Police seem to know who did it, but not why. Or at least, if they know why, they haven’t officially made a statement about it.
Lots of rumors are buzzing – you can read many of them here – but my money is on “a crazy person.”
It seems to be a serious attack. Why wasn’t there security, or at least effective security?
Back in 2016, I remember reading there was going to be a shift in the black vote towards Trump. It didn’t really happen. In 2020, it happened to a small degree in black men, but not enough to make a difference in the outcome.
Depressed Black turnout could destroy Democrats’ path to victory in closely-contested gubernatorial and Senate races such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Although Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden won urban areas, President Trump did better in both cycles in cities like Philadelphia.
In 2020, support for the Democratic Party reached a new low, continuing a downward trend from President Obama’s 2008 election. In 2008, Obama received 95 percent of Black men’s vote, but that slid down to 87 percent four years later. Hillary Clinton picked up 82 percent of Black men’s vote in 2016, but Joe Biden only notched 80 percent of their vote. This bleeding of Black men’s support has liberal strategists worried, and candidates are desperate.
Odd to think of 80% support as a low figure, isn’t it? But the trend is down, and any loss of the support of black voters is very threatening to the left because they have a deep dependence on this voting bloc. Patrice Onwuka, the author of that article I just quoted, mentions the states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and those are exactly the same states that were discussed in yesterday’s open thread.
First, from my post:
…Democrats also still own the black vote, although there have been some defections there. But the black vote is key to Democrat victories.
Next, from commenter “stan“:
When a sufficient critical mass of blacks realize that Dems choose to keep them on the plantation, the preference cascade will be stunning.
Next, commenter “MBunge’s” response:
Black votes tend to be concentrated in places Democrats would win anyway. Outside of Georgia, I’m not sure there’s another state where black support is that crucial for Democrat victory.
My response was that black votes are also crucial for Democrat victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and those states in turn have been crucial for Democrats to win presidential elections.
For example, Biden won in Michigan in 2020 by about 54,000 votes statewide. Detroit is 77% black (this site says 79%), and there were approximately 250K votes cast in Detroit. Do the math – the black vote appears to have made the difference, and a shift of about 25% more black people voting Republican, for example, would have changed the result.
The situation is similar for Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, although the proportions are different. Biden won by about 80,500 votes in the entire state. In Philadelphia, Biden got 81% of the total, or 604,175 votes for Biden. Philadelphia is 41% black. So black people accounted for about 248K (or more, if the percentage of blacks voting for Biden was higher than 81%) votes in Philadelphia. Again, a rather modest shift towards the GOP would have put the state in Trump’s camp.
Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,700 votes. Milwaukee is about 39% black. Biden won by 146,000 votes in Milwaukee, about 80% of the total cast there. Again, it seems pretty clear that a rather moderate shift in black voting patterns towards the GOP could easily have flipped Wisconsin into the Trump column.
And then of course there’s the changing Hispanic vote, which has been discussed on this blog in several posts (for example, this one).
For decades, the Democrats have been abandoning their earlier pitch to working-class Americans of all ethnicities and races, and gone for racial identity politics. It worked for them quite well in many districts and many election cycles, as well as many presidential races. But it finally – finally – may be coming back to bite them. Identity politics depends on division as well as actually performing in such a way that the various groups can see an advantage in voting for the Party. More and more black voters seem to be recognizing that this administration in particular has not helped them but has actually harmed them.
I’ve written many times that a mind is a difficult thing to change, and that remains true. People generally are very reluctant to abandon previous political beliefs and affiliations, particularly when those beliefs are bound up with their very identities – which they often are. It can feel like a betrayal and a huge dislocation. But the more people cross that line, the more acceptable it becomes to do so. That could spell big trouble for the left.
Musk has given several Twitter executives the boot:
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has fired several top Twitter executives after officially taking control of the company Thursday evening.
A source with knowledge of the matter told FOX Business that Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust, and safety were fired. Musk had accused the three of misleading him and investors over the number of fake accounts on the platform.
I guess they were giving him disinformation.
No doubt they’re very upset at his acquisition and their firing, and I don’t think it’s just because they lost their jobs. They will be hired by someone else and continue to make a lot of money, I can almost guarantee.
