I’m not overselling this. If anything, this is an understatement. But in Louisiana and around the country, we’re being tested.

By Ben Franklin. Or his ghost. Whatever. Call him the Ghost Of America Past, if you’re into the new Johnny Depp-as-Ebenezer Scrooge movie coming out this Christmas.

Franklin was present at the constitutional convention, and when it was completed, a woman caught him outside the hall.

“What have you given us, Mr. Franklin?” she asked.

“A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.”

We’ve kept it for 250 years, both under the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. But the party we’ve been told for months is set to win these midterm elections and claim control of both the House and Senate has no desire to keep the republic.

They’ve made that very clear.

The Democratic Socialists of America are the active ingredient within the Democrat Party. This is unquestioned. The DSA is running hundreds of candidates under the Democrat label across the country, including in most of Louisiana’s congressional districts.

And the only reason the DSA hasn’t slapped their label on Jamie Davis’ campaign for the Senate in Louisiana is that they know it wouldn’t help him. Pay attention to Davis’ words in this campaign and there is not a single ray of sunlight between him and the DSA on the fundamental questions of the day.

It’s even worse than that. Campaign finance disclosures show that Davis has as one of his paid campaign staffers an individual named Jack Reno Sweeney, who is the Co-Chair of the New Orleans Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Oh, but he’s a “farmer.” That’s supposed to mean he’s a centrist? How many centrists do you know who rush out to pay DSA communists who hang out with Hasan Piker as part of their campaign team?

Yep. You read that right. Here you go…

You probably saw this ad over the weekend. It’s from The Accountability Project, which is a Julia Letlow PAC. In some circles they’ve become unpopular in this cycle – they absolutely wore out John Fleming in the GOP primary and there are still people mad about that – but you should have a look at this if you haven’t seen it because absolutely every claim in the ad is 100 percent true.

That ad dropped and the Democrats went ballistic.

Over the substance of the ad? Hell, no. They knew they didn’t have a leg to stand on. All of the elements of Davis’ policy statements are 100 percent true. So is the fact that Davis’ campaign dollars all come from outside Louisiana.

Instead, they’re screaming that the ad is racist because it “darkened” Davis’ skin, except he looks pretty much exactly how he does in real life. And they’re mad that Davis’ likeness in the ad is AI generated.

They always use race to mask substance. You’re aware of that. How can you not be? In 2026, if you get called a racist it means you’ve said something Democrats can’t argue against, either because you’re incontestably right or because they’re so terrible at debate they lack the rational skills to challenge you on the facts.

And this matters, because there are more than a few of you who have decided you don’t like Julia Letlow, that you’d rather have had Fleming, and that you want to “send a message.”

Well, let me clue you into something, as somebody who voted for Fleming in the primary and the runoff – if your hurt feelings and petulance prevent you from doing your civic duty and voting against Jamie Davis, then you’re a terrible excuse for a patriot regardless of what it might pleasure you to believe.

If that offends you, I don’t give a damn.

What exactly are you doing if you won’t get out and pull a lever for Julia Letlow? You’re acting to make a U.S. Senator out of an unqualified police juror from the crappy backwater that is Tensas Parish. Jamie Davis isn’t a “farmer,” like his campaign and the national Democrat machine are trying to style him. He’s a local politician from a place where the political leadership has chased away jobs, capital and population in such numbers that despite having some of the best agricultural land in North America, miles of Mississippi River frontage and Lake Bruin, a place where lots of people with money have resort homes, the 2020 census said only 4,147 people reside there.

He’s not the parish president in Tensas. He’s not a state representative from there. He’s a police juror. From an utterly failed community. In the 1900 census, Tensas Parish had around 18,000 people. It has a little more than 4,000 now. The politicians in Tensas have run off 78 percent of the population of the place in 120 years while the U.S. population has grown from 76 million to 343 million and Louisiana’s population has grown from 1.38 million to 4.62 million.

