I cannot believe it’s already August. And yet I must believe.
Because it is.
What to do with Mrs. Barrie’s earrings?
I’ve recently been trying to organize my belongings better, and believe me there’s a lot of room for improvement. I’m not a pack rat, but I think I fall into that vast middle group who save too much stuff anyway. For me, a lot of it involves papers and photos I inherited when my mother died, which happened close to a decade ago. My brother has some of it, but I have a lot too, and it’s compounded by the fact that my mother was the only child of an only child and a great deal of memorabilia came down to her and to her alone.
In addition, my family came to this country in the 1840s, and so there’s a lot available and a lot of it is pretty old. Some of them were scrapbook keepers – for example, my great-grandfather, born in New York before the Civil War. His scrapbook contains things like his wedding invitation and the last letter his father (born around 1815) wrote before death. It’s in German, but my mother had it translated. There are also photos from the early days of photography, although to my great regret some of them were not labeled back when people still knew who they were.
Label your photographs!
Gone is the Victorian mourning jewelry made of the hair of the dead, which my grandmother showed me when I was a child. I think my mother threw it away over fifty years ago when my grandmother died.
I find that I can’t bear getting rid of the bulk of the other memorabilia and photos, so my goal now is to organize them better. At the moment, they’re stashed in many boxes in a corner of a room. The other evening I spent hours going through my mother’s old but more recent photos, of us and of her grandchildren. This was easier – much of it was redundant, and I saved only a small percentage of the best. I could be ruthless about that.
So, who is Mrs. Barrie? She’s not a relative; she was my ballet teacher, who died in 1957. She was a British woman whom I remember as being tremendously strict. She used to play the piano for class herself, not even looking at it, while she fastened an eagle eye on us. Mrs. Barrie used to test us on our memory of steps by making us turn on our backs and having us each do the combination one by one, alone. If we didn’t know it ourselves, we couldn’t look at others and draw from their knowledge.
When Mrs. Barrie became ill and stopped teaching, my mother made the obligatory sickbed call to her and discovered, to her surprise, that away from the classroom she was a charming and charismatic lady and they got along famously. So from then on, about every week, my mother visited her – which was a long trip. I remember that my mother was distraught when Mrs. Barrie died, and afterwards my mother always took care to be kind to her widower. He was quite a character himself, the quintessential British actor (here he is: Leslie Barrie) of a certain era, who had anecdotes about all the great stage actors of his time.
A few years after Mrs. Barrie died, Mr. Barrie was struck by a cab crossing Madison Avenue and badly injured. He wasn’t at all rich, and he was sent to Bellevue and then released before he was ready to live on his own again. Where did he go? To our place. He stayed for a couple of months in the room next to mine, and I could hear him groaning in the morning when he got up – he was still in considerable pain. The other thing I remember most about him was that he would say to me, whenever I referred to my mother with the pronoun she, “Who’s ‘she’, the cat’s mother?” I didn’t understand his remark at all; my mother had to explain it to me.
A few years later Mr. Barrie met a younger woman, married her, and they moved back to England. But his letters – those tissue-thin Aerogrammes – would arrive regularly, written in a tiny spidery hand that packed a ton of words into each missive. As he became older, he unfortunately got dementia, and his second wife took valiant care of him till he died in his eighties.
My mother saved the letters, plus some items from his first marriage that he gave her – including photos, and jewelry that had belonged to his wife, my long-ago dance teacher. The jewelry is worth next to nothing in monetary terms, and I’m not really attached to it. But still, I find I can’t dispose of this stuff, either. At least, not yet. It seems so callous and final to throw them out.
Here are the jewelry items:
Sinema, the supposed mystery vote
There was a lot of excitement and publicity about getting Manchin onboard with the Democrats’ new tax and energy bill. But if you do the voting math, unless at least one Republican signs on, too (which certainly could happen, knowing Republicans), the Democrats would need every single Democrat to vote for it. The Senate is 50/50, and Harris can only break the tie if there is a tie in the first place. It can be passed by a simple majority in the Senate because the Democrats are using the now-familiar reconciliation route.
