Excerpts from a couple of essays in Tablet magazine

From “The Culture of Transgression,” by Michael Lind, July 31, 2023

Everywhere we see our political, cultural, and financial elites bankrolling activists to dismantle traditions. While flags and slogans celebrating racial or sexual identity are proudly displayed by Western governments and corporations, overt displays of national patriotism are regarded by establishmentarians on both sides of the Atlantic as vulgar and distasteful. Religions tend to be viewed with distrust and contempt by the trans-Atlantic elite, unless their premodern teachings have been modified into alignment with the views of the campus left. The Western canon, instead of being enlarged to include unjustly excluded authors, has been jettisoned, and liberal education has been replaced by ideological indoctrination in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

Iconoclasm is nothing new in history. The term was coined to describe the controversy over icons in medieval Byzantium, and has come to mean any attack on cherished traditions and familiar imagery. Radical Protestant reformers broke the stained glass and smashed the statues of Mary and the saints. The Taliban dynamited Buddhist statues in Afghanistan in 2001, and later ISIS destroyed many ancient Mesopotamian monuments and statues.

In most historic cases, programmatic iconoclasm has been temporary and accompanied or followed by the fabrication of new traditions and the imposition of new orthodoxies. In communist Russia, the statues of the czars went down and statues of Lenin and Stalin went up. ...

But the cancellation of the Great Books curriculum has not led to a new consensus canon featuring minority, female, and nonbinary authors along with a smaller number of “dead white males” who are deemed acceptable. Instead, much of the energy of woke jihadists goes into purging or censoring existing works of art and thought—rewriting the novels of Roald Dahl, for example—or randomly parachuting nonwhite or “queer” characters into movie remakes instead of creating something new.

The cultural ferment in contemporary North America and Europe does not feel like an interregnum between one cultural regime and a stable successor. It feels like a permanent revolution.

Put another way, the Western elite culture of transgression is an example of antinomianism, not iconoclasm. Unlike iconoclasm, antinomianism is not a temporary campaign of destruction of older iconography and traditions to clear the way for the imposition of new canons and orthodoxies. Derived from the Greek words meaning “against” and “law” or “norm,” the term antinomianism refers to the view that all laws and norms are oppressive always and everywhere, and that the act of transgression in itself is virtuous, if not holy. ...

At the moment, the fashionable justifications invoked by the elite antinomian vandals attacking Western society from within are climate change, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and “anti-fascism” as a catchall category. Upper-middle-class young men and women who throw paint at artistic masterpieces or glue themselves to trains claim they are defending the earth’s environment, but they could just as well say they are fighting white supremacy or patriarchy. They are acting out the ethos of a Western elite culture that believes the act of transgression itself is virtuous; the alleged goal of the transgression is merely an excuse.

Call it “the culture of transgression” of the dominant overclass in North Atlantic democracies. The three saints of transgression are the illegal immigrant, the transsexual, and the woman who proudly celebrates abortion. All three are idealized by our revolutionary ruling class precisely because they violate traditional norms—the traditional norm of patriotism, based on the legitimacy of the city-state or nation-state or kingdom and its laws and borders; traditional gender norms; and traditional family norms, which celebrate the capacity of women to give birth and to nurture their infants and of men to provide for them. Most of what is called “progressivism” today is really transgressivism.

y now the antinomians in Western nations have won their war against tradition in every realm. The members of the credentialed corporate-government-nonprofit-academic-media oligarchy, along with billionaire entrepreneurs and bankers who themselves are usually born into managerial-professional families, are almost all modernist in their aesthetics, libertine in their views of sex and recreational drug use, and dismissive of nationalism and patriotism and religion, which they regard as mental diseases of the lower classes. They work in offices designed by trendy “starchitects” decorated with abstract art, and often live in postmodern homes designed to be sterile, off-putting, and the very opposite of petty bourgeois comfort.

Having vandalized every premodern tradition, the elite antinomians of the modern West now don’t know what to do next. What should rebels against the bourgeoisie rebel against when the bourgeoisie has fallen?

The answer, it is increasingly apparent, is to rebel against the proletariat. Instead of shocking the bourgeoisie, our post-bourgeois managerial overclass now delights in shocking the working class. ...

Whatever working-class “normies” believe and enjoy, the most influential tastemakers of the trans-Atlantic ruling class denounce and seek to ban, using one of their three or four specious all-purpose justifications. ...

By declaring the democratic preferences of the working class a danger to society, the West’s oligarchs justify subjecting their enemies to pervasive surveillance and other counterextremism measures originally designed for foreign terrorist groups. ...

From “The Obama Factor,” by David Samuels, August 02, 2023

[Note: There’s a lot of (counterfactual) anti-Putin/Trump crap in this piece, which rather plays right into the very stuff the authors critique. Samuels is also offended by Obama’s supposed minimization of American exceptionalism, but he equates that exceptionalism with empire, which Obama clearly embraced (to great harm).]

... By then, it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms.... The election of Joe Biden in 2020 gave the Obamas even more reasons to stay in town. ...

Near the end of June, for example, Politico ran a long article noting Biden’s cognitive decline, with the coy headline “Is Obama Ready to Reassert Himself?”—as if the ex-president hadn’t been living in the middle of Washington and playing politics since the day he left office. Indeed, in previous weeks Obama had continued his role as central advocate for government censorship of the internet while launching a new campaign against gun ownership, claiming it is historically linked to racism. Surely, the spectacle of an ex-president simultaneously leading campaigns against both the First and Second Amendments might have led even a spectacularly incurious old-school D.C. reporter to file a story on the nuts and bolts of Obama’s political operation and on who was going in and out of his mansion. But the D.C. press was no longer in the business of maintaining transparency. Instead, they had become servants of power, whose job was to broadcast whatever myths helped advance the interests of the powerful. ...

At bottom, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama [by David Garrow] is a tragic story about a young man who was deeply wounded by the abandonment of both his white mother and his Black father—a wound that gifted him with political genius and at the same time made him the victim of a profound narcissism that first whispered to him in his mid-twenties that he was destined to be president. It is not hard to see how Garrow has come to believe that Obama’s ambition proved to be toxic, both for the man and for the country. ...

My own read of Obama has always been that he was a skillful elite-pleaser with a radical streak that did in fact emerge from the anti-imperialist politics of the 1970s, the foundational claim of which was that equality trumps freedom. ...

