Thursday, November 05, 2020



Vote No to 1984

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Thought crimes, ministries of truth, and memory holes belong in Oceania, not America.

If we were to wake up in 2022, would we be more likely to see a 15-person Supreme Court, a Senate without a filibuster, a nation without an Electoral College, and an effort to admit two more states and with them four more senators if Joe Biden or Donald Trump were president?

Why would we blow up a nine-justice Supreme Court after 151 years, or a 233-year Electoral College, or a 170-year Senate filibuster, or a 60-year 50-state Union? And why now? What is the theme, the argument, the momentum for shattering these traditions, other than that progressives see them as ancient impediments to their radical ends?

Hey, What Ever Happened to Jaime Harrison in South Carolina?
Who, if president, would alter our ways of governance, and who would resist? Why are the proponents of these radical changes to the way we are governed so fanatical and yet so quiet about their intentions?

We know that about 99.7–99.8 percent of those under 60 who are infected with the coronavirus survive the disease. We know that the more we lock down everyone under quarantines, the more we risk scattering our resources to cover everyone — many of whom do not need such investment — only to short the vulnerable and elderly who most certainly do need the protection.

In which administration — Biden’s or Trump’s — will more Americans die or become ill under quarantine from increased substance, familial, and spousal abuse, from missed medical procedures and surgeries, from depression and suicide, and from the loss of their livelihoods than will die from the virus itself?

Will the forced loss of school time and ensuing economic lethargy hurt the future of today’s youth, the 20-year-olds and younger Americans, who are nearly immune from infection? Are we nuts to wonder why our “health-care professionals” swear to us in petitions that demonstrating in the streets — packed with people screaming, often without masks and sanitizers, and in phalanx-like ranks — benefits the mental health of the oppressed but sitting in a pew in church is insurrectionary and nearly felonious?

Are we crazy who watch the violence in our streets and scream at our TVs that that masked man, this hooded woman on the screen is, in real time, assaulting the police, looting a family’s store, tossing a firebomb at a police car — and all with virtual immunity? Did Americans miss out on some new state or local law decreeing that it’s now legal to ransack a store or demolish a business?

Are we callous and uncaring to expect the police to arrest those who destroy the livelihoods and property of others, or are those who commit such violence the real merciless ones? And which candidate is more likely to support the equal enforcement of the law, and with it the present and future of the those cannot protect themselves and their own?

Is this even an election year, a campaign with two candidates? Is there a media Left, or is it a Big Tech/Big Media ministry that rents itself out to the most opulent left-wing candidate, and now assures that what is aberrant is perfectly normal?

Is Joe Biden even campaigning in the American tradition of an election year? Does he go hammer and tongs with the press, wake them up at rallies, bring the press into his hectic traveling circle?

Has any reporter asked him to just assure us that Hunter’s emails are indeed Russian disinformation, that he never met a single one of Hunter’s foreign lobbyists/agents, that none of his income came from foreign interests via his son — in other words, that all that he has assured us in the past is not a complete fabrication?

Which septuagenarian, Biden or Trump, is more likely to allow a journalist’s question and then give an answer? To crisscross the country? To take flak and return it? Who will seek victory through meeting the people, and who by avoiding them? Are we unhinged to trust our senses that in the year 2020, for the first time in 100 years, a candidate simply stayed home and outsourced his campaign to an obsequious media?

When they tell us that abortion does not kill the living, that our elite follow the science that nonetheless shows that life is viable in the womb if not ended by the scalpel, who is crazy, who sane?

For a generation so prone to damn the past by the standards of the present, what will our grandchildren say about us in 50 years, we who have aborted 2,000 to 3,000 infants a day? Will they scream that we were racists to allow 1,000 African-American lives to be extinguished every 24 hours? And which current presidential candidate would be more likely to say, “Please, don’t do this” and which to boast, “Who are you to object?”

When listening the other day to the senatorial furor directed at Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder and CEO, I thought of the 19th-century agrarian venom against the railroad monopolies that rigged freight rates when farmers had no other way to ship their produce. Dorsey essentially admitted that, as a private tech baron, he too can do as he pleases. And as he pleases means censoring conservative content on all he owns.

