiley, his former mother-in-law, since 2022. 

A title search of Northampton County records reveal that Brooks owns no real estate under his own name, nor is there any recorded mortgage in which he is listed. 

Something is very fishy about Brooks’ disclosure.

Ok, so the guy who stiffed his mother-in-law out of $55,000 owns no real estate and has no mortgage, but he reports both a mortgage and a residential rental property in his report. He also doesn’t list the court ordered debt that he still hasn’t paid back to his former mother-in-law, but you know, that’s just a divorce gone bad, right? There’s always an excuse…

This guy is a ticking time bomb. If Democrats nominate him, Mackenzie and the NRCC will crack his entire life open and leave all of the worst parts out in the open for the public to see, with tens of millions of dollars of spending to make sure you see them. This would be an epic “own goal” of political malpractice.

The race continues…

“Honeypot Minneapolis” Just the Escalation of Pointless Violence in America’s Cities Under Trump

/ Rich Wilkins / 4 Comments

If you build it, they will come. That’s the old saying from “Field of Dreams,” and it is true. In normal times, law enforcement agencies don’t announce the places they are going to go and target for action, because it makes no sense to do that. In President Trump’s current America, ICE and Homeland Security announce when they are going to go into major American cities to conduct sweeps and raids. Does that make any sense? Of course not, they are tipping off actual criminals they should catch, and making the job of their officers harder. They do it though, because they openly want the attention. Not shockingly, their announcements attract people- supporters and protestors- who either want to make their voice heard or openly engage the action. This is reckless, dangerous, and stupid, of course. It’s asking for violence and engagement between extremists, agents, and civilians. It has had predictably terrible results.

A woman is dead in Minneapolis. Renee Good should not be dead. By now if you’ve seen the video, you know that J.D. Vance is full of shit as usual, and she certainly wasn’t making an attempt to kill the officer who shot her. Perhaps she was fleeing arrest, or just afraid, or even maybe trying to use her vehicle to intimidate the officers- all of which aren’t great things under the circumstances- but none of them would carry a death sentence, even on conviction (In fact, even if she drove at the cops and did try to hurt or kill them, she’d almost certainly not get a death sentence.). I really don’t know what she was doing there, or why she was there, and I don’t really care. I saw the video. The officer was never really in danger or hurt, and by the time he shot her, she was no longer a threat to any officer in any way. Renee Good didn’t need to die. This was absolutely stupid, inhumane, and pointless.

Kristi Noem and her trolls at the Department of Homeland Security are going to get a lot of people killed with this behavior, be they members of the public, illegal immigrants, or actual agents in the field. This serves absolutely no public or policy objective. If anything, this even makes raids to capture actual threats to the public harder. This is stupid and heartless to the core, and no one should be cheering it.

By the way, for those of you cheering this on and blaming the victim- here is your “injured” agent, who shot her.

To the People of Iran- Our Love and Our Support

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

The Persian culture is one of the oldest, most sophisticated, and greatest cultures in our world. Going back to the coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh, the people of Iran have not been free. That has been exponentially worse since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 Revolution. The Islamic Republic has repressed culture, aligned itself with Moscow, wrecked the economy, trampled human rights, and supported terrorism abroad. Khomeini and Khamenei now have harmed their people with their rule. It is long past time that they go.

Tonight in the streets of Iran, the people are rising up against repression. Americans should support them. I’m not talking boots on the ground- let them win the fight. But we should all support them. This is their 1776, in many ways.

The Political Winds of Change in the Lehigh Valley

/ Rich Wilkins / Leave a comment

Yesterday I attended the swearing in of Northampton County Executive Tara Zrinski. It was a really nice ceremony, as it always is, and it was packed as it ever is. I’m quite proud of Tara, the county’s first woman to serve as County Executive, as I must admit that eight years ago I would have told you there was no way she’d be Executive, let alone in eight years. She worked really hard, she got pretty good at the politics, and she did it. Perseverance can pay off in this business. I look forward to giving my two cents to her transition team on disability issues in the county, as I hope to help someone else’s life be a little easier.

In Lehigh County, the story was similar. Josh Siegel became the youngest County Executive in PA history. Up until a few years ago, I don’t think I would have predicted this either. Josh had some tough runs for office in Allentown, and he had plenty of critics on the Allentown City Council, but he eventually got himself to the State House in Harrisburg, and he grew with the office. He’s one of the most visionary elected officials in the Lehigh Valley, and I am really looking forward to his tenure.

I should take a moment to congratulate my two friends who finished their terms as the Executives this week, Lamont McClure (Northampton) and Phil Armstrong (Lehigh). I was Executive Director of McClure’s Transition team eight years ago, and I advised him and his wife’s campaigns over the years. Whatever your misgivings are with Lamont’s style, the truth is that he is a remarkably consistent politician who focused on the three issues that the public actually cares about most, in an almost obsessive way- he did not raise taxes once in his eight years, he preserved a record amount of open farmland space, and he kept the county’s nursing home county owned. Yes, there were other political issues, such as supporting passenger rail to New York and Philadelphia, opposing continuing warehouse proliferation, and addressing federal overreach where he was right, but he stuck like glue to his bread and butter issues, and it was good for the public. As for Phil Armstrong, or as anyone who knows him says, “Uncle Phil”- what a fantastic guy. I managed his first run for Executive eight years ago, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t necessarily know we were going to win, but here he is. I think the best compliment anyone can give to him is that he taught and lived in the Whitehall community for decades, and voters of all political stripes came out to support him in big numbers there. Phil preserved and expanded the county nursing home, Cedarbrook, preserved open space, and managed a large, diverse, and sometimes unruly county politically through some major transitional years, particularly some politically tumultuous years in the county’s biggest city (Allentown) during his first term. I haven’t formally worked as an advisor to either in a few years now, but I think we need to all congratulate them on a job well done.

I always enjoy the ceremonies, mostly for the sidebars. The choral group was really good at Northampton. I also got a kick out of seeing who sat by who. I had to ask one aide to a statewide elected official if he was there as a family member (his uncle was being re-sworn in as a magistrate) or in his official capacity, since he was seated with his parents. There were Congressional candidates in the room, some seated with their campaign staff (hey, we all need friends), or whatever randoms sat with them in the back row (why not make friends?), or bothering me along the wall (No one offered my crippled ass a seat, this wearing long pants stuff sucks). There were cabinet officials all over the room, and their seating selections were interesting. There were state and municipal electeds all over the room, and you can tell who they like based on who they sat with (none of them sat with me). My best friend since childhood (who works at the county) was smart enough to not be seen sitting (or I guess standing) next to me, but my poor sister did get stuck with me. As I said, this is the weird stuff that interests me. I keep mental notes.

Anyway, congrats to all. Now on to 2026.