Progressive theology is built on a mythic hierarchy of group victimhood which has endured throughout time, up until the present day; the injuries that the victims have suffered are so massive, so shocking, and so manifestly unjust that they dwarf the present. Such injuries must be remedied immediately, at nearly any cost. The people who do the work of remedying these injustices, by whatever means, are the heroes of history. Conversely, the sins of the chief oppressors of history, white men, are so dark that nothing short of abject humiliation and capitulation can begin to approach justice.

It goes to say that nothing about the terms of progressive theology is original. It is the theology of Soviet communism, with class struggle replaced by identity politics. In this system, Jews play a unique, double-edged role: They are both an identity group and a Trojan horse through which history can reenter the gates of utopia.

Ghettos were invented for Jews. Concentration camps, too. How can Jews be “privileged white people” if they are clearly among history’s victims? And if Jews aren’t white people, then perhaps lots of other white people are also victims and therefore aren’t “white,” in the theological sense in which that term gains its significance in progressive ideology. Maybe “Black people” aren’t always or primarily Black. Maybe the whole progressive race-based theology is, historically and ideologically speaking, a load of crap. Which is why the Jews are and will remain a problem. ...

[Obama] was the guy chosen by history to put something in the American goldfish bowl that made all the fish go crazy and eat each other: America’s emerging oligarachy cementing its grip instead of going bust. The rise of monopoly internet platforms. The normalization of government spying on Americans. Race relations going south. Skyrocketing inequality. The rise of Donald Trump. The birth of Russiagate. It all happened with Obama in the White House. ...

[The interview:]

DS: What do you see as the connection, if any, between the personal lives of powerful men and their public lives, based on your years of research on Dr. King, and your experience writing about Obama?

DG: I think one can in large part, in King’s case, say these were sort of two separate lives. Because he lived it that way. He lived it as two separate lives.

DS: Might one make the same case about Obama, but in reverse? It seems clear that Obama leads an exemplary, highly controlled private life, consuming exactly seven almonds while watching The Man in the High Castle or Draymond Green highlights on ESPN for stress relief.

DG: Right. Yes.

DS: In fact, I can make the case that Obama’s public life was the amoral part, beginning with the toleration of genocide in Syria and the extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens, and extending to wide-scale illegal surveillance and spying, and his now becoming the spokesperson for gutting the First Amendment in favor of government censorship of large tech platforms. ...

DS: So Obama starts out as an eloquent opponent of the Patriot Act, etc., etc. By the end of his presidency, his people are unmasking intercepts of his political opponents every day, and the FBI is spying on Donald Trump.

DG: That’s right. ...

DS: What interests you most about Obama today?

DG: The number one thing about Barack this past five years is how completely he’s vanished.

DS: Why is he living in the center of Washington, D.C., then?

DG: Well, how much time is he spending there as opposed to Martha’s Vineyard? I have no idea.

DS: Between July Fourth and Labor Day, sure. The rest of the year, he lives in a large brick mansion in Kalorama. Doesn’t it strike you as weird that he’s an ex-president, he’s comparatively young, and he’s living in the center of Washington, D.C.? The original excuse was that Sasha had to finish school. Then you could say, “Well, the opposition to Trump needs a figure to rally around.” But now Sasha has graduated from USC, Trump is gone, Joe Biden was elected present, but he’s still there.

DG: I never see any mentions of him.

DS: Doesn’t that strike you as odd? I mean, I have heard from more than one source that there are regular meetings at Obama’s house in Kalorama involving top figures in the current White House, with Secret Service and cars outside. I don’t write about it because it’s not my lane. There are over a thousand reporters in Washington, and yet there are zero stakeouts of Obama’s mansion, if only to tell us who is coming and going. But he clearly has his oar in.

DG: I don’t follow the Iranian stuff super, super carefully, but I have been puzzled at the Biden administration’s continuing attachment to the Iran deal.

DS: The easy explanation, of course, is that Joe Biden is not running that part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone because all of his people are already inside the White House. They hold the Iran file. Tony Blinken doesn’t.

DG: Rob Malley was the guy on that.

DS: Rob Malley is just one person. Brett McGurk. Dan Shapiro in Israel. Lisa Monaco in Justice. Susan Rice running domestic policy. It’s turtles all the way down. There are obviously large parts of White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama because they’re staffed by his people, who worked for him and no doubt report back to him. Personnel is policy, as they say in Washington.

Which to me is a very odd and kind of spooky arrangement. Spooky, because it is happening outside the constitutional framework of the U.S. government, and yet somehow it’s been placed off the list of permitted subjects to report on. Which is a pretty good indicator of the extent to which the information we get, and public reactions to that information, is being successfully controlled. How and by whom remain open questions, the quick answer to which is that the American press has become a subset of partisan comms.

DG: I’m going back to something you said 20 minutes ago. From the get-go, I know enough intelligence community stuff that from the first time I saw it, I realized that Christopher Steele’s shit was just complete crap. It was bad corporate intelligence, even. It was nonsensical.

DS: What scared me back then was coming to understand that a new milieu had been created consisting of party operatives, the people in the FBI and the CIA who are carrying out White House policy, and the press. It is all one world now. And that’s something people still seem loathe to admit, even to themselves, in part because it puts them in a state of dissonance with this new kind of controlled consensus that the press maintains, which is obviously garbage. But if you question it, you’re some kind of nut. ... Now the question becomes, why are they still fixated on Iran after the Iran deal failed, its premises are exploded? And who are “they,” exactly?

DG: Well, for Barack, everything has to be a success. Everything has to be a victory. I mean, I’m not a health policy expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve always thought that the whole Obamacare thing was, in large part, a fraud. It’s a great achievement for the health insurance industry.

DS: Obama reluctantly started talking about health care because it was Hillary Clinton’s issue in 2008, and then they were like, “Well, you have to have a healthcare plan, because Hillary has her big healthcare plan.” It was like, “All right, fine, I’ll have one too.” ...

DS: I think future historians are going to look at the Obama presidency and see it as the moment when this new oligarchy merged with the Democratic Party and used the capacities of these new technologies and the power of this new class of people, the oligarchs and their servants, to create a new apparatus of social control. How far they can go with it, what the limits are … you see them trying to test it out every week or so. ... So if Obama is the first U.S. president from the periphery of empire, he’s also the first president from the billionaire-foundation-NGO complex, which makes him the perfect mediating figure between the progressive part of the party, the billionaires, and the security state. ...

DS: As someone who has been a serious student of this subject for the past 45 years, how consequential is the court’s decision to overturn Roe?

