Category Archives: American Election 2016

The Epistemology of Flat Tires and Chiggers

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Epistemology: The theory or science of the method or grounds of knowledge. (OED)

How do we know what we know?

How do we distinguish fact from inference, speculation, hypothesis, or outright fabrication?

This is what the discipline of epistemology is intended to address. In the last hundred years or so, epistemological discourse has proliferated, creating a dense layer of abstruse philosophical jargon that is intimidating for a layman to penetrate (which is probably intentional).

But you don’t have to read a cubic mile of phenomenological bumf to get the hang of epistemology. There’s no need to unpack the writings of Husserl or Heidegger. All that’s required is common sense, an alert intellect, and ready access to Occam’s Razor.

Consider two very different examples of things that I might profess to know:

1.   I know that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was orchestrated by the Deep State and implemented by various three-letter agencies of the federal government.
2.   I know my car has a flat tire.
 

The second type of knowledge is distinctly different from the first. My flat tire isn’t a psyop. I can’t be gaslighted into believing my tire is flat when it isn’t. Media propaganda will not convince me that I can safely drive on my flat tire. Fact checking plays no role in my assessment that my tire is flat. My flat tire is not a conspiracy theory.

In other words: Only that which is immediately apprehended by the senses is known.

Unfortunately, very little of what is commonly accepted as knowledge is actually known. The vast bulk of what we think we know is simply inferred, deduced from available data, or received from authority, but it is not known in the same way I know I have a flat tire.

What I find most interesting is the process in which people think they know something, but they really don’t. I’ll give you an example from my own personal experience, one with no political connotations, which means it’s unlikely to spark any controversy. It concerns those nasty little creatures known as chiggers.

For readers who don’t live in the South: chiggers are tiny red mites that are also called red bugs. They’re a type of arachnid, roughly analogous to harvest mites in England. (The word “chigger” is considered rude. “chegro” is the polite word for them, but the mites themselves prefer the term “Arachnid American”. [Yes, this pathetic parenthetic aside is a joke — don’t take it seriously.])

From as far back as I can remember, until I was well into my adulthood, I knew that chiggers burrowed under the skin and remained there indefinitely, which was why they caused intense itching for such a long time. When I was in my thirties, however, I learned from a friend of mine that chiggers did not in fact burrow under the skin. He was a scientist, but not an arachnologist or even an entomologist. He had also thought that chiggers burrowed in, and had only recently learned otherwise.

That’s what everybody thought: we had all learned from an early age about the repulsive behavior of chiggers. Everybody knew it, both young and old.

But it wasn’t true.

Prior to the Internet Age it was more cumbersome to learn the facts, but now it’s a simple matter to look them up: chiggers bite and suck blood like other obnoxious pests. They just happen to secrete a digestive enzyme when they bite that breaks down skin cells and causes the formation of a structure known as a stylostome, a hardened cylinder of dead tissue. The stylostome remains in the skin for days or weeks after the bite and causes the maddening, burning itch for which chiggers are notorious.

So that’s the real story about chiggers. Yet in the area where I grew up, everyone knew that chiggers burrowed under the skin. It was a simple fact, and we all knew it.

The point is: What you know may not in fact be true.

Epistemology is the discipline that strives to discern the basis for what is known, and how knowledge is acquired.

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Earlier this year I wrote about the terrorist attack on Istanbul airport in 2016. I have no direct knowledge of the deeper causes behind that incident — I only know what I read in various media accounts at the time. By patching together the different data points, I came to the conclusion that the Russian state had ordered the hit on Istanbul, in retaliation for Turkey shooting down a Russian fighter plane over the border between Turkey and Syria. The circumstantial evidence was sufficient to convince me that Russian responsibility was a fact, but it wasn’t something I knew. In order to be able to consider it knowledge, I would have had to have direct access to sources at the highest levels of Russian and/or Turkish intelligence.

This brings us up to the paranoia of the current moment.

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Our Democracy™: In Counting There is Strength

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Electoral fraud is a venerable tradition in these United States, with a history going all the way back to the founding of the Republic.

With control of the public purse, representative government provided lucrative opportunities for both elected officials and the corporations that did business with them. Baroque levels of corruption became the norm, and public policy was devised to maximize profits for all involved while concealing the dirty deals behind a scrim of public rectitude.

Controlling the outcome of elections was essential for the smooth operation of the political machinery, in order to make sure that lucrative enterprises continued to generate lucre for everyone involved. The political cartoon below by Thomas Nast features William M. “Boss” Tweed, the head of Tammany Hall and the most powerful man in New York City in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Boss Tweed was able to guarantee results through an elaborate patronage network, lavish bribery, and his control of the ballot-counting process.