Dorsey, like the late-19th-century railroad conglomerates, operates a virtual octopus, as do Facebook and Google. Their tentacles squeeze out all their competition. They are vertically integrated. Long ago they strangulated competitors and censored and rigged their operations in a way that assumes that they are neither operating in the public domain like a utility nor subject to antitrust and anti-monopoly laws that tend to reappear when moguls express open contempt for their customers.

Which candidate, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, is more likely to rein in Big Tech? In 2023, will our Google searches, Twitter accounts, and Facebook postings become more massaged and warped under a President Trump or a President Biden?

What memory hole have we fallen into? If any of us did what Hunter Biden has for 20 years, what jail would we be in now? We thought we had seen, read, and heard evidence that Joe Biden and his brood have for decades crafted a family influence-peddling syndicate, in which his family sold the Biden name to help foreign and domestic profiteers gain an advantage over their competitors, as “Pop” Biden raked in 50 percent of Hunter’s profits. Is there yet any argument that Joe Biden has not done this?

At least for now, no Biden has sued the peripatetic Rudy Giuliani for libel and character defamation. No forensic analyst from famed CrowdStrike had stepped forward to say that the “metadata” prove that Hunter’s emails and texts are fake. No recipient of Hunter’s communications has said they were forged. No Silicon Valley sleuth had dedicated his progressive services to prove the Hunter laptop is a fiction, a tool of Russian disinformation.

Yet we are told by the ruling classes, the media, and the elite that there is no such scandal. We, not the Bidens, are unethical for asking about crimes; they are ethical for committing them. Who is more likely to allow justice to play out: Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Will John Durham continue pursuing his investigation of criminal activity at the FBI, DOJ, and CIA in 2021 if Joe is president, or if Donald is?

Whom does the top of the Fortune 400 prefer for president? Who promises to spend $50, $70, $100 million of his fortune to warp the way we vote? Does the progressive term “dark money” still apply when all that it now entails is spending in order to nullify the will of the middle and lower-middle classes? Is Michael Bloomberg or George Soros now the topic of an exposé about the corrupting influence of money on politics?

For three years, our elites cried “Russians, Russians” under every American bed — a chorus sung by the very architects of the “reset” who preached to us in 2009 that we needed to reach out to Vladimir Putin.

But by 2020, we had seen the corruption of the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA in their joint quest to cobble together a Hillary Clinton–concocted hoax to smear Donald Trump as an illegitimate president because he “colluded with Russia.” Or so we were instructed by our media Big Brothers.

Were not FISA courts lied to and deceived? Certainly, evidence was altered by the FBI. Names of the improperly surveilled were unmasked and leaked to toadyish reporters — as the lawbreaking became a sort of sport, a plaything, this ruining of lives.

American citizens, in government and in campaigns, were spied on by their public servants, unlawfully, unethically, and unscrupulously. We were told, after 22 months and $40 million, that the greatest collection of supposedly stellar American legal talent — just think of it, Robert Mueller and his all-stars, the dream team, the hunter-killers of the courtroom — would crucify the president on a cross of Russian gold.

All for what? A lie of Hillary Clinton’s, constructed in part to help her win a “sure thing” presidency? A way of hiding her own various email lies and scandals? A way of justifying her defeat? What were all those firewalls for? What did the DNC, Perkins Coie, Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele nexus seek to hide? How many lies were told and lives ruined as the price for seeding and growing the colossal farce? Who would be more likely to hold all those culpable accountable: Donald Trump or Joe Biden?

Most Americans appreciate that, in real dollars at the pump or in heating costs for their homes, their energy bill is cheaper than ever. Who is upset that in places such as rural Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and rural Pennsylvania and Colorado, once-forgotten young men and women now earn good money in the energy business?

It was once a source of pride not only that the United States was the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, but that we had reduced our carbon footprint far more and at less cost to the economy than have many of the loudest signatories of the Paris climate accord.

But most important, Americans saw fracking as a way out of the labyrinth of the Middle East, where for 75 years Americans have sent expeditionary armies, usually on the subtext that Middle East energy was key to the world and especially to the American economy.