DG: It’s a class issue. That’s the number one thing. Even before Roe [and https://kirbymtn.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-threat-to-abortion-and-reproductive.html], if you were a woman who had your life together and could get yourself to New York, you were fine. If you had the time and the ability to buy yourself a plane ticket to New York City, you were fine. Anybody from the Rio Grande Valley needed to get, past tense, to San Antonio or Austin to get an abortion. And that’s what we’re looking at now, is that it’s a travel challenge, because there’s going to be this whole swath of states—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas—where folks are going to need to get to New Mexico, Colorado, or Illinois. ...

[T]he problem with the reproductive rights movement, going all the way back to Mrs. Sanger in the teens and the ’20s, is that the activist population has no connection to the beneficiary population. Because the beneficiary population is generally poverty-class women who have messed-up lives—and, in some circumstances, abusive life situations. But they are working-class or poverty-class people for whom the ability to get out of Pittsburgh, just to use the local geography, to fly out of Pittsburgh, would be a humongous challenge for them. They can take the bus around Pittsburgh, but how do you get to the airport? How do you get a ticket? Where do you go? Do you have an internet connection at home? ...

DS: So how do you talk all this foundation-land, community-organizer shit and then preside over the transformation of the country into a Gilded Age oligarchy? Maybe I just answered my own question: Obama is the Magic Negro of the billionaire industrial complex. And targeting Jews as outsiders and pushing them outside the circle was the way that the Gilded Age oligarchy consolidated itself in America, back then and also now. ...

DS: [I]magine telling Harry Truman, “Hey, why don’t you sell that old house and buy three or four huge mansions in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii and Washington, D.C., and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in sweetheart deals with big corporations while you’re vacationing on rich people’s yachts?” ...

DG: Everybody, especially white folks, thought that having a Black family in the White House would be cure for the legacy of American racism. Now there’s no question in anybody’s mind that on that score, that scale, the presidency was a total failure. But why are race relations, at least as people perceive them or imagine them, ostensibly well worse today post-Floyd than they were in 2008? ...

DS: [T]he point where race relations in America turned sour wasn’t with George Floyd in 2020; it was with BLM in 2014, and that’s squarely during Obama’s second term ...

DG: I think it’s inescapable that Barack’s success in ‘08 is rooted in white people seeing him as an easy ticket toward racial absolution. It’s a need that white people in this country have. And what we’re still seeing week after week now for these past two or three years, especially with places like the Times and the Post, is that this white need for absolution was not cured by the Obama presidency. ...

DS: The protagonists of the grand drama of race in America are the cultural and actual descendants of the Puritans, not Black people—who, as Americans, mainly desire the same things that other Americans do, like safe streets and decent jobs and health care and not to die prematurely from heart disease. White Puritans have more elevated concerns.

DG: Exactly. For them, 200-year-old statues are more important than five-year-old Black children. ...

DS: What do the Obamas and their circle have in common with each other? They are Ivy League people, who ran away from whatever they came from in order to become members of the credentialed elites, whose loyalty is to the system that gives them prestige—or rather, gives prestige to their degrees, of which they are the holders. Once they pair off and reproduce under the seal of Harvard or Yale, they may find it seemly to donate money to an NGO that offers microloans to female entrepreneurs in Pakistan. So why should Obama, the ultimate winner, carry on the charade that he’s part of a community, whatever that means, with these people? He’s happy to go on NPR and talk about meaning or Marilynne Robinson novels or whatever, to make the wine moms identify with him, so he can put one over on them. Just don’t ask him to visit the hospital when you get cancer, because he’ll be hanging out on someone’s yacht, with the other winners. ...

Climate change–fueled weather demands action now, sez Sarah Copeland Hanzas — annotated

Sarah Copeland Hanzas was a Vermont House member for 18 years before being elected as Secretary of State in 2022. This commentary, reproduced here in full with notes following, was published in several news outlets (without the notes).

Vermonters have always rallied to protect and care for our friends and neighbors in a crisis. I am grateful for Governor Scott’s calm and measured response when Vermont is in crisis. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Governor Scott followed the science and took the appropriate steps, despite considerable opposition,^a to keep Vermonters safe and to prevent a greater tragedy. Now, we need the same courage and focus as we grapple with flood recovery and take action to address the underlying forces of climate change^b that drove its severity.

So far this summer, Vermont has seen a record heat wave in May,^c the state’s worst air quality in history in June, and recently a record rainstorm^e that dumped as much as two months of normal rain on towns around the state in just over a day.

And this is clearly the new normal^f for Vermont as the impacts of global warming hit us. Nolan Atkins, the former chair of the atmospheric sciences department at Vermont State University said: “In a warmer world and a warmer climate, [we should expect] these more frequent and more intense weather events.”

Yet despite the science, and clear evidence of increasingly severe weather, the Governor has vetoed every major piece of climate legislation the Vermont Legislature has put before him in recent years. We need Governor Scott to direct state agencies to recognize the climate emergency and treat climate action with the same emergency response and focus we are seeing right now during the floods, and that we did during Vermont’s Covid response.^g

As the former co-chair of the Legislature’s Climate Solution Caucus, I traveled throughout the state listening to Vermonters’ concerns about the looming impacts of global warming and the urgent need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. I heard over and over that if we don’t act on climate and curb our emissions we will run out of time; we will be too consumed by the effects of climate change to focus on transitioning to renewable energy.^h

I have seen our pragmatic Governor do a policy pivot when faced with an emergency. After the shooting threat in Fair Haven High School, he was a constructive and supportive partner for meaningful gun safety reforms.

It is time for the Governor to pivot on climate policy. There are a few simple things the Governor can do right now to make a difference and help Vermont be a leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And more importantly, prevent greater tragedy.

First, the Governor should direct his appointees on the Climate Council to shift to an emergency response.ⁱ The most immediate and constructive action he could take at this moment is to make sure Vermonters whose heating systems were destroyed in the flood are encouraged and incentivized to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.^j Let’s help provide loaner heating systems to get through the upcoming heating season and accelerate our investment in our green energy workforce. This will not only speed up Vermont’s green energy transition but also create jobs; we can combat climate change and help Vermont’s economy at the same time.

Second, direct his Agency of Natural Resources and Department of Public Service to become willing partners in implementing the Clean Heat Standard to help all Vermonters transition from fossil fuels for heating and cooling their homes and businesses. Over one-third of Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions come from heating and cooling our homes and businesses. Despite this, Governor Scott and his administration have inexplicably been an anchor in getting this groundbreaking initiative into action.

