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Gaslighting the Public on Vote Fraud

Bellevue woman receives 16 ballots addressed to her apartment number with different names | wgrz.com
Bellevue woman receives 16 ballots addressed to her apartment number with different names in October 2024. (wgrz.com)

Why the campaign to convince the public that the voting system is safe and secure when the claim cannot survive a rudimentary examination? Go ahead, type “vote fraud” or something similar into a Google or Bing search field and you will get link after link praising its sanctity. Yet, what they assert is not proven. Just apply the minimal amount of mental energy to the subject to cut through the bogus mantra-like narrative. We are gaslit.

I had experience in running a precinct voting station in northern California in the 1980s, at the ground, nuts-and-bolts level. Granted, that was four decades ago and mostly involved in-person voting, but, looking back on it, the system was problematic back then. Basically, people were matched with their voluntarily disclosed addresses. The person signed the registrar’s list next to their alleged name and address and were handed a ballot. We were prohibited from asking for ID. They marked their ballot, handed it to a poll worker, and it was deposited in the box. After closing (8 p.m.), the number of ballots had to equal the number of signatures and then I delivered the locked box to the registrar’s office for tallying.

Can you discern any possible avenues of fraud in that system? The system is essentially reliant on personal honesty such as truthful signatures. Transparency laws require voter lists be made public. Any activist can have a copy. It begins with an oral statement of identity at the poll. How truthful is the person requesting the ballot? Is the signature an effective safeguard? Does the list accurately represent only valid voters? Delivery to the registrar’s office meant the ballots flow into the sea of paper. At the precinct level, any other concerns were above my pay grade.

And that was in-person voting, which is widely recognized as the most secure. What happens when ballots are scattered through the mail? A precinct voting booth is replaced by the kitchen table. What goes on behind those residential four walls is anybody’s guess. One person completing multiple ballots? Who knows? All that is necessary is a reasonably matching signature.

Are temporary, part time election employees apt to be forensic handwriting experts? I doubt that graphology is a widely practiced science. Will scanning machines and their software capture any fraud? Possibly, but so what. The fraud can’t be traced to any one particular ballot. The ballot has no user name, enters the ballot ocean in the county office, is already counted thereby cancelling a valid vote if fraudulent, while the fraudster disappears into the multitude, avoiding any dragnet because there isn’t likely to be one. So much for the deterrence of the law. So much for the proud boast “experts agree that there is no widespread voter fraud” (see #1). It’s hilarious.

I searched the net and only received affirmations of election purity on the first two or three pages of links. That might mean the “experts agree”, or they are either deluded or further muddying the reputations of “experts” in a partisan crusade. Pick a website and go to the relevant page. The reasons for the system’s alleged “righteousness” are dubious to say the least.

Let’s take a look at the attempted debunking of claims of dangerous levels of voter fraud in a piece that was produced by two UC Berkeley academics (see #2), a view dominating the first two pages of links in Google or Bing when searching “voter fraud”. The points raised are ubiquitous and partisan, but very misleading and cannot survive analysis.

The first obvious and bewildering allegation is, “Voter fraud is very rare….” This will not survive basic scrutiny. Compare voter fraud with shoplifting using similar computational methods. The rate of voter fraud (quotient) is calculated by taking the total number of detected instances of vote fraud (dividend) and dividing it by the total number of votes cast (divisor). With shoplifting, the rate of shoplifting (quotient) is determined by dividing the total number of shoplifting instances (dividend) by the total number of primary household shoppers (divisor). Yes, it’s rough but the two forms of larceny provide some commonality for comparison purposes.

If voter fraud is “rare”, so is shoplifting (larceny), using comparable computational methods. Shoplifting mathematically exists at a rate of .00846. The “detected” level of voter fraud in Arizona was .0000845. Yeah, the “8” moves back three digits for voter fraud, yet both convey “rare” no matter how you cut it. The voter fraud rate is corrupted by “detected”. If you are not vigilant because it is assumed to be “rare”, the low rate is a self-fulfilled prophecy. In addition, the devised voting system can make the discovery of fraud nearly impossible. Both calculations have their noise in the numbers.

Yet, that low shoplifting rate has caused some retail chains to fly the coop out of states like California and cities within it like San Francisco, L.A., Oakland. A low number does not capture the scale of the problem. Retail operating margins hover around 3%, but retail “losses” due to theft of around 1.6% of sales bites into the reason to remain in these locales (see #3). The “rare” rate of larceny is nonetheless driving some retailers into bankruptcy, or skedaddling.

Could a similar “rare” rate of vote larceny be discouraging people to vote? “Nah”, says the UC Berkely grads. They cite 6 reasons for why there’s nothing to see here. It’s balderdash.

Reason #1: “Only valid voters can get a ballot in the mail.” How “valid”? Are millions of “inactive” voters potentially “valid” voters? In response to a legal settlement with Judicial Watch in 2016, the California Secretary of State pledged to remove 5 million “inactive” voters from its voter rolls. L.A. County alone was responsible for 1.5 million (see #4). That’s a filthy list of voters. In that same year of 2016, there was about one person improperly on the list for every 3 voters (see #5). And the UC Berkeley grads are trying to tell me that only “valid voters” get a ballot by mail, or other ways? They asserted that there’s absolutely no possibility that some of those 5 million didn’t make it into the vote count. Really, in a wild shot-gunning of ballots through the mail like in 2020? It defies logic.

