Rev. Al Sharpton speaks, center, flanked by La Raza President Janet Murguia, right, and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, speaks to reporters about the Voting Rights Act, outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Monday, July 29, 2013, after a meeting with President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
If you have any doubts about the fact that Big Tech is seeded throughout their organizational pyramids with leftists, look at what happened to Eli and Shelby Steele’s film, “What Killed Michael Brown?”, on Amazon’s website (see the trailer below).
Shelby Steele. director and writer of “What Killed Michael Brown?”, being interviewed by Fox radio.
The film was initially cancelled. Why? The censors at Amazon rolled out drivel like the film wasn’t “eligible for publishing”, “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations”, and Amazon “will not be accepting resubmission of this title and this decision may not be appealed”. That’s a gobbledygook word salad, with the last phrase an attempt at commercial assassination.
For the incorrigibly naïve ready to believe Bezos’s underlings, go to Amazon Prime and take a look at the boat loads of stuff that shouldn’t be “eligible for publishing”. Who are these people trying to kid? The Steeles, pure and simple, challenge the Black Lives Matter dogma. That’s it! The Steeles’ take on race is too jarring to the straitjacketed minds in our chattering classes of legacy media, the academy, corporate boardrooms, Big Tech and its minions, and the Democratic Party. These socio-economic satraps are different legs of a monocultural centipede that can’t handle an opposing posture. If you have $19.99 to spare, buy it and watch it. You’ll quickly discover that “quality” was a PR word to hide an organizational attack on a different, well-founded point of view. Big Tech is working really hard to get a step on Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
From left: Amazon Devices chief David Limp, SVP of corporate affairs Jay Carney, and CEO Jeff Bezos. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Later, after an outcry, Amazon relented. If for no other reason, stick your thumb in their eye by purchasing the film on Prime. You’ll also be rewarded by the “quality” and a well-reasoned outlook on the issue of race in America. You’ll quickly come to see that Amazon’s ploy was a lie.
Now, to the film. The Steele perspective on race is analogous to a kind of digestive tract that goes from real historical oppression, to later white guilt/penance, to government coddling to assuage the guilt, to crippling dependency, and to the evolution of a mutually beneficial relationship between the providers and recipients of the largesse. At this last stage of digestion, we have a full-blown race hustling industry ready to treat incidents as if they were a resource – like yesteryear’s Carnegie Steel exploiting Minnesota’s Iron Range – but leaving the cultural landscape in black neighborhoods horribly scarred.
This race-hustling industry has made a new career path in race-hustling. As in most things, the new career is founded on a few presumptions. It begins with the busybody reflex in the progressive mindset: life and people would be better only if they – the self-anointed “expert” – had power to direct their lives. Where did that lead? It led to the War on Poverty and the wholesale demolition of black property ownership and, most terrifyingly, the loss of the full humanness that naturally accrues to all of us. Blacks were put into a special category reserved for people incapable of personal responsibility. A near complete annihilation of their civil society with its faith and family spilled out of this good-intentioned crusade.
And a new market in the penance for “white guilt” arose as white liberals sought exoneration and forgiveness and race-hustlers offer it for a price: wealth and power. In economics, no market can survive without mutual benefit, and indeed Al Sharpton and Democratic Party hegemons get wealth and power and whites earn remission after bending a knee before Black Lives Matter. It matures into a forever thing, a perpetual motion machine built around grievance and shallow identities.
Shelby Steele blows the cover on this hideous marionette show. See “What Killed Michael Brown?”. It might compensate for the deep disappointment after watching Mitt Romney join a horde of Black Lives Matter enthusiasts in the wake of another one of those resourceful incidents, George Floyd.
Photo: MICHELLE BOORSTEIN / THE WASHINGTON POST / GETTY
AEI scholar and contributor Frederick Hess in his piece “The oddest sort of progressivism” lays bare the wacky idea of wiping clean $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.
Chiefly, the idea is pushed most heartily by the people most likely to benefit: the people who staff the 200 progressive organizations – not the purported constituents – who last week petitioned Biden to do it “on day one” with a stroke of his pen. The whole thing is a ploy to transfer wealth from those who didn’t go to college and those who worked their way through cheaper schools to grad school graduates at pricey private schools and those who pursued grievance instruction in identity politics departments. Simply put, the equation goes something like this: money will flow from skilled tradesman and those working their way through school to those who’ll earn about $1 million more in lifetime income and rioters demolishing monuments and blowing up our cities. The former could be excused for thinking themselves to be chumps and suckers as the latter laugh all the way to the bank. This kind of thing turns the shiftless and conniving aristocrats in 18th-century Versailles into paragons of virtue.
People in the skilled trades. Many of these people worked their way through community college or trade school and have little accrued student loan debt, if any. Plus, they are more employable and better able to repay their much smaller loans than those who spent 4 years, in addition to a couple of years of grad school, for their Social Science or law school degree.
The biggest chunk, some 40% of the debt, was accrued for grad study “by doctors, lawyers, and other professionals in pursuit of lucrative credentials” according to Hess. Add to that, the gambit does nothing to address the colleges’ complicity in the skyrocketing tuitions that drive much of the debt. Easy student loans mean more breathing room for college administrations to hike rates and offer instructional silliness. What do you get for the higher price? Certainly not a better education. The grievance industrial complex is too well entrenched in many Humanities, Social Science, and identity politics departments. Many students will matriculate their way through and come out only equipped for political activism, while facing a student loan bill that neither their activism nor barista job can afford.
Here’s an idea: put the colleges on the hook for their graduates’ inability to repay. I can’t think of a better way to use Harvard’s $42 billion endowment. The taxpayers shouldn’t be saddled with a debt that was stimulated by administrative flights of fancy in the absence of accountability. Make them as answerable as we are in meeting our mortgage. As such, all of us will be further advantaged by no longer having to submit to the half-witted sermons of grievance politics graduates. That industry could very well dry up as schools quickly realize that “… Studies” degree programs are drawing down the school’s bank account.
Let’s ignore the crony capitalist pleas of the self-interested and, instead, make the schools responsible for the quality of their instruction and the occupational fate of their students. Now that’s an idea I can support. How about you?
Mail-in ballots in Chicago, Ill., waiting for postal delivery for the November 3 election.
One way to perpetuate the politically useful cause of combatting racism is to proclaim its existence in such a manner as to make the charge unable to be disproven by announcing it to be abstract or systematic. Leaving aside the patent illogic of it all, our political practitioners of irrationality have hit upon something. The form of something, take our election system for instance, is just as important as the content of it. It’s just that the woke crowd’s preferred use of “system” is pure nonsense.