This is not a political tradition which ought to be producing U.S. Senators. Davis has zero accomplishments in public policy to recommend him for one of the 102 most important political jobs in the world.

Especially since if you’re reading this, you are probably somebody who calls himself or herself a conservative and you not only disagree with the ideological and political positions he’s taken but generally regard them as catastrophic.

In that, you’re correct. It’s impossible to keep a republic without borders, and it’s impossible to keep it if criminals get the run of the territory while honest citizens are forcibly disarmed by the government.

Well, if you actually believe those things, what’s your answer to Franklin if you sit on your ass today?

That Julia Letlow is corrupt because she signed an NDA when Meta wanted to drop a $50 billion investment into Richland Parish, and then she bought Meta stock which has generally underperformed the market?

I’m not going to tell you she’s not corrupt. If so, she’s certainly not worse than most of the Democrats on Capitol Hill, the people Jamie Davis would be a well-mannered minion for.

I can say that the NDA issue is one of the stupidest arguments anybody has made in a long time, and people who rail against it are people who have not the faintest concept of how business is done. Anything involving investment capital or site selection will involve NDA’s nowadays. And Meta, for example, hired lots of Louisiana lawyers before putting any money down in Richland Parish – and those lawyers undoubtedly told Meta “we’re making all of these local politicians sign NDA’s, because if not, you’d be amazed at how they’ll jack you up by leaking information to their couyons, who’ll buy up all the land around your project and get in your way as they hold out their hands for a payout.”

NDA’s are a way to keep sleazeball politicians honest. They’re not about blocking transparency. The people grousing about NDA’s are generally the old-school sleazeballs who haven’t gotten in on the $300 billion waterfall of capital investment projects that have descended on this state since John Bel Edwards left office.

I mention Edwards because he’s the result of the last round of Republican voters in Louisiana deciding to be petulant children because they turned up their noses not just at David Vitter but also Eddie Rispone. And Edwards was an absolute disaster for this state.

You had eight years to recognize how stupid it is to “send a message” by cutting off your nose and electing a civilization-wrecking Democrat who makes bullshit promises of being a normie (West Point grads, “farmers”) while paying obeisance to every left-wing atrocity that flies under his nose. And you didn’t learn?

Ben Franklin is looking at you with contempt, and he’s demanding you get off your ass and do something about the fact that we have a political party which literally wants to rewrite our social compact along Marxist lines and there is a real chance they might control all of Capitol Hill by Wednesday morning.

Against that threat, your opinion of Julia Letlow is pretty immaterial, don’t you think?

We managed to get rid of Bill Cassidy in this cycle. That’s a win. If we have to get rid of Letlow in six years, that might also be a win. Unless letting Jamie Davis or some other Hard-Left incompetent steal that Senate seat away turns the win into a loss.

That can only happen if you sit on your ass. There are not enough Democrat voters to win statewide elections in Louisiana if Republican voters come out to save the republic.

So save it. You don’t have to love your candidate to do that. Voting is primarily defensive – you should know that by now. Letlow might be a lousy Senator, or she might surprise you and be really good. But a vote for Jamie Davis is a vote for Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren, and their neocommunist agenda. So is the refusal to vote.

And that’s not saving the republic. That’s letting it go without a fight. Ending the filibuster, making DC and Puerto Rico into states, packing the Supreme Court, obliterating the Second Amendment and then the first, giving away our technological advantage to China and the EU, bailing out the Castro regime in Cuba – oh, yeah, they will absolutely do that if they can – and trashing Louisiana’s energy economy.

These people even want to drag Elon Musk to Capitol Hill and try to put him in prison. He’s about to drop $100 billion on the Louisiana economy and make this state rich beyond our wildest dreams and it could all go away if the Democrats get control. They want to nationalize SpaceX and put the federal government in charge, which will turn Starbase Louisiana into a pipe dream – and you’re going to sit back and let them?

No. It’s unthinkable. Get your ass to the polls and save the republic.