Reason #2: “It is very hard to make fake ballots.” This is your typical straw man. Photocopying ballots does not constitute even a small slice of the “stolen election” charges. The accusation might be out there but it is hard to find. The tactic of our post-doc candidate and her prof is to push an accusation that few if any are making and then knock it down. Straw men litter academia like in social media.

Reason #3: “Voters must affirm their identity”. How? By signature, and the eagle-eye (?) precision of temporary workers pouring over the signature books and autographs on mail-in ballot envelopes. And all of this is based on registration lists later shown, usually under threat of legal action, to be afflicted with a third flotsam – the dead, moved, or improperly registered. It’s like operating a Walgreen’s on the honor code in a sea of L.A. homeless. Then, compound the problem by flinging mail-in ballots hither and yon to be marked by heaven-knows-who in the unmonitored environs of millions of kitchen tables, all vouched by a signature. Remember, no ID. That’s a whole lot of pressure on temporary workers seeking to make extra money for Christmas. Anyway, “affirmed” or realistically not affirmed, any signature is irrelevant after the ballots enter the ballot sea. It’s counted, period.

Reason #4: “It’s very hard to duplicate mail-ballot envelopes”. Straw Man II. The “safeguards” of a government return envelope and envelope bar codes are beside the point. They are no way to guarantee the intended person voted. Get the signature later or produce a close approximation. Our grad student and her prof make this howler: “This signature usually cannot deviate significantly from the signature on their original voter registration card, or the ballot will be rejected.” Who’s expected to pinpoint the “deviations”? Yes, it’s our supersleuth temporary election workers, grandma or grandpa seeking to score a few bucks for the grandkids’ Christmas.

Reason #5: “The Postal Service will notice oddities.” Mmmmm? Our campus duo makes this announcement: “Anyone hoping to conduct mail-voting fraud would have to avoid detection by not only regular election officials, but also the U.S. Postal Service.” Let me get this straight, unionized postal workers receiving an avalanche of ballots will successfully weed out the fraudsters. There’s something about Arctic ice salesmen that keeps ringing in my head. This is beyond comical.

The final “reason” should lead to a laughter-induced seizure.

Reason #6: “Voter fraud is a serious federal and state crime.” Yeah, and murder, burglary, theft, extortion, racketeering, etc., are as well. So what? They still occur, and a lot in some places. Talk to any resident of south Chicago, or almost anywhere in California. Much of it goes unreported and falls through the cracks as untraceable. And that makes it like vote fraud.

And all of this is the corkscrew logic to avoid bringing a driver’s license to the precinct polling place. The Democrats protesteth too much. It’s intriguing. Is there something going on here that they are not telling us? States with ID laws make the things easy to get and accept other ways to establish ID. Compare it with the TSA requirement of ID at airports. Of the millions passing through the nation’s airports, the loudest complainers make one think of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Red Brigades of 1970s fame. Bewailing an innocuous safeguard understandably brings to mind bewailer nefariousness, and rightly so.

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RogerG

Source:
1. “What you need to know about voter fraud in California”, California Voter Foundation, 10/10/2022, at https://www.calvoter.org/content/what-you-need-know-about-voter-fraud-california.
2. “6 ways mail-in ballots are protected from fraud”, Charlotte Hill and Jake Grumbach, UC Berkeley via The Conversation, UC Berkeley, 9/30/2020, at https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/6-ways-mail-ballots-are-protected-fraud.
3. “Crime isn’t the full story: What else is affecting retailers in urban areas, in 4 charts”, CNN, 10/12/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/business/target-closing-us-cities-crime-dg.
4. “Calif. Begins Removing 5 Million Inactive Voters on Its Rolls”, Susan Crabtree, Real Clear Politics, 6/20/2019, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/06/20/calif_begins_removing_5_million_inactive_voters_on_its_rolls__140602.html.
5. “2016 Presidential General Election Results – California”, The U.S. Elections Atlas, at https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2016&fips=6&off=0&elect=0&f=0.

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“2,000 Mules”, 2,000 (or More) Chumps

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I am a man of faith.  There is a God.  But is faith an appropriate basis for judgment in, let’s say, a court of law or a lab?  Don’t facts or evidence count?  Two instances bring to light the muddled thinking – the weird confusion of using the thought processes of the pew in a trial or medical experiment – in Trump’s surreal conviction of God-knows-what and Salem Media’s now-discredited “2,000 Mules”.  The misapplication of faith abounds in both, and both are disgraceful.

Now, with Biden out of the picture, the Dems are pivoting to the tag line “Harris prosecutor and Trump convicted felon”.  It’ll work among people who have a deep faith in the Democrats’ neo-Marxist vision, who are already disposed to believe anything that dribbles out of PBS, MSNBC, or The View.  However, of what was Trump convicted in a Manhattan court, before a Manhattan jury, by a Manhattan DA who would make a Stalin prosecutor proud?  The indictment’s 34 felony counts were actually one count just multiplied every time it appeared in the paperwork.  The felonies were invented by injecting an ethereal and fuzzy federal election fraud charge into accusations that can’t survive the statute of limitations.  All of it was hocus pocus for people who are inclined to believe in the unbelievable.