So how has the ballot-counting process evolved in the century and a half since the heyday of Boss Tweed?

There is widespread concern among elite opinion-makers that the current electoral process poses a threat to Our Democracy™. One of the most recent public figures to sound the alarm is Rob “Meathead” Reiner, according to Variety:

“It’s time to stop f***ing around,” Reiner wrote. “If the Convicted Felon wins, we lose our Democracy. Joe Biden has effectively served US with honor, decency, and dignity. It’s time for Joe Biden to step down.”

Whether Joe Biden steps down or not, it’s obviously important to elect the Democrat, whoever that might be. Our Democracy™ is in danger if voters are allowed to vote for the wrong candidate (in this case, Donald Trump). With so much at stake, we must do whatever it takes to ensure the election of the approved candidate.

In my previous posts I highlighted the role that propaganda and the suppression of dissent play in this process. But these alone are not sufficient to guarantee the desired outcome — hence the imperative to control the voting process itself.

This requires a multi-pronged approach. The traditional emptying of the cemeteries to produce votes on election day is still part of the effort. But the implementation of the widespread use of absentee ballots and “mail-in voting” — for which we can thank the Wuhan Coronavirus — created an opportunity for ballot fraud at an unprecedented level. The vote-counting process in major cities is controlled by Democrats, with vestigial or non-existent Republican supervision. The Democrat precinct workers — in most cases part of the African-American political machine — are able to ensure that a reliable supply of ballots marked for the correct candidate can be delivered as needed.

The methodology used to produce the necessary results is complex. To gain a better understanding, I highly recommend Conservative Tree House, where Sundance has done extensive research on the intricacies of the ballot-counting process. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post:

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Our Democracy™: Alternatives to the Ballot Box

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I posted on Friday about the consternation expressed by bien-pensants all across the West about dangers to “our democracy”. If you pay attention to what the globalists who claim to represent our interests tell us, the survival of Our Democracy™ requires us to follow the directives of people and organizations that are collectively identified as “stakeholders”. Stakeholders include a fairly large cabal of organizations, political leaders, and representatives of various corporations, NGOs, and charitable foundations. It goes without saying that ordinary voters are not considered stakeholders.

“Stakeholders” is a buzzword that has emerged in the last couple of decades to describe the dirigistes who plan for the future of Our Democracy™. If we were referring to Russia, they would be called “oligarchs”, or further afield in the Third World, perhaps “warlords”. But since these estimable folks are here in the enlightened West, they are simply “stakeholders”.

And we know, of course, that they have our best interests at heart.

The problem is: those pesky voters don’t always understand what their best interests are. When confronted with the difficult issues posed by our advanced technological society, they often make the wrong decisions. That’s why they need the help of those stakeholders, who are better informed about the nuances of our high-tech 21st-century civilization.

On the other hand, it’s important to maintain the polite fiction that the ignorant voters are the ones making the decisions. They’re guaranteed a voice by the universal franchise that was so painstakingly won more than a century ago. It is their right and duty to decide the direction of their affairs via the ballot box.

So what is to be done?

The stakeholders have developed three major strategies for directing the hoi-polloi in their electoral choices.

1. Propaganda

Up until 2016 this was the principal method used to generate the desired result in any given election.

First of all, it’s crucial that the major media be brought under stakeholder control. In Europe and Canada the process is simplified by state ownership of all the major television and radio outlets. In the USA the situation is somewhat more complicated, since most media are ostensibly in private hands. Funnily enough, however, all the major outlets move in lockstep on the most important issues, reliably promoting the line pushed by the stakeholders. Even Fox News is controlled opposition — it is set up as the despised right-wing alternative, yet it never veers far from the acceptable center. And that center has been moving inexorably leftwards since the end of the Second World War.

Various agencies of the permanent administrative state can bring pressure to bear on media outlets to persuade them stick to the preferred narrative. The explosion of official media regulations over the past few decades has guaranteed that every media corporation is breaking multiple laws every day, whether it intends to or not. Selective prosecution is an effective tool to keep the MSM in line. Those who stay within the accepted boundaries are left unmolested, while any outfit that strays too far from the narrative risks being hauled into court and tied up for months or years for violating various FCC regulations. The federal government’s pockets are bottomless, and any media corporation that runs afoul of it will eventually be slapped with a big-time fine, and will have to pay its own legal expenses. So it’s much easier just to stick within well-understood limits.

That’s the stick. The feds can also deploy multiple carrots: subsidies, tax breaks, lucrative contracts, concessions granting exclusive coverage of major public events, etc.

