Mike

The Road Ahead

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I know it’s trite to offer electoral predictions, but here are mine.

I have no idea who will president at 12:00 PM on January 20, 2025.

As I have written before, just as Election Day has become “election season” with early and mail-in balloting, the election campaign will stretch out into the weeks and months ahead after Election Day. Not only does past experience suggest it, but as I wrote yesterday the Electoral Count Act practically guarantees litigation.

The dates of December 16, when electors meet in the various state capitals to cast their votes, and Jan. 6 will be the key checkpoints that offer the chance to channel what promises to be a chaotic aftermath into something approaching normality. Any successful attempt to upset the proceedings on those days means all bets are off.

After that I don’t know; the future is unknown.

In analytical work, you seek to unite the various data points into a coherent picture through the use of capability and theories of intent. Civilization in general works to keep intent below the horizon of capability. After all, there many things that you are capable of doing that would never occur to you given the way you have been socialized into various norms. By contrast the sociopath has no self-restraint and the equilibrium between their capability and intent is only governed by external force.

We as a society have spent the past eight years breaking norms. There have been cabals of government and media to censor information and spin narratives favorable to a given political party. There has been the weaponization of the security services to spy on political campaigns and entrap people for crimes, in order to derive political gain. The use of law enforcement to hunt down and punish political candidates and their supporters. The collusion of media and government in covering up the machinations and foibles of the current administration and orchestrating a coup to replace the incumbent candidate with another.

In all fairness, you also have norm-breaking on the other side. I don’t care much for mean tweets, but you take the bad with the good. Ronald Reagan left the building a long time ago. I compare Trump with his times, not with some halcyon past.

So the question is, what are the Democrats capable of doing? How close will their intent match their capability? There is no small amount of naivete, a normality bias, on the part of many so-called people of the Right, who seem to form a predictive baseline centered on hope rather than empirical evidence.

The past history above leads to the conclusion that the Democrats have not let critical norms limit their behavior in the past, and that they have raised their stakes to apocalyptic levels within the past year by stating that Trump’s return to the White House would mean an end to democracy. They have escalated to the point where they are trapped by their own past rhetoric and actions; the only paths forward are either to escalate further or to pull back from the brink and risk collapse.

The other, and perhaps more troubling, factor to consider is that the Democrats and the Left in general no longer feel much attachment to either our political system or the Constitution, seeing it all as illegitimate artifacts of an ancient and evil past.

In escalating, nobody picks collapse. It’s also true that nobody picks Armageddon. The way escalation works its evil magic is that the losing, desperate side convinces itself that with just one more shot of escalatory juice, victory will be theirs… and it never is. Desperate people do desperate things. Desperate people with power do catastrophic things.

Also remember Rahm Emmanuel’s famous quip about never letting a crisis going to waste. He was simply, in his own sweet Chicago way, regurgitating Lenin’s older dictum about crises offering revolutionary opportunities to those who possessed both the organization and the sense of historical daring to seize them.

Accordingly, I expect the Democrats to maximize every opportunity at their disposal to alter the vote count, litigate the results, and attack the process up to and including an American equivalent of a color revolution.

The path forward will be a little clearer later tonight, as results from a number of states roll in. The appearance of a decisive Trump and of the Republicans’ keeping the House and taking the Senate would go a long way toward keeping the post-election chaos to a manageable level. Anything short of that and the road to Hell is open.

My prediction? Normally I run probabilities and prepare for the top two or three, but that would be weaselly. So my leading theory, my prediction: Trump wins beyond the margin of steal and the Democrats are forced to largely fold tents to figure out how to fight another day, their Progressive wave having crested for now.

However that’s not the way I’m preparing. You always prepare for the worst…

The Electoral Count Act and Lawfare

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Our old friends in Maricopa County are back in the limelight again, having to deal with 90,000 last-minute voter registrations, 40,000 of which are too damaged to be processed. Wait until some of those 40,000 show up at the polls and find out they aren’t eligible to vote: can you say allegations of voter suppression?

I had outlined the Democrats’ obsession with “voter suppression” in a previous post; a term which seems to encompass any imposition of a requirement or restriction on voting. If you survey their various writings and pronouncements, you notice the topic has become part of their version of a Nicene Creed of belief regarding an unholy trinity also incorporating “fascism” and “Christian nationalism.”

I wrote in the same post about their hysterical response to the 2021 Election Integrity Act in Georgia which Joe Biden called “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” The voter ID provisions that Biden and others pointed out as evidence of the return of Jim Crow? Overwhelming support among blacks in Georgia. The voting experience of blacks during the 2022 Georgia election? 72.6% said their experience was excellent with 0.0% citing a poor experience.

