Fire and ice: on the enthusiasm gap

The New Neo Posted on by

Many years ago I decided that rally attendance and voter enthusiasm don’t mean a whole lot when elections come around. It’s not that they mean nothing; they just don’t tell much of the tale.

There is no doubt in my mind that Trump has a ton of voters and that many of them are wildly enthusiastic rally-goers and voted for him with extreme intensity of purpose. If that was enough, he would have won in a landslide, and fraud couldn’t have kept up with it.

There’s also no question in my mind that Biden has almost no supporters at all, and that a great many of those who voted for him did so with ether relative distaste or indifference. His “rallies” were marked by nearly zero attendance. That was not just a reflection of the lack of enthusiasm that undoubtedly existed, it was also a PR move that was meant to convey the message that Biden was the COVID-respectful candidate in contrast to the reckless COVID-defiant Trump and his crew. By using COVID as an excuse for not even trying to gather any sort of crowd, the Biden campaign also was able to avoid any meaningful “mine is bigger than yours” crowd comparisons from Trump.

Biden’s campaign was counting on something entirely different from enthusiasm for candidate Biden himself to bring his voters to the polls: the strength of their hatred for Trump. The media and the Democrats had spent four long years drumming up hatred of the president, and I can attest to the fact that every Democrat I know (and I know a lot of them) has been fully on board with that hatred ever since Trump announced his candidacy long ago.

I’ve never seen anything like it. And in all the political discussions among Democrat friends that I was privy to during the last year or so, I never heard a single one of those people say a single good thing about Joe Biden. Or really, say anything at all about him. They simply did not care about Biden. He was a means to an end, and the end was getting rid of Trump. Beyond that, he didn’t matter, because the Democrats would be in charge and that was just fine, because Democrats are good and Republicans are bad.

So there was plenty of enthusiasm on the Biden side, as well as the Trump side. But it was the enthusiastic drive produced by hatred.


Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

I’ve ignored voter fraud for the purposes of this post. I think it happened and I think it was a factor and perhaps even a determinative factor. But I also think that, without Trump-hatred, Joe Biden would have garnered a far smaller percentage of the votes. In order for fraud to be successful this year, the actual vote for each candidate had to be within striking distance of each other, particularly in swing states. That was only possible because of the driving force of hatred of Trump.

There’s also the question of whether a different, less abrasive candidate could have fostered less hatred and therefore won. Theoretically, I suppose, and yet that same candidate could not have fostered the same enthusiasm on the right and almost certainly would not have accomplished as much as Trump did as president. His bold moves – including some of his foreign policy initiatives – were made possible by some of the same bold character traits that caused so many people to hate him (with a huge assist from the Trump-hatred of media and social media, of course).

During the 2012 campaign, media showed its creative flair by making Democrats hate the mild-mannered Romney, who kept dogs in cages and women in binders, the brute! When I saw friends of mine curl their lips at Romney’s misogynistic cruelty, I saw the power of the MSM to lead people to believe just what they wanted them to believe, about nearly anyone. Trump may have given them a lot to work with in that regard, but the propagandists don’t need very much to drum up the Two Minutes Hate. They’ll work with whatever they have, and if it doesn’t obviously present itself then they’ll make it up.

They are compiling their lists of Trump supporters

The New Neo Posted on by

They’ve been calling for this for a while, and would be doing it even if Biden had lost.

Or maybe especially if Biden had lost (I realize it’s not over till it’s over, but…):

“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future,” the US representative [AOC] tweeted Friday afternoon.

“Yes, we are,” answered former Obama administration staffer Michael Simon, citing the Trump Accountability Project. “Every Administration staffer, campaign staffer, bundler, lawyer who represented them — everyone.”

On the website’s landing page, it urges urges that “[w]e must never forget those who helped further the Trump agenda,” adding that “the world should never forget those who, when faced with a decision, chose to put their money, their time, and their reputations behind separating children from their families, encouraging racism and anti-Semitism, and negligently causing the unnecessary loss of life and economic devastation from our country’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Note that Twitter seems to have no problem whatsoever with what AOC is calling for.

