Something is broken in America

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “ErisGuy”:

Both parties agreed on fraud* when both parties were American, wanted America to [be] exceptional, admired American ideals, and rejected brutal foreign ideologies. Not anymore.

* I shouldn’t have to say this, but “both parties agreed fraud was bad” because they worked for the American people, not to implement ideological conformity.

It’s not that there haven’t been signs of the coming split between the two halves of America for a long, long time. I won’t even go into the question of exactly when it began. But I think that this election is the true breaking point.

It was starting to peak in 2016, and that’s what led to the election of Donald Trump. Then the four years of his presidency – and in particular the reaction of the Democrats, the academy, social media, the press, the left, what for want of a better term I’ll call the Deep State – made the picture clearer. But only now with this election is the break complete.

It was some time during the summer, when I started reading about the widespread changes in election rules laid down ostensibly as a response to COVID, that I realized that if necessary there was going to be fraud. After four years of continual Resistance, lies, plots, and coverups, with nothing much done to redress the situation, I could not imagine that the Trump opposition was going to allow him to win again.

But for a while the polls, although very upsetting, were almost soothing, because if they were true then there would be no need for fraud. A landslide election either way would mean the people had spoken, and if I didn’t like what the people said at least I could say that what they were saying was unequivocal and loud. But despite the polls uniformly predicting an overwhelming Biden victory, at the same time I saw article after article that said that it was likely to appear on Election Night that Trump had won, and then when the mail-in votes were counted it would reverse itself.

This set off warning bells for me, because if Biden was really favored as heavily as they said, that shouldn’t be happening. The fact that it was predicted over and over (here’s just one of those articles) indicated to me that this was most likely a plan rather than a prediction (they even have a name for it: “red mirage“). And part of the plan was that of course Trump and the right would cry “election fraud!” when Biden pulled ahead, and then the Democrats could say that Trump was a sore loser and attempting to undermine democracy. That’s what all that talk about how he wouldn’t leave the White House and would have to be arrested was about, too.

So now it’s playing out just as described. If it were happening in an ordinary way – with mostly in-person votes coming in round the clock in orderly fashion – it would be believable. But reports of counting stoppage, GOP poll watchers thrown out, huge truckloads of votes coming in the wee hours of the morning, and turnouts so enormous they dwarf anything in the past sixty years, make profound suspicion inevitable although proof will be hard to find.

Nothing about this is ordinary – not for the US, anyway – and the magnitude and speed of the shift is part of it. Note also that early states that had more stable ways of counting all went more strongly for Trump than in 2016, and the same for House GOP candidates as well as state legislatures. But the states that stopped counting and have scads of “found” ballots all are going the other way. That seems suspicious, as well, and I haven’t seen a convincing explanation for a natural reason why that would happen.

This election is like watching a person bleed out very slowly, unable to do anything to stauch it. That person bleeding out isn’t just Trump or isn’t primarily Trump, that person is America – or the old “we’re in this thing together and we all want to make it fair” vision of America and America’s elections and transfers of power. If Election 2000 caused a deep rift in the common purpose that ErisGuy described, this election is ripping the fabric further and perhaps severing the two sides. The problem could have been prevented (or at least the risk reduced) by setting up better voting rules, but only if both sides had wanted to do so. And both sides didn’t and don’t.

I have felt for quite some time that whoever won this election, we were in deep trouble. But the way the election is actually being decided so far is probably the worst of all possible ways – short of an actual armed coup.

Oh yeah, I forget to mention the polls and the MSM

The New Neo Posted on by

Whoever manages to win, polls have lost.

Buh-bye, and don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Oh, and the MSM news, which includes Fox. Utterly discredited in every way. I’m with Sean Davis – they are incapable of reform because they have no desire to reform, and the only solution is not to watch:

I’d like to see Tucker Carlson go to some other outlet, perhaps Newsmax (which I hear is good but have never looked at) or even a totally online forum such as Joe Rogan’s. Speaking of Rogan, here’s an interesting article on what’s called the new contras’ insurgence against legacy media. It may be the wave of the future.

