Hey, we're still faster than California!
Arizona Announces They Have Finished Counting And Calvin Coolidge Has Won Their 3 Electoral Votes https://t.co/Krubw5nFPY pic.twitter.com/1DPYMb4pkf
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 8, 2024
Can someone please ask Florida how they do it and can our legislature just enact it?
We also need less on our ballots. Mine had 44 races (some where you voted for more than one candidate) and 19 propositions to vote on.
On Tuesday's event:
1. I've seen some comments about the "mysterious" disappearance of 15 million Biden voters from 2020 this time around, with implications about that election being stolen. Calm down, there are still over ten million votes to be counted, with two-thirds of them in California. The final total turnout number will be close to 2020, though probably a couple of million short. Because most of the remaining ballots are in Democratic states I expect that Trump's margin in the popular vote will be 2-3 million rather than the nearly 5 million as it stands now. The extreme D lean of California, Oregon, and Washington continues. As of now, Trump leads in the other 47 states by over seven million votes.
2. Trump gained nationally and it is remarkable how much individual states moved towards him since 2020. Here are the Top 10 in percentage moves from 2020 to 2024:
What is far more telling is that the Democratic Party has explicitly branded itself AWAY from all nine of these points over the last decade. https://t.co/UvdiidbftO
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) November 7, 2024
"I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists""Solidarity to everyone whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back.""Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The moral arc of the universe is not going to bend itself."
I made a series of inappropriate and offensive posts on my personal bluesky account on election night, and I am sorry. I respect and value people across the political spectrum. These posts, which I have deleted, do not reflect my beliefs; they were a mistaken expression of shock and disbelief about the election results. These posts of course do not reflect the position of Scientific American or my colleagues. I am committed to civil communication and scientific objectivity.
The first from Holman Jenkins, writing in the Wall St Journal in 2019:
Mr Trump is said to upset the norms of our political life, but how exactly? By lying? By engaging in demagoguery? By making absurd claims? His real trick has been to be a one-man satire of our politics. And so far he has yet to find an opponent or critic - whether Mr Biden, or Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney - who doesn't prove his point.The second from Henry Kissinger in 2018:
To show what a liar he is, his enemies entangle themselves in lies. Democrats have turned themselves into a party of Adam Schiffs, who, whatever his previous virtues, now is wholly defined by his promotion of the collusion canard. It's an amazing psychological feat to squander their advantage over Mr Trump in this way.
Ditto the media. In their eagerness to traffic in falsehoods about Mr Trump, his media critics lend him strength. We face the weird prospect now of a world-class scandal involving the FBI and the intelligence community being aired even while much of the press is committed to being part of the coverup.
I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses. It doesn't necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.
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(1) Try telling someone that Biden's first order of business was revoking a Trump Executive Order that allowed federal employees to be trained about diversity and the benefits of multiculturalism but forbid training based on racial stereotypes and scapegoating.
Try telling someone that Biden issued an Executive Order requiring any AI used by the Federal government incorporate racial and gender bias and stereotyping.
Try telling someone that Biden issued regulations ending women-only sports and facilitating the transing of elementary school children.
Try telling someone that the Biden administration advised a pro-trans activist medical organization to drop its draft recommendation that puberty blockers and other dangerous medications not be given to those 14 and under because such a recommendation could be damaging politically. And the organization, WPATH, followed Biden's advice!
Try telling someone about the efforts by Biden to censor opposing viewpoints on social media and about the FBI monitoring, as potential terrorists, parents who objected to the inclusion of race essentialism in public schools.
Here's Andrew Sullivan, a gay man who did not vote for Trump, on the nuttiness:
It matters when the elites decide to re-educate the masses in Neo-Marxism. Young men are sick of being pathologized, as they should be. Urban residents — from San Francisco to New Jersey — are maddened by Democrats’ seeming indifference to violent crime. And one of Trump’s most effective ads — “it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor,” according to the NYT — was on Harris’ support for public funding for sex reassignments for illegal aliens and prison inmates. It packed a real punch among black and Latino men and suburban women.
The Democrats’ insistence that women have penises and men give birth is perhaps the most insane position any major political party has ever taken in US history. And how exactly do you remain a pro-woman candidate when you favor boys competing against girls in sports and women prisoners being forced to share intimate space with biological men convicted of rape? At some point, as Harris found out, you can’t. But can she and her party extricate themselves from this hole they keep digging ever deeper? I doubt it.
Sounds crazy, doesn't it?
For a while, it was difficult to get people to accept that the Biden administration opened our borders. It was a brilliant stroke for governors of border states to start shipping illegal immigrants to sanctuary states and cities, finally waking up more people to what was actually going on.
Martin Gurri first came to public attention with his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, in which he posited that the new technologies and social media would completely disrupt the ability of elites to control communication. Much of what he wrote about proved prophetic.
In a recent issue of The Free Press, Gurri wrote an essay explaining that while he had abstained in the past two presidential elections, he would be voting for Donald Trump this time around. I agree with much of what Gurri has to say here but differ on my
conclusion. I've already voted and left the presidential line blank on
the ballot, the first time I've done so since casting my first ballot in
1972. I've discussed my reasons for not voting for Trump in posts going back three years including And Then . . . and Unbarred, reasons that remain unchanged. If elected, Donald Trump will prove a disaster for the things I think most important. Meanwhile both parties continue to ignore our impending financial crisis which will impact basic services, healthcare, retirement, and our national security. I refuse to be associated with this nonsense. No matter who wins or loses, we all lose.
My only hesitation is that while Trump would be a disaster, inspiring even more resistance, and be yet another missed opportunity for the opposition to Democratic insanity just like his first administration, if Harris wins and the Democrats take the Senate we may face an irreversible disaster and the end of a meaningful democracy. If Trump does win and the Dems don't control the House and/or Senate, don't worry, by 2026 voters will have two years to be reminded how terrible Trump is and the Dems will control Congress.
I'm going to use the format employed in Unbarred by reprinting Gurri's essay and inserting my own comments.
Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5.
For many years, I belonged to the “a plague on both your houses” party. In the last two presidential elections, I abstained: I found both candidates unequal to the task and refused to endorse either with my vote.
But I feel I can’t refrain this time around—and I want to explain why.
There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. The antagonists are roughly equal in number but vastly disproportionate in strength. True to its nature, one side controls virtually all the institutions that hedge the life of the voters. Also true to its nature, the other side spends most of the time fighting with itself.
The forces of control own the White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporations, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture. Homegrown control freaks can also rely on assistance from Control International, the cabal of like-minded elites that runs the United Nations, the European Union, and any number of nation-states from Britain to Brazil.