About that mandate

The New Neo Posted on by

Joe Biden says he’s got a mandate to do what the left wants to do on climate change and systemic racism:

Before the results are even in Nancy Pelosi was screeching at the warring factions of her own caucus that “we have a mandate!”, and on Friday, Joe Biden declared that he has a mandate to “act” on a leftist agenda he largely hid from American voters.

Remember, Biden didn’t run on a leftist agenda, and when he did mention it—his promise to eliminate fossil fuels, his team scrambled to walk it back. He flat out denied that he supports the Green New Deal, despite it featuring prominently on his campaign website as “build back better.” So we can safely knock those two issues off his imaginary mandate.

The word “mandate” used to mean something quite different. But now – particularly when used by the left – it means “power” as in “I have the power to do it because I’m in charge now.” Doesn’t matter how many people support it. It just matters whether you can do it. And in recent years, controlling both houses of Congress isn’t necessary nor is compromise necessary, although it’s nice if possible. All that’s needed is that phone and that pen.

I first realized this during the Obama administration. And I realized it applied to legislation when Obamacare was passed. That was the first time in US history, as far as I know (and I did the research at the time) that a major transformative piece of legislation was passed without significant (or any) bipartisan support and without the strong support of the people.

It used to be, prior to Obamacare, that parties cared what the people thought. Now the people are just an obstacle to be gotten around on the way to the left’s agenda.

It’s possible something will stand in the left’s way, of course, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Roger L. Simon on the disastrous 2020 election

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an excerpt:

If one were to design a system by which a democracy could be subverted, even destroyed, universal mail-in voting (not, of course, normal absentee voting that requires the citizen to request a ballot) would be at or near the top of a list…

It’s not just the obvious—dead people voting, people who left the state voting, illegal aliens voting, signatures no one could possibly recognize being authenticated, signatures with no record, envelopes being back-dated, ballots found in gullies, ballots dumped in gullies, ballot harvesting, foreign agents voting surreptitiously en masse, deadlines that keep moving like the proverbial goal posts, and who knows what.

It’s an actual guarantee of chaos—and that’s what we had and have.

No one will ever really know what happened.

The pandemic was the excuse, but I strongly suspect it was more than that. I suspect, in fact I’m sure, that the intention of some was to utilize the pandemic to institute mail-in voting because they knew it would create this chaos, almost like an Antifa for the electoral system…

Once they get through with the referrals that will doubtless include the Banana Republic-style actions of election officials and workers in Philadelphia, Detroit and elsewhere who, despite court orders, prevented Republican poll watchers from doing their jobs, moving vote scanners to avoid supervision as if they were those proverbial goal posts, there should, if we lived in a just world, be enough to keep the dockets full of cases to be prosecuted until election 2024 and beyond…

…[I]n our high tech era, the opportunities for such corruption are growing rather than diminishing. The ridiculous, propagandistic polls promulgated by some of our most famous media outlets—including the Washington Post that showed Trump losing Wisconsin by 17 points and Fox News (see the mention above) that was only somewhat better—are only the tip of a dangerous iceberg that could eventually sink a democratic republic just as another iceberg sunk the supposedly impregnable Titanic.

Are we now just rearranging the deck chairs?

James Madison knew

The New Neo Posted on by

I am continually and deeply impressed by the foresight and wisdom of the Founders, in particular James Madison. I doubt students learn much about him anymore, and I doubt that his words would strike home with many of them even if they were to read them, because the level of general discourse has been so dumbed down.

Also, since Madison owned slaves, he no doubt will be marginalized and villainized (and already has been) under the standards of today.

In the meantime, while we still can, let’s look at what he had to say that speaks to our present situation:

There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both.

Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.

Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.

…[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men; so that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.

But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflection on human nature?

