Hugh Hewitt’s radio program is a treasure. I savor his demeanor and interviews of all stripes of opinion-makers. However, his take on the two most important issues of today – the election and pandemic – drives me up the wall. He’s certainly not alone in his display of tunnel vision on these two matters.
Friday, while interviewing Steve Kornacki, NBC’s resident expert on polling, they both strayed into superficial comparisons of the 2020 election with previous ones. Right off the bat, it must be admitted that this election was like no other and hardly analogous. It’s the first election in my memory that a huge bulk, if not the majority, of the ballots cannot be assigned to particular living, breathing, and eligible voters with much certainty. Ballots were shot-gunned to buildings throughout the country, were taken inside, and nobody can legitimately vouch for each ballot’s treatment after that. It’s the exact opposite of the level of security when voting in-person. This election was strange, really strange. How is a comparison with previous elections even possible?
Kornacki blithely tries to do just that with Hewitt in tow. Kornacki cited the increasing urbanization of Georgia and the demographic dominance of the counties within the orbit of greater Atlanta, counties that Hillary won by 30% and Biden wins by 40%, to help explain Biden’s razor thin victory in the state. I’m not convinced the fact has much relevance. Demographic changes don’t occur at the speed of flipping a light switch, even though they are gradually happening in real time. Four years isn’t long enough for that factor to account for a change of 10%.
How can anyone brusquely brush off the possibility of a once-in-a-lifetime loosey-goosey election system accounting for the surge in Biden support? Kornacki and Hewitt might be suffering from glaucoma.
Hewitt would probably respond by saying that there’s no evidence of substantial fraud . . . but fraud is beside the point. He sees most issues as a lawyer would, which he is, in clinging to his conclusion that there isn’t sufficient evidence to throw aspersions on the result. He’s right if all matters must meet the standards of jurisprudence, but that’s a rarified environment involving unique standards. For real people living in the real word, we can’t conduct our lives by measuring all that we do to “beyond a reasonable doubt”. We must act on what is likely to be true.
Evidentiary norms of the courtroom are ill-suited for policy making, decisions about your child’s education, and assessing an election system that incorporated what would have been considered fraud just two years before. The system hid voting behind walls – addresses – and counting procedures that poured ballots into huge anonymous piles like a rain drop landing in a pond. The system legitimized fraud and made it next to impossible to uncover the misbehavior in “sufficient” quantities.
Indeed, this Rube Goldberg election system was a disgrace. Party activists, greased with wads of lefty billionaire cash, became the principle means for distributing the ballots as they scurried to deliver and gather absentee ballot applications from their favorite constituencies, and became the principle means for their collection in legal and “questionable” ballot harvesting operations. Vote-by-mail essentially codified scandalous conduct.
The election was a system with few, if any, authenticity checks. You can’t expect underpaid and overworked poll workers to instantly become forensic handwriting experts. This election became a race to garner the biggest pile of paper, not necessarily voters, because the system was set up to place a premium on paper, not bodies. Under these conditions, paper is made easier to pile than bodies.
Mail-in ballots being prepared for counting. (AP Photo/Don Ryan, File)
Simply put, you can’t correlate each piece of paper with a live body. A leap of faith is required to overcome that problem. Hewitt and Kornacki are unknowingly mired in something akin to a religious act.
And then there’s Hewitt’s stand on the pandemic. He announced that Gov. Newsom “is doing his best” and implored public officials like LA’s Mayor Garcetti to cordially ask the population “to endure just 3 more months of restrictions”. Au contraire, Newsom and Garcetti are deserving of condemnation not compliments and supplications to be nicer.
We’re in the midst of the much-anticipated second surge and many in power act as if they haven’t learned a darn thing. We now know that the truly vulnerable are a narrow slice of the population: the aged with serious health problems. Outside of that demographic sliver, almost all people would probably find influenza a more dangerous threat. And yet, we are told that nearly everyone’s entire way of life must be upended to protect this very small number of people, or protect ourselves from a threat that is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu. The hidden truth is, we can easily protect the vulnerable without making everyone else’s life a living hell.
