Wednesday, November 11, 2020



Donald Trump May Have Lost This Battle, But Trumpism Will Win The War

Though Democrats pulled out every conceivable stop in order to ensure the defeat of their "Bad Orange" arch-nemesis, they aren’t crowing about it quite like you’d expect. If President Trump were Satan himself or even "literally Hitler," as we’ve been told for years, one might expect his removal to be met with the level of jubilation appropriate for such a monumental accomplishment, no? Sure, there’s been some (pretty bad) dancing in the streets, but for the most part, the response from media figures and Democratic politicians has been quite muted, if not a bit depressed, as if they’d lost something in their "victory."

The reason is obvious, of course. In the end, this was never about Trump. It was about power, and the ability to dominate the lives of people they disagree with ideologically. And instead of the "blue wave" the left was hoping for that would have allowed them to parlay their victory into irreversible power grabs that would have ensured their hegemony forever, they got more of a blue trickle, even WITH what many considered super-suspicious shenanigans, if not full-on election fraud. The result? A Biden "victory," yes, but also a likely GOP Senate hold, unexpected GOP gains in the House that had Democrats backbiting at each other, GOP gains at the State legislature level, and hurt feelz from Van Jones and Joy Reid.

Though the Trump team is hanging by every possible thread, sadly the fat lady has sung. Still, it’s good that Republicans are attempting to expose shenanigans where they happen, if only to maybe make them think twice in the future. Special elections in Georgia will decide who controls the Senate, but Republicans are historically good at special elections, and I think America overall is pretty cool with divided government. So both should - minus anything crazy - stay red. Democratic donors dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into failed Senate campaigns in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Kentucky only to see their hoped-for ‘blue wave’ turn into a ‘blue mirage.’ Hopefully, a similar pattern will play out in the Peach State. That means no court-packing, no end to the Senate filibuster, no new states, no Green New Deal, no Medicare-for-all, and no crazy tax hikes. No, a Democrat in the White House is never good, but it won’t be nearly as bad as it could have been. And now, assuming Perdue or Loeffler can hold on, the Murder Turtle himself says he’s going to help Biden pick his cabinet. How ‘bout them apples?

All this is pretty much what I expected when I wrote “Four Silver Linings To A Trump Defeat” last week. It was meant to make the argument that, while Trump has done a LOT of good, his exit from the White House wouldn’t be the end of the world. I got hammered pretty hard for that one by many who I suspect never even bothered to read the post. Some told me to stay in my lane (don’t worry, I’ll be getting back to the ‘ro very soon). Others who had quite obviously never read anything I’ve ever written called me a (gasp) “Never Trumper.” If I’m completely honest, that one stung a bit, especially considering how much grief I’ve given real Never Trumpers over the years. Yet here we are, staring down the barrel at four years of a Harris/Biden, I mean, Biden/Harris presidency. Hey, when silver linings are all you’ve got, it’s probably a good idea not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I know this is a tough pill to swallow, and I’m as disappointed as anyone, but the reality for conservatives is - to use a football analogy - it's 4th and 30, and we're on our own 30-yard line. It’s time to punt, play defense, and live to fight another day. But don’t forget to look on the bright side, because there is one. Thanks to Donald Trump and the movement he started, the GOP is in a prime position to take the House in 2022 and, with the right candidate, take the whole bag in 2024.

But what kind of GOP will this be? If the Never Trumpers and the neocons think we’re going back to the days of support for outsourcing manufacturing, foreign wars, endless immigration, and stabbing the American middle class in the heart, they’re sorely, sorely mistaken. After two straight losses, Donald Trump showed us how to WIN in 2016 in the only way possible, by appealing to ordinary, middle-class working Americans and breaking the blue wall. The problem, as we’ve always known, is his many strengths also came with many weaknesses, weaknesses that turned off millions of voters, particularly suburban moms in swing states he needed to repeat his victory in 2020. Yes, more people turned out to vote for Donald J. Trump last week than for any Republican in U.S. election history, but it was largely Trump’s POLICIES that scored the accomplishment.

However, the other side of that coin also applies. We all know about Trump’s rough edges, so I won’t belabor them here except to say that it was arguably Trump himself who was also largely responsible for turning out the most votes cast AGAINST a Republican in U.S. election history. Think I’m wrong? C’mon, man! Other than the dead folks and bogus "harvested" ballots, do you really think Sleepy Joe drove that kind of turnout by hiding in his basement?

