What’s even better than election denial?

The New Neo Posted on by

Pre-election denial, says Hillary Clinton.

To wit:

“I know we’re all focused on the 2022 midterm elections, and they are incredibly important, but we also have to look ahead because, you know what, our opponents certainly are,” Clinton said in the video. “Right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election, and they’re not making a secret of it.”…

“Just think, if that happens, the 2024 presidential election could be decided not by the popular vote or even the anachronistic Electoral College but by state legislatures, many of them Republican-controlled,” Clinton said before promoting Indivisible’s Crush the Coup campaign.

“Crush the Coup” has a webpage, of course, which you can easily reach by doing a search. Its rationale is that Republicans (MAGA Republicans, that is) must be defeated at the state level in 2022 to avoid an election steal by the Republicans in 2024 at the presidential level. It focuses on the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona. Here’s their reasoning, such as it is:

In June, the Supreme Court announced it would hear Moore v. Harper this fall, with a decision likely coming next year. Right now, right-wing advocates are urging the Supreme Court to adopt an extremist and fringe legal doctrine, called “independent state legislature theory,” that would give state legislatures unchecked authority over election procedures and voting laws, and would grant broad power to gerrymander electoral maps, even if those laws blatantly violated the state’s constitution. An extreme ruling from the right-wing Supreme Court could have huge implications for how states run federal elections and ultimately give state lawmakers the power to overturn voters’ choice in presidential elections.

So what they’re saying is that their own failure to pass HR1 and wrest election control from the states, and the possibility of a SCOTUS ruling that yes, states set their own election rules (within Constitutional boundaries, of course), would somehow lead to each state legislature doing whatever it wanted in an election and overruling the will of the people.

What is the actual issue being decided by Moore v. Harper? This one:

Whether a state’s judicial branch may nullify the regulations governing the “Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives … prescribed … by the Legislature thereof,” and replace them with regulations of the state courts’ own devising, based on vague state constitutional provisions purportedly vesting the state judiciary with power to prescribe whatever rules it deems appropriate to ensure a “fair” or “free” election.

In other words, state legislatures have the express right to make laws regarding elections in their states, and yet in 2020 state court judges overruled legislatures and established their own rules. According to Hillary and the Crush the Coup people, the votes of the elected state legislative bodies are somehow less reflective of the people’s will than the decision of state judges (mostly unelected, I presume) and some also-unelected “experts” chosen by these judges.

More on the “independent state legislature theory” here:

In Moore v. Harper, the speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, Timothy Moore, asks the Supreme Court to consider what has come to be known as the “independent state legislature” theory — which holds that the Constitution gives state legislatures alone the power to regulate federal elections in their states, without the oversight of state courts. Moore notes that the Constitution’s elections clause states that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Moore argues that unlike other constitutional provisions, the clause does not refer to the state itself, but a particular institution of government.

Last November, the North Carolina legislature enacted a new map for congressional elections in response to the 2020 U.S. Census data. Respondent Rebecca Harper and 25 other North Carolina voters sued in state court to prevent the new map from taking effect, arguing that the map violated various provisions of the North Carolina constitution and represented an unlawful partisan gerrymander. In February 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court enjoined the new map, concluding that although the state legislature “has the duty to apportion North Carolina’s congressional … districts,” the legislature’s “exercise of this power is subject to limitations imposed by other [state] constitutional provisions,” and “the state judiciary … has the responsibility to protect the state constitutional rights of the citizens.” The court further concluded that the map was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. On remand, the state trial court issued an order adopting a different congressional map proposed by three court-appointed experts.

Moore and other state legislators then filed an emergency application asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the North Carolina Supreme Court’s order invalidating the legislature’s map and to stay the state trial court’s order adopting the replacement map. The justices denied emergency relief. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, filed a dissenting opinion, calling the independent-state-legislature theory “an exceptionally important and recurring question of constitutional law” and saying that “further review of the judgment below may be warranted once a petition for a writ of certiorari is filed.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the decision to deny the stay, but he agreed that “if the Court receives petitions for certiorari raising the issue, … the Court should grant certiorari … [and] carefully consider and decide the issue next Term after full briefing and oral argument.”

