Down To The Wire: First Thoughts on the Election
(Kevin McDonald) There’s huge uncertainty about how the election will turn out. What looked like a certain Trump victory when I went to bed on Tuesday night suddenly turned in Biden’s favor in Democrat-run swing states where there appears to have been massive fraud—unprecendented stopping of vote counting on Tuesday night, vote-dumps in the middle of the night in Wisconsin and Michigan in which 100% of the votes went to Biden, preventing poll watchers from actually seeing what was going on in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, and I am sure much more. The folks who firmly believe that Putin rigged the 2016 election and studiously ignore how supposedly neutral platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook have tilted their coverage in favor of the Democrats, now would have us believe that Democrats would not do anything to cheat. Given the long history of corruption in Chicago politics, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if Chicago Mayor Richard Daley swung the 1960 election to JFK. So it seems reasonably to suppose such things could happen in 2020 Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. And there’s no question that at least some of the people in charge are activists for the Dems. Jocelyn Benson, Michigan Secretary of State in charge of elections, was a board member of the SPLC. Unprincipled pursuit of power is utterly characteristic of the Democrats and their media allies in recent years, and it would not be at all surprising to learn that there was a Plan B already decided on before the election.
The good news is that I was wrong in supposing that a Trump defeat would necessarily be a total disaster. It looks like the GOP will control the Senate, so that the radical program envisioned by the left will not happen any time soon.
If the left wins they will go into end-game mode. They will establish a more-or-less permanent hegemony (via massive surge in legal and illegal immigration, amnesty to illegals and Dreamers, adding Puerto Rico and D.C. as states, and packing the Supreme Court). A Democrat victory would mark the end of the First and Second Amendments and likely lead to eventually locking up dissidents, as is already the case in Europe. (“Why it’s important for Trump to win“)
But most of this won’t happen, at least until after the 2022 elections, so I won’t be forced to shut down TOO any time soon. As noted in the above article, Trump had considerable success in lowering legal and illegal immigration and refugee settlement by simply enforcing the law and changing some policies at the executive level. One can easily imagine that a Biden presidency would mean a return of catch and release at the border, ending border wall construction, and basically issuing an open invitation for the rest of the world to come here. Then states like California would take care of the rest, allowing them de facto citizenship (issuing driver’s licenses and likely looking the other way in voting) and free health care. So that would speed up the permanent hegemony of the left. Winning this election is still important.
But the expected Democrat landslide didn’t happen, and that has cause a great deal of angst. CNN posted an article titled “Millions of White voters are once again showing who they are.” And of course, what they are can only be “White nationalists” who are happy to have Trump negligently allow 230,000 Americans to die of Covid.
Despite four years of President Donald Trump — that is, of a man who has made White nationalism a central part of his administration and whose abject negligence in the face of a pandemic has contributed to more than 230,000 dead — millions of voters are turning out for him. … Indeed, one thing that this week has clarified is the lengths to which many White Americans are willing to go in order to protect their Whiteness, to centralize it, even after a summer that saw unprecedented support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
The article includes a video of a CNN racial activist/commentator, Van Johnson, calling it a moral, if not a political, defeat. “There’s a lot of hurt out there.” Other examples: of angst about
“Racism is Trump’s brand,” declared New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
“If Trump wins re-election, it’s on white people,” insisted Atlantic writer Jemele Hill.
“Trump’s racist messaging seems to have held its strong appeal,” FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone offered as analysis on election night.
Voters “accepted — embraced — his unveiled racism and misogyny,” agreed Mother Jones’ David Corn.
Of course, what this really indicates is that the nonstop media campaign to vilify Trump and Trump voters was largely a failure. We have had four years of intense hatred and charges of traitorous behavior spewed out by most of the media against Trump and his supporters, as well as the suppression of negative information about Biden. And, despite all that, millions of evil White people came out and voted Republican. This is good news to say the least. In fact, in the face of all this propaganda and hate, Trump got 6 m i llion more votes this time than in 2016 (“A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath,” The Atlantic).
As noted many times here, the US has become polarized to an unprecedented extent, and part of that means that in general people on each side read media that confirms their worldview. Essentially, this comes down to the idea that people start forming cult-like attitudes on both sides, and in the case of the liberal-left, that came down to confidence that this election would result in a landslide win in which they would be able to end evil White America forever. When the election did not turn out anywhere near the way the liberal-left media said it would, one must suppose that there are many people on the left who experienced a great deal of cognitive dissonance —a contradiction between their innermost beliefs and what actually happened right before their eyes. Cognitive dissonance often results in simply doubling down on your beliefs, as in the case of the CNN article noted above. They have no problem thinking that around half of the American population are hopeless fascists or self-hating minorities (see below).
But I suspect there are others, likely the more intelligent and a bit less prone to cult-like dogmatism, who are undergoing a bit of self-examination. Maybe these are people who cut themselves off from family and friends because of their support for Trump—almost all of this cutting-off was initiated by Trump haters. They may start thinking that it’s ridiculous to suppose that around half the voting population are morally corrupt. And there may be lingering attachments and some fond memories of the people they cut off. Maybe at least some of these people are reasonably rational and reasonably nice Okay, I’m a dreamer.
