STANDING UP TO TYRANNY: Trump greets throngs of fans outside Minnesota rally after state allows just 250 seats.
Archive for 2020
October 31, 2020
IF JOE BIDEN IS ELECTED, SOME WILL REGARD HIS PRESIDENCY AS ILLEGITIMATE BECAUSE OF THIS: Mollie Hemingway: Yes, Media Are Rigging The Election Against Half The Country. Here’s How.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Next Populist Revolt: The combustible politics of a coronavirus ‘dark winter’.
Governments resort to shutdowns to impose discipline on an unruly population. But shutdowns do not solve the problem. They turn public health crises into economic and social ones. After a while, the price of shutdowns grows too high. The government reopens the economy. The virus returns. Before long, the cycle repeats.
There are plenty of ways to think about the politics of the Trump era. You can analyze the parties according to the traditional left-right axis. You can study public debate through the prism of liberal democracy versus authoritarianism. You can understand recent elections as pitting establishment insiders against populist outsiders. You can see the ideological contest as a three-way grudge match between common-good conservatives, neoliberals in both parties, and woke progressives. Coronavirus has spawned yet another interpretive framework. In this frame, politics is the struggle between the faction that wants to keep the economy and society relatively open during the pandemic and the faction that is ready and willing to shut them down.
Joe Biden has been able to straddle these two poles. He says you can have a (relatively) open society as well as a public health system that reduces infection to a negligible level. He says he will “shut down the virus, not the country.” What he hasn’t explained is how that can happen in the absence of a widely administered vaccine. Only Taiwan and South Korea contained outbreaks without nationwide lockdowns. It is hard to see the United States replicating their success. Taiwan benefited from its rapid response at the outset of the crisis. South Korean authorities rapidly approved tests while enjoying access to cell phone data. None of that happened here.
If Biden takes office during the “dark winter” he prophesied at the final presidential debate, he will have to decide, in addition to his national mask mandate, whether to put the country through another “30 days to slow the spread.” The bureaucratic pressure to shut down will be immense. The media, entertainment, and technology sectors will be sure to support and promote his decision. Polarization between “red” states and the nation’s capital will intensify. The commanding heights of culture and business will consign the Republican Party to the ash heap of history. And opposition to the restoration of progressive rule will manifest itself as a populist revolt whose character, magnitude, disposition, and endgame can only be imagined.
Related: Protests show two Americas — those who lost their jobs and those still getting paid.
FORWARD ARMING AND REFUELING: U.S. Marines refuel a Bell AH-1Z Viper attack helicopter during Integrated Training Exercise 1-21 at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California. Photo taken Oct. 22, 2020.
GREAT ORATORS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. To borrow an old recurring leitmotif of James Taranto, when he was writing the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web Today:
● “One man with courage makes a majority.” — attributed to Andrew Jackson.
● “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt.
● “The buck stops here.” — Harry S. Truman.
● “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” — John F. Kennedy.
● “I’ll lead an effective strategy to mobilize trunalimunumaprzure!” — Joe Biden.
PENNSYLVANIA 2020: Inside The Democratic Strongholds That No Longer Recognize Their Party.
With a soul patch and a piercing in the top of his left ear, working in a typically blue industry in a deep-blue city, his politics don’t fit into the stereotype, a sentiment that echoes all over eastern Pennsylvania. From coal country to steel town, God is taken seriously, but so is party affiliation. While in some parts of the country parents and children vote differently without a second thought, in Luzerne and Northampton counties, generations of pro-life, pro-labor Democrats feel untethered from once-familiar parties, torn between traditions and beliefs.
“My wife told me, ‘It sounds like you’re going to the other side,’” he says. “But I don’t know what my side is anymore.”
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is poised to be either the Rustbelt keystone that secures a second term for Trump, or the capstone on a one-term presidency. While much of the attention is focused on the riotous streets of Philadelphia and the machine that runs its elections, it’s a decision that might well be made in the places where the sky truly gets dark, the mines lay empty, and the ruins of industry stand cold.
WE’VE DONE IT, PEOPLE. WE’VE MADE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: McDonald’s McRib is returning to menus across America for the first time in 8 years, sparking celebration among the obsessive fans of the cult-classic sandwich.
UPDATE (FROM THE COMMENTS): “I look forward to Obama issuing a statement claiming credit for this news.”
October 30, 2020
AT AMAZON, Leupold Rifle Scopes.
NAMES THAT ARE WORTH TEN THOUSAND LANCES: Bobby Orr endorses Donald Trump with full-page ad. “NHL and Boston Bruins icon Bobby Orr took out a full-page ad in Friday’s New Hampshire Union Leader endorsing Donald Trump in the upcoming U.S. election. . . . Orr is just the latest sports legend to endorse Trump this week alone, joining Nicklaus and Pro Football Hall of Famer Brett Favre as front-seat passengers on the ol’ Trump train.”