And third, support legislation to ensure Vermont gets 100% of its electricity from renewable energy by the end of the decade. With the passage of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, wind and solar power are cheaper than ever^k and price competitive with new natural gas. Vermont needs to do its part to clean up its electric sector and end our environmentally unjust practice of importing our power from oil- and natural gas–burning plants in low-income communities in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

I’m not saying it’s simple and easy, I understand firsthand the challenges rural Vermonters face in heating their homes and getting to work. But if we think transitioning to renewable heating and transportation is inconvenient or possibly a little more expensive, just look around at what we will be facing if we don’t.^l Can we afford not to?

-------------------

^a“despite considerable opposition” — Actually, the considerable opposition was that he wasn’t draconian and dictatorial enough.

^b“to address the underlying forces of climate change” — The earth revolves around the sun with a tilted axis, thus causing the seasons, and turns on that axis, thus causing day and night. These cause weather.

^c“Vermont has seen a record heat wave in May” — And then it was over. We’re looking at a rather cool end of July and early August.

^d“the state’s worst air quality in history in June” — Canadian forest fires, which we can hardly do anything about.

^e“a record rainstorm” — Well, no, it wasn’t.

^f“clearly the new normal” — If you were born yesterday.

^g“We need Governor Scott to direct state agencies to recognize the climate emergency and treat climate action with the same emergency response and focus we are seeing right now during the floods, and that we did during Vermont’s Covid response.” — That “emergency response” to Covid was futile and harmful, as indeed is almost all of the “climate legislation” that the legislature has passed. In fact, Montpelier, along with other towns on rivers regularly floods and businesses bounce back. But they are only now recovering from that Covid response and don’t have the resilience and resources they would have otherwise.

^h“transitioning to renewable energy” — From normal New England weather to CO₂ emissions as the culprit to renewable energy as the solution, this is a study in non sequitur. It is telling that as co-chair of the Legislature’s Climate Solution Caucus, she heard only people clamoring for what she is here clamoring for.

ⁱ“shift to an emergency response” — If everyone is already clamoring, it most certainly does not require an emergency response to force it on them. This “emergency response” is required precisely because people like to make their own decisions about how their homes are heated, weighing costs and benefits for their individual situation. Again, that “Covid emergency” was similarly imposed precisely to prevent people from making personal risk-benefit decisions, even to punish people for insisting on their right to make such decisions for themselves.

^j“replace fossil fuels with renewable energy” — What is she talking about? She means replacing systems that burn fuel on site to provide warmth with electric space heaters. Granted, in Vermont, much of that electricity is from Canadian hydro, but the expanded demand of electric heat (and cars) will be provided by burning natural gas, converting a fraction of the released energy to electricity, transporting that electricity over powerlines at further loss, and then converting it back to heat. The inefficiency compared to burning fossil fuels on site is staggering, not to mention insanely bad policy.

Furthermore, every Vermonter knows that they need to be prepared for power outages, which can sometimes last for days. Depending on electricity for anything that you don’t have to is simply foolish. You will effectively be replacing efficient fossil-fuel systems with increased reliance on fossil fuel–powered back-up generators.

^k“wind and solar power are cheaper than ever” — In fact, wind and solar are only getting more expensive. They completely depend on subsidies from taxpayers and ratepayers to be built at all.

^l“just look around at what we will be facing if we don’t” — And we close with the veiled threat, based on the false premises the whole essay started with. “We’ll make sure you can’t afford not to make the choices we make for you.”

[[[[ ]]]]

From The History of Athens Vermont, Lora Wyman, 1963:

«Freshets and floods occurred too frequently down the years to mention more than a sample of them. A few that did the most extensive damage to Athens were the freshet of Oct. 4, 1869; the great blizzard of Mar. 12, 1888; the floods of 1927, 1936; and the great hurricane of 1938. Practically all adults living today can remember the destruction caused by the hurricane of 1938. In Athens countless trees were blown down, the roof on Henry Ward’s milk house and one side of the barn were blown off. A small bridge near Camp Nai-neh-ta was washed away and abutments on others were weakened. About one-half mile of the main road to Cambridgeport, parallel with the brook above Brookside bungalow was washed away. Traffic was detoured around the road past the David Karlson farm. Two of Ned Wyman’s 10′ × 12′ chicken houses on the lower road, floated down stream, one lodging in a tangle of brush. Next morning, expecting to find the 50 or more chicks housed inside drowned, Mr. Wyman happily discovered them all perched on the roost above the water, waiting for breakfast.»

Also see: 1816: The Year Without a Summer

Responses to Emily Oster’s plea for ‘covid amnesty’

emily oster's no good, really bad, terrible idea
"when we were in the dark about covid" is not a useful excuse for bad behavior
el gato malo

... just to be clear, emily is not advocating forgiving “those who deliberately spread misinformation” (though she does seem a bit confused about just who that might be) but her “we were all in the dark and people said lots of things and some wound up right and some wrong and we all just need to get over it and move on as recrimination is not useful” take rings hollow and false here.

what does this serve?

why should we forgive those who through stupidity, cupidity, and fear spent 3 years denying 100 years of evidence based science to attack our lives and livelihoods?

oh, no worries! i'm sure you had your reasons?

you were "just following orders"?

you were just doing what the authorities said?

because i seem to remember a whole pile of excuses that sounded an awful lot like that being rejected back in the late 40’s.

and i must agree with that take and take issue with emily. ...

it is precisely BECAUSE following vicious, evil orders is so easy in times of fear and that humans break and bow to authority with such ease that there must be sharp penalties, reputational and otherwise, for so doing.

otherwise, you're just greasing the rails for next time.

it’s the low energy path of submission, and freeing it from consequence serves only to render it a path more followed. ...

even if we accept this “we were in the dark” line of reasoning it still makes no sense.

1. we were not in the dark. we had 100 years of evidence based pandemic and epidemiological guidance and guideline upon which to rely. some tried to follow these bodies of canon and were shouted down by those seeking to do exactly what that guidance admonished against. that is lack of knowledge abrogating actual knowledge and panic driven superstition superseding evidence. equating those two viewpoints as “equivalent” is pure nonsense.

2. even if truly no one knew anything, then this is a reason for humility, not stridence. the base case is always “respect others and their rights. do not panic. don’t do anything crazy or drastic without a very sound reason.” that’s not what happened. a bunch of terrified anti-science loons got loose with global government and pushed literally unprecedented in human history programs of societal and economic upheaval that flat out broke the world while, predictably, having zero effect on the pandemic. guys, you took you lead from china. china. the precautionary principle does not state “every time you get scared, do the most radical thing you can think of it if feels like safety.” that is precisely what it warns against. such excursions into superstitious supplication of pseudoscience are not evidence based epidemiology. they are not even sanity. and again, calling that an equivalent viewpoint to “we need strong, data-driven evidence to take such outlandish actions” (presuming they are permissible at all, itself deeply questionable) is pure nonsense.