So the case is really about unelected judges, advised by an unelected panel of “experts,” redrawing the voting districts and usurping the power explicitly given state legislatures by the US Constitution. You’ve got to give Hillary and Crush the Coup points for creative “reimagining” of what a case is about.

The sins of the father: January 6th and the Reffitt case

The New Neo Posted on by

Have you heard of Guy Reffitt, the person who received the longest sentence so far of all the Jan 6ers (at least, as of August 1, 2022, that article’s dateline)?:

Guy Reffitt, a Texan who prosecutors said “lit the match” of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was sentenced to 7 1/4 years in prison on Monday, the longest sentence of any rioter to date but less than what the Justice Department had pushed for.

Reffitt, a 49-year-old from Wylie, was the first rioter to to be convicted at trial in March when a jury found him guilty on five counts: two counts of civil disorder and one count each of obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining on restricted grounds with a firearm and obstruction of justice.

That jury was in Washington DC.

This was what Reffitt did – and what he did not do [emphasis mine]:

Prosecutors sought to enhance his sentence to 15 years using a provision in federal law that allows for harsher punishment in terrorism cases, though Reffitt was not convicted of a terrorism charge. Reffitt’s case is the first time prosecutors have sought a terrorism enhancement sentencing for a Jan. 6 rioter.

The longest sentence of all Jan. 6 rioters was previously 5 1/4 years, which was given to two defendants. Prosecutors claimed that because Reffitt was armed with a firearm, chose to go to trial and was a primary instigator in the riots, he deserved the longest sentence to date.

F. Clinton Broden, a Texas-based lawyer whom Reffitt retained after his conviction, called for a sentencing of 24 months, claiming the case is different than other Jan. 6 rioters because Reffitt never entered the building, did not assault police and did not remove the handgun from his holster. Reffitt never conceded at the trial that he had a loaded weapon but bragged to fellow Three Percenters after the insurrection that “we all had weapons but never fired a single round.” Reffitt has already been held for 19 months in a Washington, D.C., jail.

I have little doubt that had Reffitt been a participant in a leftist demonstration, he would not have been tried, or if tried, would have received a slap on the wrist. In the Reffitt case, however, the prosecution actually sought a much longer sentence for Reffitt under a terrorism-enhancement provision, which the judge denied.

Please read the whole thing; it’s an exceptionally interesting case. One of the interesting aspects of it – for me at least – is the role Reffitt’s son played:

The obstruction of justice charge refers to threats Reffitt made to his son. Jackson Reffitt submitted a tip to the FBI on Christmas Eve, warning that his father planned to do “some serious damage.” No one responded to the tip…

After the riot, Reffitt told his daughter and son that “if you turn me in, you’re a traitor, and traitors get shot,” his son testified during the trial.

The same day of the threat, Jackson Reffitt met with an FBI agent and turned over images and recordings of his father.

Reffitt’s lawyer downplayed the threats.

“While Mr. Reffitt’s paranoid statements to two of his children are not to be condoned, he never gave any indication he would actually harm his children,”’ Broden wrote in his sentencing request of 24 months. “Indeed, his wife has stated that, while she was understandably ‘disturbed’ by her husband’s ‘extreme’ statements to his children, she did not believe that he would ever act on those statements.”

Reffitt senior is obviously a hothead, but all of his supposed crimes involved words. He and his son certainly seem to have political disagreements that have been ramped up and weaponized by the government, with the cooperation of the son. My guess is that their conflicts are not solely limited to political topics, either, and that this has a long history with them.

Jackson Reffitt has since moved out of the home. In a statement read at Monday’s hearing, he called for the maximum sentence for his father and hoped for mental health treatment to be a part of his sentence.

A daughter seems to have been somewhat involved, as well:

“I could really see how my father[’]s ego and personality fell to his knees when President Trump spoke, you could tell he listened to Trump’s words as if he was really truly speaking to him,” his daughter said in a letter to the court.