The two lessons from the Georgia experience are 1) blacks support common-sense voting requirements and 2) modern-day racial voting suppression for Democrats is a symbol with as much empirical evidence for its existence as the bogey-man. The best evidence that the Georgia laws didn’t suppress black turnout is that the Democrats no longer talk about it.

Put that aside for a moment. Let’s talk about the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 (ECA) and what lawfare might look over the next few months.

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Justice to Monitor Voting Rights Compliance in Swing States

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Another part of the Democrats’ post-Election Day strategy taking shape?

Two predicates.

First, the power of the legacy media this election cycle lies not in who believes what they say, but in the ability to bring “themes” into the limelight. The media look for allies that can provide them with the proper hook, witness John Kelly’s Hitler comment that was reported in The Atlantic last week. The purpose of the article wasn’t to inject any new, credible information. Rather, it was to give an excuse for everyone to talk about Trump-as-Hitler (again).

The second is the Democrats’ upcoming reliance on the claim of “voter suppression” and other irregularities, to contest the presidential election result after Nov. 5th. This was part of John Podesta’s ploy to throw the table and deny Trump’s victory in the electoral college in “Game 3” of the Transition Integrity Project war game.

The Democrats have been playing the voter suppression card whenever and wherever possible, essentially claiming that any attempt to clean up voter rolls, have standards regarding ballot access, or have certain requirements for mail-in ballots (like, actually, the ballots actually have to arrive by Election Day) is akin to the return of the KKK. Think I’m exaggerating? In 2021 Georgia passed its Election Integrity Law which required the use of voter ID and tightened regulations on things like mail-in ballot requests and ballot drop boxes. All Hell broke loose. Joe Biden traveled to Georgia and called it “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” in part because it banned outside groups from offering water to voters waiting in line. Georgia was also sued by the Department of Justice, the ACLU, and the NAACP despite the fact that the new law made in-person voting more accessible, through longer early-voting periods and increased funding for more staff and locations.

Just as Hitler would have been confused by the Democrats’ calling Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally (that was festooned with Israeli flags) Nazi, Herman Talmadge would have been confused by his old friend Joe Biden’s characterizing a law that made it easier for blacks in Georgia to vote as “Jim Crow.”

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Halloween, Candy, and Confiscatory Fiscal Policy

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When I’m in Arizona for Halloween, as I was this year, the night is always a blast. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were in action and there was a great street presence both in terms of yard decorations and people (both kids and adults) in costume.

However, the big talk in the neighborhood among the adults is always about the candy. Everyone has their favorite and each has their own way of getting it.

Mark Antonio Wright writes, in The Top Three Candies to Steal from Your Kid’s Halloween Bag, his thoughts on the subject.

His top three candies to steal?

1) Twix and Snickers
2) Sour gummy candy
3) Twizzlers

His bottom three candies?

1) Milky Way
2) Candy Corn
3) Swedish Fish

This might be one of the few times since the Bush Administration that I have actually agreed with something in The National Review, though I would amend his list by removing Twizzlers and replacing it with the 100 Grand Bar. Furthermore I would remove Milky Way from the bottom and replace it with Dum-Dums.

Yes, I am old enough to remember actually getting candy cigarettes in my bag. When I told the kids about this they were horrified.

However, as far as a means of getting your hands on the sweet stuff, yes, much like Wright we would loot the kids’ bags while they were sleeping.

When they got older and they started to catch on, we had to up our game. So we taught them about taxation and tariff policy, by deducting an immediate 20% of all candy brought into the house with an extra 5% surcharge on chocolate and gummies. I would also teach them how to play cards and we would use their candy as chips. Good times.

Maybe there’s a treatise waiting to be written modeling government on parents and their kids’ Halloween candy; after all, just like we would take the candy and have the kids think they were getting something out of the experience, isn’t the government doing the same with you and taxes?

Why Maricopa Matters

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Tens of thousands of citizens wait in line for upwards of an hour to perform a sacred rite of citizenship, to vote for the people who will run the government. Yet when they get to the actual voting booth they are unable to cast their votes because the “tabulators won’t read the ballots.” Many are sent to other polling places, where if they don’t find the same problem with the equipment, they are unable to vote because they are recorded as having already voted. As a stop-gap the election authority decides to place the unreadable ballots into a special box at each polling place so that they can be later scanned, but many of those ballots are mixed-up with discarded ballots and presumably lost.

The race for chief executive was decided by a margin of little more than 17,000 votes out of more than 2.5 million votes cast with the political establishment’s preferred candidate winning.

So where is this place of strange elections and funny results? Putin’s Russia? Early 20th-Century Mississippi or Chicago? The country of some South American tin-pot despot of yore? Nope 2022 Maricopa County, the 3rd largest voting district in the country, and key to what many are calling the most important presidential election in more than 160 years.

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