That means Kyrsten Sinema, the other sort-of-moderate-compared-to-the-rest Democrat. At first glance, it would seem odd that she wasn’t consulted when Schumer was ironing it out with Manchin, but apparently she wasn’t, at least according to the WSJ:
Ms. Sinema, who played a central role last year in paring back elements of President Biden’s agenda, wasn’t consulted or briefed on the secret talks between Mr. Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and learned of the agreement when it became public, according to a person familiar with the matter. When news of the deal rippled through the Senate floor Wednesday, she and other senators were blindsided by news. “What’s going on?” she asked.
Ms. Sinema is studying the legislation and may not announce her view of the bill for days. She didn’t attend Mr. Schumer’s party meeting about the deal on Thursday morning.
This wouldn’t seem to be the way to woo her vote.
Then again, most of what’s in it was already cleared with her, it seems:
The question of whether Ms. Sinema will back it could hang over Democrats for days, if not weeks. A spokeswoman said she would need to review the text and the outcome of a review with the Senate’s nonpartisan parliamentarian, a necessary step for Democrats to pass the legislation using the reconciliation process…
Ms. Sinema reshaped Democrats’ policy plans last year—before Mr. Manchin put them on ice for much of 2022—and much of the current deal reflects changes she sought.
Ms. Sinema opposed raising marginal income rates on top earners and the corporate rates, forcing Democrats to search for alternative ways to raise taxes on very high-income Americans and large corporations. Two of the solutions they arrived at, a 15% corporate minimum tax and beefing up the Internal Revenue Service’s enforcement, are now elements of the deal between Messrs. Manchin and Schumer. After nixing much of Democrats’ tax agenda, Ms. Sinema worked last fall with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) on the corporate minimum tax.
That compromise endures despite Mr. Manchin spending much of this year calling for Democrats to adopt tax increases, including raising the corporate rate and raising the top capital-gains rate, that Ms. Sinema opposed.
Ms. Sinema was also a central negotiator in the prescription-drug price proposals, squaring off with progressives over the number of drugs that should be subject to government negotiation. The proposal included in the current deal largely reflects those talks.
And while Ms. Sinema has, like Mr. Manchin, raised concerns about government spending worsening inflation, she has also been supportive of measures to fight climate change, at one point telling lobbyists that she would support a tax on carbon emissions, according to a person familiar with the remark.
So far, so good for the Democrats.
But then there’s this:
…[A] central sticking point in the current talks could be a proposal to raise taxes on a key source of private-equity managers’ income, so-called carried interest.
During a fundraiser last summer, Ms. Sinema told a group of donors and lobbyists that she would oppose raising taxes on carried-interest income, along with raising the corporate rate and top capital-gains rate.
Mr. Manchin said this week that he would insist on including the carried interest proposal, which raises roughly $14 billion in revenue over a decade, in the deal, and it is not known if he would accept a deal that drops the provision.
Aha! That might be the key to why she was excluded. At least, that’s my guess. One of the things that Manchin insists upon (supposedly) is the very thing that (supposedly) is a sticking point for her. So my hunch is that, once Manchin got publicly on board, and she was the sole holdout, the Democrats and the Democrat base would put enormous pressure on her to capitulate. And since they were giving her a great deal else that she wanted, she’d agree.
Manchin isn’t up for re-election until 2024, and at that point he’ll be 77. Will he even want to run again? He says he does, but I wonder. If not, it doesn’t matter what the people of West Virginia think of his vote. Likewise, Sinema is up for re-election that same year, but she’s a whole lot younger and almost certainly wants to run again. What’s more, according to that WSJ article:
But in public statements, she has repeatedly said that she has opposed tax increases that she thinks would harm U.S. economic growth. Business groups in Arizona, a swing state where Ms. Sinema has tried to present herself as a moderate, have also encouraged her to oppose the tax hikes.
Ms. Sinema has received roughly $2.2 million in donations since 2017 from individuals and committees in the securities and investment industries, more than from any other sector, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan campaign finance tracker.
…A political-action committee called “Primary Sinema Project” quickly blasted out a statement calling on her to support the package, saying “All eyes on Kyrsten Sinema.”
…Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) has said he is considering a primary challenge in 2024.
I think the bill will ultimately pass, after a bit of tweaking. The Democrat leaders are desperate to get what they consider a win, and they consider this bill to be a win. But I don’t see why people who weren’t already going to vote for them would like this bill. It’s not helping Americans with the many serious problems that face them right now, and in fact it could make those things considerably worse.