Here’s the son:

Notice how the CNN reporter frames Reffitt’s action in a way that leads the listener to imagine something that did not occur, when she says, “He brought a gun to the Capitol and threatened Speaker Nancy Pelosi.” Sounds like he was in the Capitol with the gun (he was not), and that he threatened Pelosi with it (he did not). His “threat” to Pelosi took this form, according to the Texas Tribune article:

In a recording played during Reffitt’s trial, he is shown on Jan. 6 saying he wanted to drag lawmakers outside of the Capitol “kicking and screaming” and that he wanted to see House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head hit every stair on the way down.

When I read that, I wondered what the circumstances were. Was he standing in front of the Capitol and inciting the crowd as he said it? But no; I discovered this report:

Multiple videos Reffitt took on and after 6 January, in which he discussed planning and bragged about participating in the riot, were used in evidence against him…

According to court papers, he had told fellow members of the militia that he planned to drag US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi out of the Capitol building by her ankles, “with her head hitting every step on the way down”.

So was this recording made by Reffitt himself? Was it before or after January 6th? If the recording wasn’t by Reffitt, who made it? Were FBI informants part of this group?

Reffitt himself said this, which I’m inclined to believe is the truth:

Prosecutors had sought a 15-year prison term, arguing Reffitt was “in a class all by himself” among Capitol riot defendants, and other rioters were “looking to him as their leader”.

But defence lawyers had argued the attack would have happened with or without him and noted he had no criminal history.

Having declined to testify at trial, Reffitt apologised in a brief statement before his sentencing, saying he had “an issue with just rambling and saying stupid [expletive]”.

At the trial, however, his wife and daughter spoke for a lesser sentence than the maximum, and this was cited by the judge as part of the reason he didn’t get the maximum:

His family, including his wife, sat in the court’s third row, and his daughter Peyton spoke on his behalf.

“He says a lot of things he doesn’t mean. His mental health is an issue,” she said, visibly emotional.

She added: “My father’s name wasn’t on the flags everyone was carrying that day.

“It was another man’s name,” she added in an apparent reference to former US President Donald Trump.

So the son seems to blame the father, and the daughter blames Trump. But the wife places the blame elsewhere:

His wife Nicole Reffitt told reporters the trial shows that “corrupt, evil politicians here in this city” are trying to undermine US civil liberties.

“This isn’t just about Guy Wesley Reffitt. This isn’t about just January 6th. This is about our liberties being stomped on,” she argued.

I can’t argue with that.

Those quotes are from the BBC, and funny thing, the Beeb seems to have given this man fairer coverage than the US papers I’ve seen. I noticed that the BBC also has this article, which dovetails with my own focus on this as a family conflict helped by the government to reach tragic proportions:

Those who know Reffitt say he is a big talker. So much so that his defence lawyer used it as his main argument for trying to have the case dismissed against Reffitt, who stood trial for bringing a handgun to the US Capitol during the 6 January riot.

But it was the volume of evidence of this bragging – detailed in texts, videos and audio – that convinced jurors of his guilt in a unanimous verdict in March after less than four hours of deliberations.

The DC jury was never going to do anything else.

More [emphasis mine]:

But Reffitt’s trial also showed how fissures dividing Americans have cracked wide open. It revealed how the deep political divide in the US has affected ordinary Americans and their families, often in a way that is emotionally wrenching and deeply personal. The divide has reached beyond the dinner table to pit family members against one another – in this case father against son – with far-reaching consequences.

For it was Reffitt’s son’s testimony against his father – whose political views he had long opposed – that formed a crucial part of the prosecution’s case.

Exactly as I had suspected. Some Red Guard action here by the son, who reported his father to the FBI prior to January 6th:

It was a string of messages from his father on Christmas Eve to the family text chain that alarmed Jackson. In them, the older Reffitt announced his intention to go to the nation’s capital “to rise up the way the Constitution was written”.

During his testimony, Jackson said that he reported his father to the FBI because he was worried about his plans.

Afterwards, said Jackson, he struggled with feelings of guilt for betraying his father: “I just felt gross.”