Break the election system into two parts: the distribution and the processing of the ballots. First, the distribution. Thanks to COVID-hysteria, across the country we went on a binge of early voting, voting by mail, ballot harvesting, and essentially eliminating the measures to ensure ballot integrity and validity. In other words, we legalized what in another era used to be called fraud or cheating. Slipping ballots in early used to be one tactic to game an election. Another was to grab a handful of ballots and hand them to God knows who to do God knows what, like in our own time mailing the things to addresses across the universe. In another time, it was considered the fraudulent abuse of the absentee ballot procedure. This set the stage for the party of one-party fiefdoms and urban political machines – Remember Missouri’s Pendergast ring or Gotham’s Tammany Hall? – to legally do overtly what they used to do covertly.
I’m reminded of Robert Caro’s The Means of Ascent, the second volume of his series on the life of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). Of particular note is LBJ’s successful and dubious elevation to Texas senator in 1948. Much that he did to steal the election from Gov. Coke Stevenson was legalized for today by the “crisis too good to waste”. Late registrations, new ballots mysteriously showing up, the whole mail-in shebang of today making it possible for one person to manufacture unknown multiples of votes, ballot harvesters hunting down warm bodies who can be cajoled to vote – and vote the “right” way – and legally diluted verification measures turned past crimes into permissible election procedures.
No wonder there’s little evidence of widespread fraud. Much of what fell under criminal fraud became, all of a sudden, statutorily permissible, or at least, with a wink and a nod, excusable. There was little fraud because fraud was legitimized by the pandemic.
You don’t need to resort to nefarious activities in processing, or counting, the ballots to manufacture the desired result. The whole system of distribution was fenagled to make a predetermined end more likely.
So, you will hunt in vain for old-style fraud like stuffing the ballot boxes because we’ve made it easy to do the same thing under cover of law in the distribution of the pieces of paper. Try and do the same thing with larceny, murder, and rape and see how far you get. This election was systematically a sham, period.
Mugshots of some of the arrested in the September 2020 BLM riots in Manhattan, NYC. (photo courtesy of the New York Post)
Now that we’ve gotten the Trump v. Biden dustup over with, we can focus on the stories that really resonated from that season of falderol. These overlooked stories should grab attention because they are profound signifiers of deeper and troubling trends in the country. Take a look at this story in the New York Post of September 9, 2020: “Inside the privileged lives of protesters busted for rioting in Manhattan”. Something has entered the brain function of the upper third of America’s wealth pyramid, and it isn’t healthy. I’m wondering if we are breeding our own downfall through the nurturing of a new kind of privileged degenerate.
One of the main points that was raised by Luke Thompson in his recent piece in National Review Online, “Why Democrats Are Winning the Suburbs“, was the demographic shifts in the composition of the ‘burbs. In his estimation, more “minorities” mean a more politically competitive environment for Democrats. He’s probably correct to some degree but I think that he’s missing something much weightier. The suburbs and other upscale districts are breeding Maos, Trotskys, Lenins, Marats, Robespierres, Pol Pots, and Che Guevaras. Our new crop of revolutionaries doesn’t comport to the movie myth of a radical radicalized by some past personal abuse. The newest editions lead a comfortable life, comfortable enough to be free to dabble in extremist matchstick politics without worry of consequence. Not surprisingly, they probably have much in common with many in the latter list.
Just look at the mugshots. All of them suffer from melanin deficiency, a surprising feature given their fanaticism for the oppressed people of color. One, Clara Kraebber from the wealthy Upper East Side of NYC, and daughter of an architect and child psychiatrist with a second home in Connecticut, fits the same mold as the others. Let’s do a deep dive into Clara.
Clara Kraebber at home from Rice University. Clara Kraebber planned to build a ‘BLM focused’ network for ‘wealth redistribution’ in notes seized by law enforcement last week.
She (if I’m allowed to use the “binary”) is quintessentially “privileged” by any of the approved measures of Ibram X. Kendi. Her mom is an accomplished New York City architect with many prestigious projects under her belt. Her dad is a child psychiatrist and professor at Columbia University. These Masters of the Universe were accomplished enough to buy a $1.8 million 16th-floor apartment on Manhattan’s East End Avenue in 2016.
Condo apartment buildings on Manhattan’s East End Avenue.
In addition, the well-heeled elders apparently went on a real estate shopping spree to buy a completely renovated historic home in tony Litchfield County, Conn. These folks aren’t the kind to share the dining room at Burger King with an unemployed steel worker in Ohio. Literally, the working stiffs of the Midwest must be an alien species seeing that the place isn’t visible from 30,000 feet or is nonexistent in a short east coast drive down the freeway to their chic rendezvous in Connecticut.
The Kraebber second home in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
This couple gave birth and raised Clara. Where’d she go to school? She was schooled with others like her, maybe not in skin tone or eye shape but more importantly in socio-economic background. In 2014 she was a freshman at Hunter College High School when she joined up with a crowd protesting the Michael Brown shooting. The school isn’t an American Graffiti high school. It’s an elite prep school at public expense with enrollment proudly proclaimed by the school to be the “top one-quarter of 1% of students in New York City, based on test scores”.
Hunter College High School in Manhattan.
Her lefty politics matriculated with her to Rice University in 2018 where she is an undergrad. She must have been home due to the crazy lockdowns in order to participate in September’s riotous fun in New York City’s Flatiron District where she earned her Bonnie-and-Clyde reputation.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the brawling munchkins are the Democrats’ youth brigades in action. Clara was an active member of Rice University’s Young Democrats. Maybe not in action but at least in thought or sympathy, Party leaders share a Vulcan mind melt (Star Trek lingo) with the chanters of “Every city, every town, burn the precinct to the ground!” I can only guess at the intimate conversation in the Kraebber home that helped give rise to this bile.
Clara Kraebber arrested.
The rest of the arrested clan have similar bios. You’ll read about their heartwarming (?) professions of idealism for the “oppressed people of color”, animals, or zealousness for environmentalism. Wokeness and the religion of environmentalism lays them open to socialism and other revolutionary tropes. These are not minds open to reverence for the permanent things, such as the faith of their fathers and mothers. These children are primed to tear it all down.
Shame on the schools and shame on the two-parent families of the comfortably prosperous. The single parent in the ghetto is overworked and frequently incapable of screening out the chaos. Those in the upper third of the wealth pyramid have no such excuse. Their permissiveness, indulgence, and subtle philosophical innuendos make it possible for there to be more people like Clara fulminating in the face of a $50,000-per-year police officer.