3. the presumption of prerogative to force upon others the unfounded desires of “those in the dark” fails inherently on every metric germane to sustaining a free society. “we didn’t know, so we took your rights away just in case” is not much of justification. this lays claim to “emergency powers” of dictatorial nature and is exceedingly dangerous as a societal foundation. it’s also incompatible with the basic idea of a republic in which the rights of the individual stand paramount to the whims of the state or the mob. this ought be especially so in emergencies with low information for what could be more likely to work vast harm than great power to coerce usurped and wielded by “those in the dark”? again, this is not a viewpoint that can be granted equivalence to a system that respects rights. doing so is, yet again, pure nonsense. ...

of all the people who should have had the confidence to follow data over diktat, should not a trained professor of data handling rise to the fore?

but this failed. and if we would avoid such failure in the future, perhaps a bit of culpability ought be spread around.

as an economist, surely ms oster must understand incentives. if there is no cost to having acted poorly, rashly, and without consideration or information despite the ill effects it had on others, are we not just subsidizing more such antisocial activity in the future? ...

but this gets more complex: being wrong is one thing. OK, you made a mistake. and this, i can forgive so long as it was YOUR mistake. but when you take that mistake and make it mine by forcing upon me actions and restrictions to which i do not consent and to threaten the lives and livlihoods of me and mine because you’re running around half-cocked and have no respect for the rights of others, well, that’s something altogether different, isn’t it? ...

getting a disease wrong is one thing, but presuming the coercive dispensation to take whatever your “conclusion” is (especially if you are “in the dark”) and force it upon the rest of us because it makes you feel less frightened (or perhaps allows you to savor the dark frisson of being beastly to others while telling yourself you’re a good person for doing it) is not something you get amnesty for.

there is a sleight of hand in the thinking here like somehow having misunderstood a pandemic excuses the mass scale abrogation of rights and reason.

it doesn’t.

such ideas are anathema to the persistence of a free society.

and this is not where team oster came down. ...

even had they been right on covid and NPI’s or anything, they still had no right to do this. they had no right to take over media, social and otherwise and censor it. that is “the dark.” they had no right to lock you down, mask you up, and force an ill-tested and ill-effective jab on people as predicate for basic freedoms.

and all the people who favored that, who brayed and cheer led for it, they are guilty too. and i just cannot see “just dropping the matter” because they’d like it to go away now. ...

if you got rolled by this, got jabs you did not want, and suffered as many did, well, so long as you did not advocate forcing this on others, you already have my forgiveness. you were a victim here.

but as soon as you cross the line into advocating coercive policy or willful data suppression, that’s a whole separate issue.

being wrong is no crime nor even is being bullied into acquiescence.

but forcing others to join you is.

knowingly suppressing data and spreading lies is. ...

if you wielded the whip hand of of the covidian crusader i’m sorry, but i don’t care if you were “in the dark” as that is no excuse. it stands rather as indictment.

having done so out of ignorance (or worse the sort of dark desire to act the dictator or demagogue by assuming a faux moral mantle to vilify and attack others) makes you a hazard and precisely the sort of actor that ought be penalized, not accommodated.

society must develop an immune system to you.

forgiving such would be past enabling and into ennobling anti-social action and technocratic science perversion. ...

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"Amnesty" Is Not the Solution to Disastrous Policy Decisions
And "gloating" is not the motivation for calling them out
AJ Kay

... I write today in response to Emily Oster’s most recent Atlantic article entitled, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

The piece starts with a lively anecdote by Emily in which her family is hiking outdoors in cloth masks, and her son screams at another small child for getting too close to him.

“These precautions were totally misguided,” she said, “But the thing is: We didn’t know.”

Two things right off the bat: They weren’t ‘precautions’ because the Precautionary Principle requires us to weigh the costs of implementing any ‘precaution’ with the same critical eye as not. We didn’t do that.

And, of course, we absolutely did know.

That’s just the first paragraph in Emily’s pseudo-conciliatory piece, which is littered with precisely the same kind of gaslighting, self-interested double-speak that landed us here. ...

Emily says, “Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic.”

We were never facing a grabbag of completely disorienting situations and unknowable outcomes. Our positions were clear and fully aligned with this list of things we knew by or before March 2020:

• COVID has a clear risk-stratification skewing dramatically toward the elderly
• COVID is not nearly as deadly as once feared
• Panic, stigmatization, mandates, and politicization are anathema to public health
• We have immune systems, and natural immunity exists
• Missing school hurts kids, especially disadvantaged ones
• Isolation of anyone is cruel and harmful
• Loneliness kills
• The media profits off fear-mongering
• Health is not just about disease avoidance
• Masks don’t work + faces are important
• Forcing people to die alone is inhumane
• Lockdowns are human rights violations
• Informed consent is essential
• Bodily autonomy is paramount
• Incentives incentivize
• Shutting down manufacturing causes supply chain disruptions
• Supply chain disruptions threaten economic stability
• Science doesn’t advance by “following”
• Panicked people don’t make rational decisions

Acknowledging the truths above would’ve been enough to keep probably 90% of the harm from occurring. But not only were they ignored, they were suppressed, despite rational people screaming them from the rooftops. ...

“In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing.”

Luck was not a factor. Just a dash of common sense was sufficient for most, and the lion’s share of the wrongs perpetrated were absolutely moral failings, not least of all because one could not promote the prevailing narrative without obfuscating the truth.

A team led by Dr. Tom Inglesby, Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and including D.A. Henderson, the man credited with eradicating smallpox, wrote the following in 2006:

«Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.»

For whatever reason, to whatever end, the powers that be implemented policies that ran counter to everything we knew about public, mental, social, developmental, and immunological health, as well as virology, epidemiology, and pandemic management.

And we knew it. ...

Emily’s diagnosis of the problem is: “The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat … Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people wracked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.”

Are you kidding, Emily? The backlash to this article was not a result of some trivial scorekeeping fixation. These policies hurt people. They killed people.

And it’s misleading to even talk about “choices” because, in most cases, we didn’t have any (at least not legally). Masks were mandated. Testing was mandated. Vaccines were mandated. Travel was restricted. These “choices” were imposed upon people.

And the worst part is that we absolutely knew better.

And we’re not going to allow people to claim they didn’t.

Not because of “points” but because we don’t want it to happen again. ...

You can’t blame “fog of war” when you walk around with a fog machine mounted to your back. Likewise, “We were in the dark!” loses plausibility when you block everyone’s access to the light switch.

The reason I refuse to accept calls for “amnesty” is not because I am vengeful.