[THC: In November 2021, Margaret Hoover of PBS interviewed Chinese dissident and exile Ai Weiwei. Hoover asked if he saw Donald Trump as an authoritarian. Since Ai had written critically about Trump, Hoover was expecting an answer in the affirmative, so she was surprised at his response (the relevant part starts at about 15:45):
Ai: If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself.
He goes on to say that in today's conditions you could easily have an authoritarian and that, in many ways, the U.S. is already in that state, pointing to political correctness and its similarities to the Cultural Revolution of Mao. Hoover asked no follow up questions.
Gurri's point, with which I fully concur, is that the power structures in the United States currently are aligned in support of repression of opposition viewpoints; whether it be the Democratic Party, the federal bureaucracy, tech and social media, entertainment, the press, NGOs, foundation, and academia. The cultural sea in which we all swim is domination by progressive viewpoints and other perspectives locked out. The exceptions prove the case - progressives are hysterical that they lost control of one social media outlet (X, the former Twitter) to Elon Musk and he's become public enemy #1, as the Biden administration pursues a "whole of government" approach to making his life difficult with the goal of forcing the sale of X to someone more amenable. The left authoritarians cannot tolerate any dissent.
During this election campaign both Harris and Walz have been open about their disdain for the First Amendment as have old war horses Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. The New York Times regularly runs columns from academics debating whether the problem of free speech can be solved with the "right" Supreme Court justices interpreting the Constitution or whether we are better off with a new Constitution more clearly defining the limits of dissent.
In contrast, Trump has no supporting system or structure. His essence is chaos and improvisation. That's why it was so easy for the Biden Administration to reverse all of his domestic and foreign policy initiatives from his Presidential term.]
Why the itch to control? Nietzsche would explain it as pure will to power, and that’s a perfectly adequate account.
The Democratic Party is the party of control. Joe Biden has been a dotty old figurehead stage-managed by Democratic establishment fixers: The chief controller is himself controlled. Harris is a less withered version of the same thing. Intellectually, she’s Biden’s equal—that is to say, a slave to the teleprompter. She has never had a thought, held a real job, or succeeded at anything on her own. She was nominated for the presidency after receiving approximately zero votes in the primaries.
No matter. The fixers are on the case, and they can work wonders. Harris has been kept in a bubble of adoration, to the deafening applause of the media and the rest of the institutional horde that controls the national narrative.
Threats to the controllers will be smashed without mercy. Trump represents the greatest danger—that makes him a criminal, to be raided by the FBI and prosecuted in Democratic-influenced courthouses.
[THC: The Democrats current hysteria about Trump prosecuting his enemies, is merely a matter of projection.(1) It's what the Dems did from 2016-19 during the Russian collusion hoax. It's what they did with their multi-pronged federal and state assault on Trump. If you want to know why Trump's supporters complain about double standards, let's take the crazy NY DA case against him. DA Bragg got 34 felony convictions because of a $250K payoff to Stormy Daniels, which was supposedly misclassified on federal reporting forms because Trump was trying to influence the election. Under the federal statute that is one misdemeanor but Bragg somehow created a state case on the same facts. I believe the conviction will be overturned by the state appellate court. In contrast, in 2016 the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid FusionGPS over $1 million to create the phony Steele Dossier in order to influence the presidential election and misreported the expense in its campaign filing. The FEC settled the matter for a $135,000 civil penalty.
After winning in 2016, Donald Trump had the opportunity to go after Hillary Clinton for her criminal violation of federal document security standards. Instead he asked DOJ to stand down. In retrospect, a mistake, as his enemies would never have done the same.]
Tulsi Gabbard demolished Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary debates. That makes her a terrorist, to be placed on the travel watch list usually reserved for hardcore jihadis. Others who run for national office against the wish of the controllers are guilty of lèse-majesté and should be arbitrarily removed from the ballot—not just a Republican like Trump but disobedient liberals like Robert Kennedy Jr. and Jill Stein. It’s about domination, not ideology.
The internet allows too many heretical opinions to reach the public. That means a censorship apparatus must be erected on the Chinese model, to smother those pesky anti-control voices. “Disinformation” has become any message the controllers find offensive. “Malinformation” is acknowledged truths the controllers wish to bury. All are protected speech under the First Amendment but Our Democracy demands the silence of the lambs. Despite Mark Zuckerberg’s pseudo-confession of guilt for his own participation, government censorship of the digital sphere continues to this day, including on Facebook.
Mistakes by the regime must be shielded from view—blunders such as Anthony Fauci’s involvement in gain-of-function research at Wuhan and Hunter Biden’s lost laptop from hell. That means the scientific establishment and intelligence service executives must be dragooned to lie to the public on behalf of their institutional masters, followed by a torrent of ridicule in the media for those who irrationally insist on the truth.
[THC: In early 2020, I thought that Covid originated from a Wuhan wet market, based on my reading at the time, as well as my experience in China from 2000 to 2011 when I had the opportunity to meet with national and regional health and safety officials. The evidence that's become available since then has changed my mind. The burden of proof is now on those who don't think it originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And, as we've now learned from the release of internal NIH and NIAID documents, Fauci and others deliberately suppressed information that conflicted with their preferred narrative of a wet market origin.
The Hunter laptop story is even worse. We now know that the FBI had the laptop for a year prior to the 2020 election and had verified the authenticity of it as well as its contents. Yet it carefully laid the groundwork with social media companies for months prior to the New York Post article, priming them to censor the revelations in the weeks leading up to the election. Moreover, a cadre of former intelligence community officials issued their letter, falsely implying the story was Russia disinformation, in order to further support suppression of the story, an effort in which they were mostly successful.
The Hunter laptop story also supports the systems and structure argument made above. This all took place when the Trump administration was in power, yet the White House had no control over its own administration. That simply does not happen with a Democratic administration.]
Every principle espoused by the controlling caste leads inexorably to a tightening of the noose. Climate change? To save the earth they must control away our vehicles, our travel, our gas stoves, our diets, even our plastic straws. Anti-racism? To ensure perfect numerical “equity” they must control every outcome of every transaction, from the test scores of our children to the people we hire for our companies. Gender identity? To allow for the proper fluidity they must control the relationship between parents and children, access to women’s bathrooms and women’s sports, and finally the English language, down to the last pronoun.
[THC: The Biden-Harris administration adopted as its primary domestic initiative, pushing through all government institutions, policies based on the conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have deliberately manipulated the structures and very language of our society in order to maintain white supremacy, also known as diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). The administration issued two major Executive Orders to make sure DEI is injected into every federal action. DEI is a repudiation of the principles of the Civil Rights Movement and is actively hostile to free expression, freedom of conscience, equality and due process under the law. It is why progressives define hate speech as speech that disagrees with progressive, and anti-democracy as disagreeing with progressives. For more read The Danger Within: Equality or Equity, Which Side Are You On?]