The Biden corruption investigation in Delaware
The Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office investigating Hunter Biden lacks the wherewithal and resources to adequately probe the dubious financial dealings of the Biden family and their business partners, according to three current or former Department of Justice officials.
“If any single one of the dozens of issues had been alleged about the Bush or Trump families, a special counsel would have been appointed immediately,” said one career official familiar with the probe. “[The Delaware office] needs help. There’s no way it can tackle everything it needs to, even if it tried.” Two other officials also expressed concern about resources available to the investigation, particularly given the political sensitivity and complexity of the underlying issues…
Sources told the Times that a grand jury continues to gather evidence “in a wide-ranging examination” of Biden’s international business dealings, with prosecutors considering charges for tax fraud, criminal foreign lobbying, and money laundering.
It’s a long article by Margot Cleveland, with a lot of information – some of it already discussed on this blog or in articles from periodicals on the right. There’s also this:
Calls for a special counsel have been percolating since April when a group of nearly 100 House Republications wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland to demand he appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. “We are concerned that in the case of Hunter Biden the Department has an actual conflict of interest and certainly has the appearance of a conflict of interest that could prevent a fair and impartial investigation of his activities,” the lawmakers wrote, adding, “You were nominated to your position by Hunter Biden’s father and ultimately work for him.”
That’s exactly why it will never happen. Garland isn’t worried about the appearance of a conflict of interest; he’s a partisan party guy and I’m pretty certain that he feels immune to any repercussions, and rightly so. The only way such a special counsel appointment might be made would be if they decide that Joe has to go. But it’s far far more likely that, if and when they decide Joe is a liability as president or as 2024 candidate, that they will threaten to appoint a special counsel in order to get him to voluntarily leave.
The Delaware investigation is in its third year – just another example of how the legal system is inadequate to deal with the problem of a corrupt executive, a party that defends and supports him, and a compliant media that protects him. In addition, I have a feeling that many (perhaps most?) Biden voters don’t care how corrupt he is. He’s doing the left’s bidding, and he’s not Trump, and that’s enough for them.
The Dutch kulaks farmers continue to protest
Once again, the Dutch farmer situation reminds me of the Soviets, who didn’t hesitate to sacrifice the kulaks for the cause. In fact, to them it was a feature, not a bug. There is something very independence-minded, as well as grounded in the realities of life rather than abstractions, about farmers, and those bent on authoritarian control don’t tend to like those qualities in their subjects. I use the word “subjects” purposely, because – as our own Founders knew – top-down control without representation is tyranny.
The revolt by the Dutch farmers is ongoing; I’ve written about it before, here. The title of of this more recent article on the subject interested me enough to cause me to click on it: “Farmer Protests in the Netherlands Show Just How Messy the Climate Transition Will Be.” “Messy” – like making an omelet. All those oozy broken eggs. Messy, but necessary, say those in power to those not in power:
“That’s what you get when you make people so very angry,” Sieta van Keimpema, secretary of the Farmers Defense Force (FDF), said July 27 as the group launched a fresh round of demonstrations.
What’s driving the dispute? Manure. The Netherlands’ intensive livestock farming system produces an unusual excess of animal feces. When mixed with urine, those feces give off ammonia and nitrous oxide. The former is a pollutant that can leak into air and water, harming local wildlife. The latter is a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in our atmosphere: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says nitrous oxide accounts for around 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
This is the rhetoric being used by the government:
The government said it was leading an “unavoidable transition” for agriculture.
Here’s the bottom line:
Trienke Elshof, a dairy farmer with 250 cows in the northern province of Friesland, says farmers feel blindsided: for decades, governments have encouraged them to increase yields. Meanwhile, other high-polluting industries, such as aviation, construction, and transport, have yet to face such severe environmental rules. “We know we have to do something about nitrogen, but not in this top-down way, and not at this speed,” she says. “It feels like they want to get rid of all the farmers in the Netherlands.”
The is the kind of seeming self-sabotage we’ve seen in so many countries lately, including ours. Government of the people, by the people, for the people? Hardly.
More:
…[F]ar-right figures and conspiracy theorists have also gotten involved. Twitter is filled with posts linking the Netherlands’ nitrogen policy to the Great Reset—a theory that claims international elites are trying to use the COVID-19 pandemic to establish an authoritarian global government.
