The Gulag academia

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an excellent article by a Jewish woman who emigrated to this country from Russia in 2012. An excerpt:

I immigrated to America from Russia in 2012 so I wouldn’t have to hide anymore. That hasn’t worked out so well for me.

Hiding our Jewishness was a family tradition. This was an understandable response given that my Ukrainian paternal grandfather, Danil Fyodorovich Bykoder, served 15 years, beginning in about 1923 at the age of 19, in the Solovki labor camp, whose anguishing cruelties were vividly described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic work, The Gulag Archipelago. My grandfather’s tripartite crime was criticizing Stalin, being an intellectual, and being Jewish. …

… The children at school … threatened me, mocked me as a “cheap Jew,” and poured a syrupy Russian knock-off of Coca-Cola over my head. This was my baptism into a culture of fear.

After school, to avoid them, I would walk the long way, through a scrubby patch of forest, to reach the little house I shared with my mother. …

For these reasons, among others, I emigrated to America in 2012, declared and was granted political asylum, and became an American citizen. Now I am Irina Velitskaya, having changed my last name back in Russia because I, too, wished to avoid a certain stigma—in my case, the stigma of a name that represented hiding and shame. “Velitskaya” means “great,” and that was what I’d hoped to be, unfettered by the ugly superstitions of the Old World.

I was safe now.

Not anymore. She describes what has happened to her recently as a student at Berkeley. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Election Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Not much to add at this point.

I’m trying to decide how to handle this evening: when to start watching, and how to maintain some sort of equanimity in the face of the tension. I don’t know whether we’ll know the outcome tonight.

Very nervous; caught between hope and fear.

How about you?

The left’s ugly racism towards black conservatives

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’m forcing myself to write at least one post about something other than the election.]

We’ve seen this picture before, many times:

(1) Larry Elder, black face of white supremacy:

“Larry Elder is the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned”

Larry Elder smiled the smug smile of a Black conservative who could very well be liberal California’s next governor.

“Where do you start with the damage Gavin Newsom has done to the state that we both love?”

He leaned forward to gaze across the room of white Republicans who had come to a hear him speak in Orange County. …

(2)

(3) Clarence Thomas is an Uncle Tom.

But this particular virus is hardly limited to the United States. It’s rampant in the UK at present, due to the election of Kemi Bandenoch as head of the Tories. Brendan O’Neill writes:

Following the election of the first black leader of a major party in this country [the UK], Ms Butler took to X not to congratulate but to sneer. Not to cheer this final breakthrough for racial equality in the UK but to share a poisonous description of the person who made the breakthrough as the “black face” of “white supremacy.” It is one of the worst things a member of the ruling party has done since they came to power four months ago. …

[Butler] … retweeted some tips for “surviving a Kemi Badenoch victory” written by Nels Abbey, a London-based Nigerian journalist. He branded Badenoch “the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class.” She’s the chief representative of “white supremacy in black face,” he sniped.

… [Badenoch] was being depicted as mere dressing, as an exotic decoration for “white supremacy,” as the black mask our supposedly racist elites have decided to pull on. This is dehumanising talk: it robs Badenoch of her agency … and treats her as little more than the mouthpiece of a nefarious agenda that hurts her own kind. …

… The writer Kehinde Andres, in typically provocative style, shared his view that Badenoch is the “shining ebony example that the Psychosis of Whiteness is not reserved for those with white skin.”

… Other Tories from ethnic-minority backgrounds have likewise been branded the fodder of whiteness.

Sickening – to wrap oneself in the mantle of anti-racism while demonstrating a vicious kind of racism against both black people and white people. And unfortunately, this phenomenon seems to be rife on both sides of the pond. As more and more members of minority ethnicities have become conservatives, the left uses sophistry to declare them to be race traitors doing the bidding of their white supremacist controllers.

Anxiety about the election: plus, why would people vote for Kamala?

The New Neo Posted on by

I have zero idea what will happen tomorrow – or even how long it will take to name a president-elect. But when I think about the possibility of a Harris win I get more frightened than I ever have been of any election result before in my life. And that’s saying something.

Prior to the 2008 election I pretty much knew that Obama would win. It was hard to accept, and I also knew he would be very destructive. His pretense of being moderate and of being a racial uniter had already been revealed by his campaign as phony. In 2012 I was even more worried because now I knew how dangerous his administration had been in setting us on a leftist path, including the enabling of Iranian power and a very subtle way of undermining race relations while feigning being a lofty healer.