If we do get it, we have proven therapeutics with vaccines on the way. We won’t die, unless we have the health issues that would imperil some of us every flu season. We had good reason to know this fact at the start but powerful officials got caught up in a hysteria that was incited by grossly inflated death rates. Remember those? But Garcetti, Cuomo in New York, and Whitmer in Michigan still act as if the embarrassingly faulty fatality numbers in March came from the burning bush on Mt. Horeb. They behave as if a spike in “positive” cases equates with a spike in deaths. Few things are further from the truth.
Jay Bhattacharya
Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford in his presentation in Hillsdale College’s October issue of “Imprimis” clears the medical fog of war. Most importantly, he addresses the confusion that paralyzes Whitmer’s and Newsom’s mind on that notorious death rate. The number that corrupts their brains muddles “cases” with “infections”. The former is a much smaller number than the latter, with the former producing a much higher death rate if used as the formula’s denominator. “Infections” is a bigger number because it refers to people with the virus or having had it. “Cases” are just the number of people with the virus that show up at a medical facility. Seroprevalence tests – an analysis of the presence of virus markers in the form of antibodies and proteins – in Santa Clara County, Ca., and replicated in 82 studies around the world, showed 50 times more infections over cases. Thus, the death rate properly calculated must drop behind the decimal point and not in front of it. Bottom line: the virus’s lethality was and is greatly overstated.
Targeted mask-wearing, quarantining and assisting the vulnerable, and an opening of life for 95% of our people should be the order of the day. Above all, get the kids back in school. Increases in positive cases should no longer paralyze us into ruination. If you get it, see your doctor, stay home, and drink plenty of fluids. Sound familiar?
The two issues are linked on account of the virus-panic being used to mutilate our elections, in addition to butchering our entire way of life. Hewitt wallows in misconceptions about the 2020 election and the virus. The school closings and lockdowns are destroying the path to meaningful lives. Our third world-style election system gave us a person of mental incontinence who will be left to populate the executive branch, and the courts, with delusionary leftists. We are going to be in for a rough ride, and the disfigurement of rational treatment of the two events is no good service.
DETROIT, MI – NOVEMBER 04: A crowd chants “stop the count,” and pounds on the glass windows and doors to the entrance of the Central Counting Board in the TCF Center after partisan election challengers were removed on November 4, 2020 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Elaine Cromie/Getty Images)
Biden got 11 million votes – or maybe 15 million – more than Obama in 2008. Trump got 23% more than McCain. And Washington Post columnist Philip Bump brands the 2020 turnout (in “Actually, it makes perfect sense that Biden would get more votes than Obama”) as “not ahistorical”. Amazingly, he then goes on to explain why it was “ahistorical”. What’s up? In 2020, the country was showered with pieces of paper (mailed ballots) that may or may not have been reflective of warm bodies or active brains. It certainly is responsible to ask whether each one of those pieces of paper represents a thinking human being or warm body when ballots were thrown to the wind like Deutsch marks in the hyper-inflationary Germany of 1923 ($1 = 4,210,500,000,000 German marks). Bump presents some sound reasoning and then falls off the cart. In fact, our election system is a joke that became a belly laugh in 2020.
Bump partially attributes the larger turnout to population growth. But that speculation doesn’t pass the smell test. The hordes in the US grew by about 31 million from 2008 to 2020, but those new bodies may not translate into more voters since they increasingly represent demographics that historically don’t vote . . . unless Tammany Hall never went away. The young and immigrants dominate the additions to the vote-eligible legions. The story is more than a myth that new immigrants were met at the docks with a job, a promise to get the oldest daughter married, and a ballot. The young and immigrants with their offspring are too busy with other things on their minds. Voting doesn’t quite catch up on the list of priorities with hooking up or working hard to get established in the new country. Unless, of course, the get-out-the-vote (gotv) campaign consists of cajoling, enticements, or harassment, or worse. Free will gets overwhelmed by the pressure from the political machine.
Thomas Nast cartoon showing Tammany Hall political boss Richard Croker’s tentacles firmly fastened on New York City Hall.
Machines still exist, by the way. Some states and most big cities function as Maduro regimes (of Venezuela fame).