I don’t know all the exact ins and outs of this control system. All I can say with certainty is that the results are obvious: we have compliant media that move in lockstep on every important issue. This was made abundantly clear during the COVID-19 “pandemic”, when all major print and broadcast media simultaneously got with the CDC/NIAID/WHO program and never veered from it. It was uncanny.

The media control system generally worked well up until 2016. One of the legacies of the Second World War was that people had developed an ingrained trust of their national governments, which were perceived as beneficial institutions. As long as that reservoir of good will was still sufficiently deep, people could be herded and “nudged” into the desired behavior patterns, and would vote for candidates that were considered acceptable. The cherished illusion of the ballot box in Our Democracy™ could thus be maintained without having to resort to obvious coercion and fraud.

During every election the democratic process ran its course. The stakeholders would guide the selection of the candidates, and voters would be allowed to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It didn’t matter which one they voted for — both were considered acceptable to the Powers That Be, otherwise the stakeholders wouldn’t have put them in place.

Relentless media propaganda would always demonize one of them as “far right”, however — otherwise the center couldn’t be pushed relentlessly to the left. Statistically speaking, the media barrage had its intended effect: on balance, voters opted for more state control, more socialist policies, and more destruction of traditional cultural practices. And the bright shiny progressive Utopia thus drew ever closer.

Unfortunately for the stakeholders, the usual process got derailed in 2016. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were supposed to be Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Hillary would have won easily, but it wouldn’t matter if the voters resisted the leftward ratchet and chose the “far right” Jeb instead — the latter was fully captured, and posed no threat to the system.

But Donald Trump upset the applecart. He was not under the stakeholders’ control, and it wasn’t supposed to be possible for him to win the nomination, let alone the general election. When he did, the system was threatened. A tremor ran through the foundations of Barad-dûr.

And Mr. Trump wasn’t the only threat: Brexit also caused the earth to shake under the rules-based order of the West. The ignorant, turbulent voters on both sides of the Atlantic had gone against their programming and made choices they weren’t supposed to make.

The stakeholders closed ranks after 2016 and pulled out all the stops to make sure that nothing similar could ever happen again. In the process they were forced to reveal themselves — they had to step out from behind the curtain and wield an iron fist with its velvet glove removed. It was a salutary moment: what had once been a vague outline in the shadows now stood out sharp and clear, red-eyed and fanged.

People became aware they had been manipulated. As a result, the customary propaganda began to lose its effectiveness. It was no longer so easy to fool the Lumpenproletariat. Different tools for control needed to be selected from the stakeholders’ toolbox, which brings us to…

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Liberal Hegemony

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Karl-Olov Arnstberg is a Swedish writer, ethnologist, and retired university professor. His essays are posted at his blog, Invandring och mörkläggning. Below is today’s installment of his “Sunday Chronicle”. Many thanks to our Swedish correspondent LN for the translation:

Sunday chronicle: Liberal hegemony

by Karl-Olov Arnstberg

At the international level, the liberal order is characterised by economic openness, i.e. low barriers to trade and investment, relations between states being regulated by laws and institutions such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and multilateral alliances such as NATO.

At the national level, the liberal order is synonymous with:

  • Democratically elected leaders
  • The rule of law
  • Market economy
  • Religious and social tolerance
  • Human rights

Proponents of a liberal world order do not believe that this dream society arises spontaneously or automatically sustains itself. On the contrary, they believe that the liberal order requires active leadership. They also agree the United States, as the only superpower, is uniquely qualified to take the lead. Because it faces no threats in the Western Hemisphere and is shielded from the rest of the world by two vast oceans, it can intervene in distant countries without jeopardising its own survival. The two fundamental beliefs of liberal hegemony:

  • The United States must remain far more powerful than any other country.
  • It should use its superior military power to defend, spread and deepen liberal values around the world.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, history seemed to be moving in the US direction and it was considered easy to spread the American version of liberalism. The victory in the Cold War, the so-called Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe and a wave of democratic transitions in Latin America convinced many that liberal democracy was the only logical end point for modern or even postmodern societies.

US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the United States ‘the indispensable nation that sees beyond what others do.’ The Washington Post hailed US foreign policy as ‘the landmine that protects civilisation from barbarism.’ Only so-called rogue states, led by dictators and international troublemakers, opposed the exercise of US power, but they were comparatively weak and politically isolated. In any case, they were assumed to be heading for the dustbin of history.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama captured the zeitgeist perfectly when he argued that the great ideological battles of the past were now behind us and that humanity had reached the end of history. In the future, he said, there would be no struggle or conflict over major issues and consequently no need for generals or statesmen. Fukuyama warned that boredom could be the greatest danger of the future.