In 2016 I disliked both candidates, and although I knew I detested Hillary Clinton and worried about what I saw as a possible continuation of Obama’s terrible policies and approaches if she were to be elected, I also worried that Trump was a loose cannon who would be in way over his head and would cause chaos. It took me a few months after Trump’s inauguration to realize that wasn’t the case, and to relax. But then the 2020 election – after COVID and riots had reduced Trump’s chances of winning, and with the always-mediocre yet now cognitively-challenged Biden as a possible winner – represented a nail-biter. And the 2020 experience of going to bed thinking Trump had won and waking up seeing that he hadn’t was deeply disturbing.

And then of course there was the 2022 red wave that turned into a tiny trickle.

But none of those elections can compare to what I feel now. I perceive Kamala Harris as representing the worst of all those worlds: the duplicity and dislikability of Hillary, the leftist policies of Obama on steroids, the cluelessness and uniformly poor decisions of Biden as well as her own seeming cognitive (or purposefully vague?) way of not making sense when she speaks. Couple that with the further leftward movement of the Democrats, and knowing how radical their legislative agenda is, plus a lack of faith in voting security and the strong sense that they wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever they they can to win and then to consolidate power that will last indefinitely, has got me in a tizzy. I alternatively reassure myself that Kamala won’t win, and then fear that she will. Back and forth and back and forth.

So, why would so many people vote for Kamala – including almost everyone I know? Don’t they see and hear the vacuous meaningless statements, the relentless lies, the strange affect? Don’t they know her extreme leftist history? I actually think that the majority of Democrats I know have not watched her interviews and do not see and hear – or at any rate, that what they do see and hear is processed differently from the way a person on the right sees it. They either pay little attention and vote in a reflexive way for the Democrat – and a woman! and a black woman! and Republicans will take away your birth control! – or they have only seen Harris debate with Trump and her speech at the DNC, and in both of those appearances she probably seemed fine to them. And, even more importantly and decisively, they truly believe that Trump is all the horrible things the left says about him and their fear of him is real.

And no, they are not dumb. The ones I know are for the most part very smart indeed in most areas of their lives. But they continue to swallow propaganda without even realizing that’s what it is.

Now, you might say, as commenter “Chris B” does here:

The thing is, it is so easy to learn the truth nowadays if one really wants to. Even with biased search engines, anyone can google “did Trump really say…” and find out that what they are being told is a lie. I believe that in reality they don’t want to know the truth. The intense hatred they have for Trump they find intoxicating. The last thing they want is to to lose the high they get from expressing their righteous hatred with like minded friends.

I spend many hours a day trying to “learn the truth” as best I can, and I really want to, as well. And yet I would never call it “easy” to do so, much less “so easy.” For example, the search engines are more than somewhat biased; they are constructed so that a person ordinarily has to scroll through reams and reams of suggestions that seem to validate all the bad things said about Trump and all the good things said about Harris before finding anything that differs.

So a person has to be committed to finding differing opinions and reading them, and to take some time in the process, while meanwhile all the anti-Trump propaganda is constantly reinforced by the search. When someone on the right does a search like that, the person knows it will be a quite a hunt, and he or she is aware of the need to be patient and to persevere. Plus, the person on the right is at least somewhat impervious to the propaganda; a mind is a difficult thing to change.

But there is no particular reason for the Democrat to be so patient, and that person probably is not already aware of the bias in the search results. That person will almost certainly see result after result that doesn’t challenge the propaganda but instead extends it and solidifies it. Why would that person keep going and going in the face of all that? And then, even if that person does keep going and finally finds a pro-Trump article, it’s from Fox or some other source on the right that the person has been told for decades is biased towards the right. Yes, every now and then a fact-check site defends Trump, but that’s often difficult to find as well unless one is willing to dig deep.

What’s more, why would a person start such a quest in the first place? To do so, the person would have to have a reason for challenging his or her own very solid and long-held belief system. Such a motive is rare on the left, but it’s actually rare on either side of the political spectrum. Political change is something I’ve written about at length, and most people will not ever be motivated to seek it.