Well, the belief in the unbelievable is evident in people who regard Trump to be God’s vicar on earth, in the same fashion as that Manhattan jury’s belief in socialist prosperity, an oxymoron if there ever was one.  So, if Trump castigates his 2020 election loss as fraud so will the massive supportive political complex behind him.  Facts, evidence aren’t allowed to stand in the way.  Salem Media’s “2,000 Mules” is a classic in the annals of political fiction.

In case you haven’t heard, Salem Media dropped Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” from its media platforms and issued an apology to Mark Andrews, one of the so-called “mules” (see #1 and #2 below).  As it turned out, Andrews was placing in the Atlanta drop box ballots for himself, his wife, and three adult children.  This is one “mule” that couldn’t be made to fit the invented profile.  The narrator’s “What you are seeing is a crime” was pure poppycock.  What of the other 1,999 “mules”?  We get a clue when Salem Media dropped all mention of D’Souza’s monstrosity.  Even diehards shrink from the prospect of having to shell out millions of dollars in compensatory awards.

Might there have been vote fraud in 2020?  Possibly.  Might there have been more fraud than normal?  Possibly.  But “possibly” shouldn’t be good enough for an electorate with their heads screwed on straight.  Good sense demands a large dose of skepticism of an allegation of a secret conspiracy of 2,000 anybodies.  A man with much good sense, Benjamin Franklin, once wrote, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”  Actually, conspiracy is the last refuge of the scoundrel, not patriotism, in today’s toxic political playground.

Why is it so toxic?  It’s the junction of two factors.  On the one hand, in true Marxist fashion, the Democrats have firmly adopted the maxim, the ends justify the means.  Anything is considered proper so long as it accomplishes the desired end.  On the other hand, the Democrats’ institutional heft behind the neo-Marxist revolution is confronted by their opponents’ cult of the middle finger in the person of Donald Trump.  As a result, our politics are grotesque and filled with fantasies.

Welcome to a public that has been made into chumps.

December 2020:

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Publisher of ‘2000 Mules’ Apologizes to Georgia Man Falsely Accused of Ballot Fraud in the Film”, US News and World Report from AP, 5/31/2024, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/georgia/articles/2024-05-31/publisher-of-2000-mules-apologizes-to-georgia-man-falsely-accused-of-ballot-fraud-in-the-film

2. “A Belated Apology for ‘2000 Mules’”, Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, 6/5/2024, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/2000-mules-salem-media-lawsuit-mark-andrews-dinesh-dsouza-2020-election-true-the-vote-1565ace0

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The GOP’s TPAC Suicide Squadron for 2024

Steve Bannon blasts Murdochs, Fox News in fiery CPAC speech | The Hill
Steve Bannon at CPAC 2023

CPAC may be turning into a pure Trump personality cult.  The first “C” in the anacronym stands for conservative, but truth in advertising demands that it be replaced by a “T” for Trump Political Action Committee – TPAC.  If Steve Bannon’s recent speech before the group is any indication, and the thunderous reception that it received, the Trump hero-worship brigades are fully prepared to torpedo the GOP’s chances in 2024 and saddle us with more of the looney left in the seats of power.

Watch a portion of the Bannon speech in the link below.

Bannon is nuts, and so is the TPAC audience.  If the numbers in a recent poll are reasonably accurate, 43% of registered Republicans support Trump as the party’s nominee.  43% of Republicans equates to 12% of all registered voters because 40% of all party registrations nationwide are Democrats versus 29% Republicans.  Do the math.  43% of 29% equals roughly 12%.

A good portion of that 12% are diehards for an intensely polarizing figure.  Let’s say half of the 12% are zealous true-believers (only-Trumpers) which reduces the kamikaze recruits to 6% of all registered voters.  Trump only gets more polarizing as he pushes a “stop the steal” story that he can’t prove in court and mires others who were sympathetic into more legal trouble for lending some credence to it.

Trial Lawyer Richard on Twitter: "I think they'll follow him until his downfall. Richard Nixon ...

Dominion v. Fox News is only one case in point.  The network and its primetime lineup should be applauded for their honesty rather than castigated by a fanatic like Bannon.  The depositions and disclosures of Fox News internal communications in court forces me to partly reevaluate some of my earlier criticisms of Fox’s celebrity pundits.  Those disclosures further confirm the out-of-their-mind emotional state of that 6%.  The Bannon audience at TPAC, if it’s typical of the cranks attracted to Trump, can only lead the party to more dismal electoral performance – 2018, 2020, and the red wave of 2022 turning into a ripple.

The attacks on Paul Ryan are particularly galling.  Somehow, the low-tax/small-government/free-market philosophy of every Republican from Coolidge to Reagan as represented by Ryan is besmirched by ad hominem attacks by the cult’s agitators.  It’s just that Ryan won’t pledge fealty to Trump, and that list of dissenters from Trump megalomania has only grown as more people cross paths with the alleged demi-god.  Now, we must add Fox News to the ever-lengthening enemy’s list.  How many more dissenters from Trump worship must there be before the TPAC crowd begins to question their slavish devotion to a self-absorbed and octogenarian adolescent.

