Immanetize the Eschaton!

 A new überpost is up at the Wordpress site. 

Quote of the Day - Seen at FB

Commentary on the absurdity of calling the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion an “insurrection” or “attempted coup:”

...if we wanted to really be violent, there would have been special elections. - Christopher Greenstein

They're Not Confessing. They're Bragging.

I am on record as saying that the Left was shocked by their loss in 2016 to Donald Trump.  They were so certain of Hillary's inevitability that they didn't bother to turn on the fraud machine.  It was in the bag.  The World's Most Qualified Woman against a reality-TV orangutan.  As Roger Kimball put it in a recent Quote of the Day:

The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump is that he was elected without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the woke oligarchy that governs us. 

I am further on record as saying that in five years or so, someone will complete a highly detailed, meticulously researched and footnoted recounting of just exactly how the 2020 election was stolen - yes, stolen.

Time Magazine has published Chapter 1 already.  The story is entitled "The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election."  The title alone tells you all you need to know, but the story goes into detail.  The Woke Oligarchy wasn't going to lose again.  

I haven't done one of these in awhile.  Let us Fisk.

A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.

The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.

Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.

"The response was not mass action, but crickets."  Left unspoken is the fact that, had Trump won reelection, cities would have burned.  You're not supposed to realize that.  What you're supposed to concentrate on is that the "Right-wing militias" didn't do anything.  The Left was prepared to "protest."  "Mostly peacefully" I would imagine.  But "right-wing militias" would have been violent!  The pertinent phrase however, is "Trump's ouster."  They'd been trying for more than four years to achieve that, and now they had.

A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

Tell me something I didn't know.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

"...an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner" was not right "in a way," it was completely accurate.  But the pertinent line is this one:  "There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes...."  Conspiracy.  Their word, not mine.  We can officially take off our tinfoil hats now.  Time has admitted there was a conspiracy.  You can argue that the purpose of the conspiracy was to prevent the torching of major cities across the United States, but it was still a conspiracy to ensure Donald Trump did not win a second term.

This next paragraph is where it starts getting really interesting:

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

"...an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted."  Lie #1, admitted to later in the piece.  Everything possible was done to "win the vote," and to hell with fairness, credibility and corruption.  Winning was everything, and you can't count on the voters to do the right thing.  Remember, the goal was to SAVE THE ELECTION.  Conspiracy.  Shadowy groups manipulating things behind curtains.  For our own good, you see.  And it was bipartisan!  Because Orange Man Bad!  But, while they brag about their success, they cannot come out and simply say "We defeated Orange Man!"  No, they have to wrap the conspiracy in wholesome cloth - the thing they were trying to prevent was "an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all"! 

So they destroyed the system in order to save it.

Let's take the next paragraph line-by-line:

Their work touched every aspect of the election. 

AKA:  They cheated as hard as they could.

 They got states to change voting systems and laws...

Unconstitutionally, but they didn't care about that.  That wouldn't be decided until AFTER the election was settled.

...and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits,

Hundreds of millions of dollars to steal the election for the conspiracists paid for by the conspiracists and the public coffers.  "Voter suppression lawsuits" is code for "making sure only eligible voters vote."  Can't have that.   But here's the kicker:

...recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. 

"Armies of poll workers."  Poll workers who shared one ideology - Orange Man Bad.  And millions of people voting using a method well known and recognized for its vulnerability to fraud, if the poll workers were so inclined.

They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. 

"Disinformation" like the Hunter Biden corruption story. demonetizing anyone who didn't toe the Leftist line, cancelling anyone who threatened The Narrative™.

They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. 

Like the story of the Red Wave, of how - at first - it would appear that Trump was winning by a landslide, but after all that mail-in vote was counted, the Right People would ensure that Trump lost!  This is known as Propaganda, and also "laying the groundwork."  See?  We predicted this!  Nothing odd about it at all!

After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. 

They'd had four years to prepare, after all.

“The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

Norm Eisen wouldn't know "democracy" if it bit him on the ass, developed lockjaw and was dragged to death.  Conspiracies and Shadow organizations have no part in democracy.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election.

That is, "not have it stolen from them" by conspirators bent on that very task.

The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” 

And it was.  And Time Magazine is telling us how.  Conspiracies, voting rule changes, massive influx of mail-in voting, recruiting ideologically compatible poll workers, control of the flow of information, and millions of dollars in public and private funds. 

His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics.

I love the Left's control of the language.  Isn't it fascinating that Trump has "henchmen," but the "conspirators" who opposed him were merely people of good intention, pure as the driven slush?  That his lawsuits were "spurious," but here's a list of the lawsuits brought and their results.  Note how very few were decided on the merits, and how many that were were decided in favor of the Republicans. 

Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.

No explanation of how Trump "plotted to block a legitimate vote count," just the assertion that he did, while this piece details a conspiracy of shadowy oligarchs intent on the very same thing.  Oh, and "violence at the Capitol."