And after all, as Chris B notes, not only does hatred have its own satisfactions, but righteous hatred can be a bonding experience: “the last thing they want is to lose the high they get from expressing their righteous hatred with like minded friends.” Indeed. I’m aware, for example, that my own presence in a group somewhat inhibits the people from a nice satisfying anti-right rant, and therefore including me in a group puts a damper on the fun even if I don’t say anything in opposition.

Why would Democrats be curious to learn whether the bad things they think about Trump are false? There aren’t many people in the world on any side of any issue who are eager to discredit their own belief system. All of most Democrats’ long-trusted media sources, and often all their friends, and all the professors and lawyers and smart people and oh-so-erudite NeverTrumpers agree: Republicans bad, and Trump just about the worst of all. To search for alternative points of view would require something that has engendered doubt about that proposition, and although that sometimes happens it’s easy enough to shake it off if it’s just an occasional flicker of hesitation.

For example, the very idea that Trump wasn’t referring to Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville as “fine people” would have to enter a person’s mind in order for the person to be motivated enough to look it up and check it out. And why would most Democrats ever do that? Why would it even occur to them? They’re not hearing it on the news they watch or read, and for those who live in blue cities their friends aren’t saying it either. The thought that it’s not true is in the nature of an unknown unknown – nearly unthinkable. And to at some point accept that it’s not true would require not only initially entertaining the thought that it isn’t true, but a much bigger shock: the knowledge that one’s political worldview, erected over a lifetime, might be a house of cards.

Don’t underestimate how threatening and difficult it is to even entertain that notion, much less believe it. It’s a long process and a shattering one, as I can report from personal experience.

And what’s the result? Why, you get to be a pariah to a lot of people you trusted and loved. Not all of them, of course; some will stand by you, and those are pearls of great price. But you are risking a lot. And it’s a facile response to say to that person, “Oh, if they desert you or grow cooler to you they weren’t ever your real friends.” Because you have a history that says they were friends, and especially if you’re older it is very difficult to replace those friends. In fact, you can’t, and you can’t replace family. Political change can even break marriage bonds and cause tragic outcomes for children.

So I have no problem whatsoever imagining why most people don’t pursue a course of challenging their own deeply-held belief system on politics. I never set out to do it myself, either – or not exactly. Although I actually always have been one to challenge a belief or a fact I think is true, changing my politics as a whole was something I never saw coming over twenty years ago when the whole thing started for me. I just followed this link and that, with a certain amount of naivete about the social consequences for me – in fact, with complete and utter naivete.

And yet once you cross that Rubicon there’s usually no turning back. I’ve gained a great deal from following where the quest led, but I’ve lost things too, and I don’t make light of why so many people would be deeply reluctant to even entertain a thought that might take them to that sort of upheaval.

[ADDENDUM: Please also see this relevant post that I wrote not long after the 2020 election].

Election fraud allegations: here, there, and everywhere

The New Neo Posted on by

So many stories to cover.

(1) In Pennsylvania:

Lancaster County officials announced in a news conference Friday that they are investigating two large batches of voter registration forms that are suspected of being fraudulent.

During the news conference, Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams (R) said many of the 2,500 suspect forms appeared to have the same handwriting and were filled out on the same day with unknown signatures. Adams said she was aware of two other counties investigating application irregularities.

(2) In Michigan, there were reports of many duplicate ballots, but “Lara Trump said on X that the RNC’s election integrity team investigated the matter and determined that a ‘glitch’ was to blame. The duplicates will not be counted.”

This “glitch” was caught. But the existence of the glitch is troubling, and I don’t see why some glitches wouldn’t pass undetected despite attempts to catch them.

(3) And this ruling on overseas ballot verification underlines how difficult it can be to get the courts to cooperate in enhancing vote security:

A federal judge has dismissed Pennsylvania Republicans’ lawsuit regarding overseas ballot verification, stating that granting their request for an injunction could affect thousands of voters before the 2024 elections, which is a week away.

“An injunction at this late hour would upend the Commonwealth’s carefully laid election administration procedures to the detriment of untold thousands of voters, to say nothing of the state and county administrators who would be expected to implement these new procedures on top of their current duties,” Judge Christopher Conner of the Middle District of Pennsylvania said in his ruling on Oct. 29.