Facebook Shuts Down Pro-Trump 'Stop the Steal' Group | Time

Ryan promises not to attend the Republican convention if Trump is the nominee.  I’ll leave the presidential line on the ballot blank if he once again bamboozles the party into the nomination.  The argument that it’s a binary choice has worn its welcome.

Trump is a loser.  He turns off more than he turns on.  His electoral performance over three elections is proof.  The only way for him to deny the numbers is to label them as fraud without the proof to convince a judge and jury, let alone a majority of the electorate in a presidential contest.  At a certain point, Trump is just embarrassing.  Embarrassment doth not make a winner.

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RogerG

* “CPAC Crowd Stands and Cheers as Raging Steve Bannon Vows to Bring Down Fox News: ‘We’re Going To Fight You Every Step Of The Way!’”, Mediaite, 3/3/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cpac-crowd-stands-and-cheers-as-raging-steve-bannon-vows-to-bring-down-fox-news-we-re-going-to-fight-you-every-step-of-the-way/ar-AA18cqic?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=e82b976dd18142c187e4f85ded29053a&ei=32

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The Red Wave that Wasn’t. Thank You, Donald J. Trump.

Republican election night party in Washington, D.C., at 9:15 pm EST on 11/8/22. (photo: Luther Abel/National Review)
Republican election night party in Washington, D.C., at 2:45 am EST on 11/9/22. (photo: Luther Abel/National Review)

“Populist” Republican voters made Trump appear to be a winner in the 2022 primaries. Now, with the midterm election results trickling in, not so much. Trump is a millstone around the neck of the party. I once compared Trump’s antics during his term in office as the big man in a basketball starting lineup, not known for his outside shooting, miraculously making a 3-pointer at the start of the game and for the rest of the game, he’s throwing bricks from the 3-point line rather than playing strong inside. Trump actually thought his 2016 surprise victory was an endorsement of his behavior; so, he repeated it throughout his term and thereafter. Well, the same analogy applies to a significant part of the GOP’s base, and now it’s this “populist” constituency who is tossing bricks.

“Trumpian” became a popular word, a compliment, in the lexicon of some. It’s popularity, however, is only discernable in a narrow socio-political silo, places of rabid confirmation bias like all such cloisters. I’ve often complained of the blue bubbles or silos. There are also red ones. Opinions are constantly reinforced and a person quickly loses sight of the fact that not everyone sees the world like them. The implausible appears plausible, and the boorish and disgusting are distorted into the attractive. These clusters are carnival funhouses of warped mirrors.

Former President Donald Trump talks to the press on the grounds of his Mar-a-Lago resort on midterm elections night in Palm Beach, Florida, November 8, 2022. (photo: Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters)

That said, the country should be as frightened of the Democrat mantra of “Save our democracy” as many are of Trump. What democracy? What kind of “democracy” are the Democrats trying to save? We know that they are opposed to almost any accountability checks in elections: voter ID, regular and mandatory cleanup of the registration rolls, and efforts to ban the fraud-laden practice of ballot harvesting or place restrictions on open and broad mail-in voting. The Republican chant of “easy to vote, hard to cheat” is essentially countered by the Democrats’ “easy to vote, easy to cheat”. Whose voice is being recorded here? Frankly, it’s getting harder to say.

The core of the problem is the first half of both parties’ chant: “easy to vote”. No, it shouldn’t be hard, but it depends on what is meant by “hard”. Is it “hard” to expect people to be willing to break away from the Xbox to trundle down to the polling place to cast their “voice”? Is it hard to expect some civic and issue literacy before a person casts their vote? Instead, it’s just “vote, vote, vote”. The NFL during broadcasts pushed the mantra, even going so far as to turn their stadiums into repositories of ballots from God knows where and God knows who. These aren’t polling places staffed by neighbors with a list of registered voters from the neighborhood. Ballots come in from everywhere, overwhelmingly mail-in, which are the most problematic in terms of “one person, one vote”. Who knows who’s marking the things once they’re taken inside a domicile, later to be harvested by activists.

I doubt if Americans understand how freakishly unusual our voting procedures have become in a country who prides itself in being the gold standard of “democracy” . . . or how similar we’ve become to Third World kleptocracies, totalitarian “democracies”, and brutal thuggeries like Putin’s Russia. When mail-in voting replaces in-person, with many other now-legalized loosey-goosey practices, we are depressing the incentives for the serious voter, serious enough to get off their tush to go down the few blocks to a voting booth. Why vote only to have it canceled by a semi-literate blockhead?

The trends according to MIT should be considered shocking (see chart below). In 1992, 8% of ballots cast were mail-in. In 2020, it’s about half. And many of those are in states with no-excuse or universal, automatic broadcasting of ballots through the mail. And to think that most of it is from dirty registration rolls. Could it get any murkier?

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Israel restricts about 95% of its voting to in-person. Exceptions are only allowed for certain military or diplomatic personnel. We’ve gone the other way toward a government of whom?, by whom?, and for whom?

Advantage, Democrats. Why? They control the culture and the messaging to low-information, unmotivated voters. The Netflix viewership is primed for the Democrats’ childish themes of oppression and meanie white guys in suits. Low-information and unmotivated voters can be found across the spectrum, but the Democrats, I suspect, have richer veins to mine.

