Is anyone surprised that this is going on? I’m certainly not, and I bet you’re not either.
The dead are receiving ballots – sometimes, the long-dead. Many people are getting duplicate ballots. Some ballots are being thrown out. And there’s probably plenty more, including of course the possibilities for fraud inherent in ballot harvesting.
It’s not just California that’s suspect, but California has one of the most easily corruptible voting situations, and I believe that is by design.
And to those who say “it should have been fixed before this,” my question is “how?”. After all, California is totally run by Democrats, and the Republicans have no power. In addition, if the game is rigged against them and voter fraud on the part of Democrats is a significant factor in local politics, the right would have to win in an overwhelming landslide in order to change things.
Is that the future of the US?
NOTE: I’ve been trying to determine whether SCOTUS has ever ruled on ballot harvesting. Apparently not, at least I couldn’t find anything in a quick search except this pending case that will be heard after the election. And the case involves Arizona, not California. What’s more, the case involves a challenge to some restrictions on Arizona ballot harvesting – that only a relative or caregiver can return such a ballot – and an effort to loosen the rules rather than tighten them.
The reporter is to be commended for asking the question, which is a bit difficult to answer but features a poll that has been widely talked about lately. Biden should have had a prepared answer for it.
An acceptable answer might have gone something like this: “Well, that was just one poll, and other polls say the American people prefer me quite strongly. So I must be doing something right.”
Instead, Biden bizarrely says that the 56% of people who think they’re better off today than they were four years ago shouldn’t vote for him. I wonder whether that means he simply doesn’t care what 56% of the people think, because he knows voter fraud will carry him over the finish line. Or maybe he just gets angry when anything or anyone challenges him, and saying this group shouldn’t vote for him is a statement he feels comes off as lovably feisty.
And what he actually says is even more troubling that that: he adds that, if fifty-four percent of the people say they are better off now than four years ago, “Well, their memory’s not very good.” So, immediately prior to challenging the accuracy of memory of a vast swath of the American public – the ones who aren’t smart enough to vote for Joe – Biden makes an error about the figure the reporter has just given him, because that figure was 56% rather than 54%. And he not only says they don’t have to vote for him, he says they don’t correctly perceive or remember the facts of their own lives. He, Joe Biden, knows better and remembers better.
It’s one thing to forget a specific number after some passage of time. But to forget it nearly immediately is evidence of a higher degree of cognitive disruption. I doubt he misheard the number, either, because “six” sounds nothing like “four.”
Then Biden pivots to what he knows best, a trashing of Trump, which is pretty much the tactic of his entire campaign. It’s his happy place. And one of the things Biden says – that Trump is not very honest with people – is especially ironic coming from one of the biggest and most long-term liars in American politics.
Of course they do – because they believe (correctly IMHO) that they can get away with it. They do it in unison, even though it’s a preposterous notion to use the phrase in this novel way – to mean appointing someone to the Court to make a conservative majority, and yet to keep the number of justices at nine.
Meanwhile, they themselves strongly contemplate a future in which they will actively court-pack in the sense that the phrase has always been used:
One of the reasons why trying to discuss things with Democrats is a frustrating waste of time is their penchant for redefining key words and concepts on the fly to fit whatever item on their agenda they’re pushing that day. So, in this case, ‘court packing’ is a bad thing, therefore a Republican president using his constitution-granted authority to appoint judges with the advice and consent of the Senate is ‘court packing’. In fact, pretty much anything the GOP does to put originalist judges on the bench is ‘court packing.’ And so the phrase, completely torn away from its historical context, is now just another flaccid pejorative used by crybaby Democrats who are unhappy about getting their asses handed to them over and over again. For example here’s sob sister Dick Durbin:
“…the American people have watched the Republicans packing the court over the last three and a half years. And they brag about it. They?ve taken every vacancy and filled it.”
Imagine that! The gall of these Republicans, filling vacancies. In other words, packing the Court is now nominating judges to fill vacancies, if the judges aren’t of the leftist persuasion. Apparently, leftism is the natural and correct state of SCOTUS, and anything different is a violation.