I think it’s because they lost these jobs. What enormous power they wielded, at such a crucial time!
An article from Politico from last April:
Shortly after billionaire Elon Musk bought the powerful social media platform, top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde called a virtual meeting with the policy and legal teams she oversees to discuss what the new ownership could mean for them.
Gadde cried during the meeting as she expressed concerns about how the company could change, according to three people familiar with the meeting. She acknowledged that there are significant uncertainties about what the company will look like under Musk’s leadership…
Gadde herself has advocated strongly for ensuring that Twitter’s policies protect its most vulnerable users while protecting free expression — a position that is at odds with Musk’s.
Protecting free expression? Excuse me?
The article also mentions Gadde’s decision to throttle the Hunter Biden story, without also noting for the reader that the story was true and would have hurt Biden in the 2020 the election. Instead, it uses a version of the “Republicans pounce” angle.
From Gadde’s Wiki page (she is 48 years old, by the way):
She is known for her involvement in decisions and policies taken by Twitter, such as the approach taken to issues such as harassment and harmful speech, and controversial decisions made by Twitter, such as suspending the New York Post for a story on Hunter Biden before the 2020 election, and preventing users from sharing the story in private messages…
In 2014, she was described by Fortune as the most powerful woman on Twitter’s executive team, though she was later joined by Chief Marketing Officer Leslie Berland. In October 2020, Politico profiled her as “the most powerful technology executive you’ve never heard of”.
Well, I’ve heard of her now.
2020 must have been a very exciting and rewarding time for her:
She was one of the key officials at Twitter involved in decisions to suspend the account of former American President Donald Trump.
Gadde earned nearly $17 million in 2021 as Twitter’s chief legal officer, and earned roughly $7.3 million in 2020.
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens to Twitter now. Some people are tentatively trying out the new regime and the supposedly new rules; for example:
First full day of Elon's Twitter. Testing… Testing…
The vaccines don't stop you from catching COVID.
Men cannot have babies.
If you have to show your ID to get on a plane you should show it to vote.
Joe Biden has obvious cognitive issues.
(hits "Tweet" and holds breath)— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) October 28, 2022
Biden: "The most common price of gas in America is $3.39, down from over $5 when I took office."
The price of gas was $2.33 when Joe Biden took office. pic.twitter.com/3MD4qighrA
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 27, 2022
He knows that most of the MSM are only too happy to enter that fantasy world with him.
Here are some of the actual facts about gas prices. When just now I searched for “Biden says gas was $5 when he took office,” none of the regular MSM was covering it – fancy that! Fox was, the Daily Mail was, and (surprisingly) Snopes was. Snopes didn’t pull its punches, either:
Biden provided two inaccurate figures in the same breath, one about the gas prices when he took office and another regarding costs during the week he spoke in Syracuse.
He gives you his word as a Biden.
I hope the US follows suit. But here’s the new British position, which is a step in the right direction:
The United Kingdom’s National Health Service now says that most children claiming to be transgender may be going through a “transient phase.”
The NHS plans to begin restricting gender-affirming treatment of minors who claim to be transgender, according to a report in The Telegraph.
Restrictions will be placed on puberty blockers, and medical doctors — not therapists — will be expected to lead the provision of transgender services.
I’m not sure why doctors taking the lead would matter. Both therapists and doctors have become predominantly supportive of children’s medical transition these days, as far as I can tell. Or at least it has become very easy to find such doctors and such therapists.
As far as social – not medical – transition goes, there’s this:
The provided NHS plans go on to state that social transitioning — the changing of one’s name and appearance to be in line with self-perception — should only be considered when the young person is experiencing “clinically significant distress.”
Additionally, the child must be able “to fully comprehend the implications of affirming a social transition.”
No child is able to “fully comprehend” such a thing. I don’t think most children even partly comprehend it. For that matter, do adults? But adults are responsible for their own decisions and can give consent. Children are not and cannot.
Also, virtually all of these children are experiencing “clinically significant distress.” That distress is interpreted by the child as a need for transition. But it often masks distress emanating from other things such as fear of puberty, social contagion, abuse, loneliness, placement on the autism spectrum, family dysfunction, and generalized depression and/or anxiety. It used to be the job of therapists to sort this out, but that has been discouraged and self-diagnosis by children has been encouraged in recent years, and doctors and therapists have been instructed to affirm that self-diagnosis by the child.