As of this writing, it isn’t all bleak news for Republicans. Many races are still undecided. It must be admitted, though, that the Republicans always had a cultural/media headwind to fight. Now, they must admit that have a Trumpian one to contribute to the gust.

Expect two more years of “wrong track”!

I’ll have more to say later after the dust clears.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Voting By Mail and Absentee Voting”, MIT, March 2021, at https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absentee-voting .

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If a Red Wave Happens, What Next? More Trump?

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What’s next after a red wave?  If it happens – big “if” – It’ll depend on how the results will be interpreted.  Will it be viewed as an endorsement of Trumpism or rejection of a radical-Left Democratic Party or both?  Regardless, Trump senses a triumphal return to the White House.  That’s “what next”.  He shared a clip of Meghan Kelly predicting “He [DeSantis] won’t win against Trump.”  Trump attached to the clip, “I agree”.  See below.

This guy is running, and with his usual uncouth cockiness.  What does he offer?  His appeal is encapsulated in “He owns the libs”.  His in-your-face style is appealing to a certain type of voter, thus a rabid following of 20-25% of the electorate.  But this combative charisma repels as much as it attracts.  As such, Trumpism as a political personality is not the stuff of decisive victories.  Politics is about addition, not subtraction, and Trump brings both at the same time.

Michael Brandon Dougherty (in many ways a Trump admirer) in National Review Online makes the point that Trump is charisma, not policy.  I agree.  Trump’s term in office was characterized by management chaos and the farming out most policy initiatives to Congress.  Trump is no policy wonk.  Other than immigration, issues like tax cuts, deregulation (Congressional Review Act repeals of regulations), and judges were at the behest of, and impossible without, Paul Ryan (House) and Mitch McConnel (Senate).  Even “energy independence” and immigration he must share with the party leadership since many of the policy aspects of these issues originated in long-established party platforms and previous Republican congressional actions.  In many ways, the country benefitted not necessarily from Trump but from not having a Democrat in the Oval Office to block them.

The Trump return is predicated on an overwhelming view within the party that Trump was cheated (“screwed” in popular Trump parlance) in the 2020 election.  The claim is only half right.  He claims that he won, but no, no one can say that.  Once the ballots entered the many registrar offices for counting, no one can say how they were marked, how they got there, nor where they came from.  Indeed, the election procedures in place throughout much of the country were the ones most prone to the kind of fraud that is nearly impossible to prove in court.  Tracing a ballot to a fraudulent voter is next to impossible once you bypass the controls of in-person voting with the mass-mailing of ballots.  That’s the wrong half of Trump’s indictment.  Trump and his backers would be on firmer ground to complain of the mass-mailing of ballots, the use of dirty registration rolls, unsupervised drop boxes, ballot harvesting, provisional ballots, same-day registration, anywhere voting, etc.  The most unsecure method of voting that put an end to the secret ballot was used in 2020.  That’s the right half of the Trump complaint.

So, did he win? No, because he can’t prove it, no one can.  A ballot stripped of its envelope is dropped into a sea of undifferentiated ballots.  He should have known, screamed to high heaven when the procedures were jerry-rigged, but saved most of his vituperation after he lost.  At this point, he looks and sounds like a petulant child.  You want to talk about a huge turn-off?

Trump is so yesteryear.  His appeal is yesteryear – “I was cheated” and “own the libs” – and he can only offer us what he has already given us: some very good policies, like many good Republicans, and repellant behavior and mismanagement.  So much for the “virtue” of having a vaunted businessman behind the Resolute desk.  As the 2022 red wave and 2024 elections recede, if Trump gets the nomination and wins, the memory will quickly wane of the Democrats’ embrace of radical-Left revolution, to be replaced by, once again, X-rated presidential antics.

We – meaning Republicans – have options.  Our bench is long.  Romney milquetoasts are not the order of the day.  A compromise with radical-Left revolution is a semi-radical-Left revolution.  Socialism and neo-Marxism – agreed, they are similar – is poison no matter the dose.  A spine is required.  We have many backboned political leaders but without the boorishness.  Republicans have a choice to salve an inflated ego or establish a winning coalition for a decade(s).  Trump in his second term can only bring more subtraction than addition.

Please watch the clip. Meghan’s prediction is a warning, not a promise.

RogerG

For more, read here:

* “The Coming Fight over Trumpism: Charisma or Policy?”, Michael Brendon Dougherty, National Review Online, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/the-coming-fight-over-trumpism-charisma-or-policy/.

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The Moron Vote, California Style

I forgot who said it – I think it was William F. Buckley – but I paraphrase, “It’s not that you vote. It’s that you take your vote seriously.” Seriously means to have acquaintance with the issues, nominally or otherwise. Today, the mantra is to vote, vote, vote; never mind that you might have the issue-awareness of a comatose patient on life support.