What country had the post-war U.S. not sent troops to in the wider region? Iraq? Syria? Lebanon? Libya? Kuwait? Somalia? Sudan? What crises were we warned might lead to world or at least regional war — Suez, the Iranian hostage debacle, the Straits of Hormuz? Who then would wish to revert to the pre-fracking status quo? Joe Biden or Donald Trump?

We live in a new age of iconoclasm. The ignorant have harvested all the low fruit of Confederate-general statuary and are now knocking down any totem deemed more illustrious than any other, from Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to Cervantes, Columbus, and Father Junípero Serra. Do the statue-topplers hate their betters, or do they wage war on the past because they, by comparison, fall so short in the present? Do they fear, when they get their ropes and chains out, that they might be arrested for destroying something not their own? Could any of them sculpt or cast what they deface and topple?

One day a school, an eponymous building, a street retains its traditional name; the next, it does not. New nouns appear out of nowhere; old ones are Trotskyized. New rules of capitalization within hours dictate that some words are now proper nouns; other similar terms, not so much. Who is more likely to say, “No more, we are not going to mindlessly wage war on our past in a fit of frenzy” — Joe Biden or Donald Trump? When and how did yesterday’s NBA star become today’s Socrates?

Professional sports used to be an escape from the conundrum and conflicts of modern life. Not now. Viewership of all the major sports has dived. Must Americans swallow yet another woke dose from mostly vain athletes before they can watch them bounce, throw, or catch a ball for an hour or two? Who is more likely to say, “Stand for the flag!” Who is more likely to see race as incidental not essential to character — Biden or Trump?

The 2020 election is — but is not — about hapless Joe Biden and his surrogate hard-left agenda.

Instead, 160 million are voting not on whether we will soon have Orwell’s 1984 but on how in the world we can end the nightmare that is already here upon us.

Put more bluntly, the choice is either Donald Trump, who is trying to rid America of Oceania and its thought police, or Joe Biden, who will give us still more thought crimes, memory holes, and ministries of truth.

A Judge Just Dethroned California COVID Dictator Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom may want to mask up for the news. The California governor was just dethroned by a Superior Court judge who reminded him on Monday that he’s not a king, but a servant of the people – people who elected a legislature to make laws.

Sutter County Superior Court Judge Sarah Heckman barred Newsom from making new coronavirus laws that use the “California Emergency Services Act [which] amends, alters, or changes existing statutory law or makes new statutory law or legislative policy.”

The decision Monday afternoon was a pointed reminder to Newsom that there’s such a thing as a legislature, whose job, after all, is to make laws. It forbade him from exercising, as my colleague over at RedState Jennifer Van Laar characterized, “one-man rule.”

That assessment was echoed by California State Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, who said, “the judge has ruled in our case against Gavin Newsom. We won. The Judge found good cause to issue a permanent injunction restraining the Governor from issuing further unconstitutional orders.”

The ruling was met with delight by people sick and tired of the governor’s heavy-handed coronavirus diktats, such as the state legislators that brought the lawsuit.

The lawsuit centers on one of the Newsom diktats from June that rewrote the laws on holding elections, which the legislature later adopted. Though it’s too late for Tuesday’s election and doesn’t apply because the legislature ratified Newsom’s diktat, the court reminded the governor that, going forward, he can’t rewrite the law even under his emergency powers.

Newsom wanted the lawsuit issue declared moot, but that didn’t fly with the judge, who issued a permanent injunction.

Assemblyman James Gallagher said the ruling was a victory for the separation of powers.

“This was never politics; it was never partisan. This ruling will affect whoever is governor, not just this governor, but those in the future. It’s about respecting that balance of power ad the fundamental separation of powers that is fundamental to our system of government.”

Gallagher and Assemblyman Kevin Kiley argued that Newsom arrogated to himself the job of making laws, which is the job of the legislature, which has taken a back seat during COVID.

Assemblyman Kiley kept a running tally of laws the governor had changed under the auspices of emergency COVID powers without the legislature. They included extending “deadlines for businesses to renew licenses, file reports, or pay taxes; delayed consumers’ late fees for paying taxes or renewing drivers licenses; suspended school districts’ deadlines and instructional requirements; suspended medical privacy rules…”

Hatred of Trump vs. Hatred of the Left

Dennis Prager

One way in which today's presidential election can be summarized is this: It is a contest between those who hate Donald Trump and those who hate the left (as I always point out, I am referring to the left, not to liberals or liberalism).