(1) Victor Davis Hanson on the party switch:
In sum, the party of old left-wing progressives has become one of rich regressives. And once country-club Republicans are becoming a party of middle-class populists. And the election will reflect both those changes.
However, Democrats also still own the black vote, although there have been some defections there. But the black vote is key to Democrat victories.
(2) Elon Musk gets ready to take over, and Twitter employees issue demands in a letter which sounds like a parody but apparently is not:
We, the undersigned Twitter workers, believe the public conversation is in jeopardy. Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation. A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation.”
The letter also stated that Musk’s proposals, including laying off employees, “threaten our livelihoods, access to essential healthcare, and the ability for visa holders to stay in the country they work in.”
Someone please tell these people that they’re not in college anymore.
Also, that they work for a company, not the other way around.
(3) Meanwhile, Musk counters with this:
In a tweet, Mr Musk said he didn’t buy the firm “to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love”.
(4) Biden thinks black people need extra room on airplanes. Or something like that.
(5) Russia conducts large nuclear strike drill, claimed to be defensive.
Best of luck, Rishi. You’ve got your work cut out for you:
Sunak gave an address to Tory MPs, during which he ruled out calling an early general election – despite calls from opposition parties.
He later made a televised statement at Tory HQ, warning that the country faced a “profound economic challenge.”
He’s not kidding. Every Western nation – and many others as well – face such a challenge right now and for the foreseeable future.
The article says he’s the first “Asian” British PM – the Brits use the word to include people of Indian and Pakistani ethnicity, although we don’t use it that way in the US. He’s also one of the youngest: 42.
Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 at Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire, to parents of Indian descent who migrated to Britain from East Africa in the 1960s. He was educated at Winchester College, studied philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Lincoln College, Oxford, and earned an MBA from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar. While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy. Sunak and his wife were the 222nd richest people in Britain, with a combined fortune of £730 million as of 2022. After graduating, Sunak worked for Goldman Sachs and later as a partner at the hedge fund firms The Children’s Investment Fund Management and Theleme Partners.
Sunak was elected to the House of Commons for Richmond in North Yorkshire at the 2015 general election, succeeding William Hague. Sunak supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on EU membership. He was appointed to Theresa May’s second government as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Local Government in the 2018 reshuffle. He voted three times in favour of May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement. After May resigned, Sunak supported Boris Johnson’s campaign to become Conservative leader. After Johnson became Prime Minister, Sunak was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Sunak replaced Sajid Javid as Chancellor of the Exchequer after Javid’s resignation in the February 2020 cabinet reshuffle. As Chancellor, Sunak was prominent in the government’s financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact, including the Coronavirus Job Retention and Eat Out to Help Out schemes. He resigned as chancellor in July 2022, followed by Johnson’s resignation amid a government crisis. Sunak stood in the Conservative party leadership election to replace Johnson, and lost the members’ vote to Liz Truss.
This exchange indicates that Sunak is a very sharp guy, at least in argument.
That question interests me as part of my general interest in the phenomenon of political mind-changing.
Commenter “Brian E” agreed with the following Althouse quote:
Will anyone switch their vote from Fetterman to Oz because Fetterman struggled to speak in the debate last night?
I think not. What’s overwhelmingly important is which party gets the majority in the Senate, and every single Senate race could be the one that shifts the power one way or the other. All Fetterman needed to do was not seem dangerously incompetent, and he crossed that low bar. The rest is chitter-chatter. Good night!
Well, my chitter-chatter consists of disagreeing with what Althouse wrote – although I’m not sure she literally meant that no one would change his or her vote as a result of the debate. Of course some people will switch their votes. There are plenty of Independents who aren’t really affiliated with one party or other, and/or are low information voters who simply didn’t realize how handicapped Fetterman is but who saw it during the debate.
No loyal Democrat will switch, of course. They realize that a Fetterman victory could help the Democrats retain the Senate. The real question is whether there are enough Independents who will switch, enough to make a difference in the outcome. That is unknown, and it really depends on how close the race is at the moment.