We’re going to have to reformulate our political lingo. Country club Republicans is an endangered species, to be overtaken by country club Democrats. We breed them faster today.
I have much to be thankful. God has blessed me with a wonderful wife, two fabulous sons, dear friends and relations, a superb career in teaching, and a beautiful Montana retirement. Mine is a blessed life. Personally, it’s sunny. Extending the purview nationally, though, dark clouds are looming. Much of the dread emanates from Hollywood.
Speaking of the weather, in the language of climate change – the fad-issue of the day – the word of choice is “anthropogenic”, or “man-caused”. Our current political and cultural storm is anthropogenic by definition. Reality is being distorted through the funhouse mirror of Hollywood and the near uniform bias that permeates the great bulk of our media. It’s sad that informed contemplation has been replaced by this stuff.
I’m reminded of our constant flirtation with Hollywood’s diseased mind in the productions that roll off the entertainment industry’s assembly line. Take for example Netflix’s “The Crown”. The third season is upon us and my wife and I have seen them all in binge-watching forays. It’s a soap opera, and it isn’t history; however, there’s not much standing in the way for it, and most of Hollywood’s other affluence, from becoming the History. After all the schooling from K through PhD to the tune of trillions of dollars every year, a 19th century pioneer in an isolated homestead on the Great Plains is better equipped to handle the cultural noise than today’s typical upper classman in a university’s ASB. For them, and probably the bulk of streaming subscribers, the noise is mistaken for the music because there’s not much in the head to contradict it.
After viewing the last episode of season 3, I have a chance to ruminate on what I’ve seen. My conclusion? It’s entertainment, not history – and extremely opinionated entertainment at that. The butchering of important personages in the life of Queen Elizabeth Il, especially those on the right, is all too obvious. Churchill is reduced to a whimpering and emotional wreck. The reality of his forthrightness is hard to perceive in his frequent, blubbering downpour of tears. In an attempt to build up Elizabeth in relation to the old white guy, the script writers concocted the fantasy of a young Queen Elizabeth lecturing the elderly Churchill on some point of the British constitution in season 1. It’s absolutely unbelievable, but maybe believable to a poorly informed audience.
The blubbering Churchill as portrayed by John Lithgow.
Prince Philip comes in for analogous treatment. In the course of 3 seasons, I can’t recall an instance of his influence and advice being treated in a positive and sagacious light. How could somebody spend an entire life and be wrong throughout? I have my doubts. Counterpoint is a useful plot device, but this one presents a towering female Socrates to a bumbling prince consort. Could this be another opportunity for Hollywood to present the “other” upstaging the patriarchy? Maybe not, but it’s a familiar theme in everything from ads to movies. The zeal to correct for a generalized “wrong” leads to a fiction that will be mistaken for non-fiction in a population unable to draw the distinction.
Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip in The Crown.
Take the character of Margaret Thatcher in this last season. Her character is molded into an emotionally scarred, rigid scold with strangely misogynistic tendencies. Imagine it, the worst of Britain’s aristocratic and sexist good ol’ boys in their men-only clubs have nothing on Britain’s first woman prime minister according to the people who put this thing together. The incongruency is profound.
Interestingly as a matter of fact, it’s well-known that she loved her mother.
The hard face of Gillian Anderson’s caricature of Margaret Thatcher in a seated position with her cabinet.
To make this portrayal a functioning theme, the setting of the 1970’s is stripped from the story. Other than a brief reference to strikes that lead to energy shortages during the tenure of Labour prime minister Harold Wilson – who’s portrayed positively by the way – we’re not given much to understand the reasons for the rise of Thatcher.
Let’s plow the fields of real history. In the 1970’s, the UN’s OECD had projected that the UK was on a glide path to the economic status of Albania. The unions had crippled the country with rampant strikes. Garbage wasn’t picked up due to strikes as shortages and inflation plagued consumers. Government-owned industries were mismanaged black holes at huge public expense. Anthony Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, an avowed Marxist, held the country hostage with his demands and strikes that periodically cut-off of the coal supply. The UK was a mess and ready for Thatcher. Don’t tell me that there wasn’t room for that context in a multi-season serial instead of the excursions into Princess Diana’s anorexia-bulimia.
Piles of rubbish lay uncollected on the streets in the winter of 1978/1979 amid strikes Litter mounted on the streets during the Winter of Discontent as collectors went on strike Gravediggers joined the strike action too, meaning that vans were filled with bodies to be embalmed and stored in disused factories.The miner’s strike crippled the country’s main source of heat and electricity.People queuing outside of bakery during flour shortage (‘the bread strike’) 1977, A sign reading ‘Sorry No Petrol’ outside a UK service station during a petrol shortage on February 1978. (Photograph: Pete Primarello/Getty Images)The unemployment rate began to spike before Thatcher became prime minister and remained high till the country is weaned off of the central planning of Labour’s socialism.
The Falklands War gets all of . . . 10 minutes . . . at most. And then it’s only mentioned as a backdrop to Thatcher’s narcissistic grandstanding. The reawakening of pride of country, and the magnitude of the success, was reduced to the scene of a self-absorbed Thatcher in a victory parade’s grandstand. The fact is lost on the producers that the success in the Falklands War gave Thatcher the breathing space to make headway in de-socializing the country. A much freer economy, a legacy of Thatcher’s reforms, would make possible the more prosperous UK of today.
And then there’s all the intimate dialogue. Where’d that stuff come from? Sure, the script writers have to put together a story by stringing the characters in verbal interaction. But most of it was most certainly contrived. There was no-one in the rooms of private quarters taking dictation on the conversations. It’s a tool in the scriptwriter’s kit to craft the character for certain plot purposes. It’s also how ideological zealotry can infect a story, and replace reality with a politically useful unreality.
Be prepared for next season. It’s likely to be Diana, more Diana, and Diana all the time.
Am I going to hang out in front of the tv when season 4 arrives? I don’t know. I’m inclined not to. I have no appetite for the elevation of ex-Princess Diana to sainthood.
Men sit passed out in a park where heroin users gather to shoot up in the Bronx on May 4, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
America is being trashed from our institutions to our public squares. Look around, roving gangs of cultural and historical illiterates – the uneducated educated – are defacing monuments; downtowns are torched by the very same hordes; public spaces are turned into graffitied homeless encampments with feces and hypodermic needles in a sickening sphere of influence overlapping the places that used to be for rollicking kids and families; and the whole thing spills into our politics. Elections are a pandemonium filled with the hyperbole to remake or tear down America while the chief malefactors designed an election system that made it easy to game. In essence, the rules of the election game function as a game without rules since they are so elastic, confusing, and contradictory with early and earlier voting, voting after election day after the intervention of unconstitutional actors, shot gunning ballots through the mail like the confetti falling from the ceiling after a NCAA national championship game, many jurisdictions lacking the will or ability to verify the ballots, and local Democrat-dominated election boards acting like feudal lords over their fiefdoms and flaunting any rules that do exist. Sounds like the wholesale trashing of America to me.