And yet, compared to how bleak things looked in 2016 when we were on the verge of losing the Supreme Court for at least a generation, I would take now over then anytime. I would also take now over exactly 12 years ago, when Democrats added the presidency (365-173), eight (!!) Senate seats, and 21 House seats. For a while there, the filibuster didn’t even matter because Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority. As far as things looking bleak went, THAT looked bleak. Yes, losing is hard, but perspective is important.

For all his faults, Donald Trump finally showed conservatives how to win, and it’s up to us to make sure they don’t forget it. A candidate WITH Trump’s winning policies but WITHOUT his personality drawbacks could quite possibly skate to victory in 2024. (Hey, Pence, Noem anyone?) Just as much as they know they got nothing even remotely close to a mandate this election, the left also knows this, and I believe that’s why their gleeful cackling isn’t quite as obnoxious as it otherwise might have been.

'America Lost': The Stories of Three Cities After Decades of Decline

Christopher Rufo didn’t mean to make a movie about religion. He set out to make a documentary about the lives of people in what he calls “forgotten America,” people the economy had left behind. Trillions of dollars in government aid hadn’t changed their lives. The number of poor hadn’t gone down. The cities that lost their industries 50 years ago hadn’t bounced back.

He found that the real source of hope for the poor in these cities isn’t government spending, but the social institutions that gave people purpose, meaning, and a real community. Highest among these are the churches.

His documentary America Lost recently aired on PBS, a rare conservative appearance on that reliably liberal network. It tells the stories of three cities after decades of decline. It begins with the white working class of Youngstown, Ohio, “the poorest city in America,” where the steel industry collapsed in the ‘70s. It moves to the black ghettos of Memphis, Tennessee, which also lost its major employers. It ends in the Latino and black ghettos of Stockton, California, a small city in central California that became famous a few years ago by becoming the largest American city to go bankrupt.

Rufo directs the Documentary Foundation, which produces “storytelling for a free society.” Among his other movies is an award-winning documentary called Age of Champions, telling the story of five people — including an 86-year-old pole vaulter and a 100-year-old tennis player — who competed in the Senior National Olympics. He’s also a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty and the Heritage Foundation.

Yet people survive, even with the challenges. Rufo doesn’t portray the people in these towns merely as victims. He wants to highlight the people who fight back. “Even in the bleakest situations, human beings have agency,” he insists. “We all have the capacity to make life a little better.”

Rufo’s a free-market partisan, and America Lost doesn’t tell quite the story he thinks it does. “At heart the crisis of American cities is a crisis of meaning,” he says early in the documentary. “All the old structures that once provided a solid foundation: faith, family, work, and community, have slowly fallen apart. The real problem is not just economic, but deeply personal, human, even spiritual.”

He delivers the movie’s lessons in several long voiceovers, but not in the stories he tells. The movie shows people in trouble, and a few people who struggle to get out of trouble. The movie treats their situation as something that just happens, without considering the system in which it happened, and happens. It never mentions the effects of race or the sometimes very stark limits to human agency. It tells the poor to “rediscover community,” but does not address the forces that have shattered it.

Government is treated only as a failure, though even in the movie its value is shown. One of the people America Lost show struggling to succeed depends for her life on very expensive treatment for MS, which no private entity could supply.

Yet the stories Rufo tells are moving and sometimes revealing of the shape of people’s lives. They push back against the assumption mainstream liberals can have that the poor are entirely victims, without agency. They point to the complexity of the subjects’ world.

One is a man in Youngstown who goes through wrecked, abandoned houses looking for things he can sell to a recycling center. He gets $42 for one day’s work. People’s “dreams ain’t coming through and they’re getting cast away,” he explains. “It’s going to be up to the individual, to whoever’s going to hold their ground, to make their own space better.” He also uses the things he finds to create collages and paintings and tries to sell those.

In Memphis, a young black man named Joseph talks about his two brothers being killed. He’s been in prison. He doesn’t want to go back. “My brothers were my friends, man,” he says, as a tear runs down his cheek. “Losing these two brothers the way I have, the way we grew up, how close we were, man, that’s a pain, man, that’s really hard to bear. But through the grace of God, I made it, I’m still here, and I’m here for a reason.”