(4) Dominion again only this time it’s about passwords:

The news that the Colorado Secretary of State’s office inadvertently included BIOS passwords for the state’s voting machines in a hidden tab on a spreadsheet on the department’s website has election officials scrambling days ahead of the election.

In an interview with CPR News, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the employee responsible for the passwords ending up online no longer works for the state and a personnel investigation is ongoing.

“We have people in the field working to reset passwords and review access logs for affected counties,” Griswold said. “This is out of an abundance of caution; we do not believe there is a security threat to Colorado’s elections.”

I’m sure everyone is extremely reassured.

(5) And is this a thing, or just nonsense? I haven’t a clue, plus it’s way too technical for me to understand. That’s actually the case for a number of accusations of fraud.

(6) In Georgia:

After a bit of a ping-pong match in Georgia over new election rules enacted by the State Election Board in recent months, the state’s Supreme Court has declined to allow the rules to go into effect pending an appeal on the merits. That means the rules will not impact the upcoming November election.

They said it was too close to the election.

(7) Nevada appeals court says postmarks, schmostmarks. Then again, it supposedly will only affect a small number of ballots. But now that it’s a known loophole, that number could easily increase.

(8) Fires were purposely set in some Washington ballot boxes:

Investigators responding to arson fires at two ballot boxes in the Pacific Northwest this week found devices at both scenes marked with the words “Free Gaza,” according to two law enforcement officials.
Investigators are trying to determine if the perpetrator was actually a pro-Palestinian activist or someone using that prominent cause to sow discord …

(9) Some good news in Virginia, though:

Virginia asked SCOTUS for an emergency stay after the Fourth Circuit sided with the DOJ, forcing the state to stop removing non-citizens from the voter rolls.

(10) Here’s another win for Republicans, this time in Pennsylvania:

A Pennsylvania judge extended the in-person voting options in Bucks County due to long lines and complaints that selection officials were turning people away.

Some of these suits contain allegations that are similar to ones made in 2020, but back then they usually weren’t subjected to a trial on the merits of the evidence itself. For the most part, either plaintiffs were considered to not have standing, and/or the suits were mooted because they came in after the election. This time the Republicans are more aware, and are trying to be more pro-active, but it doesn’t always work.

It’s in the nature of such voting fraud offenses that much of the evidence will either come in only after the election or immediately before it, and that any lawsuits even before the election must be rushed. Successful lawsuits ordinarily take time, and this is time that the complainants don’t have. And in large blue municipalities such problems probably wouldn’t even be reported in the first place.

The only effective remedy is to change the voting system back to a more traditional one using paper ballots, same day voting, equal numbers of observers from both parties, voter ID, and very limited mail-in voting with signature verification plus witness signatures. But the left will fight that tooth and nail.

It’s lies all the way down, and you can fool some of the people much of the time

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to me that lies are not incidental to the leftist campaign; they are foundational. The lies are constant and pervasive, and without them the left would have almost no selling points. The key to lying effectively is to be as united as possible in the lie, to repeat it and not back down in the face of corrections, and to enlist the cooperation of the MSM and social media heads in the endeavor.

The left has accomplished that for the most part, although now and then there’s a defection from someone who just can’t wallow in the lies anymore. That’s also why those who do defect must be ostracized and if possible destroyed financially and socially, maybe even imprisoned and certainly broken financially. And that’s why Elon Musk is considered such a dangerous traitor by buying Twitter and instituting (or re-instituting?) a measure of free speech there, as well as community notes.

But the left and the MSM still have great power, for the simple reason that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on. News junkies like us follow the details, but a great many people only get the headlines and then go about their lives, and social media and email are still great conduits for spreading the lies. What’s more, the newer lies are placed on top of a large edifice constructed of the older lies, and the new ones are integrated seamlessly and seem extremely plausible because they fit into the previous worldview of the person receiving the information.

That’s how perceptions based on lies persist and even grow stronger. It’s a rare person who – like a friend of mine did recently – tries to determine whether a new story is a lie or not. This friend likes neither Trump nor Harris, and had gotten some sort of communication from friends, either through email or Facebook, that Trump said he wanted Liz Cheney put up in front of a firing squad. My friend found this very disturbing, if true, and because she knew I research these things she asked me what I thought and I was able to explain about the “chickenhawk” charge.