Mail-in ballots on the floor at the Park East Terrace Apartments, Paterson, NJ, May, 5, 2020.Three mail-in ballots on the ground in the Park East Terrace complex, Paterson, NJ, May 5, 2020.
After the bill is totaled for this parade of the grotesque that we call an election season, we’ll have come to realize that big money was fully on board with the party of big government, the Democrats. Bloomberg was committed to spending $150 million to bring down Trump and his supporters. He ended up ladling $106,000,000. Is there any doubt about the stance of Silicon Valley and its tributaries? Zuckerberg himself answered that question in testimony to Congress – “extremely left-leaning”. Reid Hoffman (Microsoft, LinkedIn) spewed $7.6 million with $1 million each for Schumer’s slush fund and the Biden affiliate Unite the Country. His wife, Michelle Yee, pumped half a million into Biden’s coffers. Allen Blue (LinkedIn), Kevin Scott (Microsoft), Brad Smith (Microsoft), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), David Zapolsky (Amazon), Steven Kessel (Amazon), Douglas Vetter (Apple), Eric Schmidt (Alphabet), Reid Hastings and wife (Netflix), and a host of others opened the cash floodgates to the tune of six to seven figures to the left of the decimal point. Do you have any doubts about where K St. and big finance ended up?
Paul McCartney was right in singing “money can’t buy me love”, but it can buy a Mafia-like organization with its many “soldiers” to stretch the waist-line elastic of an election system that was refashioned for any size belly.
George Soros
The drumroll of tycoons backing (or banking) the Democrats includes the usual suspects such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, Tom Steyer, etc., etc., etc. What’s happening with the rich for them to be lining up behind a party whose political carnival barkers profess to hate them . . . or in reality bilk them? The quandary can’t be easily answered except as a commonality of values and worldview. The coed blathering about evils of George Washington as she affixes a rope around his statue’s neck, the corporate heads of Alphabet, and the rest of the Fortune 500 CEO’s have more beliefs in common than they do with the owner of a local hardware store.
The CEO and the miscreant came to the same ideological place because they arose from the same subcultural ether: the upper third of American life. Through their wealthy metropolitan suburbs, prep schools, and the Ivy League, they are of the mind to either bankroll the Democratic Party to the left or subsidize the pillaging of the country, as the Party’s media darlings – from the same subcultural soup, by the way – wobble around trying to justify the madness. For today’s left, some got rich and others hit the streets from their safe perch on campus.
Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt, Dustin Moskovitz, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Silicon Valley’s new power set, are instrumental to fulfilling Democrats’ four-year-long quest to oust Donald Trump. People take turns stomping the Christopher Columbus statue after it was toppled in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday, June 10, 2020. (photo: Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via Associated Press)
Today’s nouveau riche are accretions to yesterday’s. American has no official aristocracy, but we do have an unofficial one. It’s anyone with the critical mass of wealth. Millionaires alone don’t count any more. A family pedigree with trust-fund millions and multi-billionaires do. Possession of the equivalent of the GDP of a Central American country is the entry point into America’s nobility of today. No invitation from the queen (Michelle Obama?) is required. The newly arrived add to a polymorphous Patricii.
For the old gentry, someone somewhere down the family tree joined the ranks of the filthy rich and passed it to their scions. Do the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Waltons remind you of anyone? Add to them the newly minted gazillionaires. John Adams writing in the 18th century extensively wrote on the troubling happenstance of a “natural aristocracy” in America. The Rockefellers, Kennedys, et al, would be the Boston Brahmins of the Bradlees, Brinleys, and Lowells to Adams. He saw their narrow-minded ambition and avariciousness as a threat to the republic. They were “always the most dangerous” class and if unrestrained they would be the “destruction of the commonwealth”. That’s the reason for his support for corralling them in their own house of the legislature, a senate. Once penned, they could be flanked by a chief executive and lower house.
Harvard University students in the 1870s. The “Boston Brahmins” and their progeny kept close ties to the most prestigious institutions. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
Today, our Senate is in no position to perform that function after the passage of the 17th Amendment (1913). The hyper-rich with their newly acquired gazillions have nowhere to go but be like Caesar: buy the affections of the plebes with bread and circuses, or lavish campaign contributions. There’s nothing quite like having a mob on-call. Caesar could well understand. George Soros has much in common with Julius.
What has this agglomeration of our “betters” given us? Their influence, after all, is everywhere. Our public squares under this cultural miasma seemed to have been inspired by the spare, stern, and hard face of the “beast of Belsen”, Irma Greese (see below). Look at these spaces, and then at her.
Irma Ida Ilse Grese (7 October 1923 – 13 December 1945) was an SS guard at the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women’s section of Bergen-Belsen.Boston’s City Hall Plaza
Whether they be an open space in a planned development or a courtyard in front of a high-rise, they resemble military parade grounds studded with an odd, out-of-place thing, a “sculpture”, that has more in common with the glacial eratics dotting the landscape of the Scablands of eastern Washington state. New York City’s Hudson Yards has the freak “Vessel”.
The VesselAn erratic in the Scablands of eastern Washington state. It was deposited here by late ice age glacial floods. Its geology is unrelated to the geology of its current location. It is an “erratic” for this reason.
New York City seems to be dotted with these sculptural eratics. Another one is the now-deceased “Tilted Arc” (by Richard Serra) in Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza. It proved to be a visible and physical contradiction, like all walls, to the very purpose for a plaza: social intercourse, interaction, and “inter- “anything involving human beings. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed and the thing was torn down and hauled off to the scrapyard in 1989.
The Tilted ArcA lesson in urban beauty and a counterpoint to our military parade grounds: the gardens of the Fontaine de Nîmes in France. The park had the advantage of incorporating preexisting Roman ruins, and they were with stunning effect. The French architects, Jacques-Philippe Mareschal and Pierre Dardailhon, at the behest of King Louis XV in the 1740’s, created an inviting outdoor experience for pedestrians of all ages. The Walt Disney Concern Hall, Los Angeles, Ca.