An overarching political theory can be deduced from all this. The American public is axiomatically violent and bigoted. From the best of motives, therefore, the guardians of Our Democracy must radically limit the number of democratic choices available to the public.
So here is the most compelling reason I will be voting against Harris and the Democrats in November. I was born in Cuba. I recognize the stench of hypocrisy emanating from those who conceal lust for power behind a buzz of salvationist jargon.
If the control accumulated by the administration had been used for good—if the world were calm and at peace, say, or the American public brought to unity as was promised—we might have been convinced it has some merit. But there’s a reason Biden is no longer on the ballot. There’s a reason Harris is running away from her administration’s policies. At home and abroad, the last four years have been a rolling disaster—and the voters know it. This crowd understands institutional control and nothing else. Out in the world, failure has been habitual, horrendous, epic in its dimensions.
Where to begin? For motives I am hard put to explain, the Biden-Harris people encouraged millions of illegal aliens to swarm into our urban centers. They mismanaged the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, relying (naturally) on harmful school closures, lockdowns, and mandates, all based on contrived falsehoods, and they utterly botched the persuasion campaign for the vaccines. They inflated, indebted, and overregulated the economy. They spent trillions but were unable to build or achieve much beyond a handful of charging stations: We can guess where the money went. They promoted grotesque stereotypes based on race and sexual preference, a policy that sowed division and reaped distrust.
Internationally, the nightmare began in Afghanistan, where the administration gratuitously turned the country over to the terrorist-friendly Taliban. Thirteen American servicemen died in the rout and many more were abandoned—and shamefully forgotten by the media.
[THC: If Gurri's point is we should not have left Afghanistan I disagree. I've thought since about 2004 our mission was finished. Making that country into a functioning tolerant democracy was not something achievable in my view. Whether we stayed a year or a century, Afghanistan would revert to its historical tribal politics when we left. I hoped Obama or Trump would withdraw, so I give credit to Biden for finally doing it. What I do not understand is why we chose the worst possible way to conduct the withdrawal. We left massive amounts of equipment behind, we closed Bagram Airbase, which we could defend, leaving us only Kabul for evacuation, and instead of withdrawing later in the fall when the Taliban mobility was restricted because of winter, but we had superior ability to operate and could have managed a more orderly evacuation, we did it in summer when the Taliban had full operational mobility. For that, Biden and the military chiefs need to take the blame.}
Every despot in the world took note: The U.S. was in retreat mode. Putin sent his Russian legions into Ukraine. Hamas invaded Israel, which was also attacked from the north by Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen, a third-rate outfit, managed to shut down commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Iran is about to build a nuclear bomb, the logical conclusion of the frustrated Obama-Biden-Harris love affair with the ayatollahs. China is aggressively expanding its military, particularly its navy, even as our own military has atrophied because of antique equipment and low enlistment rates. We can’t even deploy all our warships because we lack the personnel to do so.
THC: This point I agree with. It's not just the disaster in Afghanistan. People forget that prior to Putin's invasion of the Ukraine in February 2020, Biden public message was that if Russia limited itself to taking an additional slice of the Donbas, the U.S. would be just fine with that. Even before that, Biden reversed Trump policy, dropping U.S. objections to Germany's approval of the Nordstream 2 pipeline, making that country's energy supply more susceptible to Russian diktat. Senate Democrats even used the Jim Crow filibuster to prevent a resolution being brought to a vote disapproving of the Biden policy. Biden had also reversed the Trump policy of refusing to renew the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty until the Russians stopped cheating. And, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion. the administration advised Zelensky to flee the Ukraine, promising him sanctuary in the West. Of course, Trump's reckless rhetoric on Russia allowed the opposite impression to be created with the public. Trump was tougher on Russia than either Obama or Biden, but both of them sounded tougher than Trump (read Ukraine Blues for more).
We've let the Houthis (and their Iranian and Chinese backers) throttle Red Sea traffic though we have the capabilities to destroy them remotely. We continue to funnel money to Iran for unfathomable reasons. And, yes, our fleet is in bad shape. For all the talk about defending Taiwan, we no longer have the capability to sustain a prolonged conflict in the Western Pacific.]
There are too many leaks in the dike and not enough fingers—not to mention an absolute dearth of strategic thinking to identify where our priorities lie in a dangerous world.
This, then, is my secondary reason for voting against Harris. I’m not sure we can survive four more years of such toxic levels of incompetence.
Against this Everest of power madness and recurrent failure, a single argument is put forward in support of Harris’s candidacy: Donald Trump. Trump, we are told, isn’t just mistaken or bad. He’s a moral abomination—beyond the pale. All decent Americans thus have no choice but to vote the other way.
But the same thing would be said of anyone who opposed Harris. That’s how the forces of control function: “It’s either us or the death of Our Democracy.” Trump isn’t a moral abomination—or at least, no more so than Harris or Biden. He’s an ex-president, a politician with a known track record. If you strip away the moralizing narrative—the endlessly repeated inanities about dictatorship and insurgency—we are left with a flawed but semi-capable person. The world was at peace during his tenure. The economy boomed. I would happily accept the U.S. and the world of 2018 over that of 2024.
A more realistic charge lodged against Trump is that he’s an inveterate liar. This is certainly the case: The man spouts industrial amounts of nonsense. But in politics, everything is relative. The entire public character of the Biden administration rested on a colossal lie, in which Harris was complicit: that the president was a wise, energetic senior, fully engaged in the nation’s business. That massive deception, promulgated for years by an irresponsible media in defiance of the evidence of our own eyes, amounted to state propaganda, many orders of magnitude more destructive of trust than the worst of Trump’s outrages.
Trump is an agent of chaos, much as the Republicans are the party of chaos. At worst, he can do limited damage, since he lacks any purchase on the institutions. At best, he will slash to the ground the malignant harvest of the Biden-Harris years: the digital surveillance and censorship, the human flood at the border, the racial and sexual obsessions, the growing prostration of our military. If, from sheer animal intimidation, he can restore seriousness and discipline to the federal agencies in Washington, that would be a magnificent bonus.
I will vote for him because he’s taken a stand against the forces of control, and has been persecuted and vilified by them—and also because, at the moment, there’s no such thing as an agent or a party of freedom. That, I pray, will come in time.
Whatever happens, our system will endure. The American public, believe it or not, is still fundamentally sound and sensible. I freely acknowledge that we are in the grip of a psychotic episode, a sort of national midlife crisis, but I have faith that we will outgrow and transcend the moment. The hysterical refrain that Our Democracy is dying, recited ad nauseam by the forces of control, is a disgusting and self-serving trope—a gross demonization of fellow Americans who happen to disagree with their views. Those of us who take the side of freedom and the open society should disdain the use of such repulsive rhetoric.