And what to make of that free will? Free will turns into mush after constant pestering, or the election system comes to you in the mail to facilitate “social” voting, the opposite of the secret ballot. Ballots go to buildings and who knows what’s happening behind those walls. Group voting, one person voting for many, peer pressure? It’s highly questionable whether each piece of paper is correlated to the free will of an individual person legally entitled to vote, let alone one above room temperature. It’s hard to say how legitimate the election is when we pull crazy stunts like this. A person can be forgiven for thinking that we systematically and legally promoted fraud and then called it voter enthusiasm, like Bump.
Our intrepid Washington Post columnist is probably correct when he cites higher enthusiasm in this election, as is true of every presidential election cycle. He then tried to pinpoint Trump as the catalyst. In his mind, the greater attention this time around was really a referendum on Trump. The election was a hate-Trump or love-Trump excursion, Biden being the beneficiary of a larger hate-Trump mob.
Could be, but my olfactory glands are once again aroused. This smells too much like east coast, beltway confirmation bias, or wishful thinking, at work. Bump so strongly wishes it to be true that he massages his reasoning to make it true. I can’t say for sure that Bump is a partisan but a person can be forgiven for reaching the conclusion if the writer subject is cloistered in a mass of homogeneous minds to such an extent that he uses the data to validate the suffocating group mind of his surroundings.
By his own reckoning, and Gallup polling, 2020 was no more of an attention-grabbing hullabaloo than 2008. And this, in addition to the increase in non-voting demographics, is supposed to explain the popularity of a candidate with the charisma of a grilled cheese sandwich and the mental acuity of an early stage Alzheimer’s patient? Philip, I’m sorry, this dog won’t hunt.
Gallup has a credibility problem anyway. These people weren’t any more capable of measuring the Trump vote than the others. As it turned out, contra their predictions, 45,000 additional Trump votes in a few states would have Trump crowing before the press of another “landslide” in the face of their glowering stares. Their faulty estimation of the state of the electorate raises serious questions about their ability in measuring something as abstruse as the emotional state – like “enthusiasm” – of that very same public. Citing them isn’t much different than resorting to tarot cards.
The predictions of the polls are reminiscent of the difference between a WAG and SWAG in the realm of probabilities. Both are wild a** guesses, but the latter adds numbers.
Today, our discredited cultural elites tell us to shut up and accept the codger as our new god-in-waiting. Just one year before, they were wringing their hands over the voting public’s decision to install Trump. How could that be, they wondered? Their answer was to throw aspersions on the 2016 election. They ran with the orchestrated lie of a Trump-Putin cabal, and threw in, for good measure, broad complaints about the American election system. Now that’s something I can buy, and I’m not speaking of the Russia charade. Our system is a mess. We are morally disqualified from being members of UN election observer teams.
Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in January 2019 writing for AP, while most likely wringing her hands over an election system that produced Trump, hit upon some truth before there was a 2020 imbroglio. She wrote a telling piece, “American elections ranked worst among Western democracies. Here’s why.” Portions of her analysis have as much a ring of truth in 2020 as it did for 2016. She cites her own Electoral Integrity Project, an operation that she directs, and the 2014 report of the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Both make some good points.
In her AP article, she heaped abuse on our election system, and rightly so. She particularly mentioned the fractured nature of our election system with many voting regimes scattered among the 50 states and thousands of election boards, all varying in their degrees of efficiency and integrity. In her reckoning, partisanship is allowed to play a huge role in writing the laws and administering the distribution and counting of the pieces of paper in each one of the enclaves, and I agree.
TOPSHOT – Mail-in ballots in their envelopes await processing at the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorders’ mail-in ballot processing center at the Pomona Fairplex in Pomona, California, October 28, 2020. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
That might explain why Montana’s vote is more valid than the ones coming out of urban one-party states. These single-party fiefdoms don’t have competitive opposition to keep them honest. Graft becomes honest graft in the memorable words of George Washington Plunkitt. In other words, electoral fraud becomes easy, legal, or hidden without the presence of a powerful opposition riding herd on the rulers. Little of this will come to light because little is open to effective scrutiny.
It’s especially true in vote-by-mail schemes. Once a mail-in ballot is removed from the envelope and added to the stack, and the privacy envelope with the signature is tossed to the wind, what integrity check is there? The vote gets certified and real skullduggery will be relegated to the mists of urban myth, popular only among the losers.