On voter fraud

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Cornhead” writes”

For the life of me I don’t understand why America in 2020 – and after the Florida 2000 disaster – can tolerate all of this clear election fraud. Wasn’t a bunch of federal money spent after 2000?

Why can’t we fix this? I know the Dems are opposed to it because they benefit from it, but really. The Dems planned this whole fraud scheme for months.

DOJ should have been on this case for years. There’s an entire voting rights division in DOJ and it is only concerned with Blacks voting in the South. What about the rest of the country? We are getting scewed.

I think I understand it, although back in 2000 I would not have understood it. I recall being shocked by that election and its multiple opportunities for confusion in voting (hanging chads, anyone?). And although I don’t recall many allegations of outright fraud in 2000 (I could be wrong; it was a long time ago), I do recall thinking it was a disaster and that of course both parties would be eager to correct the problems before the next major election cycle.

Well, ha ha on me.

What I realized some years later was that there are two competing principles at work now, and one of them seems to occupy the legal high ground, which is that all voting policies not be discriminatory. And by “discriminatory” we now mean anything that might have even a whisper of a chance of preventing a single minority person from voting.

One would think that such a thing should be balanced against the obvious plus of discouraging voter fraud. But if so, then one would be wrong. Only the right seems to care about voter fraud, perhaps because the history of such things is that it occurs mainly in blue cities with huge voter bases and a large Democratic “machine” (in the olden days it was Tammany Hall et al, which were notorious for voter fraud and patronage, but there are modern heirs).

The left sees fraud as potentially very useful. It also knows that voting inclusion – extending the vote to as many people as possible and making it easier and easier for them to vote – has the air of sanctity. Anything that tends to make voting more difficult – for example, requiring most voters to come to the polls on voting day, or requiring IDs – is frowned on as discriminatory. So making sure that a vote is a valid one falls way to the bottom of the list of priorities, far below inclusion.

It used to be – long ago, when I was young – that both parties agreed that discouraging fraud was something greatly to be desired. But at some point (and it was probably the point at which the left began to really take over the Democratic Party) it became clear that wasn’t the goal.

Of course, one of the arguments the left uses is that voter fraud almost never happens, and definitely never on a large scale. That rests on the idea that the voter fraud that has been proven is the only fraud there is. But there’s plenty of reason to strongly doubt that it’s so. I don’t think that it should matter, anyway, to the courts, because even the opportunity for any sort of significant fraud represents a gap that must be closed. Increasingly, however, that argument doesn’t wash.

I also recently learned about this consent decree, and only because it was lifted almost three years ago after over thirty-five years of being in operation. Here’s how it worked, and still works to a certain extent despite having been lifted :

After more than three decades, Republicans are free of a federal court consent decree that sharply limited the Republican National Committee’s ability to challenge voters’ qualifications and target the kind of fraud President Donald Trump has alleged affected the 2016 presidential race…

The decree, which dated to 1982, arose from a Democratic National Committee lawsuit charging the RNC with seeking to discourage African-Americans from voting through targeted mailings warning about penalties for violating election laws and by posting armed, off-duty law enforcement officers at the polls in minority neighborhoods.

To extend the decree, the DNC needed to show that the RNC violated the terms of the pact. Democrats pointed to a series of incidents during the 2016 election in which they alleged people who claimed or appeared to be working for the RNC were engaged in poll watching. A November 2016 POLITICO report describing RNC spokesman Sean Spicer’s Election Day activities led the judge to order Spicer to submit to a deposition.

Did you know this? I certainly didn’t know that for over three decades the DNC and the courts had been stopping the RNC from targeting fraud on the grounds that the RNC’s actions were racially discriminatory. Not only did this stop certain efforts to stop certain types of fraud, but it may have discouraged other efforts from even being made in the first place, because they might be thought discriminatory.

And that seems to have been the case [my emphasis]:

While the end of the decree means the RNC is now free to step up its efforts on voter fraud and to take a role in coordinating Election Day poll monitoring, it is unclear whether the national party will resume such work, which has been left to individual campaigns and state parties in recent years.

Some GOP leaders have urged the national party to continue to avoid those activities to avoid alienating minority voters, who often view those efforts as discriminatory.