It’s because granting “amnesty” leaves the people who have already been crushed by the weight of these decisions vulnerable still. ...

If they really want society to recover from the last two going on three nightmarish years, Emily et al are going to have to dig a little deeper. Pleas for forgiveness ring hollow when there’s no acknowledgment of error. “But we didn’t know!” is just more of the same self-interested trope we’ve been spoon-fed for years.

Because we did know.

And we have receipts.

And we’re going to keep showing them for as long as it takes to begin the actual recovery.

Because while Emily may want forgiveness, what we want is for this to never, ever happen again.

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Osterism
When you want to move on from the damage you helped cause but haven't told the truth about it
E.Woodhouse

Dr. Emily Oster, the Brown University economist who spent a good part of the pandemic response denying that her own data indicted the uselessness of masking kids in schools, published an article in The Atlantic today, calling for “a pandemic amnesty.” Short version: Let’s chalk up the devastation caused by fear-driven policies to benign ignorance and good intentions. ...

Oster’s implicit claim that next-to-nothing was known about SARS-CoV-2 – and therefore all the pointless, unethical, & illegal things people were forced to do are understandable – isn’t the pathway to healing, because it’s dishonest. Inexplicably, she denies that, from the get-go, we knew (for example)

• covid’s risks were highly skewed toward sick elderly people,
• plexiglass & masks don’t stop viruses,
• school closures are harmful, and
• exposure quarantines & contact tracing are useless.

She also defends things like closing beaches as “hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.” This twisted thinking - this Osterism, I’ll call it - both a) denies the truth about what was known, and b) excuses doing the worst, most non-sensical and predictably harmful things in the name of not knowing.

If an out-of-touch professor were the only person pushing such ideas, we could ignore it. Unfortunately, other vocal credentialed experts - not to mention public officials, school & church leaders, and friends/family members who embraced all manner of superstitious and harmful mitigations - have a similar mindset.

Osterism in any form will never, ever lead to healing, nor will it prevent this nightmare from happening again. ...

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Emily Oster proposes “a pandemic amnesty,” suggests that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID”
eugyppius

I don’t know much about the American pandemic pundits, but I gather that Brown University economist and “parenting guru” Emily Oster is far from the worst of them. Her Twitter timeline suggests she spent the early months of the pandemic terrified about the virus until school closures took their toll on her kids, at which point she repositioned herself as a kind of lockdown moderate, opposing the worst of the hystericist excesses while validating their central premises whenever possible to save face with friends and colleagues.

«April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

«These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.»

The thing is, Emily Oster, that we did know. We’ve studied respiratory virus transmission for years. All the virologists and epidemiologists who aren’t total morons knew your 2020 mask routine was crazy and they just didn’t care. They wanted you to do it anyway, because they thought that if they got you to act paranoid and antisocial enough, your insane behaviour might have some limited effect on case curves. Joke’s on you, and it’s sad you still haven’t realised.

«[T]here is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.»

No, reasonable people could see already in March 2020 that SARS-2 posed no measurable threat to children. There was never any honest debate to be had about this.

«We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. … [W]e need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

«Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.»

I’m sorry somebody called you genocidal, Emily Oster. That must’ve been tough for you. You know what’s also tough? Getting your head kicked in by riot police because you had the temerity to protest against indefinite population-wide house arrest.

Or being fired from your university job and banned in perpetuity from the premises because you uploaded a video to social media complaining about the onerous and expensive testing requirements imposed upon unvaccinated staff. Or being confined to your house and threatened with fines because of personal medical decisions that had no chance of impacting the broader course of the pandemic in the first place. But somebody called this woman genocidal in French and she’s ready to move on, so it’s all good.

Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.

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“Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty”—Not
Let’s not declare a pandemic amnesty. Let’s declare a real pandemic inquiry.
Michael P Senger

... The article is about as pathetically transparent as it is self-serving. Gee, I wonder what Oster did and said during Covid for which she might want amnesty ...

First, no, you don’t get to advocate policies that do extraordinary harm to others, against their wishes, then say “We didn’t know any better at the time!” Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and canceling those who weren’t as ignorant. The inevitable result would be a society in which ignorance and obedience to the opinion of the mob would be the only safe position.

Second, “amnesty,” being an act of forgiveness for past offenses, first requires an apology or act of repentance on the part of those who committed the offense. Not only has no such act of repentance been forthcoming, but in most cases, establishment voices like Oster’s have yet to stop advocating these same policies, much less admit they were wrong. With no accompanying act of contrition, these calls for “amnesty” in light of rapidly-shifting public opinion have a real ring of fascist leaders calling for “amnesty” after losing the War.

Third, there’s some question as to whether Oster herself really did know better at the time. Like many other mainstream Covid voices, Oster had long been closely attuned to Covid data showing that these mandates did not work, yet she often seemed reluctant to share that data insofar as it contradicted the mainstream orthodoxy that mandates were necessary. In that sense, the policy prescriptions of Oster and those like her may have had less to do with ignorance than with cowardice, tribalism, and “following orders,” which can’t be considered acting “in good faith.”

And that leads to the ultimate problem, from a legal perspective, with Oster’s call for “amnesty” for the advocacy of totalitarian policies during Covid: The implicit assumption that all those who advocated lockdowns, mandates, censorship, and an indefinite state of emergency, all the way up the chain of command, did so in good faith. If those who advocated these policies are simply presumed to have done so out of well-meaning ignorance, then any inquiry into the many outstanding questions as to the origin of these policies—and the underlying motivations of highest-level officials who promulgated them—is foreclosed.

The implicit assumption is that, owing to their socioeconomic status, the superficial cutesiness of public health, and the panic surrounding the pandemic, all those who advocated these mandates must have done so in good faith. But this argument presupposes that the “pandemic” was a natural phenomenon, like a tsunami, which would have inevitably led to panic. On the contrary, studies have long shown that it was the mandates themselves that caused the public to panic, making them believe their chances of dying of Covid—which never had an overall infection fatality rate much higher than 0.2%—were hundreds of times greater than they really were. Further, there’s a growing mountain of evidence that the handful of key officials who led the initial push for unprecedented lockdowns and mandates did not, in fact, do so in good faith.

Our institutions are in serious need of restoration after the incalculable damage that’s been done to them during the response to Covid. But we forget, at our peril, that those institutions weren’t built with flowery words and good intentions. They were built with blood, sweat, and tears, by those who fought for them with their lives. Let’s not declare a pandemic amnesty. Let’s declare a real pandemic inquiry.