Lisa Benson
Norris goes off the rails into fantasy when she points to proportional representation gambits and heightening “convenience” as ways to improve the system. The proportional approach splits party representation by the percentage of the vote. It’s most commonly associated with parliamentary systems, which is less problematic when there just two parties, and a disaster when there are many. Splinter parties become kingmakers and coalition governments teeter into instability. Israel in the past year and a half had 3 elections and is probably heading to their fourth. The suggestion piles instability on top of our current mess of chaotic vote regimes and vote procedures that turn election season into a farcical sitcom.
Examining absentee ballots.
As for “convenience”, there’s nothing more convenient than vote-by-mail, and there’s nothing that does more to conjure an absence of faith in the results. The whole artifice abolishes the secret ballot, which ensures that the marks on the piece of paper reflect the conscience of a single person acting independently, while eliminating the close supervision that is only possible from in-person voting. With no secrecy guaranteeing that the vote reflects the will of an individual person and no supervision in the act of voting, what can go wrong, eh? Plenty.
One question that escapes serious consideration is this one: Should every eligible voter vote? The message is rammed home that everyone “should” vote. It’s as if the only expectation for the voter is to mechanically mark the piece of paper, not to bring anything more to the act. I beg to differ. Voting should be left to those who’ve given the matters in question the requisite effort and thought to understand the matters before them. The mentally incontinent and indifferent should be at the top of the list of people who should be shamed from voting – not banned through a poll test, but shamed.
Instead, there’s a concerted effort to bring out the mentally incontinent and indifferent by making the act of voting “convenient”. One thing that this election teaches us is that convenience can only come at the expense of deteriorating credibility. If an election lacks trustworthiness, but is imposed on the population nonetheless, we’ll have all the makings for grave upheaval thereafter.
Our choices are clear regardless of any partisan result. Vote-by-mail should end, with it only justified in very limited and carefully tailored circumstances. Election day should be a holiday to get the 95% of the electorate to appear at the precinct in person. If you have to wait in line, the experience will remind you that the day is set aside for you to vote. Early voting, in-person only, should be limited to a week before election day. Precise national standards should be in place for national elections and a slew of stricter guidelines for all others. DOJ should man-up for swift investigations and prosecutions of violators, with similar requirements at the state level.
Our present system is a farce. We should be rightly viewed as a laughingstock by the rest of the world. Who are we to pass judgment on any poor country’s election system when we have this mess visited upon us very 2 to 4 years? Ours is a third world election system, American style. Maduro has a similar one, Venezuela style.
Allies of Nicolas Maduro’s party made a clean sweep of the Sunday election after the opposition boycotted, July 2017.
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.
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.
We are stuck in a rut. We are mired in a blockheaded assumption that there are few if any continuities in human experience. We are tacitly and openly told that we can make ourselves anew according to each passing era’s intellectual, cultural, and technological superficialities. After all, individuals, we are told, are blank slates to be inscribed with whatever lies about in a person’s social environment and/or can be pushed into the mind by media and the diktats of the schools. Therein lies the heart of progressivism, and its monstrous crusades to make people conform to fleeting fads of thought. The way is made wide open to endlessly fiddle with people and their personal arrangements, as in the silly-but-menacing Green New Deal.
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 14: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (L) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) hold a news conference to introduce legislation to transform public housing as part of their Green New Deal proposal outside the U.S. Capitol November 14, 2019 in Washington, DC. The liberal legislators invited affordable housing advocates and climate change activists to join them for the announcement. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
As a high school American History teacher, an entire chapter in the textbook was devoted to the “living Constitution”. It’s the idea that condones the boundless busybody government so beloved by progressives and their intellectual cousins, the socialists. However, it’s a complete refutation of the common thread throughout time of the thing that resides in all of us: human nature. This generic quality is the primary and permanent thing in the wirings of Aristotle to Adams to your Sunday morning sermon. Today is a constant war against the sage wisdom of our cultural legacy.
Norma McCorvey (right) – the “Roe” in Roe v. Wade – and lawyer Gloria Allred in 1989. The SCOTUS decision in 1973 was classic “living Constitution”. (File Photo / The Associated Press))
The confrontation plays out in our elections. Elections are the means to an end for our progressive brethren. Instead of elections being a neutral process to gauge the voice of the people, they are seen by today’s progressives as something to be manipulated to achieve the desired end, and then they drag the rest of us into their ends-justifies-the-means hell. Herein lies their predisposition to cheat by flaunting and surreptitiously breaking the rules. The 2020 election elucidates this lesson, and many, many more. Here’s a few others.