Having read the linked article, I can’t really tell how much the consent degree hampered RNC efforts to discourage voter fraud, other than limiting poll watching, which as far as I know only involves same-day voting rather than mail-in voters. And it’s mail-in votes and the possible fraud connected with them that are at issue this year.

So the problems that occurred in 2000 and beyond are not the same problems we face in 2020. The COVID pandemic had many uses for the left. One was being able, with the help of the MSM, to blame Trump for what he could not have helped. Still another was to amp up mail-in voting so much that it made fraud easier in swing states. Together these two may end up putting Joe Biden in the White House.

More thoughts

The New Neo Posted on by

Ordinarily I’d write “more post-election thoughts,” but the election’s still going on. It will go on for a while.

But my stomach doesn’t feel good about the final outcome. It didn’t feel good last night, either, even when Trump was winning. I knew the left had a lot more up its sleeve.

So today I’m not going to do what some blogs do – give a state-by-state rundown, with counts and possibilities. Everything is in flux right now, with the outcome unknown but trending in the wrong direction. I know that Trump won’t give up without an enormous fight, and he could win that fight, but I’m not optimistic about either his chances or the increased hatred and multiple coup attempts if he were to win.

And speaking of unknowns – if Biden/Harris do win, it’s not the least bit certain how long Biden would last in the top position.

It’s not even so clear that such a switch would matter much, either, except to those who care about having a First Woman President (I’m not one of those people; identity politics is of zero importance to me). It would be fitting and almost humorous (bitterly humorous, but humorous nonetheless) if the first female president were to be someone who was not elected to that office as well as being deeply unpopular – so unable to get votes on her own that she dropped out of her party’s primaries early, and who was chosen solely for her leftism, race, and sex.

I hope the Senate stays in GOP hands. That won’t help the foreign policy and executive order problems inherent in a leftist administration, but it would help a lot of other things.

It’s hard to be optimistic, but I’m trying.

[ADDENDUM: I want to add that, based on what we know so far, the cheating seems obvious and egregious.

However, what will the solid evidence actually show (evidence that would hold up in court, that is)? And what will the courts will ultimately say? That, I can’t predict.

The plan of the Democrats was always to claim victory even if they were behind Election Night, and then to “find” enough votes to win or at least to win in court. The plan for Trump was to claim victory when ahead on Election Night, and then to challenge the “found” votes in court.

That is always what I thought was mostly likely to happen. The part I didn’t know and still don’t know is how good the evidence of fraud will be, what the courts will say, how long it will take to decide, what the immediate reaction of the country will be until then, and how the ultimate loser’s constituents will react.

The entire thing is fraught with peril.

I’ve also just put up a new post on voter fraud.]

It’s the morning after, and America has the Mother of all hangovers

The New Neo Posted on by

And this hangover will last a long time, I’m afraid.

Actually, a hangover isn’t really the proper metaphor, because this illness has been going on for a long time. We’ve had the drift leftward, the institutional rot, and the 50/50 division that makes for too many election squeakers and allows fraud – or at the very least the strong incentive for and possibility of fraud – to become a big player in the results.

And then the resultant court battles.

Did I expect this? Mostly. At least, it was always one very strong possibility and probably the leading scenario in my mind: that Election Night would end with the results close but Trump ahead, followed by the “found” mail-in votes, followed by the weeks or months of fighting in the courts, leaving half of America with the lingering feeling that the winner was illegitimate.

Another possibility was that the polls were right and Biden would sweep in a big victory. Although that would say something terrible about America – that it preferred a corrupt, addled nonentity who would be controlled by the left to a strong, vulgar, smart, America-loving can-do sort of person – it still would have been an unequivocal result that would leave no doubt about what voters intended. Another scenario was an enormous Trump victory that some had sensed and predicted, but in my opinion that was always the longest longshot of all.

I don’t understand how half of America could vote for Biden, even though I know how it happened because many of the people I know are consumed by such hatred of Trump that they would vote for an old tree stump if had gotten the Democratic nomination. And so the prospect of voting for Biden – who, after all, was the sainted Obama’s vice president – and the off-putting leftist Harris was no problem at all, although I’ve yet to hear a single person actually praise either of them.