But what of her friends who believed it and I’m pretty certain continue to believe it? It fit in perfectly with their idea of Trump, formed by thousands of other such incidents and lies: that he’s a violent threat to women and should never, never ever, be given power. What’s to be done to set them straight? You might say it’s not worth bothering and/or impossible, but they are the voters who might elect Kamala Harris as president, without even knowing how they’ve been duped.

I think the key is the MSM. If the media did its job properly, the politicians might tell their lies but the lies wouldn’t get halfway round the world.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) I haven’t watched it yet, but here’s Joe Rogan’s interview with J. D. Vance:

(2) I’m extremely nervous about this election. I’ll probably write more about that before Tuesday. But at the moment I’ll just mention that reports of women leading in the early voting increase my worry.

(3) Here’s how the Harris campaign manipulates social media to skew the message. Of course they do.

(4) And speaking of Harris, don’t think she wasn’t very much an agent in getting herself anointed by the party as the candidate [hat tip: commenter “huxley”]. From The New Yorker:

By the time Biden announced his withdrawal, that Sunday afternoon, a scramble was already under way, largely out of public view. Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative who helped Harris secure the nomination, told me that her team saw value in moving swiftly. “We weren’t going to do this bullshit that other people were asking for,” he said. In his view, an open convention was a way to “skip over Kamala.”….

David Axelrod, who was the chief strategist for both of Obama’s Presidential campaigns, told me, “There was an argument that she would be strengthened by a competition, but she showed a mastery of the internal politics, which is one test of a potential candidate. People respond to competence, and that was a very competent operation.” He compared it to a rapid military strike. “She didn’t get handed this nomination,” he said. “She took it.”

(5) A bad jobs report has come out. Will that even matter to people voting next week? The MSM excuses the low number of jobs as being a result of hurricanes and a Boeing strike, but this is a national report and I doubt those reasons accounted for all but a little bit of the shortfall.

(6) More lies about what Trump said about Liz Cheney being a chickenhawk.

Ordinarily mild-mannered Hugh Hewitt quits the WaPo on air

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know how any conservative can stand to work for an organization like the WaPo and listen to their slanted coverage. But Hewitt couldn’t take it any more, a bit like Howard Beale in Network.

Here’s the video. Capehart’s incredibly off-putting attempt to convey the pretense not only that nothing much had occurred but that he didn’t have to answer Hewitt’s accusations is unintentionally revealing of how deeply biased and truly obnoxious he is. Ruth Marcus, another long-time shill for the left, was – to her temporary credit – at least more flummoxed by the whole thing. I’m not sure if she was also subject to a simultaneous technical problem, but the timing of it makes me think it was not an accident:

Hewitt actually quit the paper rather than just walking out of the interview:

“I have in fact quit the Post but I was only writing a column for them every six weeks or so,” Hewitt later told Fox News Digital.

I wonder what Bezos will say, or whether he’ll address it at all.

“Journalism” ceased to be journalism long ago, which is one of the main reasons we face the possibility that the execrable duo of Harris/Walz could well be elected next Tuesday.

[ADDENDUM: Found at Ace’s, this sarcastic comment:

Not knowing details of election fraud and just insisting that there was none at all is the way to go.

Well, okay, there was some, but it didn’t affect any outcomes.

How do I know it didn’t affect any outcomes? Because that’s impossible. People commit fraud in elections in order to have no effect on the outcome. It’s really more of a hobby.

Yes, that’s the way it’s spun by 98% of the press and every Democrat. As I’ve said so many times, once the voting rules are relaxed it becomes impossible to prove fraud and to prove it affected the outcome, except in a very few extremely local elections with only maybe a hundred votes or less cast, total, and minuscule vote differences between candidates. Other than that, it would be nearly impossible to prove and in any event courts are reluctant to hear the evidence in a timely fashion and to apply a remedy.

And what would a court-ordered remedy be, anyway? It can’t be to automatically award the win to the other candidate. It could be a do-over, but in a federal election that’s not going to happen. A fine wouldn’t matter, because the fraudsters often would consider it well-worth it to pay the price if the election is for national office. Criminal convictions? Maybe, but the proof would have to be ironclad and as I’ve already said, it’s very hard to prove.

No, it must be an ounce of prevention, because there really is no cure. Trust in elections is earned, not automatic. The stakes are way too high, the temptation too great, and the opportunities too available.