The buildings surrounding the parade grounds – aka “plazas” – could be jumbled eyesores like LA’s Disney Concert Hall or the structural boxes that were animated by Germany’s Bauhaus movement or Rommel’s Atlantic Wall. Long gone are the graceful lines of neo-classicism with its adornments. Long gone are the interplay of nature, terraces, columns, and balustrades in our green spaces. It seems that our urban landscapes were inspired by the Soviet Union . . . or worse. The setting for the Vessel would be just as fitting for a guillotine.
A fortification in Rommel’s Atlantic Wall.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Marcel Breuer architect.The new House Gropius, designed by Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architects, is built on the basement of the original, the only part to survive the bombings in WW2. (Photo: Christoph Rokitta / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau)
The only applicable interplay in modern architecture is the one between ideology and design. Speaking of long gone, long gone are defined boundaries and the architectural axis. The limits to a public space are the imposing and ominous structures that resemble Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome, or busy traffic lanes. The spaces are boundless except for the grim and graceless stare of these giants.
Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome.The MetLIfe Building, New York City.The Seagram Building, New York City.
The formlessness comports well with the unquestioned obedience to the belief in the tabula rasa of the mind among our so-called cultural superiors. To many of them, there are no preordained limits, only those that we choose to plug and unplug into our self-identity. If we can’t see their function because our minds are too superficial, they are to be discarded like so much rubble in front of a bulldozer’s blade. Functionalism replaces order and standards.
Michael Lewis, architecture critic, The Wall Street Journal.
Michael Lewis writing in National Review Magazine makes the case: “… after World War I, modernists abolished the axis, as well as a good many thrones and altars, and replaced it with the idea of flowing space. Paths of movement were to be efficient and functional, without any ceremonial hierarchy, suggesting freedom of motion in any direction. Where the public square was once a kind of bounded outdoor room, it was now a mere incident along boundless space.” It’s now considered a social good for people to intellectually and morally emasculate themselves, just like their public spaces.
And, boy, are we emasculating ourselves. The moral and intellectual castration began in earnest when it started its march through our governmental institutions. Official sanction was given for our urban outdoors to be turned into an open sewer. San Francisco began its slide into the gutter when in 1961 it announced that it would no longer enforce its vagrancy laws. The idea went national when the Supreme Court in 1972 issued one of its decrees in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville that abolished such laws. Contemporaneously, the doors of our mental asylums were flung wide open and the number of inmates plunged from 559,000 in 1955 to 72,000 in 1994. Adding insult to injury, in 1975, the Supreme Court once again piled on with its ruling in O’Connor v. Donaldson. After the Court jumped into the fray with O’Connor, we could no longer reinstitutionalize because another one of the Court’s infamous “tests” made confinement a Sisyphean task.
A woman walks toward friends at a homeless encampment where she lives next to the Interstates 101 and 280 in San Jose, California, on Saturday, February 3, 2018. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group Archives)
Where would the released end up? You guessed it. They congregated in those open spaces meant for kids and families. And thus, our open spaces became informal convention centers for junkies, the mentally troubled, and the bachelor herds that we often call youth gangs. Who wants to go to the park, with or without COVID hysteria? It’s far safer to ride out the horrors beyond your home’s walls with your internet, smartphone, and video games. Hopefully, you’ll have a gun in case what’s outside makes its way inside . . . if your local sovereigns haven’t regulated the 2nd Amendment into oblivion, or, God forbid, defunded the local PD.
COVID became the go-to excuse to further malform our existence. We’re trashing our faces with masks for God’s sake. The masks, social distancing, and lockdowns have killed romance, our children’s schooling, and given us a scorched earth through our economy. Church, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are redubbed super-spreader events.
All of this has come to us not from scientists and medical practitioners, but from lawyers. For some reason, the strong scent of power is irresistible to those who passed the bar. Our governmental pyramid is filled with them. Only a handful have a PhD after their name.
Oh, they, the JD’s, claim that’s what the “science” says. But they don’t understand what the science says any more than my grocery store’s stocking clerk. If I had to bet on the one with the most knowledgeable of science, my money would be on the clerk. To borrow from James Carville, just like one could trawl through a mobile home park with $5 on a fishing line and hook many Paula Joneses, so I could wade my way through the halls of almost any professional building with that very same $5 and hook any number of lawyers.
Anthony Fauci all masked up.
And, also, you might snag a few politicized “experts” along the way. “Experts” are notorious for having the blinders of a racehorse. They frequently have little empathy for competing “experts” and look at the world through their narrow professional prism. If you want a sure path to hell, find yourself a narrow claque of “experts”, follow their advice to the last punctuation mark, and then scramble for excuses as things fall apart, for them and the rest of us.
These trashed times come to us courtesy of a certain political class with cramped cultural antecedents. With a few politicized “experts” in tow, they have left an inhospitable living space in their wake. We can’t go to work, school, church, see grandma, and experience Christmas cheer due to their singular approach to a science that the lawyers don’t understand, but their patronizing “experts” do, but to the exclusion of any other consideration. If we are ever again allowed to go outside, we’d be reacquainted with the marred urban surroundings that they knowingly and unknowingly left behind.
Trashed elections. Smothered public life. Venturing outside is a walk on the wild side. Our cityscapes are an affront to decency and good sense. The waterboarding of life through a return to lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masks, social distancing, and all along knowing it didn’t work the first time. Other than that, what’s there to complain about?
As of now, I see no good reason to vote, especially if you live in one of those deep blue one-party states such as Chicago, California, the Acela Corridor, LA to Seattle, almost any metropolis, any burg with a 40,000-student college campus, or battleground state with Philadelphias crammed within it. What’s the point? The human capital to stay informed, tromping down to the polling place, or spending an hour filling out the thing is wasted when boxes of ballots are filled out by civic illiterates at the conniving of party activists or ballot harvesters reaping unused ballots and filling them out on the side of a van. Again, what’s the point in doing your duty only to have it canceled by the election equivalent of gangland enforcers?
I do have one caveat, though. It’s that the down ballot races, or maybe the mid-terms, retain some legitimacy because they lack a “Gone with the Wind” marquee status of the race for federal head honcho. Those races aren’t likely to attract the sinister gaze of our election system’s villains and therefore we benefit from their inattention. It’s like in a riot when one store is unexpectedly spared while the rest go up in flames. In such races, the pride in voting is replaced by the relief in knowing it will probably count because it won’t be aborted by the 3,000 empty ballots with the exception of one marked bubble next to one presidential candidate dropped in one heave at the registrar.
Undelivered Election Ballots Discarded on Arizona Farm, Nov. 4, 2020.