This is so accurate an assessment I suspect even most Democrats would agree with it.

They know they hate President Donald Trump. And they know conservatives (and a few courageous liberals) hate the left.

When you put it this way, it shows how superficial the anti-Trump electoral argument is. We who are not on the left base our opposition to the Democratic Party on ideas, values and our love for America, not on antipathy toward an individual. And let me assure Democrats: Most Republicans had just as much contempt for former President Barack Obama and have as much contempt for Joe Biden as Democrats have for Donald Trump. But we don't obsess over personalities; we obsess over America.

Leftists -- and the naive liberals who do not recognize the left as the mortal enemy of liberalism -- are obsessed with the president's persona. In their endlessly repeated, hate-filled descriptions of him, he is the apotheosis of evil: a dictator, narcissist, misogynist, racist, xenophobe, anti-Semite and white supremacist. He is morally and financially corrupt. He is mentally incompetent. He's unrefined. He uses the presidency solely in order to enrich himself. His reelection will mean the end of American democracy. He has told more than 22,000 lies. He loves dictators and has contempt for America's allies. His 2016 campaign colluded with Russia to undermine and "steal" the presidential election. He said there are "very fine" Nazis. To top it all off, he is responsible for more than 200,000 American deaths due to COVID-19.

And that's just a partial list.

Virtually every charge is either wildly exaggerated or outright false. For instance, regarding Trump's alleged responsibility for the American deaths due to COVID-19: Do these people hold the leaders of Belgium, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador -- all of whom have a higher rate of death from COVID-19 than America -- responsible for all of their respective countries' deaths?

Do these people hold any other leaders in the world responsible for the COVID-19 deaths in their countries?

Do these people hold New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo responsible for the deaths in New York, the state that has had by far the highest death rate in America?

If one cared about truth, one would hold Cuomo far more responsible for New York City's virus deaths than Trump for America's virus deaths. But what is truth compared to hatred of Trump?

To those who hate Trump because they regard him as such a defective human being, there is nothing good he can do.

A particularly pathologic example is American Jewry, which is expected to vote 3 to 1 for Joe Biden. Presidential candidates since Bill Clinton have vowed to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, which would entail moving our embassy there. Israel was the only country in the world in which the United States had its embassy in a city other than the capital. Only Donald Trump kept his promise by actually moving the embassy. And he did so despite the dire warnings of "experts" -- a group that is frequently wrong on almost every issue -- that the Arab and Muslim worlds would erupt in violence. The opposite happened: His policies have led to peace between Israel and three Arab countries, with more likely to follow unless Biden and the Democratic appeasers of Iran and the Palestinians come to power.

But peace between Israel and Arab countries, moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, and the fact that Trump has a Jewish daughter, Jewish son-in-law and Jewish grandchildren all mean nothing to most American Jews, for whom The New York Times means far more than the Torah. (The proof, if needed, is that the Jews who believe in the Torah will vote overwhelmingly for Trump.) Meanwhile, 70% of Israel's Jews support Trump.

In addition, Trump did more for black America than any president since Abraham Lincoln -- but, of course, that's only true if you think the lowest black unemployment rate ever recorded, prison reform, opportunity zones, support for school choice and second chances for those convicted of crimes matter. But none of this matters to Trump haters. Their only concern for blacks is that blacks be as angry at America as possible. Angry blacks are Democratic voters. Blacks grateful to be Americans are Republican voters.

Which brings me to the competing hatred: hatred of the left.

Those who hate the left do so not because of dislike for any individual but because everything the left touches it ruins. As I have written about this at length, I will only list examples:

Universities.

High schools.

Elementary schools.

Journalism.

Art, music, architecture.

Late-night comedy.

Mainstream Christianity and Judaism.

Sports.

Marriage and family.

Happiness -- especially among women.

The police.

Crime rates.

Children's innocence.