First, as it seems now, the Republicans will never win a close election. The predilection of progressives to win at all costs leads to legal and illegal abuse of the vote. Massive mail-in voting is scandalous, period. The progressive resistance to the simplest measures to protect ballot integrity is shameful in the extreme. The system is tailor-made for cheating.
The amount of cheating is hard to determine at this point. But we do know what happens when the protections of a police force are pulled back. Look no further than Minneapolis, Seattle’s CHOP/CHAZ, Portland’s mean streets, New York City, Chicago, Kenosha, nearly anywhere a large concentration of people reside. What gets rewarded with no fear of consequence gets repeated. Ditto for election fraud when guarantees for election integrity are replaced by the equivalent of the Boy Scout oath as the sole stop for malevolence that lies in some hearts.
Protesters gather in front of a liquor store in flames near the Third Police Precinct on May 28, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, A police precinct in Minnesota went up in flames late on May 28. (Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images)
Second, stop early voting and tighten the qualifications for mail-in voting. Even in a pandemic, we must return to in-person balloting on a set day. Any mail-in ballots can only be allowed within a predetermined window of no more than 5 days before the election and certainly not after. Early voting means that a voter acts before all the information before the election has been presented. The Democrats were harvesting some ballots before the public got an inner glimpse into the seamy world of the Biden family. Some people may have voted for a man who might face impeachment and criminal prosecution.
Third, ad hominem and failure to articulate a policy rationale can be serious problems in a chief executive. Have I accurately described a significant part of the Trump persona? The approach may appeal to a fixed slice of the electorate but has little capacity to reach out beyond that cocoon. Results are definitely important but weren’t sufficient to overcome a wildly permissive election system and a portion of the public who couldn’t take the absence of a generous spirit. Much of this was baked into cake by Trump. It was euphemistically referred to as being Trumpy.
Being Trumpy for four years meant that he failed at expanding his base to compensate for the rabid opposition. Results were enough for some among the hesitant but an energized Left with its mobs, fellow travelers, and money – and there was much of that from the Left’s growing billionaire class – and those of the center-right who were put off by his manners made a solid mass of irreconcilables and an uphill climb. The virus was another one of those things that fell into a preexisting vortex. Trump is a two-edged sword of combativeness against the swamp and crudity. The persona has a niche audience.
Fourth, the Republican Party is now a working-class party. Nationalism, patriotism, economic growth, and opposition to the “woke” thought police are now the party’s watchwords. Our elites from the boardroom to the faculty lounge are lost, but it’s no great loss since they are numerically insignificant and already held in such great disrepute. The party must assiduously plow those demographic fields that knows no specific ethnic, race, or gender attribute.
Trump supporters at a campaign even in Fort Dodge, Iowa, November 12, 2015. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
Fifth, the great divide in our politics is no longer liberal/conservative. The catalyst for what divides us is culture. We are two different peoples irreconcilably separated by fundamental beliefs and ways of life. More accurately, liberal/conservative has been supplanted by tradition/avant-garde. The geographic complexion of the dichotomy is rural/urban or city/countryside, an age-old split.
Traditional notions of family and faith are more readily and publicly defended outside the metropolis, boardroom, and faculty lounge. The traditions of self-reliance, personal responsibility, equal opportunity, grace, and fidelity have an appeal beyond the frivolous categories of race, ethnicity, or gender. Therein lies tradition’s appeal to certain demographic segments nationwide, but the bastion is in the countryside.
This last lesson on our current state of affairs is fraught with the most danger. Culture defines us. Assaults on it and its related livelihoods will elicit strong reactions. Many nations, including ours, have been through this before. It isn’t pretty, and frequently bloody.
As long as the city continues the movement to separate itself from the rest of the country – and, indeed, it’s the city with its avant-garde reflex that is the engine of the separation – the country will be on the cusp of a fight, both physical and rhetorical. Be prepared for dark times despite the empty calls for unity, empathy, and accommodation in the election’s aftermath. The reality on the ground and the machinations in our institutions won’t match the speechifying words. Are we truly irreconcilable? We’ll soon see.