I was thinking today about the huge vote totals for both presidential candidates in this election. As of now, we have about 145 million ballots cast for president out of a US voting-age population of around 255 million. Of that number, about 169 million were registered to vote. Does each one of those 145 million represent one person above room temperature? Call me skeptical. The closer the vote percentage approaches the full mark, the greater the likelihood that many of those votes are reflecting the wishes of non-souls and the functionally illiterate. You can’t help but scrape more of the muck in the bottom of the pond as it is emptied.
The fix was in when people were allowed to vote a month early, sometimes after election day, and the spray of ballots across the country through the mail. In other words, the muck was thicker than usual this time around. And it ended up in the water supply.
Now the candidate that benefitted the most from this afterbirth of an election will have all the executive power to go COVID crazy. Get prepared, he’s going to go all Gretchen Whitmer on us. The Wuhan virus was used by power-hungry Democrats to destroy nearly everything in our public and private life. Authoritarianism is an addictive drug, and, once used, it will be easier the next time. Watch out every flu season for the mutilation of our social and economic life. Intoxicated with power, nothing will escape the gaze of our new Caesars. This virus, and any others that may befall us in the next four years, will be milked to essentially repeal the Constitution and turn an industrious people into a cowed and subservient one.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Our political ethos will not be spared. Supportive riots will be quietly approved through official silence as dissent against the rulers will be quashed. The right of association to protest will go out the window with the rest of the First Amendment. Forget about faith and fellowship. The equal protection of the laws will suffer a similar fate as children in chaotic homes won’t fare as well with Zoom education when compared to those well-heeled enough to form learning pods, tutors, and close parental supervision. It’s a social catastrophe. Watch other issues get thrown into the vortex such as gun control and AOC’s adolescent musings in her Green New Deal. COVID is robust enough for Schumer’s “change America”. This highly dubious election put the fox in the henhouse.
Let’s not look under that rock called the economy once these clowns get their hands around its neck. That important part of our lives involved with making a livelihood will be destroyed under the auspices of a hysteria about a vulnerable few, very few. The vulnerable should stay home and Biden’s efforts should focus on assisting and protecting them. A Sherman’s March through all of American life is a moral monstrosity and hardly justified, but we’re likely to get it anyway. That mound of pieces of paper said so.
One of the things that is lost on the civically illiterate – as they were made kicking and screaming to contribute to the rancid pile – is subtle and not so subtle distinctions. Biden and his crew wallow in a muddled fog between “experts” and policy-making. It works on the easily befuddled. In reality, experts provide advice; policy-making incorporates different points of view alongside an analysis of cost-benefit ramifications. For God’s sake, policy-making isn’t being led around by the nose by a select few “experts” who appeal to your authoritarian instincts. Different actions carry with them huge costs in a people’s social, economic, and political lives. Biden’s selected cabal of “experts” shouldn’t have the first and final say in what is to be done. There are too many in the class of “expert” who disagree. Plus, other experts in affected fields should have a say. That is what is meant by the art of statesmanship. Bringing all this together is the stuff of policy-making, not an act of waiting for Anthony Fauci to emerge from his lair like Punxsutawney Phil to issue his garbled pronouncements.
Punxsutawney PhilAnthony Fauci
Collecting 50%+1 of these pieces of paper in enough states is just what the doctored ordered to resurrect the divine right of kings, or Rousseau’s “general will”, or Lenin’s “vanguard elite”, or whatever you want to call the emasculation of our citizen’s republic. After the Democrats mangled the vote by making the process a farce, there is little that the single citizen can do. It matters not if scant skullduggery can be proven. Follow your nose. You may not be able to identify the source of the stink in the pile, but that won’t stop it from stinking.
South Floridians stood in long lines Sunday during the last day of early voting in Miami, Oct. 31, 2020. (photo: Alan Diaz/AP)
The direct answer to the question is “no”, but it’s what we’re stuck with. All the other governance choices are even more dangerously spurious. Autocracy, aristocracy, and oligarchy take the powers of a mob and put them in the hands of one or a few egos. Still, to admit that a broad franchise is the only remaining sensible option is a far cry from it filling the role of the holy grail. Our world is flawed and so are the people in it. All we can say with certainty after an election is that one candidate was first past the post, that one person got more of the little pieces of paper than the others. Any attempt to tease out of the result something more significant is a recourse to divination. You know, like trying to uncover the will of the gods from haruspicy (inspection of animal entrails) or ornithomancy (interpretation of bird actions).
This man in Rhumsiki, Cameroon, attempts to tell the future by interpreting the changes in position of various objects as caused by a freshwater crab through the practice of nggàm. Does he have better accuracy than our pollsters?
It looks like Biden is our president for the next four years. What does it mean? It’s simple: Biden got more of the little pieces of paper than the other guy. That’s it! It was just as true in 2016 as it is today.
The possible reasons for an electoral outcome are as numerous as the number of hair follicles on a silverback ape. Back in 2016, Trump got more of the slips in key states than Hillary, but was it mostly because a sufficient bulk of voters in those places didn’t like Hillary or was it due to love for the orange man? Was it an outrage vote against suffocating political correctness? Was it a rebellion of the middle of the income spectrum without college degrees? Was it a cry from flyover country? Was it an uprising against halfwit elites awash in money, influence, social status, and discreditable educations from Ivy League schools? Was it because the other side was simply caught off guard? Can’t say, but that won’t stop the crystal ball gazers at Fox News and the leftist cabal at MSNBC/CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC/WaPo/NYT/Newsweek/Time /Slate/Politico. There’s no shortage of seers (pundits, talking heads) when dollars-for-mouth is dangled before some with past or present clout. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.
MSNBC host and former Bush-Cheney Communications Director Nicole Wallace speaks to John McCain 2008 campaign strategist Steve Schmidt.
2020 offered some intriguing results. Biden pulled out a squeaker. But how? Let’s start with a few things that are objectively true. First, we are in the midst of a virus-panic. The hysteria contorted nearly everything from livelihoods to educating the young to Thanksgiving to elections to romance. How can anyone get a date while marring the face with the look of a bank robber? It’s hard to even get started with a stranger when eyes meet but the rest is a mystery. As for the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas are to be relegated to computer screens. Ugh!
Back to elections, they were deformed by throwing caution to the wind, just what Democrats have been trying to achieve for decades. For them, many deep blue jurisdictions functioning as one-party states tossed ballots to every addressee on the voter rolls. Please, if you will, compare that to going to the old tried-and-true voting booth. The ballot is accounted from poll worker to voter to the secrecy of the booth to the observed placement of the ballot in the box in front of the poll worker. Surely, chicanery is still possible but it becomes viral in massive vote-by-mail schemes when ballots are thrown about like supermarket ads into mail boxes or on the ground next to them. The only real stopgap for integrity is the Boy Scout oath. Ugh!