The Greatest Generation in sports renders a final service.
OUT OF SIGHT, BUT NOT OUT OF MIND: There’s an old sawhorse in media about the “Streisand Effect,” namely, that when someone tries to suppress a story it backfires and gets more attention than it might have without the suppression. There’s a lot about the Hunter Biden story and its suppression that proves this true.
The news that Glenn Greenwald had resigned from The Intercept because management there have joined the open conspiracy among so-called news providers to pretend that there is no substance or legitimacy behind allegations – or even asking questions – about Joe Biden’s involvement and financial interest in his son’s business dealings in Ukraine, Russia or China was stunning. NPR was surprisingly honest about their dishonesty when they “explained” that they would not cover the story because:
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions […] And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was a politically driven event, and we decided to treat it that way.”
As has been said repeatedly, they and other legacy media operations’ newfound devotion to media ethics is both amusing and depressing at the same time. These are the same people who had no problem alleging that Justice Kavanaugh was a gang rapist on the say-so of a somewhat mentally frail woman who could produce no documents or corroborating witnesses, could not recount any details and yet, these same publications applied “woke logic” by insisting we “believe all women.”
Every insane allegation and false witness propounded by Michael Avenatti was breathlessly reported and touted as the truth by CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and Washington Post. Avenatti was convicted last year of extortion in a $20 billion scheme against Nike, and still faces trial for defrauding his client Stormy Daniels. Up until this week, these kinds of witnesses and “sources” were more than credible enough to publish defamatory and salacious stories.
If you need a reminder, this is the same media who promised you “pee tapes” of President Trump cavorting with Russian hookers based on evidence that never existed. In one of his magnificent histories of LBJ, Robert Caro retold the story of then-congressional candidate Johnson asking his aide to help spread a rumor that his opponent engaged in sex with barnyard animals:
“We can’t prove that Mr. Johnson,” the aide said.
“But we can make the son of a bitch deny it!” Johnson purportedly replied.
For a story that the Biden surrogates and stenographers insist has no factual foundation, they have been rather vocal, splashing a tremendous array of defensive claims. Despite the fact that neither Biden nor his son Hunter have yet to deny the authenticity of any of the documents and emails being reported on by smaller news organizations dismissed as “conservative” those committed to dragging Biden across the finish line no matter what, have said (like NPR) that the story doesn’t pass their standards of integrity; that the timing of the story being advantageous to Trump somehow nullifies its factual underpinning (welcome to political journalism); and perhaps most laughably, social media surrogates insist that “nobody cares.”
This last chimera is perhaps the most revealing. It reveals the arrogant elitism that led the mainstream off the rails in 2016 and shows us how this small group has a genuine disdain for most Americans. Moreover, it underscores the denial they suffer about the inevitable extinction of their long-held and highly profitable grip on public opinion.
The data show how remarkably wrong our moral and intellectual betters are. In the last ten days – and before Tucker Carlson’s bombshell interview – The Daily Caller’s Hunter Biden stories drew 554,566 unique internet visitors. That’s more than half a million “nobodies.”
One of their initial stories, about the laptop left behind by a crack-addled Hunter Biden drew 16,474 unique readers; another story, about Hunter Biden’s setting up a meeting with his father (then Vice-President) and Chinese businessmen was read by at least 89,649 people. Oh, I mean “nobodies.” As JustTheNews’ Editor in Chief John Solomon pointed out:
“[C]riminality isn’t the only standard by which Americans evaluate their leaders. Judgment, ethics and transparency are also essential attributes.”
JustTheNews.com has been doggedly breaking news on Hunter and Joe Biden’s “pay to meet me” scheme. Rough estimates show that JTN’s coverage of this issue has been read by as many as 7.5 million people. Moreover, Tucker Carlson’s interview with whistleblower and ex-Biden partner Tony Bobulinski broke cable news records: as many as 7.6 million viewers tuned in. That’s a lot of nobodies. I’ll bet NPR’s Public Editor Kelly McBride wishes she got a third as many “nobodies” to pay attention to her.
It’s little wonder the mainstream media is going broke. They don’t serve you: They insult you. When they say “nobody cares” what they really mean to say is that the only people who count, who deserve any say in our political process are those who agree with them. Everyone else is a nobody. (Bumped, by Glenn, because this is important).
OPEN THREAD: Post your election predictions here.
AFTER SIX MONTHS OF SCARING PEOPLE ABOUT A VIRUS: Wisconsin governor urges voters to come to polls rather than mail ballots.