The enlargement and deepening of the EU in 1992, and the introduction of the euro as the single currency, fitted into this optimistic narrative. The EU was further proof that democracy, and the gradual development of international institutions, could bring lasting peace between countries that had previously fought bloody wars with each other. Overall, the future seemed bright not only for the United States but also for much of the world. Liberal values were on the rise and seemed to be inexorably pulling the world in the direction American leaders wanted it to go.

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Whose Face Will Be on the Trillion-Dollar Bill?

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Some of the things that President Biden and the Democrat Party have been doing over the past few months are pretty bizarre, considering that this is an election year.

Hispanics and even blacks are shifting away from the Democrats. Young people — the parti-colored Zoomer TikTok generation — are increasingly drawn towards Donald Trump. The way things are going, there won’t be enough dump trucks available to haul in the “found” ballots required to put Joe Biden over the top on the night of November 5th. The Democrats are virtuosos at rigging elections, but even in the dystopian twilight of 21st-century America, elections can only be stolen at the margin. The race has to be at least somewhat close in order to pull off an effective steal.

The Democrat apparat seems utterly unconcerned with making sure the race is a tight one. One unpopular policy after another is being pushed — open borders, criminals released without bail, the promotion of sexual perversion, the war against the internal combustion engine, uniformed soldiers with pink hair mincing around in high heels…

And, to top it all off, there was the “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter Sunday. Don’t they even want to win the election?

Well, maybe they really don’t.

I’d been thinking along those lines for a while, and then last week I happened to read something similar at ZeroHedge, an essay saying that they’re going to let Trump win.

These are the key paragraphs:

Let Trump back in, and fight him on home turf — in the maze of the executive bureaucracy. Some of his backers have announced their intention to become politically competent in the event that he wins — but compared to the alternatives, that’s a very manageable risk.

More importantly: let Trump hold the bag for the all-but-guaranteed economic calamity of the next four years. The regime could skate for another decade if they succeed in pinning the collapse on a dangerous, erratic right-wing upstart. [emphasis added]

Everything I say here tonight is pure speculation. I’m not an expert on any of these matters, and especially not on financial issues. I’m just a reasonably well-informed layperson who reads a lot of information from diverse points of view.

It’s undeniable that the country is headed towards some form of fiscal calamity. As I mentioned last month, money-printing is being taken to new extremes:

I swore off making specific predictions after the previous great fiscal crisis in 2009, when my prognostications were so completely wrong. I never would have thought they could keep the racket going for another fifteen years, but here we are. The Powers That Be have managed to do a lot with derivatives and real estate bubbles.

But the debt graph can’t keep going up with a steadily increasing slope — it just can’t. Someday the pyramid scheme will come crashing down, and the chickens will come home to roost. Based on the current debt acceleration, it won’t be much longer. It might take a week; it might take a decade. But the chickens will be roosting relatively soon.

The thing is, the people who keep the Ponzi scheme afloat know exactly what’s coming. They know the money-printing tactic will eventually stop working. It’s a complex process, what with cryptocurrencies, CBDCs, derivatives, paper and digital “futures” of precious metals, and now the BRICS alternatives. Keeping those plates spinning must surely be a tricky business.

And the people in charge know that a collapse of the dollar will eventually come. In order enrich themselves fully, and assure themselves an unbroken hold on the levers of power, they will need to time the crisis carefully. At exactly the right moment they will topple the pillars supporting the dollar-based economy, after having thoroughly prepared the replacement system that will be built on the smoking ruins of the old one.

So which patsy will be nominally in charge when the house of cards comes tumbling down? Who will preside over the Great Collapse?

Whose face will be on the Zimbabwe-style trillion-dollar bill?

For a long time I thought Brandon was being set up as the fall guy. He was always obviously a disposable president, a non-re-electable senile geezer who could be pushed aside when he was no longer needed. The people who crafted his policies and wrote his speeches clearly didn’t try to make him more popular. I assumed that when the time was right, he would be gently eased out (and Kamala, too, although that part would be tricky), and a substitute such as Gavin Newsom or Big Mike installed to run in 2024, someone who was at least plausible enough that the election could be rigged on his behalf.

But it never happened. And the scripts that Brandon has been following have been so damaging to him that it’s obvious that his handlers don’t really want him to win re-election. It is intended that he go down in flames, taking the Democrat Party with him.

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Our Dystopian Moment

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The two videos below are unrelated; I just happened to encounter them both today. They seem somehow emblematic of the apocalyptic times that we Americans are forced to live through.

