Do you think the people who made this San Diego monument in Barrio Logan are happy to be stuck with government-mandated crappy education, complex regulations that favor big corporations—who can afford the necessary lawyers to get around them—over local entrepreneurs, and dependency-oriented public assistance?

It’s that time of year when everybody tells politicians how they should run their campaigns. What interests me is the idea of outsiders, and what they could do differently because they are not bound by the restrictions of establishment politicians. If you’ve read my blog for the last year, you’ll know I’m not a huge Trump fan. But there is a place for a leader willing to go around the media and attack Democrats where they are weakest.

I recently read Victor Davis Hanson’s The Soul of Battle^• and I highly recommend it. His basic thesis is that a great general can lead citizens on a moral crusade in favor of freedom against a supposedly strong opponent, if that opponent’s strength comes from exploiting a captive underclass.

A plantation class living off of a captive underclass is hollow, and can be defeated by freeing the underclass and attacking the plantation class’s pretensions.

The way to beat the Democrats is not to fight them on a conventional battlefield. The media defends them. But the media protection is hollow. A renegade politician should be able to go past it, like Sherman through Georgia, neither running from nor looking for battle, talking directly to the poor exploited by plantation Democrats.

This is how a real “no-boundaries” candidate would campaign against Democrats.

The poor are victims of Democrats. Say so. Identity politics makes blacks and hispanics victims of Democrats. Bring the campaign to them. Talk to them. Illegal immigration hurts blacks more than all other workers. Government-run education hurts blacks more than all other students.

Force Democrats and the media to explain why so many black students cannot read. Force Democrats and the media to explain why so many black workers cannot find a job.

Force them to explain why black independence was rising steadily until Johnson’s Great Society, when Democrats engineered dependence again upon the race they had previously enslaved.

Like the Democrats of the South, Democrats today can afford their leisure because they exploit black voters. That’s their strength, until it is their weakness.

With the media on its side, Democrats can call everyone from Romney to Trump racist fascists, and get media play. Meeting them in the middle of a flat television set and fighting it out on the media’s terms is fighting the wrong fight. Better to show the hollowness of a term that is used on every Democrat’s opponent regardless of applicability, and instead attack the actual racist policies of Democrats. Those policies that have turned most of our industrial cities into hellholes for minorities. Those that have ensured that half of adults in Democrat-run cities such as Detroit are functionally illiterate. Policies that shut down the small businesses that are the heart of neighborhoods and make it impossible for people without batteries of lawyers to start local businesses and hire local workers. Policies that guarantee violent neighborhoods, while at the same time denying the residents of those neighborhoods the tools to defend themselves, because Democrats don’t believe blacks are responsible enough to share the rights that all other Americans have, and that Democratic politicians exercise by hiring or requisitioning armed security whenever they go out.

Maybe even those policies that kill the next generation and pretend that it’s a favor.

One of the silliest—but also most telling—aspects of the left’s campaign against ballot integrity—voter ID—is how often they bring to court a person who the voter ID law doesn’t block. Either the person already has a valid ID to use for voting, or they regularly pass by the office where they can get a free ID, or they discover some other means during the deposition that they could easily obtain an ID. It usually takes only a few minutes in deposition to discover that the Democrats’ lawyers were deceiving the people they claimed to represent.

In order to get these defendants into court, the left had to lie to them—and lie to them in a way that took their vote away. The left either thinks so poorly of the people they claim to represent that they don’t bother to help them, or the left knowingly prefers to exploit them rather than just let them vote.

Having also recently finished reading Righteous Indignation^•, Andrew Breitbart^• understood this, too. The Democrat-Media Complex, as he put it, “is not used to being attacked at foundational levels.” The Democrat-Media Complex “have spent so many years on the offensive with people lying prone at their feet that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be on the defensive. If we come after them, they won’t know how to respond.”

The media covers the truth with a thin facade. Leaked emails show that the Democratic Party blatantly rigged the 2016 primaries in favor of one candidate, used racist smears against another, and the media tries to protect them with a thin conspiracy theory about the Russians. But it is still just a thin facade that does not change the truths revealed by those leaks. Inside, the left’s vaunted media army is hollow.

Democrats, like the South and like the Spartans, are able to make everything political because of a captive class they despise. But that’s a hollow strength. People believed that the Spartans were invincible until Epaminondas showed that they were not; people believed that the Southern plantation class was composed of fearless warriors, until Sherman showed that it was not, and people believed that the Nazis were an invincible war machine until Patton showed that they were not. In each of these cases, it was their supposed strength—slavery, allowing them to focus on military prowess—that became their weakness. A political Epaminondas, a Sherman, or a Patton could show just how hollow and immoral the Democrat’s hollow invincibility truly is.