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With whom does Emily Oster want an amnesty? Moms, so they will return to the democratic fold
Just another cynical attempt to ask women to forget the harms of the last few years.
Emily Burns

... The political establishment—left and right—want desperately to move on, to pretend the last 30 months didn’t happen. With very few exceptions (Ron DeSantis, Kirsti Noem, Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, Ron Johnson, and a few others, later), they betrayed their core values. Many Republicans and so-called Libertarians quickly capitulated the primacy and importance of individual liberties. Whereas supposedly equality-loving democrats embraced policies that in no uncertain terms screwed women, children and the poor. The 2020 democrat campaign slogan might as well have been “protect the rich, infect the poor.” Or “only the rich need to learn.” They’d all very much like that you forget about that. They’d like to go back to the fights they know how to fight, the golden oldies that turn the bases out, and turn us against each other. ...

First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. The damage done by these policies is at its beginning, not its end. Dr. Oster, would like women to believe that it was all just a mistake, a mis-understanding, and remember that it is the Republicans who are looking to limit the freedoms that really count. That while Democrats had no problem sacrificing the well-being of our living children for three years in support political power, it is Republicans that pose the real threat.

The problem for Emily is that while the hardcore democrat base of women voters never questioned any of these policies, others did—and they incurred significant personal costs for doing so.

An embarrassing portion of well-educated women acted as the regime’s stormtroopers. They sicced social media mobs on any who dared to voice a question, much less dissent. The pain of having family, friends and neighbors turn on them for voicing an opinion or asking a legitimate question caused many women to seek out others with similar questions.

In so doing, we found a smart, snarky, data-driven community pushing back hard on the totalizing power of a government trying to re-define reality. In some cases women were the generals, in others we were the infantry, going forward and taking constant fire from above, so that some recently discredited truth might once again retake its rightful place in the sun of acceptable opinion.

Emily Oster would like us to forget that. But we can’t—and I hope we won’t—because we were there bringing the government’s own data to shine a light on the lies it so ceaselessly manufactured. These weren’t lies of omission, they were lies of commission. They were lies that were wrought by smelting the credibility of science and medicine in the fires of politics to create weapons wielded by the powerful against us. They literally called us terrorists for our opposition.

Now, after having been called terrorists by our governments for arguing for the well-being of our own children, Dr. Oster wants us to forget that. In asking us to forget, she beseeches those who strayed from the flock to return, to believe that it is not their shepherd who takes them to slaughter that would do them harm, but the wolf lurking unseen in the shadows of the wood. So now we must talk about abortion.

What Democrats, and their credibility-launderers like Oster want women to do, is to put two things on the scales. On one side is the fear of a loss of access to abortion services. They hope that their female base will forget that rather than living in 1972, with limited access to contraception, we live in 2022, where contraception that is more than 99% effective is inexpensive and widely available, even if paying out of pocket; that this contraception includes abortion pills, which can be accessed anywhere in the country by mail up to 10 weeks of gestation. They want you to forget about the interstate commerce clause which would make hindering this nearly impossible—even, or especially, with a conservative court. They want you to forget that a flight to an abortion-providing state is at most a $200 plane ride away. Or that should you fail to secure an abortion, the worst-case scenario results in a baby you choose to give up for adoption. They want you to forget that if they [anti-abortion politicians] win the senate, they would still have to overturn the filibuster and the important political stabilization that the 60-vote threshold provides.

They want you to forget that they failed to legally codify access to abortion for 50 years. And they want you to forget that there is no way on earth they are going to give up the only issue they have to reliably stoke fear, drum up dollars, and drive women to the polls. Not a chance in hell.

On the other side is the harm that was done to your children, to you, to your community over nearly three years. On the other is the fear of a loss of access to abortion services. What they are hoping is that their female base will believe the lie that Dr. Oster is peddling, that it was all just an unfortunate mistake, and could never happen again. It’s in the past! Don’t worry about it.

But it wasn’t a mistake. It was a political calculation, and on the cost side of that equation was the education and welfare of our kids—and so much more. The people who made this calculation wagered that the fear that they could drum up around access to abortion could be used to distract women from the manifold harms these policies caused to children and/or that they could craft a narrative that would mask the truth. If you understand the cynicism of that decision, you have to expect the same cynicism on the other side of the equation. ...

The narrative that conservatives seek to limit access to abortion in order to keep women down is a just that—a story. In order to prop it up, fetuses had to be literally dehumanized, and the narrative bolstered with overtly anti-natal supporting philosophies, philosophies which, in their anti-natalism rob life of most of its meaning for most people. For women, this anti-natalism is expressly anti-mother, hence, anti-feminine, transforming motherhood—one of the few truly transcendent human experiences—into a dupe’s prison.

That said, I remain pro-choice, fundamentally because after the past two+ years, all I want is the government smaller and weakened in every possible capacity. I don’t want the government legislating or coercing morality (we’ve had quite enough of that over the past few years) any more than I want it coercing medical decisions. Further, I believe that the vicissitudes of life can make such government interventions result in dangerous corner cases.

But despite being pro-choice, I have become a single issue voter. My vote this cycle is a vote for vengeance against the party that kept my kids masked for two years; that robbed me of my best friends, and strained every relationship I have; that caused us to move to an entirely different part of the country; that perverted a discipline that I love, and which I use to navigate my life (science); and that then lied about doing it, and called me a terrorist for being upset about it. After this cycle, my vote will always be for the party that represents the most decentralized power structure, and the greatest respect for individual rights and responsibility. For me, the new f-word is “federal”.

While I can only speak for myself, my experience has been that in the aftermath of our leaders’ decision to break and reset the world, there are new coalitions forming. I don’t think I’m alone in my efforts to try to better understand the positions of others who became my “comrades in arms”—and I have felt that reciprocated, with the possibility of compromise arising out of mutual respect and in the face of a greater perceived mutual threat. At the moment, I think this is only happening on the “right”. But if the democrats get the drubbing that looks likely in the mid-terms, this will also happen on the left; it’s why this drubbing needs to happen. Such a shake-up can only be to the good. Indeed, our leaders may yet have gotten a “Great Reset”—just not the one they were hoping for. ...

Moms in general, and stay-at-home moms in particular, played a very significant part in the grassroots pushback of COVID policy malfeasance. I believe this was due to three key things. First, COVID policies created many more SAHMs, as the exigencies of virtual school made work impossible. Second, these SAHMs experienced the harmful impacts of COVID policies directly for years in their own lives, and in those of their children. Third, I think that SAHMs ended up being a very important and vocal minority because they could be. You can’t fire or cancel an SAHM, and there is significant power in not being anonymous.

