Archive for 2020
November 15, 2020
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Applications Plummet For Next Year’s Freshman Class.
A FRIEND TEXTS: “In the two big trainwrecks of 2020, COVID and the presidential election, the cure is looking worse than the disease, and the same people are responsible for both.”
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Why Trump Supporters Are Here For Good.
Blue America is feeling triumphant at the moment. But vanquishing Donald Trump is not quite the achievement they think it is, because Trump has always been much more a symptom of our Great Divide than a cause of it. That may not be obvious to an intellectual class that knows more about the Uyghurs than it does about Southwestern Oklahoma, but those who are interested in understanding the other America rather than merely sneering at it have a lot of homework to do.
Blue staters may indeed know more about the Uyghurs than Southwestern Oklahoma, but based on Disney and the rest, Hollywood, the NBA, and Biden’s deep ties with China, they don’t seem very concerned about their fate. Read the whole thing.
THAT DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING BECAUSE REASONS: Bellwether Counties Went Overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020.
PROFESSOR PREDICTS A BAD DECADE TO COME:
The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. . . .
Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites overproduce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.
In the words of Eric Hoffer: “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”
November 14, 2020
BE SURE TO INCLUDE NANCY MACE WHEN YOU DO: Rep-elect Nicole Malliotakis forming ‘Freedom Squad’ to counter AOC crew.
ACTUAL TERRORISM: Law Firm’s Withdrawal Reflects Chilling Reality. “Porter Wright is a mid-sized law firm with offices in eight cities across the country. But apparently it lacked the courage to stand up against the Twitter mob. The ‘Lincoln Project’ doxxed the two Porter Wright lawyers who signed the Pennsylvania complaint, tweeting their pictures, addresses and telephone numbers, and encouraging leftists to harass them.”
Remember, the alleged goal of the “Lincoln Project” is to return America to its pre-Trump decency. They should instead call themselves the McCarthy Project.
Plus, from John Hinderaker: “We can imagine a future, someday, when law firms will be able to represent Republicans without having to explain or apologize for it. Just like the law firms that represent Islamic terrorists.” I believe he means, “just like the law firms that represent Islamic terrorists for free.”
The thing is, like most institutions in America, big law firms are run by people who care more about the opinions of their social peer group than about their institutional or civic responsibilities. Unfortunately, not only are the people who run most of our institutions garbage, but so are the peer groups they let guide them.
Related: If Media Didn’t Think Trump Could Win, It Wouldn’t be Targeting his Lawyers. “When dealing with compulsively dishonest people, it doesn’t pay to spend too much parsing their words. It’s more helpful to study their deeds. The media keeps claiming that President Trump can’t win, that his legal challenges are futile, hollow, and have absolutely no chance of winning in court. And, it’s also launching a full-scale Jihad against those law firms and lawyers participating in legal challenges against the election results. This harassment, which includes threats to the licenses of lawyers who represent Republican clients, is an unprecedented violation of political norms. But it’s also a tell.”
OPEN THREAD: All this chitter chatter, chitter chatter, chitter chatter.
IF THE ELECTION DOESN’T TURN OUT FOR HIM, TRUMP SHOULD BUY IT AND REBRAND AS TRUMPTV: AT&T reportedly looking to sell CNN after ‘hit’ from ‘hating Trump.’
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Pollster: It’s Curious How Biden Underperformed Hillary Clinton In Every City…Except These Four. “Trump won the largest non-white vote share for a Republican presidential candidate in 60 years. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”
NOT MENTIONED: WIDESPREAD CHLOROQUINE USE. Exploring the reasons behind Kenya’s low COVID-19 infection and death rates.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Seen on Facebook:
CREDIT WILL NOT BE GIVEN: Trump’s Operation Warp Speed: 5 Times Faster Than Fastest Prior Vaccine.
Mrs. Pelosi unveiled a 600-plus page bill devoted to “election reform.” Some of the legislation was aimed at weaponizing campaign-finance law, giving Democrats more power to control political speech and to intimidate opponents. But the bill was equally focused on empowering the federal government to dictate how states conduct elections—with new rules designed to water down ballot integrity and to corral huge new tranches of Democratic voters.
The bill would require states to offer early voting. They also would have to allow Election Day and online voter registration, diluting the accuracy of voting rolls. H.R. 1 would make states register voters automatically from government databases, including federal welfare recipients. Colleges and universities were designated as voter-registration hubs, and 16-year-olds would be registered to vote two years in advance. The bill would require “no fault” absentee ballots, allowing anyone to vote by mail, for any reason. It envisioned prepaid postage for federal absentee ballots. It would cripple most state voter-ID laws. It left in place the “ballot harvesting” rules that let paid activists canvass neighborhoods to hoover up absentee votes.
Democrats grandly named their bill the For The People Act, but conservatives had better titles. This page called it the “Majority Preservation Act,” while the editors at National Review described it as an “Unconstitutional, Authoritarian Power Grab.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the bill as a “naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party,” and dubbed it the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.”
Mrs. Pelosi’s bill didn’t become law, despite her attempts this year to jam some of its provisions into coronavirus bills. But it turns out she didn’t really need it. Using the virus as an excuse, Democratic and liberal groups brought scores of lawsuits to force states to adopt its provisions. Many Democratic politicians and courts happily agreed. States mailed out ballots to everyone. Judges disregarded statutory deadlines for receipt of votes. They scrapped absentee-ballot witness requirements. States set up curbside voting and drop-off boxes. They signed off on ballot harvesting.
Meaning, “the fix” (as it were) was in well before anyone started counting votes. Pollsters aside, political operatives understood this election would be close—potentially closer in key states than it was in 2016. The Democratic strategy from the start, as evidenced by that legal onslaught, was to get rules in place that would allow them to flood the zone with additional mail-in ballots.
Related exit question: “Trump is still very much in ‘Hail Mary’ territory regarding pulling this out, but it’s no longer about this election. It’s about the next one. If Democrats can get away with these shenanigans this year, do you think they’ll stop?”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Importance of Practicing Unconventional Shooting Positions.
MEANWHILE, BAT AT THE GWOT: Al-Qaeda’s Number Two Killed in Iran by Israel.