[THC: I am less optimistic than Gurri. The damage we have already sustained over the past decade is immense. The damage that will be incurred, deliberately in the case of Harris, and through ineptitude by Trump, will make it substantially harder to "outgrow and transcend the moment".]
If my candidate wins in November, I will be content but not overjoyed. If our current masters retain control, I will be depressed but not suicidal. I am old enough to have acquired a sense of proportion. The United States and its amazingly sturdy Constitution, and the way of life that has flourished therein, will remain long after I have passed from the scene.
[THC: I hope I'm wrong and he is right.]
-------------------------------------------------
(1) For more on projection and where the danger to democracy comes from read this piece by a former Democrat.
Along with facing disaster whichever candidate wins next week, we also face the prospect that one of them will lose. Do not expect the loser and their supporters to accept their fate with grace.
Should Trump lose he will roll out the 2020 Stop The Steal Playbook.(1) He will never accept any result when he loses. Remember, he didn't just say he won in 2020, he claimed he won in a landslide. Even when he wins, Trump makes outrageous claims; in 2016 he said that the result in California, a state he lost by 4 million votes, was rigged and he would have carried the state in an honest election.
He will once again rile up his hardcore supporters. Trump will have no strategy, no long-term plan; he just loves stirring stuff up and seeing that his supporters still love him. What happens next, since he is not the incumbent this time around, is hard to predict, but it will be ugly, and likely punctuated with violence, whatever form it takes. Expect to see attempts to get state legislatures refuse to certify electors, although I think the changes to the electoral college Congressional vote counting process made since 2021 make federal obstruction less likely. I see no sign that Trump will fade from the scene unless he is physically and/or mentally disabled, thus delaying the emergence of whatever will come as the next generation of GOP leaders (if there is still to be a GOP).
On the other side it is not a person who is of concern - it's Democrats. Harris is a nothing and if she loses her political career is ended. Other than recriminations in the immediate wake of the defeat she'll be a soon forgotten figure. However, the Democrats and their institutional supporters in the government, academia, media, the foundations & NGOs, and the corporate world will be mobilized; it'll be 2016 on steroids and an amplification of what had been planned in 2020 if Trump won. The goal will be to disrupt and impede any attempt to restore normality if Trump wins.
In 2016 Democrats worked themselves into hysteria over Trump, somehow convincing themselves that a gullible and easily manipulated figure, with little interest in the details of policy, and with erratic behavior and occasionally outrageous rhetoric, was actually a Nazi who kept a copy of Mein Kampf by his bed (yes, I heard this from people), prepared to become a dictator, and unleash his brown shirt legions on America. Somehow Trump forgot to do all that during his administration but in 2025 he'll supposedly get around to it.
After his election in 2016, the Democrats and their allies in the media and in the government conspired to continue and elevate the Russia collusion hoax. And, breaking with more than two centuries of precedent, the Senate Democrats routinely obstructed the approval process for even noncontroversial nominees for federal jobs in order to prevent the administration from functioning. If Trump had won in 2020 the Democratic plan was to bring the mobs out into the street across American cities and do even more than during his first administration to prevent The Donald from exercising his constitutional powers. This year, Democrats and their allies have been whipped up into a hysterical frenzy far surpassing that of 2016 and 2020. I expect that if Trump wins in 2024, we will see protests, violence, obstruction way beyond that of 2016 along with the federal bureaucracy sabotaging the administration of a democratically elected president.
Good times are not coming.
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(1) I live in Maricopa County, Arizona, ground zero for one of the key alleged steals. Trump narrowly won the county in 2016, narrowly losing it in 2020. I read all of the allegations regarding the steal, the documents from the "forensic audit" by the Cyber Ninjas, the county's response, as well as learning a bit about Arizona election laws. The steal claims here were junk; laughably idiotic.
The other day I saw a lawn sign in our town, "Harris/Walz: Unity Over Division".
The Democratic ticket is campaigning on the themes of "Centrism", "Joy To The World" and "Uniting America".
How can this be for the party that has made the race essentialism of "Diversity Over Unity" as its governing policy since 2020, seconded only by its efforts to attain permanent power by "Unity Over Dissent", defining any policy disagreement as misinformation and/or hate speech deserving of suppression?
The answer was provided by David Burge (Iowahawk) back in 2016.
1. Target a respected institution.
2. Kill & clean it.
3. Wear it as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
It's happened over and over to our institutions, that continue to trade on their prestige from the old days, when they have become merely debased propaganda outlets (see, for instance, the New York Times).
In the case of Harris and Walz, the skin suit they have donned for the campaign consists of the Democratic Party of 1996 and Centrism, a strategy that may work for those who pay more attention to vibes instead of substance and for whom the fear of Trump obliterates any reasoning power.
But what is inside the skin suit is a radical reformation of America, continuing the march of insane academic theories hostile to racial conciliation, to the family, to freedom, and to equality under the law, in which the only solution to the inevitable frictions and disagreements that arise in a nation of more than 300 million with a diversity of political and religious beliefs, and of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, is the suppression of opposition in the name of "preserving democracy", when "democracy" is defined as doing what Democrats want.
It may work, as the Democrats have four advantages.
First, they are much more effective in aligning their rhetoric with a strategy to achieve their goals than Donald Trump. The Democrats use their rhetoric to obscure their goals. It's their skin suit.
With Trump it's the opposite. His reckless rhetoric undercuts his goals.(1) Trump can sound authoritarian (and ignorant), yet most of his actions while President were not, and most of his policies were centrist. The best example of the mismatch is with regards to Russia. Much of Trump's rhetoric regarding Russia and Putin was irresponsible and terrible, while Biden talked tough about Russia during the 2020 campaign and thereafter. But what were their actions?
- In contrast to the Obama administration, Trump authorized the sale of anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, weapons which proved critical to that country's defense in the early days of the Russian invasion. At the time, AP sadly reported that, by doing so, Bad Man Trump had created yet another "sore point" between Washington and Moscow.
-Trump vocally opposed the Nordstream 2 pipeline, which would supply Russian gas to Germany, because, as he argued, it would make Germany economically dependent on Russia. For this he was mocked for alienating an ally.
- Biden, upon taking office, endorsed Nordstream 2. In fact, when Senate Republicans tried to introduce a resolution rebuking Biden for that support, Democrats used the "Jim Crow" filibuster to avoid the resolution even coming to a vote, so they would not have to take a public position.
- Trump vocally urged NATO allies to increase their military expenditures, for which he was mocked by our allies and American media outlets. Doesn't sound so bad now, does it?