September 14 is decision day on Gavin Newsom’s political career, and California is scattering ballots to the wind like our Fed at Democrat insistence is papering the world in dollars. The dollar as the word’s reserve currency, with Weimar Germany integrity, isn’t likely to survive as such any more than California’s election integrity will. Out the window goes the secret ballot. What’s secret – meaning, one voter is alone with one ballot – when 4 ballots land in a mail box, go behind the door, and are “harvested” a week later? And, even more troubling, everyone alive, dead, sentient, vegetative, moved, unmoved, caring, and uncaring gets one (maybe two). The state has a vote system that can’t help but rope in a lot of morons.

Vote by mail in South Carolina

Nothing is expected of the human being, not even breathing. You don’t have to break away from the Cheetos and the Xbox. You’re registered automatically under motor-voter. A ballot will come with the junk mail. Don’t bother with getting presentable and hunting down the car keys. Somebody will come by and pick it up, and maybe offer a little advice on how to fill it out.

It’s a system designed for the likes of Stacy Abrams, the goddess-avatar against “voter suppression”. Never mind that the Georgia race hustler doesn’t make a lick of sense. In her latest published screed, Our Time Is Now, she doubles down on stupid, or stupefying self-negation (Is there a difference?). Take a look at this glaring insult to logic from her book: “I watched in real time as the conflicts in our evolving nation became fodder for racist commercials, horrific suppression — and the largest turnout of voters of color in Georgia’s history.” Large turnouts of “voters of color” aren’t evidence of racist voter suppression any more than victory is defined by the enemy holding the ground and your troops are wiped out.

Stacy Abrams

It boggles the mind for what passes for “elite” opinion, or willful malpractice on the part of Holt & Reinhart editors. The mind is also left spinning when examining the latest turnout numbers in places like Georgia. The normally low-turnout 2018 midterms surpassed the 2016 presidential election. And 2020 exceeded Obama’s 2008. And proof of some kind of voter-ID is Jim Crow 2.0, something on the books in 35 states? The fact is, nobody – alive or dead – is impeded, especially when you’ve got a pandemic excuse at your disposal. Our elections are open sieves for votes from God-knows-where.

With that great vote sucking sound at open throttle in California, Newsom’s prospects look brighter than what they should be in a state with most of the nation’s homeless, eco-crazed forest management policies that reduced the woods to an open-air match factory, public schools geared for failure, COVID-panic as routine government policy, a cost of living that strangles the middle class and forces mass out-migration (and the loss of one House seat), tax rates that make the Socialist International glow in envy, and a neglected and obsolete water storage and delivery system as the state pursues trains-to-nowhere and inter-urban transit boondoggles suitable for Tokyo. What’s there to complain about?

Here’s my pet theory: As the number of registered voters approaches the number of human beings above room temperature, the proportion of morons in the vote totals increases exponentially. Newsom and Abrams are on the same wave length. Stacy’s prattle provides cover for a California election system that promises one-party control into the foreseeable future, like the one in North Korea that keeps the Kims in power with 95% approvals. The other 5% won’t be around next year.

Advantage Newsom, unless the Republicans become as adept as the Dems at improving their standing among the growing moron demographic. Believe me when I say that there are rich veins to be mined left, right, and center.

RogerG

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Last Night, Senate Republicans Protected Elections So the Supreme Court Wouldn’t Have To.

The “For the People Act” would make wide-open absentee voting the new norm.

H1/S1, the “For the People Act”, is actually the “For the Democrats Act”. It would codify the Democrats’ enthusiasm for mass producing votes, real or imagined. But regardless, the thing is unconstitutional. It would make a shambles of the US Constitution’s Article 1, Sec. 4, Cl. 1. The Clause reads:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but Congress may at any time make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of chusing [sic] Senators.”

According to the Democrats’ wild reading of the Constitution, the clause behind the semi-colon eliminates the one in front. But why would Madison and company bother writing “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature” if Pelosi and Schumer could erase it with the “make or alter” in the secondary part of the sentence? That’s certainly what H1/S1 does. It’s a federal takeover of all elections in the country. Here’s how:

It effectually repeals a state’s voter ID laws.

It lacerates a state’s registration requirements. It commands same-day registration for all states which would make it impossible to validate a voter before they vote as the thing is then allowed to untraceably flow into the river of votes to the counting center. It decrees automatic registration from government databases (DMV) which ropes in the eligible with the ineligible. States would be required to allow the registration of 16 and 17-year-olds. What would stop them from voting since the ID laws were emasculated? If that isn’t enough, a state’s laws to clean up the registration lists would be repealed through a variety of petty and self-serving legalisms.

The act of voting according to a state’s laws would be altered beyond recognition. Mail-in voting with ballots shot-gunned to the wind would be the new norm coast to coast, all of it with no validation of a signature or anything else for that matter. Ballots can be dropped off anywhere, any precinct, and by anyone. Combined with the rest of the loosey-goosey provisions, who know who’s voting and from where? To boot, party activists are empowered to sweep the area to collect the things (ballot harvesting). No potential for fraud there?

Election Day becomes a minimum of Election Two Weeks+1 by federal edict. People get a chance to vote before they know all the issues, like a presidential candidate’s son engaging in influence-peddling that also implicates the presidential candidate. The idea is to get votes in the bank before the digging can expose the candidate as a scoundrel.

The First Amendment would be under permanent siege with provisions criminalizing political speech. George Soros’s and Biden’s lefty DA’s would have a field day going after anyone who dared to stand athwart their vision of the “right side of history” – reminiscent of Lenin’s “ground down by the wheels of history”.