The first clip shows remarks made by Peter Navarro at CPAC. Mr. Navarro is an economist who served as a presidential advisor during the Trump administration. After the “election” of 2020 he, like so many other Trump associates, became a target of the January 6 Inquisition when the Democrats were in control of the House. He refused to comply with a congressional subpoena to provide documents and testimony, and was charged with two counts of contempt of Congress. After being convicted on both counts, he was sentenced to four months in prison. He is appealing the verdict, but the judge ruled that he must serve his sentence in the meantime.

I don’t have any opinion on Peter Navarro, nor any idea on the merits of the legal cases against him. However, I know that the treatment of him is shameless political persecution. The mickey-mouse stuff he was accused of doing would have merited no notice if he had been a Democrat, or served under an elected pol with a “D” after his name. He is being persecuted because he had the temerity to hitch his star to the evil Orange Man.

He made the following remarks just prior to beginning his prison sentence:

The second video is an excerpt from Tucker Carlson’s interview with the inventor and entrepreneur Steve Kirsch. Mr. Kirsch has great expertise in statistical methods, and since early 2021 he has been investigating the statistics on the adverse effects of the experimental mRNA treatment intended to mitigate infection with the Wuhan Coronavirus. He has done great service to his country by digging up and exposing to public view the ghastly figures on the adverse effects, especially deaths, caused by the vax. The CDC and the other panjandrums of the political-corporate power structure are doing their utmost to marginalize and shun him so that the general public will never become aware of the harm the government has done by coercing them to get jabbed.

I watched the full interview, which is almost an hour long, but it has since been taken down, presumably because TCN is zealously protecting its copyright. The video below shows only the first eleven minutes, but it will at least give you a taste of what Steve Kirsch had to say:

Hat tips: Vlad Tepes and Steen.

Hey, the Bugs Ain’t So Bad

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I’ve often recommended an excellent blog called Conservative Tree House. I read the site every day, because Sundance (who does most of the political posting there) is almost invariably right in his predictions on domestic American politics. He has the knack for research and analysis that enables him to forecast the upcoming political trends in this country with uncanny accuracy.

His basic premise is that the national leadership of the Republican Party is thoroughly globalist in outlook, and is interested only in preserving its funding sources. Winning elections is of secondary importance; it’s the money that matters. And, when winning would compromise the continued flow of cash, the party will covertly make common cause with the Democrats to make sure the Republican candidate loses. That’s what happened in 2016 when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the Republican presidential nomination.

The same coalition was at work in 2020, and is currently being mobilized to stop Trump in 2024. Sundance calls it the “R.A.T. alliance” — Republicans Against Trump.

He has provided us with a useful prediction for the upcoming political season. He advises us to watch for the Republicans to start saying, in effect:

“Hey, the bugs ain’t so bad.”

Here’s a sample of what he posted today:

People were confused ten months ago when I said the 2024 DeSantis coalition will be fully laughable once they start saying, “Hey, the bugs ain’t so bad.” However, it’s the natural conclusion to this R.A.T. alliance. Those who were hiding as CONservatives in order to retain their influence and affluence, are merging into the traditional big corporate Republican Party apparatus and reflecting an attitude that says elitism isn’t so bad after all.

[…]

Another dynamic that is really interesting to watch is to remember the GOPe establishment Republicans were the support system for the 2016 Trump-Russia nonsense. In 2016, the professional Republicans joined with the leftist Democrats in their Never Trump effort to support Hillary Clinton.

Those Bush establishment Republicans are now in an alignment with the conservative pundits (Team Cruz, now Team Ron) who previously were attacking the fabrication of the Trump-Russia narrative.

This “Russiagate wasn’t so bad,” in combination with the “Bugs might not be too bad,” in combination with the “Big Tech ain’t so bad” Elon love, is buckets of funny. They hate me for pointing it out. Actually, they hate me for everything, but it’s fun to point out how easily the CONservatives compromise themselves for money.

At the end of the day, that’s what all of these alliances are about, MONEY!

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Evil or Stupid?

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Last week, in one of our Skype groups, a non-American participant said:

I’ve seen this quote: “The US has two parties: the Evil Party and the Stupid Party.” Is it any wonder the stupid party is losing a** over teacup over and over again?

I replied:

I understand the sentiment, but it’s worse than that. The Republicans are also evil, but pretend to be stupid. They don’t need to win elections to reach their goals; they just need the system that rewards and enriches them to remain in place and stable. They get just as rich when they’re the opposition.

They have to pretend that they hold conservative principles and want to win elections, but it’s all a charade. Any Republican who intends to move up in the hierarchy has to forget all that. In the end, it’s about money and power and perks and getting laid (whether hookers, rent boys, or little kids).

All the rest of it is pretense.

It’s very demoralizing to realize what’s going on. But once you start seeing this stuff, you can’t go back to not seeing it.