Not all that gross, however. The following does not surprise me at all [emphasis mine]:

“I started the fire,” Guy Reffitt told his family. He did not know that his son was secretly recording him on his mobile phone.

He threatened his son, warning him not to tell the authorities.

“If you turn me in, you’re a traitor,” his father told Jackson. “And traitors get shot.”

That was also probably recorded on Jackson’s cellphone, although the article doesn’t say. At any rate, it certainly was reported by Jackson:

Soon after, Jackson spoke with an FBI agent. Within days, his father was arrested.

On the day that his son testified against him, Reffitt walked into the courtroom with a swagger. But when Jackson took the stand, Guy’s demeanour changed. The big, burly man covered his face with his hands and doubled over in his chair, turning away from his son to hide his tears.

The two men looked strikingly similar that day. They both had the same lush locks – Guy kept his hair back, in a tight ponytail. Jackson’s hair fell loose, past his shoulders. They both wore a dark jacket, no tie, and a light-coloured shirt. Guy’s shirt was pale blue; Jackson’s was pink.

But the similarities ended there.

This is something that should never have come to this, and the government is shamefully exploiting a family dispute and using words said in anger in a long-lasting family dispute to imprison this man. They can state all they want to that it was his actions for which he’s being convicted, but it seems to me it is his angry words. He has no record and there is no report that he ever even laid a hand on anyone.

Here’s a little perspective from another family member [emphasis mine]:

The rift between the father and son was profound, eating away at their family. Guy’s older brother, Nathan Reffitt, a 50-year-old electrician, called Jackson a “snowflake” and overly sensitive.

“My nephew turned against his father,” Nathan told the BBC while attending his brother’s trial. “It’s sad that our country has come to this.”

Sad indeed.

His daughter backed that up:

Sarah described her father as a loving, gentle man. “Even the things he says that sounds like he would be violent,” she told the BBC, her voice trailing off. “He doesn’t hurt anyone.” She remembered that it was always their father the children would turn to if they would get into any trouble, because he was so forgiving.

Jackson seems to have, or to pretend to have, a bit of post-sentencing remorse:

Jackson, meanwhile, tweeted that it was “impossible to be happy” about the verdict. “My father could have possibly been home by now getting mental help if he took a plea deal,” he added.

There were other ways to have gotten help for both of you so it didn’t come to this. Involving the FBI was never going to be one of them.

I suggest you read the whole article. But I’ll let the daughter have the last word:

She said that a desire for one-upmanship fuelled her father; it caused him to not only swear like a sailor, but also drove him to Washington DC.

Specifically, she said, he wanted to show Jackson the kind of man that he is.

“He’s always trying to impress Jackson,” she said. “And he didn’t really impress anyone.”

What’s going on with this black hole’s star meal?

The New Neo Posted on by

I just can’t figure this out. But I’m not alone; neither can the astrophysicists or cosmologists, at least so far.

I had originally thought nothing could escape once captured in a black hole, although I later read that Hawking radiation – whatever that really is – could indeed escape. But this isn’t Hawking radiation:

In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, the event did not come as a surprise to astronomers who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky.

But nearly three years after the massacre, the same black hole is lighting up the skies again — and it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say.

“This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and lead author of a new study analyzing the phenomenon.

The team concludes that the black hole is now ejecting material traveling at half of the speed of light, but are unsure why the outflow was delayed by several years. The results, described this week in the Astrophysical Journal, may help scientists better understand black holes’ feeding behavior, which Cendes likens to “burping” after a meal…

“We have been studying TDEs [which stands for tidal disruption events “when encroaching stars are spaghettified by black holes”] with radio telescopes for more than a decade, and we sometimes find they shine in radio waves as they spew out material while the star is first being consumed by the black hole,” says Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and the CfA, and co-author on the new study. “But in AT2018hyz there was radio silence for the first three years, and now it’s dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio luminous TDEs ever observed.”

Here’s an explanation for “spaghettification”:

TDEs are well-known for emitting light when they occur. As a star nears a black hole, gravitational forces begin to stretch, or spaghettify, the star. Eventually, the elongated material spirals around the black hole and heats up, creating a flash that astronomers can spot from millions of light years away.