Every legal vote

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats’ mantra is “count every vote,” and the Republicans say “count every legal vote.” That’s part of the difference between the two parties, isn’t it? The first with a “win at all costs” mentality, the second more concerned with process because it knows the entire country loses if process is tainted:

by “every vote counts,” the Left means each vote must be tallied regardless of whether the voter is lawfully qualified to vote, and regardless of whether the vote was cast within the properly enacted rules of the election. This is why Democrats fight tooth-and-nail against every proposal to require voter identification, to match signatures, to outlaw vote “harvesting,” etc. Just as the Left takes umbrage at the term “illegal alien” on the nonsensical ground that “no person is illegal” (as if there were not patent differences between legal immigration status and human dignity), they would have you accept, on a “social justice” rationale, that there can be no illegal votes in a “true democracy.”

To be sure, this is a political pose.

And I might add, a very productive one.

So, process is tainted, and I don’t just mean the voting process although I certainly do mean that and I want to stress that it’s central because voting is the people’s major non-violent means of redress and correction for all the other problems. The process has been tainted for quite some time in many ways, but as time goes on it becomes more and more clear. For me, the fist powerful and unequivocal realization of that came a while back, when the IRS discriminated against the right and nothing was ever done about it. Your turning point may have been earlier or it may have been later, or it may not have happened yet although I tend to doubt the latter.

There were many other incidents that occurred earlier and some later. Some of them may have seemed extremely minor to other people (like this early move of Obama’s and rank-and-file Democrats shrugging in response) and some were major, like the promises about the Durham investigation that did not materialize prior to the 2020 election.

The biggest problem is that the left’s attitude towards power is to gain it at any cost and keep it at any cost. And right now they have a lot of power, and their power spreads across most of the institutions of our society. But right now, for whatever reason, it does not include the state legislatures, which remain majority Republican in the majority of states, and that’s especially important in this year of reapportionment. If there’s any silver lining to the huge storm clouds I see right now, it’s that. But what to do with it, in the face of all the forces arrayed against the right?

Pennsylvania was a good example of how it worked. It has a Republican-controlled legislature that passed laws setting the rules in this year’s elections, with the seeming cooperation of the Democrats. And then the Democrats took it to the Democrat-controlled Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and won further extensions. In effect, the Pennsylvania court legislated from the bench and overruled the Republican legislature, and then SCOTUS punted 4-4, which allowed that ruling to stand for now.

“For now” included this election, of course, and once the deed is done it’s very difficult to call it back. The Court would be loathe to overturn what is perceived as the result of the 2020 election, a Biden win, and declare Trump winner when Biden has been labeled the winner by the entire media and at least half of the American public. That’s my prediction, anyway.

In addition, it’s hardly just Pennsylvania. One of the things the Democrats have going for them is their control of deep-blue large cities in swing states, and that’s the key to perpetuating fraud. If they’re willing to do it in most or all of the swing states, then it is exceptionally hard to counter because it will produce an overwhelming effect – and because once the votes are counted, how does one prove anything to the degree that the Court would require?

Correct me if I’m wrong – I’m no expert on election law, and I haven’t been able to locate a definitive source that can answer my questions – but once Republican poll watchers are sent away and the vote-counting is done in secret, and once a bunch of bogus votes are counted and/or bona fide ones tossed, how can it be proven? The envelopes with the postmarks and names are gone, aren’t they? And even if saved, they’re no longer matched with the votes they contained, right? And in particular in states where mass unsolicited mailings had occurred, I doubt for the most part that votes cast exceeded ballots mailed, so the total vote counts would be unlikely to prove fraud on a scale that exceeds Biden’s margin of victory in that state, right? Even whistleblowers – and what Democrat partisan is a whistleblower – are unlikely to be able to report fraud on the scale that would justify overturning an election. If the votes are counted in secret, it seems to me that it’s game over even if some sort of suspicious activity is proven in court, because it’s a case of “What’s the remedy?”.

I could go on in that vein, but you get the idea. As I said before, I don’t like being a downer, so I actually invite correction and more upbeat points of view in the comments.

In closing, here’s a roundup of very relevant articles:

This from the NY Post, a paper that has emerged as a champion lately.