It took me a long time to reach this cynical position. I wanted to believe that the Republican Party presented a viable opposition, and for many years I resisted the nagging sense that the whole thing was a charade. Even after I came to loathe Republicans, I still clung to the forlorn hope that the party could somehow overcome its deficiencies and mount a real challenge to Democrat hegemony.

The presidential elections of 2016 and 2020 were the final nails in the coffin of that hope. I meant it when I responded to my liberal friends who referred to me as a Republican:

“I’m NOT a Republican — I HATE Republicans! The only thing worse than a Republican is a Democrat!”

But now I’m not even sure that the Democrats are worse. After all, they don’t try to hide their true nature. They no longer pretend not to be Marxists. They’re fully up-front about wanting to raise taxes and increase spending. They make no bones about their intention to control our lives in minutest detail. They proudly wave the banners of racial discrimination and sexual perversion. What you see is what you get.

Republicans, on the other hand, pretend that they are conservatives, when they are just as enmeshed with the globalists and the international financiers that are ushering in the New World Order. And they pretend they want to win elections, but ever since 2016 we’ve been able to see that they really don’t. Right now the Republican establishment is simply committed to making sure that Donald Trump does not win another election, no matter what it does to their party. As long as the current power-sharing system remains intact, and they keep their places at the trough, the party that holds power is irrelevant.

It’s plain that Donald Trump is seen as the greatest threat to the existing system, and must be stopped at all costs.

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So how do the recent midterms fit into all this?

First of all, it’s completely clear that the voting systems are now fully rigged. The Democrats control the process in major urban centers, and have developed multiple interlocked strategies for generating the votes they need to put their candidates over the top in all races they deem significant.

Earnest Republican commentators are having a hard time with the results. They aren’t yet ready to see what is right in front of their eyes, so they take the midterm results at face value. This forces them to conclude that their fellow Americans are ignorant, uninformed, and unfathomably stupid. Which is depressing, so now they’re depressed (I’m thinking in particular of the gentlemen at Power Line). For some reason they aren’t able to grasp the fact that the system is rigged.

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The Great American Divide Isn’t What You Think

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The following guest-essay by Brad Lena was originally published in 2019, but is still apropos, given today’s events.

The great American divide isn’t what you think

by Brad Lena

For the last 50-plus years, “the peaceful transfer of political power” meant a four- to eight-year rebranding of the ruling paradigm designed to preserve the policy, perks, economic, legal, and legislative advantages of the governing class. In 2016, the election ushered in a division some say is as significant as the election of 1860. Many think it is the clear division of political ideologies. While this is true, there is another split, and in my opinion, it is generally not recognized and is ultimately more profound.

First, some context. The complex, interdependent infrastructure that supports modern life in America operates with such reliability that unimaginable amounts of goods and services are conceived, produced, and distributed with seamless regularity. It takes a massive natural catastrophic event to interrupt it. The downside is that the demands are so great that a broad interruption lasting two weeks or more would result in chaos in every major city.

What does this have to do with this divide? The divide can be generally thought of in terms of two groups: those with the skills that maintain the modern infrastructure and those who lack those skills. For example, a person might be the most brilliant, accomplished brain surgeon in the world, but he is dependent on someone understanding, building, and maintaining electrical power generation and transmission or having the skills to design and build emergency power generators.

A more down-to-earth example: What would happen to the business you work for if the power went out for a day? Would the business function?

There are countless people whose skills and detailed coordination of complex systems enable modernity. Somewhere along the line, those who benefit from modern infrastructure but lack the contributing skills decided to bite the hand that sustains them. The disdain and contempt of the media, academics, students, comics, the MSM, progressives, etc. for those who engineer, build, maintain, and repair modern infrastructure, goods, and services has become particularly virulent and now violent.

One indication is that Harvard, with input and guidance from others, organized an excursion to introduce some students to the reality that supports their worldview. So detached have these elite students become that an expedition had to be mounted to expose them to reality outside their experiences. A situation where never have so many known so little about so much will not weather a prolonged disruption with stoic endurance.

Perhaps it is no surprise that a populace encountering a level of unprecedented material abundance would, after a sufficient number of generations, act is if it were like oxygen: it’s just there, always has been, always will be. That belief will be put to the test. What the future holds is anybody’s guess, but I’d be nice to those who know how to do something practical.

Previous posts by Brad Lena:

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Scientific Insanity

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MC’s latest wide-ranging essay addresses various aspects of the Culture Wars, most of them from the American front.

