Panic time for Democrats as election looms

Democrats are beginning to panic.

Elon Musk, who isn’t afraid to speak truth to power, said the party has been “hijacked by extremists.” He is locked in, we’d argue, on the zeitgeist.

“The far left hates everyone, themselves included!” he added in another post on Twitter.

That has sent everyone from Twitter employees to members of Congress and amateur pundits on social media into a fury.

It comes as our local member of the Squad, U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, is backing President Biden’s move to end Title 42 — which would basically lift COVID-related restrictions at the U.S. southern border.

And, we should add, allowing a flood of immigrants into the U.S. as the COVID pandemic is still lingering.

Pressley calls Title 42 a “racist and xenophobic policy that has denied millions their fundamental right to seek asylum and resulted in the inhumane deportations of 1.7 million people fleeing violence and humanitarian crises across the globe.”

The policy was enacted during the Trump administration to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Earlier this week, a federal judge halted the Department of Homeland Security’s plans to suspend the order on May 23 while a growing number of Democrats up for re-election have joined Republicans in criticizing the administration’s plans to wind down the policy, the Associated Press writes.

Republicans grilled Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas on Capitol Hill over a record number of border crossings that resulted in 210,000 arrests in March, the highest monthly total in two decades, the AP adds.

Pressley has nothing to worry about. She running for re-election in the 7th District seat that includes precincts in Boston and Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Milton, Randolph and Somerville. That’s all heavily Democratic and firmly in her bluest wing of the party. But that’s not the case in other parts of the country.

The midterms will be disastrous, a lot of political watchers predict.

The war in Ukraine, inflation, student loan forgiveness, the budget, immigration, the virus and who knows what will flare up next are all putting Biden to the test — as he fends off nagging attacks from his own party on the far left.

Full circle back to Musk and he’s seeing a Democratic crater coming. (His SpaceX success warrants the metaphor.) Sure, he’s trying to whip up the Twitterverse now that he’s in the process of purchasing the platform, but he’s not stupid.

“For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he writes.

But the left, with its wobbly majority, can’t stand being called out.

Just read this Twitter response to the debate: “(Musk) and a lot of other people were actually left of the center. Then the left moved so far to the extreme left and now we’re considered right-wing.”

That’s the point. Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot by moving Biden to the extreme while the country begs for common sense. (We’d like to insert here that our state Legislature, backing pay hikes but not tax cuts, is guilty of this already.)

But one more bit of wisdom from the Musk thread: “BTW, sweeping generalizations don’t help any argument.”

Yes, drilling down on the midterms the details show Democrats are more focused on policy than what people are feeling as they try to afford gas and groceries. Maybe they’ll grasp that after the votes are tallied Nov. 8.