Not much to do with the title of this post, save that when I began writing it, the local classical station is playing Bela Bartok’s version of three Romanian folk dances. I was reflecting on how much fun it was, two weekends ago, to be with my books at the Folkfest in New Braunfels – to sit under the trees by the white building that houses the museum of hand-crafted furniture, listening to the music from the pavilion across the way … everything from traditional German songs, to country-western, and covers of rock music by a local teenage band. There were animals on display – a whole farmyard of them, and a pair of camels, as well. Reenactors came and went, demonstrating their craft, and their mastery of black-powder gun and cannon-fire, as well as simply astounding displays of bladed weaponry. It was all very reassuring, watching the families, the parade of children in costumes on Sunday afternoon, led by an accordion player in lederhosen and an honor guard of Scouts with flags. The children’s masquerade march was a custom first established by the schoolmaster of New Braunfels’ public school more than a hundred and sixty years ago. Life goes on in the Shire, from day to day; much has it always has done.
America 3.0
Quote of the Day
“E.g it would help America/Britain far more to close 99% of ‘conservative’ think tank activity in DC/London and put the energy and money into expanding school choice and breaking the state’s grip on education by creating new institutions, given how much of politics is downstream of education and how ineffectual most conservative thinking/activity is.”
Isn’t It Simpler to Speak of Bourgeois Norms?
Or perhaps, where people from different backgrounds find themselves in more frequent interactions with each other, to have concepts such as diplomacy (for the leadership classes) or simple good manners?
Kaufmann, a Canadian who teaches in Britain and is of Jewish, Chinese, and Latino ancestry. His most recent book is called Whiteshift, which he defines as “the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation.”
As he points out, something like this has happened before. A hundred years ago, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants pouring into Ellis Island were considered to be of different “races” by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites.
Half a century ago, their descendants were regarded as still culturally and politically distinctive in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s description of New York ethnics groups, Beyond the Melting Pot. A “balanced” ticket in those days had to include Irish, Italian, and Jewish candidates.
Today, all these groups are lumped together as “whites,” even though there are still perceptible, though muted, differences in political attitudes and perspectives between those with different ancestries.
I vaguely recall some of that writing about “unmeltable ethnics” during my adolescence in Milwaukee. Although Americans All was a rallying cry during Woodrow Wilson’s war, the existence of a Croatian soccer collective different from the Serbian soccer collective still meant someone not conversant with the past millennium of feudin’ and fussin’ in the Balkans ought be circumspect.
What will Trump do after January 20, 2021 ?
It is quite unlikely that the election fraud can be reversed before Biden is sworn in. I don’t expect any of the nonsense the left has been predicting if that occurs. Trump will leave office peacefully but will not attend the “inauguration,” which will probably be “virtual” anyway.
What will he do next ? He is the titular head of the Republican Party, and the choice of 98% of the 75 million voters who supported him. He got 10 million additional votes this year compared to 2016.
Trump may or may not purposely dominate the political scene in the background as Teddy Roosevelt did from 1909 – 1912 and then run again in 2024, but I argue that Trumpism will dominate the scene for a long time to come, and that any successful GOP presidential nominee will need to be a Trumpist. I go further, in fact, and believe the shuffling of the issue map and the realignment of voting coalitions are as substantial as FDR and the New Deal—and it took FDR four terms to effect that change.
I don’t see Trump running again in 2024. He will be as old as Biden is now and, while he is a good deal healthier than Biden is, the party will need new blood to carry on. What then?
This does not seem realistic.“I received a call from President Trump last week. We chatted about the election briefly [and] he made it clear that he wasn’t giving up on fighting for a second term,” said Eric Bolling, a Sinclair host and friend of the Trump family who appeared on Trump’s reality TV show years ago. “I mentioned to him that I believe whatever happens with the legal fights, he would emerge as the biggest media personality on the planet. Trump has a clear opportunity to be a media mega-personality post-presidency.”
“I think an Apprentice/Celebrity Apprentice revival would be a humongous hit,” Bolling added. “This iteration would be ratings gold for whomever is fortunate enough to get the reboot.”
That is the least likely possibility, in my opinion.
What else?