Scientific Insanity

by MC

We should by now be learning that ‘Nazism’ as such, is not an instance in history, but a logical pathway for those who seek totalitarian power. Soviet Communism destroyed itself because it assumed that ‘equity’ would overcome all difficulties, and that expertise was bourgeois, unneeded and unwanted. By killing off successful farmers, the Soviets destroyed their agriculture, failing to learn that ability needs to be rewarded, otherwise it is replaced by mediocrity; the “to each” side of the equation driving the “from each” to a degree which renders the whole instance unbalanced and unworkable.

Nazism works, and had to be taken down by overwhelming (and expensive) force of arms; it rewarded each according to his input and thus kept the workforce motivated.

We know that repeated attempts to make a losing strategy work are futile, and until one admits that failure, and accepts that there is a need to change the direction of the strategy, then failure will follow failure. To continue to try and make failure work without changing the strategy is pure insanity. In a society that forces the productive to support the unproductive there is an element of unpaid labour inflicted on those who produce. Am I therefore a 30% slave if I have to pay a third of my paycheck in extra taxes to support the idle?

Traditionally, those unable to work — the ‘poor’ — were a family responsibility, but historical Poor Laws made them a parish responsibility, and in many ways this was the start of the disintegration of the family as responsibility and duty passed to (expensive) bureaucrats. Costs increased, as did the numbers as more and more discovered that they could ride the gravy train. Thus the ‘solution’ was worse than the original problem .

This tendency for failure to repeat itself is endemic in democratic politics where the appearance of emotional intelligence is essential to winning votes, but irrational when it comes to actual lawmaking. Thus are politicians always benighted with the need for inappropriate emotional answers (lies) to rational questions.

There can be no doubt that President Trump was a highly successful President, as Presidents go, but he lacked an emotional empathy with a particularly avid but active and vocal group of powerful and immoral people for whom the ends justify the means. While they succeeded in displacing President Trump — possibly through the illegal manipulation of the vote — his compromise replacement(s) were and are totally disastrous.

The powerful voices in the Democrat party — Clinton, Sanders etc. — were unelectable, and even Democrats are wary of avowed communists and unindicted criminals.

So we got Brandon as a time-served and ranking Dem, who, they thought, could be relied upon to follow the party line. However in a divided party, the party line comes from she who shouts loudest.

But the big drawback of rigging votes is that the election concerned lacks credibility and does not help the winner’s political credibility. In the case of President Trump in 2016, it would appear that vote rigging was inconclusive and failed because Trump basically got more votes than had been predicted in (biased) pre-elections polls (poetic justice?). Still, shedding doubt on outcomes because more ‘people’ apparently voted for Clinton, did not help the Trump presidency.

In 2020 the vote rigging was much more blatant. It was based on COVID panic measures, and relied on a biased media and a bought (or blackmailed) SCOTUS for any credibility it had.

The Brandon administration started under a cloud which got blacker and blacker as Brandon lost all real credibility. He is at best senile, and at worst in the middle stages of dementia. All at a time when the USA needs strong leadership. The Veep is no better, displaying a strange idiocy even without the obvious dementia. This idiocy of the Veep is the guarantee that the dolt needs to stay in power. She is there because she is non-white, female and incompetent non-threatening.

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Vladimir Putin on Election Interference

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The following clip contains excerpts from an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin that was recorded by NBC News back in 2018. As I understand it, this footage was omitted from the final broadcast version of the interview.

Before I am denounced yet again as a Putin stooge, I must say that I find Mr. Putin’s assertion that the Russians don’t interfere with American elections to be laughable. They may not go so far as to hack into Dominion servers and similar operations — I have no expertise on such matters, so I don’t know — but they plant massive disinformation all over the Internet, and have been doing so for as long as I’ve been paying attention. I personally know a vlogger who was offered money by a Russian to propagate certain material (he refused).

More to the point is that the American intelligence services often do things that are just as bad, and sometimes worse, in an attempt to interfere with Russia.

And the idea that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to help elect Donald Trump is ludicrous on the face of it. Anyone with half a brain can see that the Russians would have had every reason to prefer Hillary Clinton over Orange Man Bad.

Many thanks to HeHa for translating it from the Italian subtitles, and to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:


Video link

Video transcript:

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Dueling Lawn Signs

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Sundance at Conservative Tree House asked for readers to supply what he calls “ground reports” on the upcoming election. Since the current political atmosphere is so toxic, and most polls are so obviously bogus, collective anecdotal accounts of what’s happening are all we have to go on.

Rather than clog up his comments section with my remarks, I’ll post them here instead. But first I want to recycle a joke from four years ago. It was relevant in October of 2016, and it’s even more relevant today:

“When this dreadful election is finally over, I hope we can still be friends, even if we are in different internment camps.”