Michael doesn’t want to go back to prison either. A heavily tattooed Latino young man living in Stockton, he has a wife and daughter, but can’t find a job. “It breaks my heart inside to sometimes I can’t provide for my family.” Life in the city feels like a pressure cooker, he tells a counselor at a ministry called Friends Outside. “All those times I was arrested, those times I went away, it’s like the pressure cooker just blew.” He’s left picking up the pieces, he says.

It sounds half like an excuse or a reason to give up. The counsellor gently corrects him and challenges him to begin each day with a purpose. He also comforts him. Taking care of a family, he says, “is a responsibility that most men in this population we come from cannot maintain.” It gets too stressful and they give up. “But you’re not going to give up.” Michael nods. Later he’s shown getting a job with a company willing to hire someone with a record, and keeps at it. Near the end of the documentary, he and his wife have a second child. His life seems to be working out.

It’s in Stockton that Rufo comes to see the importance of social institutions, especially religious ones. He hardly mentions churches in Youngstown or Memphis. Pentecostal pastor Armando is shown telling the congregation, including Michael, that Jesus will pick them up, even if they fall 100 times. He tells Rufo that everyone who comes to his church, “they come in hurting, they come in empty, they come in broken, they come in need of a miracle, in need of a healing, in need of a touch, in need of someone loving them.” If they find that, they can change their lives.

“We’ve tried to solve our problems through top-down public policies,” Rufo says in the concluding voiceover. Twice he wryly intercuts his explanation with clips of politicians who promise economic revival but don’t deliver. In one, Clinton, Bush, and Obama are shown speaking in Youngstown, promising economic revival. Obama promises a new one million square foot plant and all the jobs that would bring. It was never built.

“I’ve learned that real change doesn’t happen from the top down. It happens from the inside out,” he continues. “It starts within each individual human heart and then slowly works its way outward.” That requires helping the poor “rediscover the traditional sources of meaning: faith, family, work, and community, and adapt them to the modern condition. As a society, we must ensure that being poor doesn’t mean being disconnected from the primary sources of human happiness, so that those at the bottom can lead dignified, meaningful lives.” While remaining, one notes, at the bottom.

“If I didn’t have a family, I wouldn’t be alive right now,” Michael says. His wife and children and the life they’ve created give him a reason “to keep moving forward. They give me a purpose. The thing I’ve been looking for my whole life is to be here for them. … That changed my heart. It’s a miracle.”

Report: Big Tech, Media 'Stole the Election' by Burying Biden-China Scandal

In the critical weeks before Election Day, Big Tech and the legacy media took extreme measures to bury the unfolding story of Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s personal ties to his son Hunter’s notorious business deals in China, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Facebook and Twitter suppressed a New York Post story even before a fact-check, and legacy media outlets refused to cover the story even as evidence mounted. According to a blockbuster new poll, this unprecedented suppression of a bombshell story arguably cost President Donald Trump his reelection.

A Media Research Center (MRC) poll conducted by McLaughlin & Associates found that 36 percent of Biden voters were not aware of the evidence behind claims that Joe Biden was personally involved in his son Hunter’s business deals with China. Thirteen percent of those voters (4.6 percent of Biden’s total vote) said that if they had known the facts, they would not have voted for Biden.

Such a shift away from Biden would have given Trump the election, according to MRC’s analysis of the preliminary — and contested — election results predicting a Biden win. Had the Biden-China story seen the light of day, Trump would have won the election with 289 electoral votes.

“It is an indisputable fact that the media stole the election,” MRC President Brent Bozell argued. “The American electorate was intentionally kept in the dark. During the height of the scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings, the media and the big tech companies did everything in their power to cover it up.”

Bozell noted that Twitter and Facebook limited sharing of The New York Post‘s bombshell report, while legacy media outlets largely ignored it. After the Post story failed to get the kind of traction many expected it would, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, came forward with firsthand knowledge — and evidence — tying Joe Biden to the notorious deals.

Democrats, former intelligence officials, and even the Biden campaign claimed — without evidence — that the story was “Russian disinformation.” Not only did numerous sources debunk that claim, but Vladimir Putin himself came out to vouch for Hunter Biden.