The other huge question is, of course, whether the Democrats will be able to pull a significant enough amount of fraud to overcome any margin Oz might gain. It is highly important for them to win this race and I believe they will pull out all the stops to do so.
Here’s a post I just noticed on reactions to the debate. It quotes one vote-changer who fits the profile of the sort of Independent I’m referring to:
Independent Pennsylvania voter: Before the debate “I was definitely leaning towards Fetterman, and I think I have totally changed to the Oz side.” pic.twitter.com/rgkMJSlyzP
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 26, 2022
Where there’s one, there are more. But how many more?
And, as Jeff Goldstein writes:
In fact, Fetterman, like Biden before him, is useful precisely because he’s a mere vessel for an agenda, something that those with the capacity for independent and coherent thought — along with what remains of free will — can often problematize.
(1) For voters who voted early – and there are plenty of them – the debate will have no effect. That’s one of the reasons I detest widespread early voting; things come out or get clearer as time goes on, and Election Day should be the same for everyone except a few who need to cast absentee ballots.
(2) I have little doubt that many many Democrats literally do not care whether Fetterman is competent or not. The only thing that matters is whether he’s able to say “yeah” or “nay” as the party dictates. He also can be replaced, and the gubernatorial Democratic candidate Shapiro is significantly ahead in the polls, and therefore probably would get to name Fetterman’s replacement, who would therefore be a Democrat. So voting for Fetterman makes perfect sense if a person’s goal is to try to preserve the Democrat majority in the Senate.
(3) Is Fetterman being exploited, and if so by whom? Despite Fetterman’s obvious cognitive difficulties, I believe he is fully capable of making a decision about running or not running. Therefore I believe it is his decision, and no one is exploiting him in that sense. The people who are helping him prepare for a debate, and promoting him in other ways, are operating under either the hopeful idea that he’ll recover physically and mentally (I think that’s a minority view) or under the more cynical but practical point of view outlined in #2.
(4) Note this exchange:
When asked about his prior opposition to fracking and outright calls to ban it, Fetterman became a deer in the headlights.
“I do want to clarify something,” said the debate moderator directing her question at Fetterman. “You’re saying tonight that you support fracking, that you’ve always supported fracking, but there is that 2018 interview that you said, ‘I don’t support fracking at all,’ so how do you square the two?”
Silence took over the studio as Fetterman froze.
“I do support fracking,” Fetterman said. “I don’t, I don’t, I support fracking and I stand and I do support fracking.”
But if not for the moderator’s question, I submit that this moment would not have occurred. In most debates I’ve seen, the Democratic candidates aren’t called on their lies or errors by the moderators. As an example of what I’m talking about, I bring you none other than Joe Biden, circa 2008, in his debate with Sarah Palin:
Then there was what might have been the biggest head-scratcher of the night. Said Biden of the Bush administration’s supposed Middle East follies:
“When . . . along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”
Huh?
Assuming that Biden was referring to when, in 2005, American and French pressure helped the Lebanese people kick Syrian troops out of Lebanon, who ever thought NATO occupation of that deeply divided country was a good idea?
That linked NY Post editorial lists many other such moments in that debate, an encounter that occurred 15 years ago, before Biden had entered his present decline. Except for a brief detour as a result of his 1987 plagiarism, he’s gotten away with that sort of thing his whole life – as I noted yesterday.
(5) And speaking of Biden, his cognitive disabilities – and the excuses and coverup attempts for it – paved the way for something similar with Fetterman.
(6) In last night’s debate thread, there was a discussion about voting third party. I’m going to repeat the gist of one of my several comments there, which is this: a voter has a right to vote third-party or any other way that voter chooses to vote. But don’t confuse having a right to do something with whether that “something ” is a good idea or a terrible terrible one. Voting third party this year – especially in any close contest – is a terrible terrible one. For people who call themselves “conservative” or “Republican,” it is in my opinion an act of dangerous self-indulgent virtue-signaling that helps the Democrats win. It doesn’t “send a message” to anyone; all it does is act as a spoiler. Those who think otherwise live in a dreamworld. But elections and their consequences occur in the real world.