Let me clue the folks at Time (not that they care): when you launch into that kind of language – “far-right” and “conspiracy theorist” and “claims” – it is a transparent attempt to label something false rather than demonstrate its falsity. The sad thing is that the Great Resetters have said plenty themselves that indicates they are indeed using the pandemic, plus climate change and other crises, to do just that: establish an authoritarian global government or at the very least a series of leftist national governments that are all on the same page. This isn’t some wacky hidden-conspiracy theory; this is what they’ve indicated by their own public words.
More (emphasis mine):
This may be just the beginning of much wider global unrest over agriculture. Scientists say dealing with climate change will require not just gradual reform, but a rapid, wholesale transformation of the global food system. As one of the world’s most densely farmed nations, the Netherlands is one of the first countries to grapple with how that upheaval will impact farmers—and how messy the transition will be. It won’t be the last.
Nah, no global plan there, right? And notice that gradualism will not do – this must be immediate and harsh, you kulaks! You don’t understand, but we do.
Even the Dutch farmers seem to be admitting there actually are some problems from the effects of too much manure. They’re objecting, however, to the speed of these demanded changes and the fact that they are generated completely top-down and are destructive to one of the main engines of the Dutch economy. What’s more, making The Netherlands much less self-sufficient in food production will make it more dependent on other countries for its food – can’t imagine that that will be a good thing.
It’s not just the Dutch, as we already know:
Farmers in Spain, Ireland, and New Zealand have all staged demonstrations in their capitals to challenge green reforms in the last few years. Populists in the U.S. and Europe, including France’s Marine Le Pen, are seizing on the protests to cast climate action as a conflict between rural heartlands, working people, and urban elites.
Populists seize!!!
Those “urban elites” will really love it when cities become “food deserts.”
The focus is on the farmers:
Van Maanen says farmers are being unfairly targeted: “If you come for us and our families, you come at a farmer’s soul,” he says. “We’ve proposed all kinds of solutions but we are ignored. And finally, they come up with a plan for a reduction in livestock. No other sector has reduced nitrogen in the last 30 years [as much as] we have. This is why there’s a lot of emotion and pain.”
It’s supposedly due to a court decision:
After a landmark court ruling in 2019, it needs to reduce nitrogen emissions in order to allow building projects to go-ahead in the country.
There is no choice, says Rudi Buis, spokesperson for the agriculture ministry. “Even if you stop with the policy tomorrow, the problem doesn’t go away. If you want to build a house or a road, a lawyer will say: first reduce nitrogen and then you get a licence. We have to do something. It’s not a luxury. It has to happen.”
This is why, he says, the farming sector was addressed first in parliamentary briefings which asked provincial governments to come up with detailed plans for reductions within a year.,,
The government plans, reports the Financieele Dagblad, will affect five times more farmers than is strictly necessary.
It’s to comply with EU regulations, according to this site:
Now, in a show of solidarity, German, Albanian, Italian, Spanish and Polish farmers have launched protests, in what is fast becoming an EU-wide campaign against “anti-farming” policies.
The farmers fear they could be next and that their governments will seek to impose similar climate policies to comply with EU rules, which they say would threaten their livelihoods and disrupt global food supplies.
Did the powers-that-be think these protests wouldn’t happen? I suspect that they knew they would happen and didn’t care. They are confident they can suppress the farmers and their supporters for the Greater Good.
NOTE: If you want a view on climate policy from a person I consider a very reasonable climate scientist, see Judith Curry’s essay on Plan B.
Open thread 7/30/22
What a story. He doesn’t have the gorgeous voice of his father, or the songwriting ability – but then, that would be too much to ask. I wish him well:
How the media polarized us
We’ve certainly become more polarized in recent years, and the MSM has certainly played a large role.
This article advances a theory as to why:
Throughout the twentieth century, journalism relied for its funding predominantly on advertising. In the early 2010s, as ad money fled the industry, publications sought to earn revenue through subscriptions instead of advertising. In the process, they became dependent on digital audiences—especially their most vocal representatives. The shift from advertising to digital subscriptions invalidated old standards of journalism and led to the emergence of post-journalism.
It probably had a role in worsening and reinforcing the situation. But it did not cause it. I recall the problem being quite bad much earlier in time. It predated even Watergate, but Watergate gave the media the idea that it was composed of warriors fighting for the cause of righteousness against evil, and reporting became “journalism” and attracted more people from the left who’d never served much of an apprenticeship in life prior to entering the profession – which became a “profession” as opposed to a job.
