Victor Davis Hanson speaks about the election and after

The New Neo Posted on by

VDH has long been one of my favorite political commentators. I don’t agree with everything he says in this entire video, but I’ve cued it up to show a part where he makes an interesting analogy (although he starts by assuming that “for now” it looks like the anti-Trump forces may have won):

And here’s the whole thing. He’s more optimistic than I am about the radicalism of what the Democrats might be able to do in the next four years; I hope he’s right and I’m wrong:

[NOTE: Here’s Hanson post-election, writing about the NeverTrumpers.]

The Democrats’ calls for healing…

The New Neo Posted on by

…remind me of a dynamic I’ve seen over and over in human interactions.

Person A mistreats Person B. Instead of apologizing, Person A demands that Person B forget about it and “move on.” To illustrate his/her own magnanimity, Person A says, “I’m such a big person that I’ve moved on, so why can’t you?”

Of course. It makes sense that perpetrators who believe themselves victorious would be willing and even eager to “move on” and then to pat themselves on the back for doing so.

In this case it’s even worse, because one form the mistreatment by Person A took was to refuse to heal or compromise or do anything but declare total war on Person B for four long years, setting out to utterly destroy him. So it is almost funny, if it weren’t so outrageous, that Person A is now holding out the hand of “healing” to Person B because Person A believes that victory has come at last and Person B is destroyed.

Nor is Person A offering anything that might actually lead to healing. It’s just “suck it up, buttercup, and act like everything’s just fine, because I know you’re a lot more polite, forgiving, and passive than I am.”

Some will oblige, of course.

[NOTE: In this essay, I used the singular “Person A” and “Person B” for convenience. But sometimes I mean the singular to refer to whole groups of people.]

COVID vaccine news: now it can be told

The New Neo Posted on by

Good news from Pfizer:

Of course, [Pfizer] announced less than a week after the election that its COVID-19 vaccine is 90% effective in the latest study.

Pfizer also said it would ask to put the vaccine on the market “if pending data indicate the vaccine is safe.”

I hear a rumor that the Nobel Prize committee is planning to give Joe Biden the prize for medicine.

I’ll be very happy if a vaccine is available that’s effective and safe. New York’s Governor Cuomo, though? He wants to delay distributing it until Biden takes over, because Biden will do so much better at that. And of course, Cuomo is the go-to authority on how best to deal with COVID administratively, since his approach was such a raging success.

If I recall the election of 2000 correctly…

The New Neo Posted on by

…newspeople weren’t calling either Bush or Gore the “president-elect” while the conflict was ongoing in the court system.

Of course, that was then, this is now. In 2000 the media had not yet gone quite so far over into utter, undisguised, blatant, no-holds-barred partisanship. The allegations were different as well. As complex as 2000 was, and as long as it took, it was simplicity itself compared to now. One state. Not fraud, but logistics of counting and whether certain types of votes qualified or not, who would do the counting and how. And two rather conventional politicians, each of them connected to previous presidents albeit in different ways (Gore had been Clinton’s VP, and Bush was Bush Sr’s son).

I don’t have to describe what’s going on now, except to point out that it involves many states, a very unconventional GOP candidate who is the incumbent, many allegations of Democrat fraud of different types, a media that has been out to destroy Trump for his entire presidency and is determined to back Biden in any way it possibly can, and a populace and two parties far more bitter and divided than before. General standards of behavior have also fallen, and although I believe that in 2000 many rank-and-file Democrats would have been repelled by voter fraud – even if committed to achieve a Democrat victory – I don’t think most of them would care if it were proven to have happened now, so great is their desire to cut down all the laws to get rid of Trump.

Tips on how to swat a fly

The New Neo Posted on by

A change of pace from politics, and some news you can use.

I’ve intermittently had a couple of especially pesky flies this fall. Noisy little buzzing buggers, and extraordinarily fast. They eluded my fly-swatting skills, even when I tried these handy tips.

But they might work for you.

And here’s a video that tells you a lot about the world of a fly:

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?