Check out this scenario: party activist is alerted to the date of the mailing, is assigned a voter registrar list to visit addresses, helps persons answering the door to fill it out, assists them in getting a replacement if they threw the thing out with the supermarket ads, helps those delinquents in filling it out, and reaps the ballots from any leftovers, and all the while getting paid for it. Some of this is illegal, but how can you prove it? It all happened before anyone was alerted and ends up in the vote count. And then it’s off to the microphones after the things have been counted to admit the presence of fraud but claim it’s inconsequential. The reliance on the moral integrity of political activists is a sorry basis for an election system.
Secondly, all the pieces of paper are treated equal by the counters, as they should be. But are they in reality? Do they truly reflect an equal mental comportment for voting? Some people don’t care. Some people don’t care enough to devote the mental energy to be informed, or even vote if left to themselves. An election might be reduced to the success either side experiences in galvanizing the non-informed and uncaring. Under these auspices, an election is a race to collect pieces of paper from both sides’ dunces.
Where’s the buy-in on the part of voter? I don’t think it’s asking too much of the citizen to sacrifice a portion of their lunch hour to fulfill their chief civic responsibility. It says much about you if you’ll only do your duty if the ballot is delivered to you, someone helps you fill it out, get it to the registrar, or worse, bribes you into voting with holidays, free rides, and free lunches. Still, that vote from a blank slate has the same weight as the one from a person who understands that a ban on fracking will destroy their livelihoods and children’s future while doing nothing to mitigate “climate change”.
Democrats are the main instigators of a loosey-goosey election system. COVID gave them the prime opportunity to saddle us with choices of their multitudinous uncaring and ill-informed.
True, both sides have ample minions in the dunce category, but ample doesn’t mean equal. The Democrats seem to incorporate a bumper crop of dolts who are all-too-willing to believe in bunkum. The absurdities aren’t limited to the person who can’t break away from The View or the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Profound inanities proliferate from Democrat head honchos on down. The vagina-head protests at the time of Trump’s inauguration – a good sample of the D base – were populated with people who are now ecstatic about the head grifter of a family of grifters with a creepy personal history ascending to power. Pelosi, Biden, and the rest of the big cheeses are alright with sovietizing healthcare, as if bankrupting the nation will make it all better. The Green New Deal is Soviet central planning no matter how you shake it. The destruction of the livelihoods of millions will come at no change in Climate Change since the two biggest CO2 polluters don’t hone their policies to the wishes of the Sierra Club and are too ecstatic about leaving the stone age. The Dem’s bastardization of the confirmation process is now legendary after they tried to conduct a lynch party on Kavanaugh on the basis of nothing more than the baseless and raw accusation of single person, a person without evidence and littered with contradictions. The Senate hearing room and the mob in the street – the Democrat base in full view – were enflamed with the slander. Speaking of dunces, who else but a dunce could believe this bunk? The rabid D base could.
Women’s March, Washington, DC, Jan. 21, 2017.
And I haven’t mentioned the bilge that came to be known as “collusion” and an impeachment that was solely based on a singular phone call in the president’s exercise of foreign policy. A request for assistance in an American investigation on the grifting habits of the Biden family was turned into coup against the 2016 election. The manner in which the conversation made its way to the wolves in the Dem leadership in Congress speaks volumes. As it turns out, the “whistleblower” was an Obama leftover partisan hack in the bowels of the NSA. From there, the salivating wolves running Congress ran wild with impeachment at a time when a dangerous virus was insinuating itself into the country.
Collusion like impeachment was pure hooey, as Mueller had to reluctantly conclude. The only proven collusion turned out to be an unwitting (or witting) kind between Hillary/DNC and a partisan zealot and a sometime Russian intelligence operative, which ended up in the form of a smear known as the “dossier”, and then to the wolf pack. Who could believe this stuff? Dunces could, especially if clouded by untrammeled hatred and a lust for power. This disreputable cast of characters made up the “loyal opposition” in 2020. Biden was only a surfer riding the wave.
Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee, July 2019. (CSPAN)
Interestingly, Trump’s earlier request to the Ukrainian president unexpectedly gained additional legs in the week before this November election. By then, though, it was too little, too late. The scandal known as “early voting” – a month or earlier – became standard and the Dems exploited it to the hilt. The non-voting tendencies of their demographic base could be corrected by the mailed ballot and ballot harvesting. They already had millions in the bank before the good news about the vaccine, the recovering economy, and Tony Bobulinski’s revelations of Biden and his family’s time-honored tradition of peddling influence to become millionaires and maybe next door neighbors to the Obamas with a Martha’s Vineyard estate of their own. The party of big government is self-interested in it becoming bigger because it will make millionaires of them all. Grifting is a profession for this clan.
Joe Biden (middle), his son Hunter and his sister Valerie Biden Owens in 2016. Recent attacks on the former vice president pivot off the lucrative business activities of his son during the Obama administration. (photo: Visar Kryeziu/AP)
The picture of the 2020 election is more complicated than the elevation of an incontinent grifter to the presidency. The Republican down ballot did slightly better than the top of the ticket. The Republicans are in a stronger position to flood the zone with proposals to restore integrity to our elections. Voter ID, putting an end to early voting, reducing the prevalence of mail-in voting, establishing stronger federal standards in federal elections, and instituting criminal penalties for public officials who violate those official norms are some ideas that should make their way into bills. Let the Democrats play their “suppressing the vote” gambit. These measures poll well. Republicans, get on with it and make some hay.
With Republican successes down ballot, what is the “voice” of the people? Some voters believe this, some believe that, and some are just morons. The last category might be more numerous because it includes the folks who believe in things that aren’t true. Progressivism and socialism are plagued with things that aren’t true. These two related worldviews have a head start in the fantasy department. How many voters are firmly entrenched in them? My guess is that there are many. So, the “voice” of the people is a cacophony with a healthy dollop of the farcical.
Wayne County (Detroit) poll worker covers the windows after poll watchers were evicted on November 3, 2020.
Justice Alito ordered Pennsylvania election boards to segregate late-arriving ballots. The order is important to be sure, but there are two kinds of possible corruption in this virus paranoia-stoked election: misbehavior in the processing of the ballots and the abuse in the production of them. Alito’s order deals with the former.