The Wiki Minitrue
Well, language changes and evolves, doesn’t it? Sometimes overnight, depending on political exigencies:
Wikipedia has suspended the edit feature on its ‘Recession’ page after users flocked to amend it to concur with President Biden’s claim that the US isn’t suffering a downturn.
The page was altered at least 47 times over a roughly 24-hour period, with an administrator locking unregistered users out until August in an effort to curb what the encyclopedia website characterizes as ‘vandalism,’ and ‘malicious’ edits.
The edit-freeze comes as numerous members of the Biden administration have tried to argue the country is not in a recession by casting doubt on the word’s definition, which commonly agreed upon to be two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
One member made repeated edits to the Wikipedia page to insist there was ‘no global consensus’ on the definition of recession, in what appears to be a bizarre attempt to push White House messaging.
It’s not the least bit “bizarre” for people on the left to push what the left is saying. It’s the White House whose message is bizarre, but we’ve grown very used to that in recent years.
As I write this post, the Wiki entry is holding firm with the traditional definition of “recession.” Good. In this case, Wiki seems to be making a valiant effort to preserve the truth. But the episode shows how determined the left is to change the language in order to change minds.
In the case of the economy, however, it’s something people know in their gut. Language and definitions become less important:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in floor remarks Thursday…”You [the Democrats] would rather redefine a recession than restore a healthy economy”…
‘This is Joe Biden’s recession. Biden can lie and deflect blame all he wants, but that will not alleviate the pain Americans feel every time they fill up their gas tanks, go grocery shopping, check their retirement savings, or balance their budgets,’ said Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in a statement.
Call it anything you want – inflation, recession, inflation plus recession, or just some little blip – people are aware of it and for most people it is bad.
It seems fitting to use Wiki to explain the “Minitrue” reference for those who never knew or who may have forgotten their Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was a Newspeak nickname for this:
The Ministry of Truth (Newspeak: Minitrue) is the ministry of propaganda. As with the other ministries in the novel, the name Ministry of Truth is a misnomer because in reality it serves the opposite: it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events. However, like the other ministries, the name is also apt because it decides what “truth” is in Oceania.
As well as administering “truth”, the ministry spreads a new language amongst the populace called Newspeak, in which, for example, “truth” is understood to mean statements like 2 + 2 = 5 when the situation warrants. In keeping with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is thus aptly named in that it creates/manufactures “truth” in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes the doctoring of historical records to show a government-approved version of events.
The left in this country has been engaged in this endeavor for quite some time, and the re-definition of “recession” is only the latest iteration.
The would-be Kavanaugh assassin wanted to kill 3
I”m referring to this:
The California man accused of plotting to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had an expansive goal to change the makeup of the Supreme Court “for decades to come,” according to a recent court filing that cites discussions the man had online.
Nicholas John Roske, 26, told unidentified internet users that his goal was to reverse the then-leaked draft decision of the since-overturned Roe v. Wade decision, according to an affidavit for a search warrant in the case, filed in Maryland federal court this week.
Killing one jurist could change the decisions of the court “for decades to come,” authorities said that Roske wrote, adding, “I am shooting for three.”
There’s an interesting grammatical ambiguity there, because I suppose Roske might have meant he is shooting for three decades rather than three justices. However, it’s pretty clear he meant three justices, as it was followed by “all of the major decisions for the past 10 years have been along party lines so if there are more liberal than conservative judges, they will have the power.” He needed to kill more than Kavanaugh to reliably achieve that.
The rhetoric of hatred and illegitimacy towards the conservative justices has escalated in recent years, and now that the conservatives often have a majority of votes on important issues such as Dobbs, the anger towards them is even more intense. Kavanaugh was purposely and falsely painted as a rapist, and plenty of people believe that he was. But for someone like Roske – and I doubt he is alone in this – the important thing isn’t any supposed background of Kavanaugh, although that helps fuel the hate. The important thing is Kavanaugh’s future presumed case opinions, and the most important thing is stopping him and replacing him with someone from the left.