It was an election that saw increases in the numbers of non-Whites voting for Trump from 2016, up four points nationally with black men and black women and three points among Latino men and Latino women, and much higher in some areas, such as Florida and parts of Texas. Of course the only possible reason for this is that White supremacy struck again. These voters were self-haters, much like the knee-jerk Jewish reaction to Jews who criticize other Jews or don’t go along with mainstream Jewish agendas. Like other activist reasoning, no evidence is ever needed for such beliefs. As in the case of Whites, there are no real data on this, although it’s reasonable to think that the surge in Latino GOP voting in Florida was due to concerns about impending socialism among the areas many refugees from socialist utopias, and polls have often found that Latinos do not favor high levels of immigration because the are aware of its effects on the job market. For Blacks, it could be that there were more high-profile Blacks who rebelled against the Democrat mindset (HipHopWired lists 15.) If it’s one thing about Blacks, they look up to Black role models.
The interesting thing is that the only group to show less support for Trump compared to 2016 is White men. There could be any number of explanations for this, and we await from real data. Perhaps Trump was seen as ignoring his White base, constantly highlighting what he has done for Blacks and Latinos, but never saying anything explicitly about Whites, much less White men. I doubt this explanation because White women increased their support for Trump, and the marriage gap was huge. His rallies were attended overwhelmingly by massively enthusiastic White people — enough in itself to terrify our hostile elites. And the same goes for beliefs about Trump’s handling of the virus or the GOP health care package (or lack thereof). Why should these issues make supporting Trump go down among White men but up among White women?
Another possible explanation that comes to mind is the incessant propaganda from the media hyping White guilt (e.g., the notorious “1619 Project”), the massive promotion of Critical Race theory and BLM complaints. Although White women are also included in the blame for White evils, it’s nowhere near as bad as with White men.
Speaking of cult-like behavior, we saw a lot of that among Trump supporters during his campaign stops leading up to the election. These rallies were often commented on in the media, particularly with the criticism that they were super-spreader events (although leftist protests were always exempted from this criticism). The devotion of these crowds was something to behold, and, whatever else you want to say about Trump, his rallies were incredibly entertaining—who can forget his many laugh lines and his dancing along with the 1970s anthem, “YMCA.”
But the enthusiastic receptions Trump got terrify the mainstream media, resulting in a what I suspect is a reflexive reaction where they think about another political leader in 1930s Germany who has able to hold crowds spellbound. Trump’s charisma is terrifying to our hostile elite. Anything and everything must be used to stop him.
This brings up the media’s role in creating the hatred for Trump. Given how close the election is turning out to be in the swing states, it is inconceivable that the media’s role was not decisive in preventing a huge Trump victory—suppressing obvious Biden corruption and endlessly hyping covid as the big issue rather than issues like law & order in Democrat-run cities. Sins of omission are often at least as important as sins of commission. If the detailed evidence on Biden corruption would have been headline news in the rest of the mainstream media besides FoxNews, it would have been a different outcome. I suspect that if Biden wins, the media and the rest of the Democrats will start to sour on him come March of next year and suddenly get on board with Biden corruption or his incipient dementia. They would love to have Kamala Harris as president.
Another plus from this election is that it’s obvious that Trump’s populist message still resonates strongly in the GOP. This will make it much more difficult for the neocons and establishment Republicans types to regain control. If Trump had lost in a landslide, Kristol, Kagan, Rubin, and the Lincoln Project folks would be generously offering to pick up the pieces. But in the event, an awful lot of Republican politicians and strategists will continue to pursue Trump’s populist rhetoric. No going back to Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan types. What comes next may be even far better than the mistake-prone and sometimes tone deaf Trump.
Finally, the situation created by evident election corruption by the left, in the context of cult-like fealty on both sides, is producing a very volatile situation. I was just reading some research on the “democracy premium” showing people will contribute more to the group and go along with group rules if they feel they have had a voice. In other words, even if you lost the election fair and square, you are much more likely to continue working within the system if you were able to vote on it and think the election was conducted fairly. But if 65 million Republican voters reasonably think the election was stolen—quite likely the case here, watch out. It will delegitimize the system and exacerbate an already extremely volatile situation.
This could possibly turn out well. Civil wars are messy and disastrous in many ways, but we have reached the point where compromise and discussion are impossible. Better sooner than later. When Romans in the first century BC found themselves in an empire under Augustus rather than a republic, they were grateful. The republic had shown it couldn’t work any longer. Order and stability were needed after repeated civil wars and intense factionalism. Similarly, the divisions in the contemporary U.S. are too great to heal. The only question is which side is going to establish hegemony—unless we can somehow develop a consensus that the country should fractionate into more politically homogeneous areas. It’s going to be interesting. Perhaps too interesting.