- Trump withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia, because of the Kremlin's noncompliance with its provisions.
- Upon taking office, Biden said, "where do I sign for the INF extension?".
- Trump imposed sanctions on Russia's ally, Iran.
- Biden lifted the sanctions on Russia's ally, Iran, providing billions of funds which Iran is using to supply armaments to Russia in support of its Ukraine invasion, as well as to Hamas and Hezbollah.
- In 2017, Trump went to Poland, delivering a speech in Warsaw praising that country as an ally, and warning Russia "to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere, and its support for hostile regimes — including Syria and Iran", adding, "We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East"
- Biden labeled Poland a "rising totalitarian" regime (because, at the time, its government was not considered progressive), grouping it with a real totalitarian regime, Putin's ally, Belarus.
- Up until the moment of the Russian invasion in February 2022, Biden sent signals to Putin that the U.S. would do nothing if Russia satisfied itself by just seizing the remaining parts of the Donbas Region, something Trump never did.
- Trump encourage increased oil and natural gas exploration and fracking in the U.S., all of which lowered global prices, hurting the Russian economy.
- Bush hindered such exploration, helping increase oil prices and aiding the Russian economy. [NOTE: The National Intelligence Assessment on Russian interference with the 2016 election, stated as undisputed fact that Russia supported the anti-fracking movement in the U.S.].
The bottom line:
In the Bush administration, Putin invaded Georgia.
In the Obama administration, Putin invaded Crimea, the Donbas region of Ukraine, and intervened in Syria.
In the Biden administration, Putin invaded Ukraine.
In the Trump administration . . .
Yet
the public impression is much different, and part of that is due to
Trump's own rhetoric, which allows the Democrats and media create false narratives on this and other issues, and it is a trait he clearly cannot, or has no interest in, modifying.
The
second advantage is the role of the news and social media in creating a
bubble in which many voters who don't carefully follow politics exist.
We've seen how quickly most of the news media has switched on a dime from telling us that Joe Biden remained on top of his game mentally, and running stories questioning Harris' ability to step up, to rapturous coverage of Harris and Walz. (2)
But it is the longer term existing bubbles that create the information world in which most of us exist. An example is the Russia collusion story, which I've covered in exhaustive detail, and is the greatest political scandal in American history, though for a large percentage of the populace that scandal doesn't even exist.
What I've experienced speaking with people who live within that media bubble is complete disbelief with what I've learned from reading the source documents. Over and over again, I've heard people say "I read the Mueller report", but upon further inquiry it becomes clear that what they read is what the NY Times, the WaPo, the New Yorker, or other such publications or news media said about the Mueller report, which is quite different. That media bubble is very difficult to penetrate.
The third advantage is that the sheer insanity of what the Democratic party has become inside the skin suit is hard for people to believe, particularly for older, more traditional liberal Democrats. When you tell them that the Biden administration has repeatedly declared its top domestic priority to be promoting a conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have attained and maintained their positions in society by plotting to promote white supremacy and that is the sole explanation for any group discrepancies in America, and that all federal actions need to be taken applying those analytical lenses, they simply will not believe you because it sounds so bizarre, so un-American, and such a repudiation of traditional liberal values because it denies the legitimacy of free speech, freedom of conscience, due process, equal protection under the law, and a sense of basic fairness to individuals.
The final advantage is they are running against Donald Trump, who has no discipline or self-control when it comes to campaigning.(3)
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(1) "Goals" is probably the wrong word to use, but not sure what that right one is. Trump cannot articulate meaningful goals in most cases, beyond a very high level statement. He constantly improvises and sees what works for him and his audience. It's why, on an issue like Ukraine, Trump's rhetoric has been all over the place. He really doesn't know what he thinks, other than falling back on the one constant in his public life; he'll negotiate a "great deal". In that way, he is oddly like Harris, who is stunningly inarticulate. Her inability to speak coherently on policy is because she's never had to think clearly or deeply about serious issues. She comes from a one-party state and has, from the start of her career, been in campaign mode, just saying stuff that her partisans like to hear, even if it doesn't make much sense. It's why she ducks any tough questioning. We are in such deep trouble as a country with these two people as presidential candidates.
(2) And why does the same news media, now ignore that a clearly incapable Joe Biden remains nominally president? Who is making the big decisions in this administration?
(3) To be fair, Trump's greatest advantage is he is running against Harris.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's letter of August 26 to the House Judiciary Committee has gained a lot of attention and prompted much discussion about its contents, intent, and posturing, which you can read elsewhere. Other than noting the letter is very carefully drafted, there are two less discussed aspects I want to discuss, both contained in the fourth paragraph.
"In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation and, in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story. We've changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn't happen again - for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers."
The first point is that, unlike the prior paragraphs, which refer to efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to get Facebook to censor information, the information in this paragraph refers to events occurring during the Trump administration. This paragraph refers to the Hunter Biden laptop story and, as we now know, both the laptop and its contents were really Hunter's. And not just now - the FBI had the laptop for over a year and knew its provenance and contents; the 51 former members of the Intelligence Community who wrote the letter denouncing those promoting its legitimacy knew it was actually legitimate. The media who reported it, the media who censored any mention of it (like NPR), and Twitter and Facebook which throttled the distribution of the story simply didn't care if it was true or false; their only concern was to ensure Trump's defeat and Biden's election. You can read more about how it was accomplished in The Robust Alliance.
The second point is the reference to fact-checkers as though they provide an objective evaluation of information. They don't. The fact-checking industrial complex is simply another layer of progressive control over the media. All of the leading fact-checking organizations enforce a progressive narrative, using a number of techniques developed over the past decade, including:
Fact check Right-coded statements, but ignore Left coded-statements
Subtly mischaracterize accurate Right-coded statements so they can be declared False, and inaccurate Left coded statements so they can be declared True.
If a Right-coded statement is literally true, but there is additional context casting doubt, reference the context and declare statement False.
If a Left-coded statement is literally true, but there is additional context casting doubt, do not reference the context and declare statement True.
If the Right-coded statement is accurate in all respects, cite to a Left-coded "expert" to declare it False.
Note: Giving credit when it is due, it took Snopes only seven years to declare the claims about Trump's "fine people on both sides" to be false.
The fact-checker web is even more rigged. For instance, if you Google something, usually the first reference is to Wikipedia, which is on the Left and is adept at changing its entries to meet progressive needs. Both Google and Wikipedia use as trusted references, reliably Left publications like the New York Times. The result is a virtuous circle in which the institutions of the Left continually reinforce the validity of their viewpoints.