This and this as well as this and this. From the latter:

Now we are asked to simply trust corrupt Democratic political machines in one-party cities to count the vote honestly. We will not. Instead, Republicans must aggressively investigate and prosecute any and all wrongdoing in the attempt to steal this election.,,

If Republicans let this happen without pushing to ensure all applicable laws were and are now being followed they can forget about winning contested states and therefore national elections. The new rule, the new “norm” for the Democrats, will forever be what they did last night: “If an election is close we stop all the counting for a while until we can figure out what’s going on.” But Republicans do not have to let it happen.

So don’t get me wrong – when I express pessimism I’m not saying we should give up.

Back in early September of this year, I wrote the following:

We are in a heap of trouble. The voting laws have been expanding in recent decades in a way that I believe erodes the voting process as well as trust in the voting process. Absentee ballots have extra safeguards built in, and I’m okay with them in limited circumstances. But early voting and mail-in voting and vote harvesting, as well as laws banning the requirement of IDs, are a travesty and increase fraud. Once people no longer trust the vote-tallying process – and I submit that we have reached that point – we’re in banana-republic-land.

This was allowed to happen in this country despite the fact that it didn’t have to happen. No other Western country has voting processes anything like ours, but ours are no accident.

Andrew C. McCarthy tries to correct the narrative on vote-counting

The New Neo Posted on by

Facts from McCarthy vs. propaganda from the left:

This is yet another semantic battle the Left has won before the Right even realized it was on.

The latest talking point in the election coverage, which I’ve seen or heard in several places today, is that the Supreme Court has validated the mail-in, depot-drop, and ballot-counting procedures that have been ginned up by state courts and election-board bureaucrats. This is wrong. The Supreme Court has not validated anything. It has abdicated.

This distinction needs to be made clearly. The narrative that the Supreme Court has already authorized voting that does not comply with state election laws is just part one in a two-step scheme to enable post-election cheating: First, infiltrate as many illegal ballots as possible into the state systems; second, keep chanting that “every vote counts” and demagogue anyone who says otherwise — i.e., anyone who insists that state statutory law be followed — as “suppressing” votes, no doubt motivated by racism.

The Orwellian narrative is already being written: To call for the Constitution to be enforced is to “steal” the election.

Please read the whole thing.

McCarthy is a fine lawyer, and of course he’s right – as anyone who followed the SCOTUS cases on Pennsylvania voting so far ought to know. But even though plenty on the left do know it, they also know it’s in their favor to lie to the rubes.

McCarthy doesn’t sound too sanguine about the results. I think that to win at all, Trump had to win in a huge landslide. And that didn’t happen.

More random thoughts about the election

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) According to exit polls, every single demographic was higher for Trump than in 2016 – except white men. Blacks of both sexes, Hispanics of both sexes, and white women were all higher – but not white men. On the other hand, the percentage of white men who voted for Trump in 2020 remained higher than his percentage of any of the other groups, although it had come down from an even greater height in 2016. The changes in all the groups were between 2 points and 5.

What caused white men to like Trump less, when no other group had that reaction? I can’t figure it out. Maybe Stockholm syndrome? Maybe white men hated Hillary even more than they hate Biden? Or maybe elderly white men identified with Joe?

(2) Of all the bad polls, perhaps the most awful polls of all were for Susan Collins of Maine. I had read them and feared she was in big trouble, even though I know that Maine has always liked Collins even as the state has gotten bluer. Take a look at how wrong polls can be:

(3) Whistleblower talks about voting fraud in Michigan. One of the things about voting fraud is that it’s so hard to prove. How will these back-dated ballots be identified? Even if each envelope is saved along with the ballot that each contained (which may not be the case), the postmarks would look the same as the valid ones, wouldn’t they?

(4) I can’t watch TV news of any sort these days. I never have watched all that much of it, but right now it’s like chalk on a blackboard to me.

What will happen to the Abraham Accords if Biden becomes president?

The New Neo Posted on by

Probably nothing good.

That has been one of my many fears regarding this election. I see it as Obama’s revenge.

[NOTE: I’ve been resisting putting a “Biden” category on the blog. I do have a tag for him, but so far not a category. I think I’ll keep it that way for a while.]