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During the last two or three weeks, the number of campaign signs in people’s yards in this part of Central Virginia has really exploded. In the region I’m personally familiar with — which comprises a rough triangle having Charlottesville, Lynchburg, and Farmville as its vertices — Trump signs outnumber Biden signs. In my immediate neighborhood, however, the Biden signs are ahead. My neighbors are mostly black, which I assume is one of the main reasons for the difference.

In fact, putting a Trump sign in the front yard is the same as saying, “A white family lives here.” I have yet to see a single Trump sign in the yard of a house whose inhabitants are definitely black.

The converse is not true, however. There are enough white Gutmenschen in the area — especially retired transplants from Yankeeland — to give Biden a strong showing among the palefaces. Among the white population, the Biden signs are usually found in front of middle class or upper middle class houses. A trailer or double-wide inhabited by white people is almost certain to have a Trump sign, if it has any sign at all.

A couple of other correlations are worth noting. The first is the display of American flags. I haven’t seen any yards with Biden signs that also fly an American flag. The Trump supporters, on the other hand, are very likely to have a flag on a pole, or hanging over the front porch.

For the last year or so I’ve noticed a sign that some people post in their front yards: “Love thy Neighbor / NO Exceptions”. I wondered what particular import the message had, but now that election season has kicked in, the correlation is clear: If a “Love thy Neighbor” yard has a campaign sign, it’s inevitably a Biden sign.

This leads me to conclude that the “Love thy Neighbor” initiative is about race. I take it to mean: “You lousy racist! You need to be high-minded like me.” It’s virtue-signaling, in other words. It can be found in the front yards of both black people and white people.

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There’s no way the entire Commonwealth of Virginia will go for Trump. The demographics of the state are now dominated by dense concentrations of snowflakes, federal employees, and culture-enrichers in the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy, a.k.a. Northern Virginia, plus the more progressive zip codes of the Richmond area and Tidewater. And Charlottesville, of course, which habitually votes just to the left of Ann Arbor.

Taken county by county, Trump would win, but the majority of the population in the Old Dominion is loyal to the Communist Democrat Party.

The Fundraiser That Wasn’t

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This fundraising post was “sticky” for two weeks. Scroll down for lots of posts that were put up after it first appeared.

Update August 30 5:30pm EDT

I’m struggling with the new payments service, trying to find out how to make a form, or get a quick link, for a donation button. Until I manage to do that, snail mail is the only option. If you would like to make a postal donation, please email me at gatesofvienna {at} chromatism {dot} net, and I’ll send the address to you.

Since the last time I posted an update, more snail-mail donations have come in from the following places:

Stateside: Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York, Texas, West Virginia, and Washington

Canada: British Columbia

A big thank you to everyone who sent in their contributions. Your generosity is astonishing!

Email acknowledgements have gone out to most of the donors, and the rest will be sent shortly.

The Fundraiser That Wasn’t

Update August 25 8:00pm EDT

A week ago I thought this was going to be a normal quarterly fundraiser. I started it in the usual fashion, with an opening post on Monday for the fundraising “octave”. Then I woke up on Tuesday morning and discovered to my dismay that I’d been shut out of PayPal. After a conversation with the lady in the Terminations Department (as I think it was called), I was left in no doubt that I had been cancelled for my political opinions.

This eventuality was hardly unexpected; it’s not like I’m the first to be cancelled by PayPal. Over the past couple of years I watched the big guns go down one by one — Jihad Watch, Tommy Robinson, and numerous others. Since I’m just a tiny popgun in the “racist” scheme of things, my day of reckoning was delayed. But it had to come someday.

Hitting this speed bump made me decide to keep this post on top for a few extra days, to make sure that everyone gets a chance to see it. Newer stuff will continue to accumulate below it.

For the time being I’m fundraising by snail mail. Those who want to donate and don’t already have the address, please email me at gatesofvienna {at} chromatism {dot} net, and I’ll send it to you.

So far the results have been encouraging — a fair number of envelopes have arrived in the mail. I’ve already started writing the thank-you notes. I really appreciate your willingness to pitch in. And at least five people who have never donated in the past were affronted by what PayPal did, and wrote to ask for the address.

Even so, there’s no doubt that PayPal’s heinous actions will reduce the amount I can successfully raise. Not everyone will be willing to send money by regular mail, and the logistics for overseas gifts will be tricky.

The big question is whether the reduction will be significant enough to threaten the continuation of this site. Everything should proceed as normal for at least another quarter — I have enough savings to cover that.

In the meantime, I’m determined to find a substitute for PayPal. I’m in the throes of attempting to set up an account with a new service, but the interminable process of account verification is still incomplete. So keep your fingers crossed, or send up a smoke signal to the fire god, or say a novena for me — I need all the help I can get.

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