A rhetorical approach like this can succeed only if two things are present: a dumbed-down electorate too ignorant to understand the principles involved, and a unitary MSM that doesn’t include a sizeable enough and vocal enough segment of journalists who are not onboard and who will challenge the prevailing agree-on message. The right can rant all it wants in our hermetically sealed echo chamber, but will anyone who isn’t already on the right hear it?
What conservatives miss in this question of why do Democrats accept lies and ignore the debunkings is that Democrats realize, likely unconsciously, that their place in the circle is being jeopardized. It’s a tiny threat to their survival and they know better than to do that.
This is what raises the #walkaway videos to acts of courage. I guarantee each walkaway person is going to suffer socially.
I think that huxley is correct. But I’ll add that it’s not only a threat to their social survival. It’s also a threat to a deep marker of self-identity. The question “Who am I?” is one we all answer in an ongoing manner, and political leaning is a big part of that. So while the threat that the person perceives can indeed be social, it also involves the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance of having an internal belief system threatened.
I think that, for most (not all) people on left or right, the first reaction to such a threat is to entrench by coming up with reasons that the evidence contradicting a previous point of view is wrong, or to just shrug off that evidence in some way. In the WalkAway video by Georgia that I posted a while back, she describes that process very well several times in her video. Here’s one of those times (this and the other clips in this post are very very short, although her entire video is rather long):
It’s understandable. People are busy, and there’s a lot of confusing information coming at them. How to evaluate what to pay closer attention to, and what to dismiss? Authenticating information isn’t easy, and it takes time. And of course, the more deeply committed a person is to a side or a cause, the more it usually takes to change the person’s mind, and for many even an avalanche of convincing information will never do it.
This rejection of evidence is not exclusive to the left. But I have noticed it is especially common on the left compared to the right, at least among people I know.
At some point – but only for some people – there’s a critical moment where the doubt can no longer be overcome by rationalizations or just not thinking about it. As Georgia says later:
She makes several statements there that are especially important, I think, and one of them – “If I was wrong about that, what else was I wrong about? – is especially central. I’ve seen people say that in many WalkAway videos, and it’s something I experienced myself as part of my change experience. I maintain that it is the turning point (as Georgia also seems to be saying in her video): the moment of pivot when the entire edifice of belief begins to be questioned in a deep and meaningful way, and the person becomes committed to pursuing the truth wherever it may take him or her.
Not everyone will do that. It takes curiosity and – as Georgia also indicates – a certain amount of humility that means the person is able to entertain the notion of having been wrong about something very important, and wrong for a long time. Georgia also mentions that to do this she had to get some distance from feelings and emotions which had been a partial driver of her political opinions.
A commitment to finding out the truth as best as one can is by no means a universal need. But for some people it becomes a deep one. In this portion of the video, Georgia describes two things – the loss of the sense of social belonging to the Democratic group (you might say she perceives herself as being outside the circle dance already, and she can’t pretend anymore), and the sense of needing truth as much as she needs oxygen:
The social intersects with the sense of personal integrity, and everyone has a different need for each and makes a different decision – sometimes unconsciously. For me, I made the transition alone, in a time when I was socially isolated. I was naive, and had no idea people would ostracize me or get so angry at me – which shows you how long ago this happened to me. By the time I realized I had committed a grave social transgression, it was too late and there was no turning back. Not that I would have, anyway, had I known what was in store.
NOTE: I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea to send the Georgia video to people you know who are not completely rabid leftists, especially younger people, and see how they react. Here’s the URL. The cuts are somewhat distracting, but I think she may have edited out meanderings or pauses, or stopped periodically to collect her thoughts. She certainly doesn’t appear to be reading a prepared statement, and she seems to be very sincere.
Barrett seems like a remarkable person, a worthy candidate for the Court. Of course, if the Democrats manage to get the big victories they are predicting, they are likely to set about destroying the Court because the right had finally achieved a majority of SCOTUS judges, and the voice of Barrett would be drowned out by those of the new leftist judges joined with the old leftist judges.