Congressional redistricting, a clear power of the states (Art. 1, Sec.2), would be rendered moot by the bill’s order for every state to have unelected redistricting commissions. Once again, another slice of the Constitution is made silent by narrowly partisan congressional gamesmanship.

Now this is real chutzpah: the bill would restrict the power of the Court to hear suits against the bill. They aren’t happy with silencing opposition. They desire to muzzle the Court.

Simply put, this rotten fish wouldn’t pass legal muster. In today’s Court, judicial review can’t be repealed when fundamental federalism and personal rights are being flattened. Here’s a list of Court precedents that are steamrolled by the monstrosity:

NAACP v. Alabama: The concomitant intimidation against opposition political groups in the bill’s disclosure requirements violates NAACP’s key finding that a group’s associational rights are protected by the 14th Amendment.

Citizens United v. FEC: Political groups have First Amendment protections to shield them harassment.

Allen v. Cooper, Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, City of Boerne v. Flores, Cutter v. Wilkinson: All concern the “congruence and proportionality” standard. The rule sates that a federal statute can’t be overly broad when it crosses into the states’ constitutional powers and must be tailored to specific ends that are validated by heavy evidentiary findings. By any stretch of the imagination, H1/S1 doesn’t cut it. Pelosi rushed this thing through without much of a hearing back in 2019, only to bring the thing back again in 2021 now that Schumer, at least nominally, is calling the shots in the Senate. The atrocity is ripe for the Court’s guillotine in spite of their best efforts at garroting the Court.

Senate Republicans stepped into the breach. They aborted the thing before the Court would have to do a later-term version of the act, to borrow the lingo from the long-simmering abortion debate.

RogerG
*Source: https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/the-facts-about-hr-1-the-the-people-act-2021
*Source: https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/07/even-if-congress-pretends-h-r-1-is-constitutional-the-supreme-court-cant/
*Also on my Facebook page.

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Warning! Don’t Box People into Corners.

Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflix’s “Last Chance U: Basketball” (highly recommended), stated, “Rules without relationships are rebellion.” When you think about it, he’s onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.

Coach John Mosley of East Los Angeles Community College’s basketball team

The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our society’s centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that it’ll no longer be loyal. Don’t box people into corners.

In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump “for life” by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her son’s sexual assault. Amazing.

Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. I’m not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, it’s been happening for quite some time to the less notable. It’s raw power and used in a brazen manner.

Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. He’s got that right. “Left-leaning” means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. It’s certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who aren’t caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.

Brandon Eich

It’s unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was “forced” out by something loosely called the “Mozilla community” – a more accurate term would be “mob” – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008’s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mob’s “cancellation” is the recognition that there aren’t other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.

An excursion into the functioning of tech central’s totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, “consumer tech”, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCullough’s defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eich’s opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.

Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eich’s opinions on marriage aren’t fashionable in Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”, and in McCullough’s San Francisco – thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCullough’s and those of Zuckerberg’s left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCullough’s support for gay marriage won’t by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, there’d be a groundswell of opposition for making a person’s employment status contingent on rectitude with an area’s popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place”.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifying before the Senate on April 10, 2018.

In that “left-leaning place”, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCullough’s twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single person’s exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, he’s right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into “ought” and Zuckerberg’s “left-leaning place” is all into gang-style suppression; that’s the difference.

And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.

Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesn’t comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Post’s Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of “Russia collusion”. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.

Another alliance member – the upper echelons of DC’s permanent Fed Administrative State – were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.

What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that it’s due to their software “protocols” or “algorythms”. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it “misinformation”. It’s still a crock.

Big Tech’s “misinformation” campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.

And if that’s not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Tech’s near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:

“Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.”

Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New York’s 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialism’s new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of “settled science” since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of “sustainable energy”. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the “settled science” of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of “misinformation” are the people combatting “misinformation”. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.

What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionary’s maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.

Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the “knowledge problem”. Big government’s attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.

Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with government’s top-down management of its residents, but aren’t, and can’t be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.

The spirit of resistance in California, April 2020. Protesters to the lockdown blocked traffic around the state’s capitol in Sacramento.

Coach Mosley properly acceded to the state’s decision. What else could he do? But what’ll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.

CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 15: A man walks with a stroller as people stand in line outside the Martin B. Retting, Inc. guns store on March 15, 2020 in Culver City, California. The spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has prompted some Americans to line up for supplies in a variety of stores. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

RogerG

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Pray for America

Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The pandemic gave us a death toll and a politically motivated overreaction that is actively mauling the foundations of America’s greatness. The consequences are frightening as yesterday’s troubling events indicated. My guess is that more disturbances are coming because some Americans will not be passive observers as others wreck their world. I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it . . . if cooler heads don’t prevail.

From where came the time of troubles? It can be traced to the longstanding machinations of the donkey party and their cultural and institutional allies. The Democrats used the virus to nearly eliminate faith in the last vestige of free and independent citizen control of their government: the election. They’ve worked tirelessly to prevent ID verification, turn voter registration over to the DMV, push same-day registration, persist in maintaining sloppy voter lists, earlier and earlier voting, and now, with the pandemic, remove most remaining guardrails by shot gunning ballots through the mail and thereby throwing mud on the results, and all the while facetiously spouting “voter suppression” to silence opposition. Today, who can trust election processes that would make an Iraqi cringe? No refuge there.