Some spaghettified material occasionally gets flung out back into space. Astronomers liken it to black holes being messy eaters — not everything they try to consume makes it into their mouths.

But the emission, known as an outflow, normally develops quickly after a TDE occurs — not years later. “It’s as if this black hole has started abruptly burping out a bunch of material from the star it ate years ago,” Cendes explains.

Not only that, but these are massive burps, and the burped material is exiting much faster than usual. Apparently this star was exceptionally indigestible.

Here’s a previous article on this “spaghettification” process. An excerpt:

“People have been seeing other evidence of wind coming out of these [TDE] events, and I think this polarization study definitely makes that evidence stronger, in the sense that you wouldn’t get a spherical geometry without having a sufficient amount of wind. The interesting fact here is that a significant fraction of the material in the star that is spiraling inward doesn’t eventually fall into the black hole — it’s blown away from the black hole.”

In the recent case, however, this blowing-away occurred nearly three earth-years later. The initial swallowing took place in October of 2018, and the Big Burp took place in June of 2021.

NOTE: It often seems strange to me to report far-off celestial events with earth-dates such as October of 2018. That of course represents when an event was viewed from earth or whatever orbiting telescope may have sent pictures and data.

Dreaming of clothing

The New Neo Posted on by

Ann Althouse has a post on dreaming about clothing. It got me thinking.

Many or even most of us have dreamed of the opposite – that is, of going out minus an important article of clothing and walking around embarrassingly naked. It’s almost as common a dream as the student anxiety dream.

But what of dreaming about clothing, the sort of thing described in the Althouse post? I’ve had dreams like that. One of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had was of being in a large clothing store filled with clothes of the most beautiful, glowing, harmonious colors I’d ever seen. The design of the clothing was interesting, too, but it was the colors that were spectacular. In my dream, I spent a lot of time looking around and marveling at the wondrous colors, and I recall that when I woke up (and this dream was about 35 years ago) I was amazed that I had actually managed to visualize such beautiful things in a dream.

I’ve never had another dream like that. But I did have a series of other dreams about clothing. These all occurred in the months prior to my wedding, when I was in my mid-20s. They were anxiety dreams. I dreamed that it was my wedding day and I didn’t have a wedding dress. I tried to make do with different pieces of clothing but of course nothing was right; nothing was a wedding dress.

I probably had this dream at least five or six times, but it stopped when I actually bought a wedding dress – not in the dream, but in real life. My dress wasn’t a traditional wedding dress; it was an old-fashioned dress that very much resembled this one from the movie “Portrait of Jennie.”

While we’re at it, I’ll just mention that a quirk that I’ve had all my life is that I often remember the clothing people were wearing when certain things happened that seemed important to me at the time. And I remember much of my favorite clothing as a young child. There was a dress with strawberries on it that I wore when I was around three years old. I loved it very much, and when I was a year older and outgrew it, and my mother gave it away, I was very sad. I still remember that day.

Why? I don’t know; I’m not one of the world’s bigger fashionistas. But my memory tends to be very visual, like a snapshot or even a movie – where people were standing, what they were wearing, and whole dialogues that were emotionally important to me.

Hiding and avoiding as political tactic (and more on Fetterman versus Oz)

The New Neo Posted on by

In 2020, Joe Biden’s approach to campaigning was to keep an extremely low profile. His surface excuse was COVID, but it obviously wasn’t the real reason. The real reason was that, the more we saw of Joe, the more apparent it would be that he was cognitively challenged and lacking the required energy to function well as president. So it made sense to keep him under wraps as much as possible.

He got away with it for a number of reasons. One was that a lot of people had been primed to hate Donald Trump and would have voted for literally anyone who opposed him. Another was the full cooperation of the MSM (including the laptop coverup). Another may have been voter fraud on the part of the Democrats, although we’ll never know the extent of that. Still another was that a lot of Obama voters were favorably inclined towards him because he had served for eight loyal years as Biden’s VP, and so some of that Obama glow had rubbed off on him in their eyes.