Recently I was watching a video of WalkAway founder Brandon Straka being interviewed by TimPool and telling the story of why he left the Democratic Party. It’s a good video, with the hallmark political changer experience of an “aha!” moment in which the person previously on the left realizes that much of what he has come to believe via the MSM is based on a lie, and then a series of lies, and that moment sparks a sequence of realizations that leads to a political change.
You can watch the whole thing at YouTube if you like. But I’ve cued it up here to show the particular segment I’m talking about:
Do you remember when the press said Trump was mocking the reporter’s disability? Here’s a clip and commentary from CNN, posted on YouTube five years ago. It has over 8 million views and is still going strong. You can see very recent comments there made by people outraged – just as Brandon Straka was way back when – that Trump would be such a low human being as to mock a reporter’s disability, and that anyone would have voted for him in spite of that.
So the story had a dual purpose: turning people off from Trump and making them not just dislike his policies but despise him as a person, and causing them to detest Trump’s followers as well. The video has never been taken down or corrected, either by CNN (which undoubtedly knows better because their claim was debunked quite quickly) or by YouTube:
And yet, as Straka says, Trump was not making fun of the reporter’s disability at all. He was using a mocking gesture he’s used many times (and for years) to indicate a person who is flailing around in terms of an answer, either lying or pretending not to know or just acting confused:
Notice also that although the original video has over eight million views and almost twenty thousand comments, the video correcting it has a relatively small view count (the same is true of other videos making the same point). The lie gets many times around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on. And this is a lie that has mattered to voters.
But as Brandon Straka discovered, it’s not just about this lie. Nearly every day something about Trump is blatantly lied about, or covered up, or distorted by the media. Sometimes it’s done the way it’s done in this instance. Sometimes it’s done by simply not covering an important story that would make Trump look good or make his opponents look bad. Sometimes it features a misleading and truncated quote, sometimes just an exaggeration, and there are other techniques used as well. The coverage isn’t just occasionally deceptive; it’s a relentless barrage of it pervading the entire MSM except for the small enclaves of conservatism – and even they are not exempt.
Fox News used to be one of those enclaves, but these days it’s been joining with the rest more often. That leaves us some talk shows, some YouTubers, bloggers, and The Federalist, parts of National Review, and a few other online outlets. The imbalance is profound, and social media acts as an amplifier.
But I wonder how many people would see these videos and, like Brandon Straka, ask themselves, “What else was I wrong about? How else have I been lied to, and how often?” And then how many would start digging into it and find out that the answers are, “A lot, and often, and it matters.” Many of the people giving WalkAway testimonials on YouTube have a similar story to Straka’s, as do I, although mine happened many years ago.
But I think such people are somewhat uncommon. At any rate, not enough people – not nearly enough people – change their minds even when confronted by evidence, or get curious about what other evidence they might be ignoring. Too many never even see the evidence in the first place. Too many who do see the evidence don’t seem to care and would never watch three times as Straka did and then again the next day, deeply disturbed. As Winston Churchill said: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
[NOTE: I’d be curious – if you were to send a link to this post to some Democrat friends who hate Trump, whether they’d read it and if so, how they’d react. Would it cause them to rethink at all?]
One of the hallmarks of today’s Democratic Party is contempt for the American public – even its own supporters. They are children who must be taken care of, manipulated, and if need be deceived, in order to get them in line to vote for their Democratic leaders and betters.
Such as Joe Biden. Need I say more?
Republican voters are beyond the pale, deplorables beneath contempt. But Democratic voters aren’t much better and don’t deserve to know much of anything – certainly not the truth, whatever it might be.
“Well sir, don’t the voters deserve to know—“
“No, they don’t deserve” to know.
So not only is the Left not answering whether they will pack the courts, their standard-bearer thinks you *don’t deserve* to know whether they will. pic.twitter.com/cEj0dV5p6I
So not only does he answer “No, they don’t,” when asked if Americans deserve to know his viewpoint on Court-packing, but he doesn’t even explain why they don’t deserve to know. He says it’s only Republicans who want to know – which at least gives them credit for some thought, as opposed to his Democratic voters, who don’t know and don’t care and who are just sheep. Then he immediately deflects to an attack on Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, and relies on a whopper of a lie, a lie so huge it’s almost stunning in its audacity – that making a SCOTUS pick “in the middle of an election” has never been done before – that it’s “the first time in history” it’s happened.