Look at Georgia. How does a state go from reliably conservative to neo-Marxist without any transition? Something is afoot, and it ain’t a new pair of sneakers. Mail-in voting shifts the premium from the independent voter to the moron voter. You don’t have to know the candidates, their positions, and make sense of it all because a generic “D”, which today is a generic socialist, is all that is needed when you’re harvesting pre-packaged early votes in a well-funded processing operation. Interesting . . . and appalling.

Voters drop off their presidential primary mail-in ballots at a drop box at King County Elections in Renton, Washington on March 10, 2020. (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)

Now, all institutions of critical societal mass are organs and tools of the cultural left, which is a direct pathway to the political left. For instance, the schools, K to grad school, have indoctrinated your teachers and kids in material and moral relativism, the philosophical mainstay of the many socialisms at the heart of the Democratic Party. In essence, they are the finishing schools of the cultural/political left. No refuge there.

Using the metric of political donations, the corporate boardrooms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are overwhelmingly populated with acolytes of the cultural/political left. Money poured into the coffers of the donkey party from these deep pockets, and made it possible to fund Stacey Abrams’s vast political mining operation that gave us two more neo-Marxists in the Senate. Corporate America is no longer a trustworthy bastion to defend American civilization. Their ads are increasingly endorsements of left-wing sloganeering and the collectivism of the super-state. The robber barons of today aren’t robbing your purse. They are stealing your country. No refuge there.

A war is brewing between Wall Street and Main Street.

And of course, there’s Big Media. The stuff creeping through your tv screen is resplendent in lefty values and causes. Big Tech reinforces the bias by acting as gatekeepers of “acceptable” thought. Big Entertainment and Big Information are channeled in only one cultural and political direction. Lefty groupthink is pervasive. The ChiComs would find much to like. No refuge there.

At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if, indeed, bigness is badness.

The pulpit is coming under increasing fire. For those denominations unwilling to submit – some mainline ones already have – the power of the state will be used to impose the agenda of coerced participation in abortion, transgenderism, and every other trendy surrender to the human will to come down the pike. If you are a church who takes seriously the mission to help the lost and the least, you are in the public square and subject to their gaze. Your church may remain something of a refuge if you remain locked in the sanctuary.

Boxing people into a corner with no outlet is not a prescription for civility. Some might resort to violence rather surrender to the central planning of the Green New Deal. Some might resist rather than submit to gun confiscation. Some might resist rather than see the path to prosperity for their children hampered by the color of their skin. Some might resist rather than accept the full emasculation of their state by a donkey party- and DC-engineered neutering of the Electoral College. Some might resist rather than submit to self-serving manipulation of the size of the Supreme Court, or accept the edicts of a cowed Court under constant threat of impeachment. These are dark times.

I hear the faint sounds of a militia in training. I hope and pray it never comes to that. My only recourse is prayer. Pray for America.

RogerG

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Our Oligarchy and the 2020 Election

This configuration doesn’t capture the essence of our modern mode of government. The branch on the left is mostly superfluous. The subterranean one and the one on the right hold sway.

Ours is not a limited government founded upon popular sovereignty. It is something unmoored from any sensible reading of the Constitution. Congress, the legislative branch, is a pointless political soap opera, no longer deliberative and relevant for the most part. The real stuff of governance happens in an alliance between government workers in the executive branch and the courts. The same pattern is repeated in the states. The least democratic parts have the greatest effective power.

No better example of this disfigured mode of governance can be found than the actions of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on September 17 to nullify sections of the state’s election law signed by Democratic governor Tom Wolfe last year. The law stipulated that mail-in ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on election day. The Court supplanted the plain language in the law with its own judgment of 3 days after the election. Why 3 days? Good question. I’m sure that there’s some rationale but I don’t think that it’s far removed from arbitrary.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court: the state’s second legislature.

On what did the narrow majority of four black-robed potentates hang their hat for their edict? Well, it’s the same tack as finding the right to abortion in emanations and penumbras (Griswold v. Conn. /Roe v. Wade). Find some language in the Constitution (state or federal) clearly meant for something else and stretch it to apply as needed. That way, they can legislate but hide it under “interpretation”.

These legal eagles invented an entirely new elastic clause in the state constitution. The relevant passage in the state constitution, now stretched to satisfy judicial whims, reads, “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” Of course, if a deadline can be annulled by such reasoning, so can any standard to ensure a credible election. Shower the state with ballots – which was done – and let them come in by wind and clutches at times made fungible by judicial flights of fancy – which was also done.

The federal Constitution lays the power to establish the “manner” of elections with the state legislatures. If, as part of their “manner”, Pennsylvania’s powers-that-be are willing to tolerate the transfer of the legislative power to judges, we’re stuck with it.

What a sorry state of affairs. Legislatures legislate, courts legislate over them, and everyone who likes the result yawns “ho-hum”. No constitutional provision can prevent the reality of sorry governments producing sorry elections. What do you expect from a corrupt oligarchy?

RogerG