And so Joe Biden became president while mostly hiding in his basement. And it seems like quite a few Democrat candidates in 2022 are following that playbook, to the best of their ability now that COVID has diminished as an excuse. The form it’s taking now is to haughtily refuse to debate opponents.

One such candidate is Katie Hobbs of Arizona:

Hobbs’ decision has been criticized even by Democrats. But it probably gives Hobbs her best shot, because her opponent Lake is a formidable debater who would probably win such a one-on-one exchange.

And then there’s John Fetterman, who is in a class by himself. He tried and tried to avoid debating Oz, but finally committed to one debate that is scheduled to take place next Tuesday – although early voting has already been going on in Pennsylvania:

The Oz statement said the Republican would agree to the debate under three conditions: if the moderator explained to the audience that Fetterman was using a closed-captioning system, if the practice debate did not include real debate questions and if the debate was 90 minutes instead of 60.

“If those three reasonable requests are acceptable to the Fetterman campaign, then we accept the debate invitation on October 25th” the Oz campaign said in a statement, continuing to slam Fetterman for agreeing to only one debate.

Like them or not – and I don’t like them – debates have become one of the rites of passage of political contests these days. Shying away from them with a bunch of lame excuses doesn’t ordinarily enhance a candidate’s appeal. But for some politicians, the risks of debate appear to be worse than the risks of refusing to do so.

NOTE: I’m not exactly sure where to place this tidbit of news, but I guess right here is as good a place as any:

President Biden raised eyebrows Thursday when he said that Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman’s wife would be a “great lady in the Senate” — appearing to imply that the Democrat would be unable to serve due to his poor health.

“John, thank you very much for running, I really do appreciate it,” Biden said at an event in Pittsburgh. “And Gisele, you’re going to be a great, great lady in the Senate.”

And then there’s this:

Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman has said he thinks of the 1994 classic “The Shawshank Redemption” when he’s deciding whether to vote to free criminals as head of the commonwealth’s Board of Pardons.

Fetterman, who has been hammered by his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, over his soft-on-crime approach, was asked during an interview how he determines whether a person who has committed first-degree murder deserves clemency.

Fetterman answered that it was a “very simple choice.”

“I believe the perfect metaphor is ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’” Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor said in an interview with online news outlet Semafor that was published Tuesday. That’s a touchstone that virtually everybody has seen, everybody understands.”

“I’ve asked people, ‘Would you want Morgan Freeman to die in prison or not?’ And I’ve never met anybody that says, ’Yeah, he should die in prison. I would have voted to have him die in prison,’” added Fetterman.

Wow. Just wow.

Oz’s response:

“Does Fetterman know that Shawshank Redemption is … a movie … with actors? And that this is real life — and these are brutal murders?,” Oz said on Twitter, linking to articles reacting to Fetterman’s analogy.

That these two people are even close in the polls is a depressing fact. In one recent poll, Oz is leading among Independents (51 to 44), men (54 to 41), and rural voters (60 to 41). Fetterman is leading among “Shawshank Rebellion” fans.

No, I just made that last sentence up. Actually, Fetterman is leading with women (56 to 38), college-educated voters (56 to 41), and urban (63 to 32) and suburban voters (50 to 44). Black voters support Fetterman 84 to 8, while white voters support Oz 51 to 46.

Election denial, left and right

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back, commenter “Bauxite” wondered:

I think there is something missing from leftists. Behaving the way they behave now while “forgetting” about the last three times a Republican has won the presidency destroys their creditibility and the credibility of the institutions that we all need (and that progressives especially need to achieve their objectives.)

Maybe they’ve grown so used to the media acting as the propaganda arm of the Democratic party that they are beginning to believe their own BS. How can any minimally informed person not understand that Stacey Abrahms looks like a fool when she criticizes Trump for denying election results?

I think I can answer that question. For some, it is a case of 2+2=5; that is, believing what the Party says. Republicans questioning election results means Republicans are bad, and Democrats questioning election results means it’s okay to do so because Democrats are good. But for a lot of Democrats it’s not that. For example, I can almost guarantee that the majority of my Democrat-voting friends either do not even know who Stacey Abrams is (or if they know now, they didn’t know who she was the first time she ran for governor), or do not know what she claimed about the election of 2018. It’s a detail that isn’t on their radar screens.