The Capitol, aside from the razor-wire topped fencing and the armed National Guardsmen, looks a lot better than downtown Portland, Oregon.  What, a couple of broken windows and someone appropriated Nancy Pelosi's Speakers lectern?  One unarmed protester was killed by a Capitol cop, several more protesters died of natural causes, and the one cop who died after apparently being struck by a thrown fire extinguisher apparently showed no signs of blunt-force trauma.  Some coup attempt.  How many died in Portland?

The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. “Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,” says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. “We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.”

There's that control of language thing again.  Our heroes were "democracy campaigners."  "Pulling off" the election meaning "making sure Trump loses."  Because they knew if he won there was the strong possibility of "a real dangerous moment of unraveling" as the extremist members of their side would go stark-raving. 

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

Again, who's a conspiracy theorist?  And language once again - saving the 2020 election.  From Donald Trump: "...how close the nation came to disaster."

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

 

They weren't rigging the election!  Oh no!  Changing voting rules, implementing vote-by-mail, recruiting ideologically pure pollworkers, controlling The Narrative, silencing dissent, that's not "rigging the election" it's fortifying it!  

Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

I'm not going to fisk the rest of the story line-by-line - it's far too long for that, but I will comment on excerpts like this one:

The usual tools of data, analytics and polling would not be sufficient in a situation where the President himself was trying to disrupt the election, (Mike Podhorzer, senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO) wrote. “Most of our planning takes us through Election Day,” he noted. “But, we are not prepared for the two most likely outcomes”–Trump losing and refusing to concede, and Trump winning the Electoral College (despite losing the popular vote) by corrupting the voting process in key states. “We desperately need to systematically ‘red-team’ this election so that we can anticipate and plan for the worst we know will be coming our way.”

And this is the paragraph that gives lie to the claim that it was "...an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted."  It is also an absolute psychological projection, as he accuses Trump of "corrupting the voting process in key states" when that was precisely what they were doing.  Refusing to concede?  Didn't Hillary tell Biden not to concede under any circumstances?  And winning the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote is how Trump defeated Hillary.  It's why the Electoral College exists.

The chief difference between the U.S. and countries that lost their grip on democracy, he concluded, was that America’s decentralized election system couldn’t be rigged in one fell swoop. 

No, that required that "Their work touched every aspect of the election."  Not just one.

The first task was overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure....

That has worked just fine unless a Republican gets elected.  Especially when the wrong Republican gets elected.

...Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately. 

TV anchors "bending over backwards" and "framing" is also known as "Controlling the Narrative."  And it's nothing new, but was brought to new levels.

RTWT.  Try to keep your blood pressure down.  For all the high rhetoric, democracy in America is dead.  The Oligarchy is in control, and they're not giving it up.

It's Not a Cage!

 

No Widespread Evidence of Fraud?

Over on the Book of Face someone linked to this report of the forensic examination of the Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan.  Pullquote:

We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.

(Bold my emphasis.)  In this video (since deleted by YouTube for "violating Community Standards."  Here it is from Bitchute, thanks to my readers.) Fulton County, GA, Elections Director Richard Barron reported that they had scanned 113,130 votes, and adjudicated 106,000 - almost 94% of the votes cast. It would appear that the Dominion machine "problem" was not limited to Antrim county, Michigan. (Is it a "bug" when it's been designed to do that, or a "feature"?)

Where else did this occur?  I am reliably informed that there is "no evidence" of "widespread election fraud."  Apparently because no one was willing to allow anyone to look, or publicize it when some did.  Goes against The Narrative™ you see.

I'm Moving

In today's Progressive environment of inclusivity and civility, I no longer feel comfortable that Google will continue to ignore this blog.  I am therefore migrating off of Blogger to a privately hosted server.  This requires moving to Wordpress.  The translation is not very clean.  A LOT of formatting problems, and I still haven't figured out how to export the Disqus comments from here to there.

The site needs a LOT of work, but it's up at http://smallestminority.org.  I have no plan to delete this blog, I'm just going to start posting over there (and probably copy over here for a bit.)

Quote of the Day - Mark Steyn Edition

 

Yesterday's mental illness is today's social policy. - Mark Steyn

Analysis:  True.

Quora question: "Why is the United States so messed up right now in 2021?"

My answer:

100+ years of “public education” has produced the electorate we have today. Too many people can’t reason, have no coherent philosophy, have no knowledge of actual history (only “social justice” history), have been taught that Western Civilization is the root of all evil in the world, etc.

It started in the very early 1900’s, driven by the wealthy industrialists to set up a system that would produce a two-tiered output - the actually educated sons & daughters of the elite who would be managers, and the people who would be working in their factories and buying the resultant products. All the “Progressives” were in favor of it. They wanted obedient, unquestioning workers who could read, write, and do math, but not think for themselves.