Because SCOTUS justices are appointed for life, and Kavanaugh isn’t all that old, Koske’s reasoning (not his morality, but his reasoning) makes perfect sense: assassination of a conservative justice during the administration of a Democrat president and with a Democrat-controlled Senate would do the trick. If Koske is willing to risk martyrdom for that cause, he would accomplish a history-changing goal, helping to deliver the only branch of the government not presently controlled by the left into leftist hands. If he killed two or three conservative justices, then the goal would almost certainly be thoroughly and completely accomplished.
What apparently stopped him from going further with the Kavanaugh assassination was being spotted by “two U.S. Marshals who were part of 24-hour security provided to the justices following the leak of the draft opinion.” He left the scene as a result and ended up calling 911 and saying he wanted to kill himself. How far would he have gone had the marshals not been there is anybody’s guess, because he certainly sounds unbalanced. But being unbalanced hasn’t stopped killers before, and Roske certainly performed activities that meant his plans weren’t just in the mental realm but had become behavioral:
Prosecutors say Roske traveled from California to Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with the intent of killing him. Roske pulled up near the home in a taxi shortly after 1 a.m. on June 8 carrying a suitcase with a suitcase with a gun and ammunition, a tactical chest rig with pepper spray and a knife, a flashlight, a laser, a thermal monocular and other burglary tools…
As a general rule, receipt of the proceeds of a life insurance policy by the beneficiary is prohibited if that person has been the insured person’s murderer (see this). Most states even have explicit statutes prohibiting such collection of benefits, called “slayer statutes.” This makes sense because it’s understood that, for some cold-blooded people, the thought of receiving all that money acts as a potent motivator to murder.
But there are no slayer statutes for the assassination of SCOTUS justices, and someone who would like a certain party to benefit from such a slaying can be assured that, if the correct party is in power, there would be tremendous and far-reaching political rewards.
Maybe Congress should enact some version of the “slayer statute” for the murder of SCOTUS justices. Yes, I’m aware that will never happen. But until it does, the motive for assassination remains great, and therefore the danger remains great.
Open thread 7/29/22
This guy is good at what he does (I don’t mean the thumbnail guy; I mean the artist):
“They Can’t Let Him Back In”
Quite a few people have recommended this Michael Anton article. Anton was the author of the “Flight 93” piece prior to the 2016 election, which he wrote under a pseudonym at the time.
His more recent essay is about the left’s efforts to stop Trump at any cost. It happens to dovetail with the post I just published, which I had written late last night before I read Anton’s. But it’s not surprising that a lot of people are seeing similar things right now, because they are rather obvious – although Anton fleshes it out with greater scope and detail.
I think that people on the right sometimes underestimate how successful the framing of January 6th by the left has been. If a person reads sources on the right, it is easy to know a lot that undermines that “narrative” by the left. But most people don’t do all that much reading and at least half of America is unfamiliar with anything that would challenge what the January 6th show trial has been saying. From the start, shortly after January 6th, most of the people I know thought it was akin to a revolution from the right, a hyper-dangerous movement involving Trump supporters in general and needing to be crushed.
Anton’s piece has many things to recommend it, but one phrase that struck me in particular was this:
The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.
It’s not just that they think the deplorables are – well, deplorable, or that what the deplorables want is bad or wrong. It’s also because of who the members of the “regime” are: those whom Thomas Sowell has so aptly labeled the anointed. So many of his books, including ones written long ago, described the combination of self-righteous arrogance, ignorance, and condescension that they exhibit, and they’ve gotten a great deal more planful and ruthless in recent years.
Another part of Anton’s essay that struck me was this:
People I have known for 30 years, many of whom still claim the label “conservative,” will no longer speak to me—because I supported Trump, yes, but also because I disagree on trade, war, and the border. They call not just my positions, but me personally, unadulterated evil. I am not an isolated case. There are, as they say, “many such cases.”
Indeed.
Charging Trump
They’ve been trying to convict Trump of something for a long long time. So far, no dice. But the thrust of the January 6th hearings was to lay the ground for conviction of a crime later on through the court system. Failing that, the secondary goal was to discredit him so that he either will not run in 2024 or if he does he will do poorly.
It the same technique that was successful with Netanyahu in Israel in 2021, although he appears to be making a comeback because the charges were so obviously bogus when the trial played out.
This is what they’re brewing for Trump:
The move by the Justice Department to bring two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence in front of a federal grand jury is the most aggressive public step taken yet by prosecutors investigating the plots to subvert the 2020 election.