I’d rather see Trump get involved with something like Newsmax or just generally working to increase the conservative footprint in news media. Since Fox News has become sort of like the Justice Roberts of the news world, there’s a very real opportunity to capture a very large and underserved audience. And with the tech monopolists brazenly practicing story suppression for the Dems, it’s more important than ever.
That is a thought. How about this ?
In my opinion Trump should get together with someone like Vince McMahon and invest in something like Parler, expand the platform to take on twitter and facebook simultaneously. I’d bet taking them down a peg or two would be two would be very satisfying to him, and it would be a huge platform if it worked.
There is a good chance that he will be blocked on Twitter after he leaves office, although Twitter would be foolish to do so financially. Parler is an alternative, as iWe is an alternative to Facebook. I have joined both but not used them significantly. I never joined Twitter and have used Facebook mostly for baby pictures and the like.
Would he stay in the hotel business ? His kids have been running much of that the past five years and , while some like Ivanka might have political ambitions, I don’t see him getting back into development. My personal opinion is that the consequences of the virus and the insane reaction by Democrat Mayors and Governors have killed many cities. New York City is bleeding emigrants.
It will be interesting to see if he chooses to supervise the transition of the GOP from a corporate, Chamber of Commerce, party to a populist one. I think that is coming and he is the likely one to lead it. Third parties do not do well in our binary system. The old Republican Party, and many of its stalwarts, like Mitch McConnell, seem out of date, if not beholden to China. Ross Perot and Sarah Palin were warnings ignored. The Tea Party was an attempt that failed because they (we) lacked leadership. Obama went after the Tea Party with every department of the federal government weaponized. It resembled the assault on Trump the past four years in intensity and motive.
What if the country starts to separate? If the leftist radicals behind Biden try to enact their agenda, their real agenda, we could see a cold Civil War. They would be foolish to pick a hot one with the segment of the population that is comprised of most military veterans and which owns 350 million guns. A book written about such a peaceful separation is “America 3.0”
The analysis of American history is worth the price of the book and the time to read it. I wish the recommendations for recovery were more likely to be adopted. There are some excellent points about future trends, as in medicine for example. I like some of the suggestions for defense policy. The whole thing is a nice exercise in predicting the future. I just wish it would happen that way. I previously reviewed George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century . I think I like this one better and highly recommend it.
I was not optimistic about their suggestions in 2013 but then world has changed markedly since then. We could end up with a country that has blue crusts on each coast. The rest solid red. Chicago is a blue island that is failing. Maybe Canada would take them.
Millions of 2020 Votes Will Be Stolen – How To Tell If Yours Is One
The Democratic Party’s vote-by-mail scheme (which is NOT the same as absentee ballots) and, worse, its previous and expanded “vote-harvesting” scheme, will steal millions of votes to re-elect Trump, and for Republican candidates, in the 2020 election. This is NOT counting fraudulent votes. This is stealing Republican votes by changing them to Democratic votes. Here is how they do it, and how you can determine if your vote is stolen. If this clear signal that your vote has been stolen appears, do not walk away quietly. FIGHT BACK! How to do that is also explained.
Absentee ballots and vote-by-mail differ in that individual voters request absentee ballots for their current address, while mail-in-ballots (or “applications” for them) are automatically sent by state voting officials to every possible voter at their last-known address, even if they are dead or have moved away. And absentee ballots must be received by Election Day, while mail-in ballots in most states allowing them can be received days or even a week after the election and, depending on the state, do not require post-marks or other evidence that they were posted by election day. Every state allows absentee ballots, while there is a wide variation on mail-in votes. Some states don’t allow them at all, some states do only for 2020 due to COVID-19, some states send “applications” for them which voters purportedly fill out and return, and some states send every possible voter a ballot to be filled out and returned.
Vote-harvesting lets people other than the US Postal Service deliver ballots purportedly filled out by voters to polling places, even hundreds of ballots at once. Vote-harvesting as allowed in California in 2018, and now in other states such as North Carolina, has no controls whatever against fraud by the people delivering the harvested ballots. Vote-harvesting is voter fraud pure and simple. No state allowing it is a democracy any more.