If Biden/Harris end up winning, this will be the first time we have a president and a vice-president whom no one likes. That would be remarkable. And not good.

Trump’s voters are not going away. Most will feel betrayed, and rightly so. There are reports of massive dumps of all-Biden ballots in the contested states, and although I don’t know if those reports are correct, the strong perception will be that Biden won through fraud. What I do know for certain is that the way voting was set up in many states, ostensibly because of COVID, was at the very least an invitation to fraud. If mail-in votes aren’t counted first, that’s what opens the door to “finding” just the right number to make up for any lead that Trump might have. So when we see leads evaporating, it’s easy to believe fraud is the explanation.

That’s where the courts come in, but they can only take us so far. And an election decided by the courts is not good, as we’ve learned before.

Whatever has led to this moment and this awful situation has been a long time coming. The Gramscian march and leftist dominance, especially in education. The degeneration of the media into a mendacious and partisan facade. The decline of standards of behavior and integrity, in personal and public life.

Trump alone was certainly never going to fix it. That will require much more.

In the end, I think it helps to have faith – in God, in a higher power – and to try to figure out what part you can play in the “more” that is required.

And now for Election Night

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a philosophical article about the election that you might think of recommending to friends and family. Even if you don’t agree with everything in it (and you probably won’t), the goal is to soften strife with those near and dear.

As for the rest, we wait. Whether we’ll find out tonight, soon after, or much later, remains to be seen.

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
‘Tis of the wave and not the rock;
‘Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest’s roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o’er our fears,
Are all with thee, are all with thee!

The poem’s history can be found here.

Election Day

The New Neo Posted on by

And here we are. A thread for discussing it. Hoping for the best but very nervous.

I think I’ll wait for later today and/or tonight to post more. Going out now – to vote!

Victor Davis Hanson on Trump the Counterrevolutionary

The New Neo Posted on by

Some thoughts from Hanson:

Until Donald Trump’s arrival, the globalist revolution was almost solidified and institutionalized—with the United States increasingly its greatest and most “woke” advocate. We know its bipartisan establishment contours.

China would inherit the world in 20 or 30 years. The self-appointed task of American elites—many of whom had already been enriched and compromised by Chinese partners and joint ventures—was to facilitate this all-in-the-family transition in the manner of the imperial British hand-off of hegemony to the United States in the late 1940s…

What tools did Donald Trump have to wage these many counterrevolutions?

The media? America’s Fortune 400? Academia? The great foundations? The nation’s think tanks? The bipartisan government establishment? The international community? The banks? Wall Street? Corporate CEOs? Silicon Valley? Professional sports? The entertainment industry? Hollywood? The intelligence community? The current and retired top military brass?

In fact, none of them. All had joined or enabled the revolution, on the theory either that their wealth and influence would shield them and their own from its excesses, or like naïve Kerenskyites their status would impress and win over even those who targeted them, or they were inner revolutionaries themselves all along, just waiting to be freed at last by BLM and Antifa.

Against all that money and clout, the counterrevolutionary Trump had only one asset, the proverbial people. He had solely the under-polled and the written-off. They came out to his rallies in the tens of thousands, deluded the pollsters, and told the media less than nothing, but voted and will vote in waves to save America from what it was becoming.

Well, they will vote again. And I have no idea whether the waves will be enough.

Glenn Greenwald’s uncensored article…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is very good. It’s the piece that made him quit the site he founded, the Intercept, because the editors apparently wanted him to go easy on good old Joe.

Some excerpts:

But nobody claimed that any such deals [as Bobulinski and the emails describe] had been consummated — so the conclusion that one had not been does not negate the story. Moreover, some texts and emails whose authenticity has not been disputed state that Hunter was adamant that any discussions about the involvement of the Vice President be held only verbally and never put in writing…

These documents also demonstrate, reported the Times, “that the countries that Hunter Biden, James Biden and their associates planned to target for deals overlapped with nations where Joe Biden had previously been involved as vice president.” Strassel noted that “a May 2017 ‘expectations’ document shows Hunter receiving 20% of the equity in the venture and holding another 10% for ‘the big guy’—who Mr. Bobulinski attests is Joe Biden.” And the independent journalist Matt Taibbi published an article on Sunday with ample documentation suggesting that Biden’s attempt to replace a Ukrainian prosecutor in 2015 benefited Burisma.