Right now, we are in the processing phase and, rightly, much attention is focused on the much rumored, historical, and serious irregularities in Democrat one-party fiefdoms. Yet, let’s not forget the altered system that produced the ballots, delivered them, set the conditions for which they were marked, and played footsie with the deadlines for their arrival for processing. It’s the production side of the equation wherein lies the greatest difficulty to prove widespread criminal abuse, beyond what has been dismissed as just anecdote, but which naturally draws into question the legitimacy of elections. The biggest threat to our democracy (actually, citizen republic) is the Democrats’ long-held desire to conduct monkey business with the franchise.
The setup before the ballots get to the counters makes it possible for all the other suspicious activity in processing them. That setup was due to COVID, which was the expedient to turn our elections into a Third World affair. The virus has been exploited to mutilate our way of life. The COVID panic was used to repeal the First Amendment – unless you’re going to march in the streets for a neo-Marxist revolution, erase our history, loot, pillage, and burn – construct authoritarian regimes in the states, and dismantle livelihoods. The COVID scare was used to destroy the education of our children, social life, and our self-concept as we move about disguised in masks. Children will grow up knowing people only from the cheek bones up. Now the ginned-up madness has tainted the foundational element of a citizen republic, the vote. Among those other things, COVID became the pretext to construct a Rube Goldberg election system; one mostly designed by Democrats to cook up Democrat victories.
Election challengers watch poll workers count absentee ballots for the city of Detroit, Nov. 3, 2020.
Are elections in the COVID and post-COVID era to be limited to rubber stamping Left/Democrat proclivities? The collectivism gang distorted our established ways while Republicans tried to put a break on Democrat designs with ballot integrity measures, to no avail in the era of the COVID panic-as-excuse. The Democrat dream of expanding the franchise to include the living and the dead, the non-citizen and citizen, the uninterested and grossly ill- or non-informed, and the ineligible and eligible was made real.
In many states, particularly blue ones, ballots were sent hither and yon by mail using voter rolls dirtied with many who cannot legally vote and those who would not if left alone. Where did the ballots go? They went to an address to then be marked by God-knows-who. A kind of cattle roundup in the form of ballot harvesting was authorized by the usual suspects to milk every last vote out of the uninterested, ill- or non-informed, living or dead, and ineligible and eligible.
Ballot harvesting.
What was happening behind the closed doors of those addresses? Who and how were the ballots filled out? I don’t know, you don’t know, they don’t know, which now elicits healthy suspicions that the entire process is a sham.
Then deadlines became meaningless, all in order to keep the ballot boxes open so they could be later stuffed to produce the Democrats’ preferred result. Another healthy suspicion. This jerry-rigged system encourages such misgivings. Is this what is meant by the risible chant “count very vote”? Pardon me, after this contrived and mockery of a system, for having my doubts about the results. Reagan said it best, “Trust but verify”. He said it in reference to the Soviet general secretary; many of us are saying it to the people of a party with many similar beliefs.
If Trump loses, nonetheless, Trump will have pulled the makeshift bandage off a fetid wound. He brought out of the interstices all the harmful bacteria that are present in the open wound of our modern politics and system of government. Thanks to a dossier, Mueller, and a coup that was disguised as impeachment, we now know of the existence of the dark influence of a new, pernicious, and burgeoning social class: an American nomenklatura. Sometimes referred to as the deep state, it’s an interweaved and integrated social class of government-associated non-profits and government workers, both appointed from the world of DC and ensconced in the civil service.
The nomenklatura
They have allies in the culture in the Democratic Party, Big Media, corporate boardrooms, the uber-rich, people with haute couture pedigrees and pseudo-prestigious degrees from our campuses-turned-indoctrination centers. It’s a vile socio-political ecosystem that Trump has exposed by his presence and persona.
Out of this milieu came the 2020 election. Biden is the quintessential creature of it. He might ride into office on a river of this socio-political slime. These next four years might be very interesting ones.
Supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump bang on the glass and chant slogans outside the room where absentee ballots for the 2020 general election are being counted at TCF Center on November 4, 2020 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)
If Biden wins, he will earn the rap “Your Fraudulency”. The virus has given us more than 200,000 dead. It’s now the go-to excuse for conducting an election that appears to be eerily reminiscent of those in a post-Soviet republic. Massive mail-in voting is, on its face, highly dubious. The blanketing of many urban-dominated states (overwhelmingly blue) with mail-in ballots is an invitation to fraud in states with a history of it. Accounts are trickling in of the dead voting and out-of-staters and non-citizens mysteriously showing up in the vote count. Poll watchers were evicted from the counting (see below), something stipulated in law, ostensibly due to COVID-induced paranoia about “overcrowding”.
And the post-election vote counts in these deep blue, historically corrupt Democrat one-party jurisdictions all blows one way: to the D’s. As they say in politico-speak, the “optics” aren’t good, and neither is the legitimacy. Will Biden be declared the winner by a rankly partisan media, and truly accepted by the public, in an election with as many credibility holes as a block of Swiss cheese?
What’s next for the aggrieved? Frankly, options are few. Potentially illegal votes will disappear like a rain drop in a pool. Segregating them will be impossible once they are counted. The wrangling over the 2000 election brought to light the realization that a do-over isn’t likely because the courts are as reluctant to get involved as a child is in eating his spinach.
Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, November 24, 2000. (Photo by RHONA WISE / AFP)
The Constitution stipulates the process for choosing the president and leaves management of the election process to the states. If the state turns a blind eye to chicanery, there’s little recourse, especially if the process is as opaque as Trump initially wanted his wall to be.
Court challenges might have legs if the shenanigens clearly violate other Constitutional provisions, as in 2000 when the Gore team violated equal protection in trying to cherry-pick selected Florida counties for recounts. A case could be made here, but it’ll have to overcome extreme judicial hesitancy.
The state legislature could be called into session to block the caper in a legal action, but it will be late to the party and, as of this writing, there seems to be little life at the state capitol. No doubt, the Constitution establishes the state legislature as the election nanny. Still, it would be too little, too late.
Sadly, election fraud has proven to be the the most unenforced crime on the books. There are no finger prints and the smoking gun is so dispersed as to be unrecognizable, and the jury-rigged system of throwing ballots hither and yon in the mail invites suspicions. In response, the public may be limited to the Constitutional right of association. The election lacks legitimacy, so show up at Your Fraudulency’s inaugural in droves and express your disapproval.
Wearing his trademark aviator sunglasses, Vice President Joe Biden visits a mall in Las Vegas with senate candidate Catherine Cortez Masto. (AP Photo)
Don’t worry about being accused of mimicking the 2016 vagina-heads. They had no case. They just didn’t like the result. This one has the pungent stink of fraud all over it.