This is just another example of the control of the institutions by progressives and another reason why, despite the hysteria and hyperventilating by Democrats over the supposed threat to democracy by anyone not following the party line, it is only the Democrats who pose a threat. They have become what they denounce. They are the only ones with the power to effectively end our democracy, and they've made no secret of their intent to crack down on dissent.
In November 2021, Margaret Hoover of PBS interviewed the Chinese dissident and exile Ai Weiwei. Based on his past writings critical of President Trump, Hoover asked Ai if he saw Donald Trump as an authoritarian, clearly expecting an answer in the affirmative. She was surprised at the response: (the relevant part starts at about 15:45):
If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you. You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself.
Trump had, and has, no supporting institutional system.(1) Ai went on to say that in today's conditions you could easily have an authoritarian regime and that, in many ways, the U.S. is already in that state, pointing to political correctness and its similarities to the Cultural Revolution of Mao. Hoover quickly moved on to another topic.
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(1) In contrast, Kamala Harris is not just supported by a system, she is a system. Between Biden and Harris, what we've learned is it does not matter who the Democrats run as a candidate; the system will support whomever is that candidate, because the system is running things, not the candidate.
That's an old Soviet-era joke, based on the Communist penchant for deleting party members, determined not be aligned with current ideology, from Soviet encyclopedias or erasing them from photos, and disappearing inconvenient events or simply rewriting them in accordance with the current line of the revolutionary vanguard.
We have an increasing number of examples in the U.S. over the past decade. Here's a recent one. On March 13 of this year, the Minnesota Star-Tribune, the state's leading newspaper and house organ for the Democratic Party (the editor was in Walz's cabinet) ran this headline:
"Gov. Walz shares his family's IVF journey as Democrats look to guarantee access to treatments."
Within the past few days, the paper went back and edited, without any editorial note, the headline to read;
"Gov. Walz shares his family's fertility journey as Democrats look to guarantee access to treatments".
The stealth change was necessitated because Walz has wanted to emphasize IVF because it aligned with yet another misinformation attack from Democrats that Trump wants to ban it. It turns out that once his wife admitted IVF was not involved it became an embarrassment for the VP candidate.
It reminds me of USA Today's treatment of an op-ed by election denier Stacey Abrams. Remember when Georgia amended its election laws to make it easier for its citizens to vote compared to those racist restrictions in states like New York and Connecticut?(1) Remember when the Democrats and the media called the new Georgia law "Jim Crow 2.0"?
At the peak of the media frenzy over the law, Abrams published a piece in which she urged businesses to boycott Georgia until the law was changed. As the frenzy died down and the impacts of the boycott, including the ridiculous MLB decision not to hold the All-Star game in Atlanta, which had been designed to honor Hank Aaron, became more and more unpopular, a conservative wrote a piece pointing out how bad Abrams advice was, referring to the USA Today article. Abrams' people responded that she had never advocated for boycotts and, sure enough, the current version of the USA Today article did not mention it. Fortunately, someone had saved an archived version of the op-ed which did urge boycotts. Turns out that once boycotts became unpopular, Abrams, then running against Brian Kemp for governor, was allowed by USA Today to stealth edit her piece!
We constantly see this happen with Wikipedia, an organization run by the Left, where, within 48 hours of any controversy arising, entries have been rewritten to align with the new Democratic party line. It is why Wikipedia is completely untrustworthy as a source for anything with even a slight political or ideological connection.
It's even happening with on-line dictionaries. During Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett's confirmation hearing, Webster's changed its definition of "preference" within 24 hours to conform with the new definition used by Democrats to attack Barrett.
Lately, it's happening at a dizzying pace. Six weeks ago we were told Joe Biden was fine, and attempts by the GOP to "pounce" on his physical and mental health were misinformation, while Kamala Harris was clearly not capable of stepping up to replace him. Today, we are told by the same people that, of course, Biden was in a diminished state, did the noble thing by stepping down (as candidate, not as president which, of course, where is he perfectly capable of performing his duties), while Kamala is the perfect candidate to embody the politics of joy, while running against her own administration, or more accurately to run as if Trump is the incumbent. They don't even try to make any sense of it all. With her incoherence, Kamala is Trump, except the press and the institutions love her.
When we talk about the capture of the institutions by the Left, and why trust in those institutions has diminished so much in recent years, this is why.
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(1) I voted in CT from 2000 to 2106. No one mailed me a ballot, and obtaining an absentee ballot was restricted to a limited set of circumstances. I also had to show ID to vote. One time, the person I checked in with at the polling place was my next door neighbor. She made me show ID!
Regarding the kerfuffle about Tim Walz's military service, we've seen defenders of Walz claim he is being "Swiftboated", an allusion to attacks on John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. A recent example is from PBS News Hour Anchor Amna Nawaz who asserts:
“This is so reminiscent of that swiftboating attack on John Kerry back in 2004 . . . Why run with these attacks when there’s no evidence for what they’re saying right now?”
She goes on to say that the attacks on Kerry were “discredited". If Nawaz was drawing a comparison with the attacks on Kerry, the accurate one would be that the allegations against Kerry and Walz were similar, in that both are correct. However, I doubt that is what she meant.
Walz did not have the rank claimed as of his retirement and, on multiple occasions, stated, or left the impression, he had served with his unit in combat in Iraq, rather than resigning once he learned the unit would be going to Iraq. The governor's immediate superior, battalion commander, and unit chaplain, all confirm the allegation. Attempts to defend Walz have relied upon mischaracterizing the allegations.
As for Kerry and Swiftboating, I wrote in 2016 (and updated in 2020) about the true story:
For those of you who may not remember, the "Swift Boat Incident" or Swiftboating as Democrats liked to call it, was in their version the slandering of Presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam War record during the 2004 campaign. If you notice, Baquet refers to it as an "allegation". In the preferred liberal summary, the Incident was about mischaracterization of Kerry's record as a Swiftboat commander during the war and the awarding of his combat medals. In reality, the television ads by Swift Boat Veterans For Truth focused primarily on Kerry's alleged treasonous actions in carrying out secret negotiations with the communist government of North Vietnam and in denouncing his fellow soldiers for atrocities in front of the U.S. Congress, a denunciation used by the communists as justification for torturing American POWs. All of this is completely true.
A secondary theme was an attack on Kerry's claim, made on the floor of the Senate, that he spent Christmas on his Swift Boat in Cambodia, in what would have been an illegal incursion at the time, a demonstrably false claim. The final claim was that his actions in combat were not deserving of his medals and that he had manipulated the system to obtain them. This claim is controversial and the only one by the Veteran's group which may not be accurate (unfortunately the Wikipedia entry on this topic focuses almost exclusively on this last point and is very one-sided).