It signals that the Department’s probe has reached inside former President Donald Trump’s White House and that investigators are looking at conduct directly related to Trump’s and his closest allies’ efforts to overturn his election defeat…
The questions to Jacob and Short included a focus on the fake elector scheme and the role of Trump lawyers John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, the source said…
The House committee has described the fake electoral plot, in which Trump supporters would be fraudulently put forward as substitutes for the legitimate Biden electors, as part of the broader push to have Pence interrupt the certification of Biden’s win.
Interesting that this all is being labeled as criminal. But the left is no stranger to related devices – such as calls for Trump electors to defect to Hillary – which I wrote about in 2016, after Trump won.
And then there was the election of 1876, which you can read about here.
One of the approaches to convicting Trump has to do with what the left has labeled the “fake electors” plot by Trump and company. I had written about the event back in December of 2020, when it occurred, and there was nothing fake or secret about it. In that post, I quoted this:
While the Democratic electors in the states of Pennsylvania and Georgia are casting their votes for Joe Biden, slates of Republican electors in those states cast votes for President Trump just in case legal challenges succeed.
There’s also word that Michigan may be doing it as well. Michigan GOP Electors were prevented from getting into the state house to vote. But they can vote anywhere.
So what that means is that they are trying to ensure that ultimately they have enough votes on record.
It also offers Congress and the state legislatures an alternate slate of electors in the contested states.
Here’s how “politifact” later described (January of 2022) what happened back then:
But on the same day — Dec. 14, 2020 — something unusual happened: In several battleground states where Joe Biden had defeated President Donald Trump, representatives of the losing side decided that they, too, would gather as purported electors to sign certificates falsely attesting to a Trump win and submit them for approval by Congress.
Months later, American Oversight, a watchdog group that seeks to hold Trump accountable through public records requests, published the phony certificates calling them “part of the failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.”
This was no small caper by a few disappointed Trump loyalists.
The fake electoral certificates were signed by Republican state lawmakers and party officials in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico, states accounting for a combined 84 electoral votes. And like the violent insurrectionists who came to the Capitol on Jan. 6 with knives, bats and other weapons, the fake electors sought to overturn a democratic election through extralegal means. They did so in a coordinated effort, mostly out in the open, and through official channels.
Note how the contingency of court approval is described:
The certificates in Pennsylvania and New Mexico hedged by tweaking the language suggesting that they would be the electors if it was later determined they were the electors — for instance, through a final court order…
“It was not freelancing. It was a coordinated effort,” said Norman Eisen, who was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Donald Trump impeachment and co-authored a report for Brookings about Trump’s effort to overturn the results in Georgia. “These appear to be false documents that were submitted to the federal government. They were handed in to the National Archives as the genuine articles are supposed to be.”
And everyone knew what they were and what they were intended to be.
See this for what’s happening now:
According to the Washington Examiner, questions are being asked about what Trump said in meetings around the time, including what he may have told others to do in regards to stopping the certification of the election results. One specific line of inquiry entails the so-called “false electors” scheme members of the press have been going nuts over.
This Washington Examiner story adds:
The investigation aims to uncover what the former president told his attorneys and senior officials to do as part of their bid to change the 2020 election outcome, and there are two other paths that could lead to additional scrutiny of Trump, the sources said.
One centers on seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct a government proceeding, similar to charges levied against individuals who were arrested for storming the Capitol. Another involves charging Trump with fraud in connection to the false electors plot or his efforts to pressure the DOJ to overturn the results of the election.
At RedState, “bonchie” adds:
None of the “false electors” ever cast a vote for anything, they didn’t interfere with the election, and the original electors cast their votes for Joe Biden. If that’s what the DOJ is probing, good luck proving a “seditious conspiracy” without any actual attempt at sedition on the record. Besides, how can something be a conspiracy when the plans were public knowledge at the time?
My response is that (a) they will take the actual facts and use them to allege something more nefarious, and this effort will include threats to the former Trump associates they want testifying a certain way; and (b) if they want to charge Trump, they will do so in DC and they will get the verdict they want no matter if the charges are incredibly flimsy.
After the Flynn case (and even before that), anything is possible. The only real question is whether they will actually try to do it, or whether they will be afraid of backlash and/or think a trial is not necessary because they think they have better means to accomplish their ends.