But if they do happen to know those details, they would claim it’s a different order of denial. It’s not a denial resting on a claim of over-inclusion – in other words, Abrams didn’t claim that too many “people” voted fraudulently, including dead people or non-existent people. That’s the sort of claim Republicans make. Instead, her denial rested on a claim of under-inclusion – that is, exclusion. And that exclusion was in turn based on a claim of systemic racism in the voting system.

So to them, the claims would not be equivalent. The principle on their banner is not that every challenge of voting results is bad. The principle is that there are noble challenges (which are challenges that claim exclusion and particularly racial exclusion) and there are base challenges (challenges that claim cheating and over-inclusion, particularly cheating on the part of people of color in big cities such as Atlanta or Philadelphia and therefore are racist challenges).

As for the claims about the presidential vote in 2016, that was a claim by Democrats that rested on Russian influence, which in turn rested on an uncharacteristic demonization of Russia, a foreign country that until that moment had elicited little anger from Democrats. After all, as Obama said, the 80s had called and wanted their foreign policy back. Nevertheless, for those who already hated Trump – which meant most Democrats – it was a convenient fiction that allowed them to call him an illegitimate president and to mount an instant Resistance.

And what was the difference between that Resistance and the January 6th supposed insurrection? I think most people on the right give insufficient emphasis to the very real although erroneous belief among Democrats that January 6th was an armed, bloody, lethal, white-supremacist insurrection that is ongoing and must be fought with every tool fair or foul. For very many Democrats, the riots in 2017 at the Trump inauguration are either quite literally forgotten, or are considered mere demonstrations of the ordinary sort. The post-Floyd riots in 2020 are either quite literally forgotten or remembered as “mostly peaceful,” and at any rate did not involve an “armed insurrection invading the Capitol” in order to stop a “duly elected” president from taking office. That last description of January 6th is the one they believe is the truth, and there is no exact parallel in the riots that came at the hands of the left.

The perception of January 6th that way is vital to the claims the left is now making. That’s why the coverage right from the start was so unified and so over-the-top: it was a lethal insurrection. And that is very widely believed to this day. If January 6th was in fact engineered by the FBI, aided by the failure to have enough security that day, as some on the right have asserted and that may be true, it was a brilliant and coordinated move that served its purpose quite well.

On longtime commenter “Cicero”

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Cicero” has experienced some recent health problems from a fall about a month ago, specifically a subdural hematoma that hasn’t resolved. A decision will be made on November 1 about brain surgery, which would follow about a week later. I’ll update you when I get further news, but I thought I’d put an announcement here to ask for prayers and good wishes from anyone who wishes to offer them.

Drug and surgical treatment of transgender-identified children is wildly unpopular…

The New Neo Posted on by

…among likely voters of both parties.

It’s a lot more unpopular among Republicans, though, as one might expect. But it’s not approved of by either group. The question in the poll was, “Do you believe underage minors should be required to wait until they are adults to use puberty blockers and undergo permanent sex change procedures?” Here’s the breakdown of responses:

Full survey: 78.7% wait, 21.3% don’t wait
Democrats: 53.2% wait, 46.8% don’t wait
Republicans: 96.8% wait, 3.2% don’t wait
No party or “Other”: 84.6% wait, 15.4% don’t wait

I’m actually kind of surprised that the opposition in that last unaffiliated or “other” group was so very high.

Another thing that surprises me are the age breakdowns (found on page 12). The age group with the highest percentage of “wait” responses is the youngest, 18-24. In that group, 92.3% responded “wait.” And yet the next age group, 25-34, had the highest “don’t wait” response wait – 37.2% – although even in that age group the majority (62.8%) said “wait.”

And yet, despite this enormous amount of opposition, the Democratic Party forges ahead with its support of the practices. I think it’s hurting them in the polls and will hurt them in the election as well.