Shortly afterward the “Progressives” suborned the system to create ever-greater numbers of “Social Justice Warriors,” culminating in what we have today. After more than five generations the population consists of essentially four groups - those that despite being in the public system still managed to get an education, those who were privately educated, those who the education system didn’t radicalize but instead made numb, and the radicals. (Note: a lot of the radicalized went back into the education system as teachers and administrators in a positive feedback loop.)

The private system has always been oriented towards the elites. The majority of the nation, I think, are the numb. Those who educated themselves are a minority and the radicals are too, but they - being radical - have influence far beyond their mere numbers.

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G. Wells, 1920

--

"Give me a child for his first seven years and I'll give you the man." - Quote attributed to the Jesuits

--

"All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth." - Aristotle

--

"A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.

"There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?

"Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

"In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees." - Thomas Sowell

--

"It is only from a special point of view that 'education' is a failure. As to its own purposes, it is an unqualified success. One of its purposes is to serve as a massive tax-supported jobs program for legions of not especially able or talented people. As social programs go, it’s a good one. The pay isn’t high, but the risk is low, the standards are lenient, entry is easy, and job security is pretty good...in fact, the system is perfect, except for one little detail. We must find a way to get the children out of it.”—Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian.

Quote of the Day - Roger Kimball Edition

 From his American Greatness piece A Party of Faction and Fantasy:

The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump is that he was elected without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the woke oligarchy that governs us. 

Exactly right.  

Also this:

Donald Trump brought peace to the Middle East, Joe Biden brought war to Washington.

RTWT.

Nothing Says "Incipient Civil War" Better

 ...than "Loyalty checks" for your military. 

Third-World status achieved!  Sh!thole status to follow.

Quote of the Day - Seen @ Facebook

You’ll love this.

I’m in my masters class for education (already know where this is going) and Paulo Freire and Myles Horton are mainstays for this class with their book “We make the Road by Walking.” Here is a quote by Freire “Education is not neutral and that by claiming to be neutral, we are technically siding with the powerful.” 

Paulo Friere is best known for his book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and is the spiritual founder of "Critical Pedagogy," which is to education what "critical race theory" is to racial healing.  Miles Horton is known for his textbook "Education for Social Change."  As opposed to "education to learn how to read, write, do math, understand science, and think for yourself."

This Makes Me Look Positively Cheerful by Comparison

 RTWT:

American Thinker:  Are the End Times Near?

Pullquote:

I believed, and still believe, that every manifestation, every symptom of the sickness of our time, the self-destructive corruption, the lies and hypocrisies and weakness of spirit, the coordinated attack on the institutions and traditions that have sustained Judeo-Christian civilization, the digital surveillance project of billionaire Globaliers -- these must be resisted and fought, for there is no other choice but feckless and dishonorable surrender.

But at the same time, we need to be realistic. We are not doomsayers to acknowledge that civilizations fall of necessity, disappear or are subsumed into new syncretic entities, and that ours is no different. The conclusion is foregone, but not yet. In Michael Walsh’s terms from his new book Last Stands, manly virtue fights to the foreordained end. The issue is this: We cannot deter, but we can defer.

That's all I've been trying to do - postpone and hopefully soften the landing when the inevitable crash does come.  No way to tell until it happens, but it's not looking good right now.

Coming Soon from the Biden Administration?

Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke - "Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47."

Where are We Going, and Why are We in This Basket?

Here's hoping this post makes it past the Google censors.  

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.” ~Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

Add nearly three more decades to that record.  

(C)onservatism is not so much based on ideas, but on simply observing what works, and then generalizing from there. - Dr. Robert Godwin

After the preceding sixty years, I am now an almost perfect "enemy of the Left."  I'm an old(er) white cisgendered heterosexual male who drives a pickup truck and owns guns.  The only checkbox I don't tick is that I'm not a Christian, but then I am not an "anti-theist" either.  Because I'm in favor of maximum individual liberty and minimum government power - what used to be called a "liberal" - I am now labeled a member of the "Alt-Right," which (deliberately) carries with it ominous implications of "White Supremacy." And I'm a Donald Trump voter, so I am Evil Incarnate.

If not for my heresy of voting for Trump, I might be redeemed - but I would never be trusted.

I started blogging in May of 2003 after spending time in the trenches of Usenet, on bulletin boards, and as a contributor to a failed experiment known as Themestream.  Why?  Because I was pissed.  I forgot to mention that in my CV.  I'm a pissed off old(er) white cisgendered heterosexual male. 

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know that this pissed-off white cisgendered heterosexual male is also a Debbie Downer.  I'm a pessimist by nature.  I've said that being a pessimist is generally a pretty good way to go through life - you're seldom disappointed and occasionally pleasantly surprised.  I've had very few pleasant surprises recently.

This post is no different.  You've been warned.  Logorrhea to follow.

But There's No Evidence of Fraud!!!

 I wonder how they're going to move the goalposts this time.

And if you think this happened exclusively in Georgia, I have the title to a bridge in Brooklyn I'll sell you, cheap!