My tour of radio shows, podcasts and streaming media continues, and this morning it was Steve Gruber’s show to talk about the rioting on the streets of France and how it relates to our own situation here.

Steve welcomes political writer and author Scott McKay to discuss his recent commentary warning that unrest in France could offer lessons for the United States. McKay examines political protest movements, activist organizing, the potential for escalating confrontations with federal authorities and the distinction between peaceful demonstrations and political intimidation. They also explore what growing political tensions could mean for America’s stability heading into the midterm elections.

Learn more about McKay’s latest political thriller, The Necessary Men, at MikeHolman.com.

Obviously, all of this is playing out within the context of the midterm elections in the U.S., which is being fought on ground we don’t have a lot of reference for.

There are more pollsters now than ever before, those pollsters are increasingly anonymous – most of the calls and texts you’ll get asking you to take their survey are from outfits you’ve never heard of, and polling organization after polling organization turns out to be simply making numbers up.

But even the “reputable” pollsters seem to be behaving badly. We keep hearing about a scam polling organizations are running which goes like this – they’ll set up a polling sample which is realistic, and they’ll call into it, but then they’ll ask push-poll questions which irritate the Republicans and make them hang up. Then they’ll report the polling results as though the advertised sample is the unadulterated number.

Or the sample isn’t realistic, which is a time-honored polling flaw.

Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, was all over the Sunday shows saying what he’s been saying for a while – which is that all of the polling the media is reporting is garbage, that in race after race the GOP candidates are right there, that they’ve raised more money than ever, the crowds at the rallies are as big as they’ve ever been (and that’s been pretty much true, particularly where President Trump’s appearances are concerned), the Democrats aren’t getting bigger crowds than they’ve gotten.

He might be right. The early-voting numbers are good in some places, bad in some others, so we can’t say for sure what’s going to happen. And Republicans usually vote on Election Day anyway.

The point being, this midterm cycle is being fought in a fog of disinformation, against the backdrop of left-wing revolution all around the world. In Brazil on Sunday, the socialists flat-out stole the election just like everybody expected them to, and if Lula da Silva’s “re-election” stands, it will break a string of seven straight losses for the Left in Latin American elections. The Left did manage electoral victories in Serbia and Albania, though in France and Spain’s upcoming elections it’s generally thought the Left is going to take a beating.

But there’s a sense that the Left no longer really cares about elections. That they’re much more about destroying capitalist systems than building political power. The French rioters are demanding more government when France’s public sector accounts for 57 percent of the country’s GDP – a figure which is utterly indefensible for what’s supposed to be a free country. France’s leftist government physically cannot give the rioters what they want, and as a result there is no electoral solution available. Either the communists or the anti-communists will win in France.

And a very similar calculus is likely to descend on America. Next week’s midterms are probably only the start of that running battle, no matter who wins.

One of the reasons I wrote The Necessary Men was to dramatize the stakes of that conflict, and to hammer home the importance of the anti-communists winning the day. But if the anti-communists aren’t willing to vote the communists down, then the suffering and violence which has always come will come to us, and there will be untold misery before Americans recognize what many others around the world have recognized.

Namely, that you can vote yourself into socialism, but you generally have to shoot your way out.