Mail-in ballots are so vulnerable to fraud that the United States seems to be the only country in the world which allows them. The most common way the Democrats commit fraud with mail-in votes is made possible by a rule or practice that the “first ballot processed” by election officials from a particular voter is deemed the only official one.
So if a fraudulent mail-in ballot, purportedly from a registered voter, is processed by election officials before the real voter votes in person, only the fraudulent mail-in ballot is counted.
Sometimes the real voter finds out about this in the polling place – “You’ve already voted so we won’t give you a ballot” – and, if the voter complains, is given a provisional ballot to fill out, only the provisional ballot is mostly ignored when the robbed voter leaves. Sometimes provisional ballots are counted too, but so is the fraudulent mail-in one, so the real voter’s ballot is at best cancelled out. Here is an example of how that works in progress from the email of a Colorado friend who alerted one of my e-mail lists to this practice.
“Hey, I know this. I watched polls. Let me tell you, by the way, that year – 2012 – 1/3 of the people in my precinct in Colorado Springs ran into that. Our counterparts in Denver said 2/3 did.
Which means that I guess dementia is rampant in Colorado. Coff. Because there’s no voter fraud, right. That was, btw, the election in which the left eeked enough of a majority to then go full time vote by fraud. I mean mail.
What happened – I’ve had people tell me no, that’s not what happens, but hell I was there, and I know how it was explained – is that these people got to fill a “provisional vote”. Later, the records would be examined, and if it was shown they really hadn’t voted before those votes would be counted.
In other words, people are fobbed off. Even should their votes be counted – as some people insist they are – then they would count for ½ because there’s no way to retrieve votes already cast.
This is why I say the left has been winning by fraud for several cycles already and the only reason Trump won is that they were so sure it would be a Hillary landslide they failed to manufacture enough votes.”
Mail-in vote fraud occurs when the perpetrators obtain mail-in ballots, before they are sent to voters, from election officials who are part of the fraudulent vote conspiracy, or when for the same election officials simply give the perpetrators all the information needed to print their own fraudulent mail-in ballots and return envelopes, fill those out and mail them to the election postal box numbers/addresses. It is also possible for fraudsters to obtain the necessary information about voters online, but that requires far, far more work than if election officials give it to them.
However fraud with mail-in votes is done, it is so easy to do that no other nation seems to allow mail-in votes at all, let alone the way it is being done in America.
Note also that it is easier, and therefore more likely, for mail-in vote fraud to be targeted at all voters than just Republicans and independent voters. A lot of Democratic voters who choose to vote in person on Election Day may have polling place workers refuse to give them ballots because they have allegedly already voted by mail.
The simplest and best way to keep your vote from being stolen in this way is to have your vote be designated the first received from you. This requires that you vote as early as possible, preferably in person so there is no question about your identity, and so the US Postal Service doesn’t delay or lose your mailed ballot (which was a major problem earlier this year, and seems to be happening now). Don’t wait for Election Day – vote as early as possible. As an example, October 5 (Monday) is the earliest people can vote in person in California. Do so in your state.
If you do wait until election day to vote in person, a sure tip-off that your vote has been stolen will be a polling place worker refusing to give you a ballot because you allegedly have already voted. Don’t just walk away. Insist that you haven’t voted and demand that you be given a ballot. Don’t let them fob you off with a “Provisional” ballot. Insist on a real one. Make a screaming stink about it, and insist on speaking to a Republican poll watcher who will hopefully follow up on your problem, and add you to a list of names of people who have been denied ballots.
But it would be better if you also volunteer as a Republican poll watcher at a polling place on election day so you can protect other voters from having their votes stolen. They’ll be easy to spot – a polling place worker will refuse to give a ballot to a prospective voter. Your county Republican Party will love to have more volunteer poll watchers, and they’ll give you a little training on, including on what to do when voters are denied ballots. The Trump re-election campaign and Republican Party are prepared for massive nationwide Democratic voter fraud, and need help documenting it as it happens.
Do something about it yourself. Vote Early! Become a poll watcher!
But the problem will remain. This is the first national election involving massive nation-wide vote fraud by a major party. That means a nation-wide political conspiracy, and my Colorado friend’s experience indicates it has been building for years. How can America remain a democracy when a large portion of the country rejects the core American, and democratic, value of free and fair elections?