When YouTube first became available several years ago, I went back and found the original Swiftboat ads. Unfortunately, they are not all still available but my fragmentary notes indicate that six of them focused on Kerry's post service actions - negotiating with the enemy, his Congressional testimony and throwing the ribbons from his medals away in a protest. Two others and part of a third dealt with his Christmas in Cambodia fabrication and one part of one raised the question of the validity of his medals. I view all except the last as fair game.
The Swift Boat Veterans were a coalition of two groups. The first were POWs, held in North Vietnam under brutal conditions, who deeply resented John Kerry's support for the enemy. The second were members of the Swift Boat unit who had served with, before or after Kerry. The leader of the second group was John E O'Neill, who had debated Kerry on the Vietnam War back in 1971 on the Dick Cavett show. I happened to see O'Neill on C-Span during the 2004 campaign. In response to a question he referred to President Bush as "an empty suit". This was always about John Kerry, not Bush.
By mischaracterizing the substance of the Swiftboat attacks and turning them into merely a dirty political tactic, Democrats and their media accomplices sought to avoid dealing with the substance raised by the ads; Kerry's statements after his service disparaging the U.S and his fellow servicemen and the question of why so many people disliked the man. I was still reading the Times back then and the Swift Boat ads were out there for weeks before it wrote a word about them. It was as if the paper was awaiting instructions from the Kerry campaign about what to do. Finally, the Kerry campaign responded and the Times printed a front page story but, as it was mostly an attack by Kerry without a full explanation of what the controversy was about, it must have been very baffling for most readers. In any event, Baquet appears to have fallen for this hook, line and sinker.
If what Nawaz meant to reference were inaccurate and discredited allegations there is an example from the 2004 campaign that fits the bill - the attacks on George W Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard (TANG). In fact, the better term for unjustified and false allegations about a candidate's military service is being "TANGed", not "Swiftboated".
In the case of the TANG controversy, Dan Rather of 60 Minutes used the vice-chair of the Kerry election campaign as his primary source for the allegations against Bush, a man whose claims had been denounced by his own daughter (a fact not disclosed on the broadcast)! Rather himself, a native Texan and partisan Democrat, also had a son who was running fundraisers for the Texas Democratic Party. 60 Minutes ignored the substantial evidence contradicting its thesis (no one who served with Bush confirmed the story and there was documented contemporary evidence supporting Bush) and, most famously, used a document to seal its case, allegedly from 1973, that turned out to have been composed using Microsoft software not invented until the late 1990s!! Oh, and Rather's producer gave a heads up to the Kerry campaign before the broadcast, so they were in position to release campaign ads as soon as the segment broadcast. Rather still maintains his reporting was accurate.
Whether it is New York Times editor Dean Baquet in 2016 or Aman Nawaz in 2024, they exist in a enclosed universe in which their crowd just repeats the same lies to each other over and over again, until they become accepted truth. This is the same crowd claiming to be so alarmed about misinformation, by which they mean information they disagree with.
Tim Walz is simply Gavin Newsom without the Gordon Gekko/American Psycho affect.
Same policies and both are driving their states into the ground.
Kamala and Tim's history of working together probably helped in the selection. As someone else has already pointed out, back in 2020 Tim let minority areas of Minneapolis burn to the ground while Kamala raised funds to bail out the perpetrators.
I am surprised by the choice. Minnesota is not a swing state; Pennsylvania is. And I've seen enough of Gov. Shapiro to know that while his policies are progressive, his rhetoric is very unthreatening to non-progressives, while Walz is proudly an insane and vocal leftist. The selection is revealing in two ways.
1. Since Biden dropped out, Kamala has been desperately running away from her radical left positions, but Walz is a signal to the radicals who run the party that, whatever Kamala is now saying, don't worry, because after the election it will be business as usual. Her positions in this campaign are merely to fool the rubes.
2. I had figured that after Kamala, the next Democratic nominee would be from the Hamas wing of the party, but things have moved faster than anticipated. As mentioned, Shapiro is from a swing state, can sound like a normie to those not carefully following politics, but differed from the radicals in refusing to denounce Israel. This tells you who wields the power in the Democratic Party of 2024.
Sadly, it's no surprise. The top domestic priority of the Biden Administration is promoting the conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have plotted to manipulate the language and structures of our society to attain and maintain White Supremacy and this system must be dismantled. The administration's two DEI Executive Orders and its appointments show its commitment to implementing race essentialism into every aspect of the Federal government. The rejection of Shapiro and the embrace of Walz are the logical outcomes of the dominant Democratic Party ideology as my post from last October pointed out.
One of my favorite Democratic commentators, Reuben Rodriguez, notes of the Walz selection:
Harris & Walz have records that make Rs lose their minds.
Issue for Rs is 90% of the country is against this stuff but "b/c everyone hates it, no one BELIEVES it's real".
So Rs come off as crazy describing something that did in fact happen.
Reuben Rodriquez, the pseudonym for a Florida Democrat political observer, has some astute observations on Donald Trump. I've been reading Reuben on Twitter since 2020 and find he has remained true to his political beliefs, while avoiding the stampede to insanity of mainline Democrats.
Trump exists as a flawed, powerful & impotent, VESSEL for a cornucopia of grievance. He is a revolt against a global economy, cloying feminism & a subconscious revolt against the victory of post-material liberalism. That he can not even comprehend this ADDs to the appeal.
Say it weekly: Trump being fully unable to articulate his value prop allows HUGE swaths of the pop to project on him their *own* amorphous grievances Grievances they can’t even say aloud. Trump is an inadvertent masterpiece of channeling desperate groups & desires.
I don't think this completely captures Trump or his appeal but does account for a certain amount of it.
His observations were prompted by tweets from Matt Stoller (a leftist and no relation to THC), including this scathing and accurate assessment.
There's this belief that JD Vance was 'radicalized' by something, as if it's weird to lose faith in institutional leaders, academics and journalists who are clearly inept and totally full of shit all the time.
Andrew Sullivan, who will not be voting for Trump, provides another perspective on the man and his political resurrection, while pondering the collapse of the liberal establishment.
What makes this narrative feel like something deeper than a mere looming electoral college landslide is that, simultaneously, the entire liberal establishment seems to be imploding. The Democrats’ Biden formula — impose radical social, economic, and cultural change by fronting it with a moderate, easy-to-bully old man — has unraveled as obviously as Biden’s health. One reason is that the president is simply incapable of catching the attention of the country — except in universal cringe — and has singularly failed to construct a compelling narrative of his own.