Astonishing. Not only did Barack Obama try to do the same thing with Merrick Garland, whom he nominated in Match of 2016, but both Obama and Trump have every right to do so. It was the Senate controlled by Republicans that made a different decision in each case as to whether to take up the vote – which, by the way, is the Senate’s right to decide.
Twenty-nine times in American history there has been an open Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, or in a lame-duck session before the next presidential inauguration. (This counts vacancies created by new seats on the Court, but not vacancies for which there was a nomination already pending when the year began, such as happened in 1835–36 and 1987–88.) The president made a nomination in all twenty-nine cases. George Washington did it three times. John Adams did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ulysses S. Grant did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. Barack Obama, of course, did it. Twenty-two of the 44 men to hold the office faced this situation, and all twenty-two made the decision to send up a nomination, whether or not they had the votes in the Senate.
Say it isn’t so, Joe. When the media has your back, you can say anything.
The relative quietness on the southern border – both because of Trump’s policies, and then the effects of COVID as well – has made it almost a non-issue in 2020. And that’s too bad for Trump, in a way, because the energy of that battle was a great part of what propelled him to victory in 2016.
…[N]now House Democrats are toying with attempting to invoke the 25th amendment to remove Trump from office since he tested positive for COVID-19. Or so they say.
Trump’s response:
Crazy Nancy Pelosi is looking at the 25th Amendment in order to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris. The Dems want that to happen fast because Sleepy Joe is out of it!!!
We’ve been seeing some demonstrations lately from groups who don’t usually go that route. First, Chasidic Jews, and now Colorado nursing home residents:
Waving signs that read such things as “I’d rather die of COVID than loneliness,” and “We are prisoners in our home,” residents of one nursing facility staged their own anti-lockdown protest along one of the busiest streets in Greeley, directly across the street from the city’s largest and longest operating hospital.
“Freedom, freedom, freedom,” one lady chanted while waving a sign that read “we want our families back.”
The protest against the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) and Gov. Jared Polis’ mandates that do not allow nursing home residents to see their loved ones, was thought up, organized and carried out by the residents, with oversight from their nurses and other staff members, said the Assistant Administrator of Fairacres Manor Ben Gonzales.
Good for them.
I have long felt that this is one of the cruelest of the many cruel “protective” measures set by certain states in response to COVID. The first month or two of the pandemic, I could see why it was done. But once we learned more about the disease, and as time went on and the effects of prolonged isolation of the elderly and ill would become more serious, it has become more and more important to allow visits. Surely some sort of distancing and hand-washing and all the rest can be instituted without too many ill effects?
I don’t say it’s not a problem, because the nursing home population is especially at risk. But if someone is saying “I’d rather die of COVID than loneliness,” shouldn’t their wishes matter? The problem is that they live in a group facility with other people who perhaps would rather die of loneliness than COVID, and visitors increase everyone’s risk of COVID at least somewhat.
This hateful disease has had so many terrible repercussions. One of them appears to have been the strengthening of the hand of the left against liberty. I hope we can escape that grip.
“Forever Young” sure has a different meaning in my fifties than when I was nineteen. Still love that song.
May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young…
That’s one of the great things about any sort of art – popular or classical, highbrow or low. We can keep revisiting it and find something fresh every time. They say you never step into the same river twice, and that’s true of all artistic experiences. It’s also true of performers, who bring something different to the very same song as they age.
The son for whom Dylan wrote the song was born in 1966, which would make him around 54 years old now. Not forever young, I guess, because that’s not possible, as we all know. And yet the wish is there.
The following poem on a similar theme gives me the chills every time I read it. And by “chills” I don’t mean chills of fear or revulsion. I mean a mixture of feelings that includes enormous admiration for the craft involved, delight at the unusual images, appreciation for the poet’s economy of words, awe at the depth of his love that is imagined beyond the grave – and a sense of dread at the meaning of that final couplet.
My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy’s mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.