That Taibbi piece is here, but it’s behind a paywall. I believe Taibbi’s claims probably rest on the fact that the prosecutor who replaced Shokin – and who was Obama/Biden approved – had a history that was more corrupt than Shokin’s, and also let Burisma off the hook in fairly short order.

The MSM must think that Americans are very very dumb indeed. I hope they’re not correct in that assumption. Why on earth would anyone think that Russian disinformation (the laptop, supposedly) would be launched in order to hurt the Biden campaign? Perhaps the thought that the Russians preferred Trump was more believable in 2016 – although I never for a moment thought it was – but at this point, isn’t it obvious that Trump is far harder on Russia than Biden (or surrogate Harris or whichever Obama holdover becomes Secretary of State – Kerry, anyone?) ever would be?

Socialism is doubleplusgood

The New Neo Posted on by

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it:

This year’s study showed increased favorability of the term ‘socialism’ (49%) among Gen Z compared to 2019 (40%). Opinions of capitalism declined slightly from 2019 to 2020 among all Americans (58% to 55%), with Gen Z (ages 16-23) slightly up (49% to 52%) and Millennials (ages 24-39) down (50% to 43%). 35% of Millennials and 31% of Gen Z support the gradual elimination of the capitalist system in favor of a more socialist system.

It also showed growing concern for Donald Trump as president, especially among younger generations of Americans, with 34% of Gen Z and 35% of Millennials seeing him as the greatest threat to world peace, up 8% and 7% from 2019, respectively. This sentiment held true regarding his handling of the pandemic as well, with 39% of Gen Z and 32% of Millennials believing Trump is more responsible for COVID-19 becoming a pandemic than Xi Jinping of China. Opinions of America’s inequality grew markedly from 2019 with 68% of Americans thinking that America’s highest earners don’t pay their fair share. Among these Americans, 57% of Gen Z and 60% of Millennials favor a complete change of our economic system away from capitalism — a 14% and 8% increase from 2019, respectively.

“It shocks the conscience that more Americans today believe the U.S. President is a bigger threat to world peace than the most brutal dictators in the world, and that four-in-ten Americans believe that their country is a ‘racist’ nation,” says Marion Smith, Executive Director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. “This represents a total failure of our education system, not just in schools but also a basic dishonesty in our media and popular culture. When one-in-four Americans want to eliminate capitalism and embrace socialism, we know that we have failed to educate about the historical and moral failings of these ideologies.”

A few reminders:

Election 2020: those who think they are above the fray

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed a comment on another blog to this effect: “I can understand not voting if you don’t think either candidate should be president.”

That’s one of those statements that looks logical on its face but really is not, because (barring some very bizarre circumstances) one of these candidates will be president whatever you think. Of course, in the case of Joe Biden, Kamala might be president, but you’re voting or not voting for the ticket not the candidate. It’s a twofer.

If you choose not to vote, or vote third-party for someone with no chance, it should be because you honestly and sincerely feel you cannot decide which of the two main candidates would be better and which worse. Although that was a position that had some validity in 2016, I just don’t see how anyone can argue that today. So I view abstaining from voting this year as an exercise in virtue-signaling, a way to say “I won’t dirty my hands to vote for either of these extremely flawed humans. I am morally above it all.” And by taking such a stance in the real world rather than the ideal world of your imagination, you are in fact dirtying your hands by allowing others to possibly choose the worse candidate of the two.

People who live in deep deep red or deep deep blue states have a bit more of an excuse not to vote for either candidate, because they know (or think they know) how their state’s electoral votes will be alloted. But I still don’t think it’s a good excuse, because although the general popular vote doesn’t matter in the legal political sense it matters in the psychological political sense – as we’ve seen since 2016.