Even so, many media outlets refused to cover the story in the lead-up to the election.

“Now we know the impact of that cover-up,” Bozell argued. He noted that “4.6% of Biden voters say they would not have voted for him had they been aware of evidence of this scandal. This story would have potentially changed the outcome of this election. The media and Silicon Valley were fully aware of this, so they actively tried to prevent it from reaching the American public. The American people deserved to know the truth; now it’s too late.”

MRC and McLaughlin surveyed 1,000 actual voters (including early voters).

“At the time you cast your vote for President, were you aware that evidence exists in emails, texts, eyewitness testimony and banking transactions that the FBI has been investigating since last year directly linking Joe Biden to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese communist party and Hunter Biden’s business, which may have personally benefitted Joe Biden financially?” the survey asked.

Perhaps surprisingly, 73 percent of respondents said they had heard about the allegations, while only 27 percent said they had not heard of them — a rather impressive showing for conservative media breaking through the Big Tech and legacy media efforts to bury the story. Yet 36 percent of Biden voters said they had not heard of the allegations.

MRC and McLaughlin asked that subset of Biden voters, “If you had been aware of this actual evidence in emails, texts, testimony and banking transactions being investigated by the FBI, would you have…” still voted for Biden?

Not surprisingly, most of the Biden voters said they would still have voted for Biden (86.9 percent) if they had known about the story. Yet a handful (5.6 percent) said they would have voted for a third-party candidate, while some said they would have not voted for any presidential candidate (4.7 percent), not voted at all (1.7 percent), or even voted for Donald Trump (1.1 percent).

In other words, 13.1 percent of the voters who did not know about the scandal (4.6 percent of Biden’s overall vote) said they would not have voted for Biden if they had known about the allegations.

It is impossible to know whether or not this survey accurately represents Biden voters, much less whether or not the knowledge of the corruption scandal would have had the same impact in each state, including swing states.

However, MRC applied this 4.6 percent drop in Biden votes to the most closely-contested states and concluded that a knowledge of the Biden-China corruption scandal among Biden voters alone would have turned Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin red, giving Trump a 289-vote margin in the Electoral College and handing him the presidency.

While Trump is currently contesting the reported preliminary results of the election, it is unlikely that he will be able to switch enough margins in enough states to pull ahead of Joe Biden, to whom most media outlets already refer as the “president-elect.”

It is quite plausible that the Big Tech and legacy media efforts to suppress the Biden-China scandal may cost Trump the election. This is utterly unconscionable, considering the legacy media’s rush to publish any salacious Trump-Russia rumor for years, even when those rumors turned out to be unverified and untrue.

Issues with China in Australia

A public hearing held over three weeks ago as part of the Senate inquiry into issues facing diaspora communities in Australia has sparked ongoing controversy after Senator Eric Abetz repeatedly demanded that three Chinese-Australian witnesses “unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] dictatorship”.

His demands were made in the context of the Party’s persecution of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang and its extra-territorial attempts to intimidate and silence Uyghurs living in Australia.

The trio — Wesa Chau (a deputy lord mayor candidate for Melbourne), Ormond Chiu (a research fellow at think tank Per Capita) and Yun Jiang (an ANU researcher and co-editor of China Neican) — made it clear they did not endorse the Party or its actions and re-affirmed their support for universal human rights and democratic values.

But they rightly refused to be hectored into making blanket public condemnations, arguing that this amounted to an unfair “loyalty test” based on ethnicity.

The exchange has only served to highlight the undue pressures some Chinese-Australians face. These pressures cut both ways.

It is intolerable that some citizens cannot criticise the CCP without being stalked and harassed and/or fearing for family members back home. It is equally intolerable that others may feel they need to self-censor or stay silent to avoid being tarred as a CCP sympathiser.

And from a national security perspective — as Natasha Kassam and Darren Lim recently argued — such a line of questioning may make it harder for security agencies to investigate foreign interference, if it alienates rather than engages the very communities that are not only the most targeted by such interference but also the most important to countering it as a major source of knowledge, understanding and intelligence.

We must ensure that genuine concerns about CCP interference do not lead to over-reactions that undermine liberal values and community cohesion, undercutting ritual claims that Australia is one of the most successful multicultural countries in the world.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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