Freedom of speech -- for the first time in American history.

Law and order.

Race relations.

History.

Nothing in life is left unscathed. In a nutshell, liberals build; conservatives build; leftists destroy. And the Democratic Party is now the party of the left.

So, while the Democrats and their media focus on Donald Trump, the rest of us focus on the left and the list above.

That strikes me as the more moral concern. Between Donald Trump's narcissism and the left's assault on liberty; left-wing elected officials standing by as leftists smash windows and burn cities; and the left's rewrite of American history to ensure that our children have contempt for America, a vote for Trump should be an easy call to make for anyone who loves this country.

Can a Disintegrating America Come Together?

Pat Buchanan

On the last days of the 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump was holding four and five rallies a day in battleground states, drawing thousands upon thousands of loyalists to every one.

Waiting for hours, sometimes in the cold, to cheer their champion on, these rallygoers love Trump as few presidents have been loved. This writer cannot recall a president and campaign that brought out so many and such massive crowds of admirers in its closing days.

And who are these cheering, chanting loyalists who have brought their children out with them to see and remember "the great Trump" -- in the eyes of our dispossessed elites?

They are people who belong in a "basket of deplorables," sneered Hillary Clinton: "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic" bigots, and a sub-species of humanity that is "irredeemable."

Today's election is an us-versus-them choice unlike any other, for the issues in dispute are broader and deeper than ever before.

And those issues raise questions: No matter who wins, can this nation come together again? And if it cannot -- a real possibility -- what form will America take as it disintegrates?

Even as voters were mailing in ballots in the millions, stores in our great cities were being boarded up against rioters, looters and arsonists.

Suburban residents, fearful that the urban mobs may one day be coming for them, were stockpiling guns and ammunition.

How divided are we?

The New York Times "Sunday Review" devoted its entire section to Donald Trump, as seen from the eyes of its columnists. On the cover page of the Review ran the headline, "All 15 of our columnists explain what the past four years have cost America, and what's at stake in this election."

Each of the 15 trashed Trump from his or her perspective.

Since World War II, America has held elections where the country seemed at sword's point. Not all were like 1960, where scholar Arthur Schlesinger Jr., felt compelled to write the book, "Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?"

Schlesinger felt he had to explain that despite the similarity of the candidates, both in their 40s, it made a difference who was elected.

Yet, even after the most divisive elections of the post-war era -- 1952 and 1968 -- the country pulled back together. President Dwight Eisenhower, from 1952 to 1956, and Richard Nixon, from 1968 to 1972, restored unity to the nation during their first terms by ending the Asian wars into which their predecessors had taken the nation.

New leadership ended the wars and brought the United States together.

The difference today?

Americans are not divided over war. One of Trump's successes has been to keep us out of new wars, even if he has not yet extracted us from the wars he inherited.

Today, we are divided over ideology, morality, culture, race and history. We are divided over whether America is the great nation we were raised to revere and love or a nation born in great sins and crimes -- such as the near annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Black peoples from Africa.

Are we the nation of 1776 and 1789, or the nation of 1619, whose institutions are still infected with the "systemic racism" of our birth?

In this divided country, at times, Americans seem to detest each other.

Indeed, if the United States did not exist as one nation, would this diverse people ever agree to form a compact to come together, or would we seek to retain our separate identities?

In tearing down the statues of explorers such as Christopher Columbus or the Founding Fathers and their successor presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the contempt for the country these men helped to bring into being, and for what this country stands for today, is manifest.

A significant slice of America's young believes that the nation to which they belong was detestable from its birth, and that the Western civilization from which it sprang is not worth saving.

In his farewell address, President Ronald Reagan spoke of the America where he was raised and which he cherished:

"The hope of human freedom -- the quest for it, the achievement of it -- is the American saga. And I've often recalled one group of early settlers making a treacherous crossing of the Atlantic on a small ship when their leader, a minister, noted that perhaps their venture would fail and they would become a byword, a footnote to history. But perhaps, too, with God's help, they might also found a new world, a city upon a hill, a light unto the nations."

How many Americans still believe what Reagan believed? How many yet see America as "a city upon a hill, a light unto the nations"?

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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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