Another is the incoherence of the Resistance. If you want to protest potential abuse of the justice system by a future president Trump, don’t bring an obviously flimsy, political case in New York City that merely helped Trump sweep back to dominance in the GOP. If you want a saner GOP, don’t demonize every other possibility, from DeSantis to Vance. If you emphasize the danger of political violence, don’t turn a blind eye as BLM burns America’s cities to the ground, or ignore Antifa. If you want to accuse Fox News of propaganda, don’t push out equal and opposite propaganda on toxic MSNBC. If you think democracy dies in darkness, why try to get Trump legally excluded from some state ballots, and prevent any real primary among Democrats?
More saliently, if one of your main lines of attack on Trump is his mendacity, it was probably not a great idea to tell the entire country that Biden was, in Joe Scarborough’s words, “far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been — intellectually, analytically…”
The lies the Democrats have been telling us these past few years are legion: inflation won’t happen/is temporary/is good for you; the Southern border is secure; “equity” is “fairness”; biological sex is a “spectrum”; Ukraine is about to win the war; Russia’s economy can be sanctioned to death; political violence is entirely on the far right; children can meaningfully consent to sex changes; the only thing holding black Americans back is white bigotry; the mainstream media is fair; and women have penises. Yes, Trump is a shameless liar. But the left’s propaganda has muddied the waters. When NBC’s higher-ups took Morning Joe off the air this week, it was a real moment. Even the muckety-mucks couldn’t take the lucrative propaganda anymore.
I will never vote for Trump — because he is so psychologically disturbed and so contemptuous of the rule of law that he remains a danger to us and the world. But I can see the logic of Trumpism. Those who feel left behind — culturally, economically — need at least one party to represent them and their values. As Biden has proven, protectionism is not all bad, especially when related to supply chains and national security. Mass immigration is out of control, and only one party gets it. Support for those who have lost the most from globalization seems to me a defensible conservative position, after migrant winners like me have had such a good run of it. And the madness of the neocon war machine demands a president able to spurn it.
Neither Rodriguez or Sullivan focus on the authoritarian turn of the Democrats, for whom a danger to democracy is anyone who does not vote for Democrats and, as a party, are doing all they can to ensure that the opposition never attains power again. The radical social, economic, and cultural change referenced by Sullivan can only occur if accompanied by the repression needed to impose and maintain that change.
As for THC, he remains committed to leaving the presidential line on the ballot blank in 2024.
Of the many legal proceedings that Donald Trump is being subjected to there is only one, or rather a portion of one, that I find has some surface plausibility - the obstruction of justice charges in the Mar-a-Largo documents case (whether he is actually guilty of the charges is another matter). I noted in Here We Go Again that the Mar-a-Lago case is another self-inflicted wound by Trump. The rest are politically motivated, with the New York cases the most egregious.
This article by Andrew McCarthy, no friend of Trump, explains how crazy the proceedings are in the current trial regarding the payments to Stormy Daniels, due to the deliberate malfeasance of the prosecutor and judge.
Understand, most criminal cases in the United States do not take two weeks to try. There are lots of long trials, too, but to get to this stage of the proceedings and still have the subject matter of the case unaddressed is . . . highly unusual.
That’s because the case is not about what the case is about. That’s why I’m not sure how effective Bove’s shrewd point was. Judge Merchan has helped prosecutors frame the trial as a “conspiracy” case – specifically, a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election by suppressing politically damaging information (allegations of extramarital affairs), supposedly in violation of federal campaign-finance law.
I don’t want to further belabor the record regarding how there is no conspiracy charge in the indictment, how there is no such conspiracy statute in New York law, how Bragg has no authority to enforce federal campaign law, how the statute actually charged in the indictment gives him no such authority under New York constitutional law, and how – even if Bragg arguably had jurisdiction to enforce federal campaign law – the so-called hush-money payments charged (based on lawful non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)) were not campaign expenditures for which that law mandated disclosure. These points may end up being more germane on appeal – which, if Trump gets convicted, could take a year or more to process.
Merchan is letting Bragg’s prosecutors present the case as if the charge were conspiracy to suppress politically damaging information, and he slaps down Trump’s lawyers when they try to object.
As McCarthy notes, any Trump conviction will be vulnerable on appeal due to the many procedural irregularities in this case. But since this is a political prosecution it doesn't matter, since the goal is to achieve a conviction which can be used in the presidential campaign. Whether it is overturned after the election is irrelevant.
The New York case is the clearest example of the political double standard at play in the various Trump prosecutions.
In 2016, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee hired FusionGPS, paying it more than $1 million to concoct the Steele Dossier, a fictitious set of allegations regarding a conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin.(1) The conspiracy to steal the 2016 election was an effort to divert attention from Hillary's email woes and to damage Trump during the campaign. In inventing this allegation, the Clinton campaign utilized a series of agents who had contact with Russian intelligence and Kremlin-connected oligarchs.(2) After the election, the FEC found that the campaign and DNC attempted to hide the purpose for which the expenditures were made and fined both a total of about $140,000. There were no criminal charges filed regarding the conspiracy which after it failed to bring about Hillary's election was transformed into an effort to undermine the new administration of the duly elected president of the United States.
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(1) The DOJ Inspector General report on the dossier and the FISA warrants on Carter Page implicitly found no basis for the allegations. The Durham Report, issued in May 2023, explicitly found no support for the allegations.
"Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated: not the salacious allegations of events at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow, not the allegation of there being a 'well-developed conspiracy of co-operation' between Trump and the Russians, not the allegations of a secret meeting involving Page and certain sanctioned Russians (namely, Igor Sechin and Igor Divyekin), and not the allegation of Page serving as Manafort's conduit for information between the Russians and the Trump campaign. This is true even after the FBI offered Steele $1 million or more for such corroboration and after Danchenko was signed up as an FBI CHS [Confidential Human Source] and paid more than $220,000 for information on other matters." (pages 236-7)
It was all a cleverly invented fiction.
(2) FusionGPS was, at the same time, working for a Kremlin oligarch, trying to get Congress to rescind sanctions. Christopher Steele, hired by FusionGPS, was working for Oleg Deripaska, another Kremlin oligarch, currently under indictment in the U.S. Steele's "major-sub-source" was Igor Danchenko, who had been subject to an unresolved U.S. counterintelligence investigation due to his connections with Russian intelligence, and one of Steele's other sources (and the source for the scandalous Moscow Ritz Carlton allegations), was Charles Dolan, a DC public relations guy who was working for the Russian Federation to improve its image in the U.S. in association with Putin's press secretary and the Kremlin's ambassador to the U.S. Dolan had also been the Virginia Chairman for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992 and 1996, executive director of the Democratic Governor's Association, a senior advisor to Hillary in the 2008 campaign and was supporting Clinton in 2016. Dolan also authored emails asserting Danchenko was an FSB agent (the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB). When FBI analysts identified Dolan as a source and recommended the Mueller team interview him, their request was denied and they were instructed to cease their investigation.