As women, we have felt far more acutely than at any time in the past what it really means for government to interfere in our lives—controlling whether our children go to school, whether we can socialize, or go to a gym, or a restaurant, how many people can be invited to our home, whether we can spend holidays with family, whether we can run our businesses. These are all violations, violations of our personal liberty that harmed us, our children, and our communities, and which were done solely in service to political power. We have internalized this, and many will not be quick to forgive.

Emily is asking us to forgive a mistake. There was no mistake. There was a political calculation that harmed us, but even more, that harmed our children. The harm was considered acceptable because those who undertook it, took the votes of women for granted. They assumed they could lie and manipulate us into believing these harms were necessary, or barring that, unintentional. If we, as women, want our votes to be courted in the future by either party, we must vote to punish the past three years treachery. ...

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Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain
Shuck-and-jive from America’s broken thinking class, the people who pretend to know better than everybody else.
James Howard Kunstler

By now, everybody and his uncle has seen Emily Oster’s plea for “pandemic amnesty” in The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about … really … everything. Emily’s wazoo is so stuffed with gold-plated credentials (BA, PhD, Harvard; economics prof at Brown U) it’s a wonder that she could sit down long enough to peck out her lame argument that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

Emily wasn’t “in the dark.” She had access to the same information as the Americans who recognized that everything the public health authorities, the medical establishment, and many elected officials shoveled out about Covid and its putative remedies and preventatives was untrue, with a patina of bad faith and malice — especially when it was used to persecute their political adversaries.

These dissenters turned out to be “right for the wrong reasons,” she declared, the main reason being that they were not aligned in good-think with the Woke-Jacobinism of her fellow “progressives” at Brown U, and academics all across the land, who were righteously busy destroying the intellectual life of the nation, making it impossible for the thinking class to think.

Let’s face it: every society actually needs a thinking class, a cohort able to frame important issues-of-the-moment that require argument in the public arena to align our collective thoughts and deeds with reality. America used to have a pretty good thinking class, with a pretty good free press and many other platforms for opinion — all animated by respect for the first amendment to the Constitution.

The thinking class destroyed that by vigorously promoting a new censorship regime in every American institution, shutting down free speech and, more crucially, the necessary debate for aligning our politics with reality. Hence, America’s thinking class became the torchbearers of unreality, in step with the Party of Chaos which held the levers of power. This included the powers of life and death in the matter of Covid-19.

These were the people who militated against effective early treatment protocols (to cynically preserve the drug companies’ emergency use authorization (EUA) and thus their liability shields); the people who enforced the deadly remdesivir-and-ventilator combo in hospital treatment; the people who rolled out the harmful and ineffective “vaccines”; who fired and vilified doctors who disagreed with all that; and who engineered a long list of abusive policies that destroyed businesses, livelihoods, households, reputations, and futures.

How did it happen that the thinking class destroyed thinking and betrayed itself? Because the status competition for moral righteousness in the sick milieu of the campus became more important to them than the truth. In places like Brown U, what you saw was an escalating contest for status brownie-points, which is what virtue-signaling is all about. And the highest virtue was going along with whatever experts and people-in-authority said — the pathetic virtue of submission. Anything that got in the way of going along — such as differences of opinion — had to be crushed, stamped out, and with a vicious edge to teach the dissenters a lesson: dissent will not be tolerated!

Some thinking class. The case of Emily Oster should be particularly and painfully disturbing, since she affects to specialize, as an economist, on “pregnancy and parenting” (her own website declares), while the Covid regime of public health officialdom she supported instigated a horrendous pediatric health crisis that is ongoing — it was only days ago that the CDC added the harmful mRNA “vaccines” to its childhood immunization schedule for the purpose of conferring permanent legal immunity for the drug companies after the EUA ends, a dastardly act. Where’s Ms. Oster’s plea to the CDC to cease and desist trying to vaccinate kids with mRNA products?

The CDC is still running TV commercials (during World Series ballgames!) touting its “booster” shots when only weeks ago a top Pfizer executive, Janine Small (“Regional President for Vaccines of International Developed Markets”), revealed in testimony to the European Union Parliament that her company never tested its “vaccine” for preventing transmission of SARS CoV-2. The CDC under Director Rochelle Walensky is still extra-super-busy concealing or fudging its statistical data to obfuscate the emerging picture that MRNA “vaccines” are responsible for the shocking rise of “all-causes deaths” in the most heavily-vaxxed nations. In short, the authorities are to this minute still running their whole malign operation.

Notably, Ms. Oster’s plea for amnesty and forgiveness, showcased in The Atlantic, omits any discussion of accountability for what amounts to serious crimes against the public. A whole lot of people deserve to be indicted for killing and injuring millions of people. At the heart of her plea is the excuse that “we didn’t know” official Covid policy was so misguided. That’s just not true, of course, and is simply evidence of the thinking class’s recently-acquired allergy to truth. The part she left out of her petition for pandemic amnesty is: We were only following orders.

Agriculture (and Energy) Revolutions

The First, or Neolithic, Agricultural Revolution was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making an increasingly large population possible. [Also the beginning of centralized government and social hierarchy]

The Second, or British, Agricultural Revolution, was an unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain arising from increases in labor and land productivity between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries. Agricultural output grew faster than the population over the hundred-year period ending in 1770, and thereafter productivity remained among the highest in the world. This increase in the food supply contributed to the rapid growth of population in England and Wales, from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801, though domestic production gave way increasingly to food imports in the nineteenth century as the population more than tripled to over 35 million.

The Third Agricultural, or Green, Revolution is the set of research technology transfer initiatives occurring between 1950 and the late 1960s that increased agricultural production in parts of the world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s. The initiatives resulted in the adoption of new technologies, including high-yielding varieties of cereals, agrochemicals, controlled water supply (usually involving irrigation), and newer methods of cultivation, including mechanization. … It contributed to widespread reduction of poverty, averted hunger for millions, raised incomes, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced land use for agriculture, and contributed to declines in infant mortality.

The energy for the Green Revolution was provided by fossil fuels in the form of fertilizers (natural gas), pesticides (oil), and hydrocarbon-fueled irrigation.

(above from Wikipedia)

Obviously, there have been adverse consequences for the environment and other animals, but you can't just outlaw it without an alternative in place (and support for the transition, eg, to large-scale organic agriculture) that can sustain what it created. But that's what much of the new "green" agenda is doing, particularly in energy, pushing (much) less efficient technologies (requiring more resources – both materials and land – and infrastructure) that are therefore even more harmful to not only people but also the planet as a whole.
 

Donald Trump statement on “The Sham Investigation”

Our nation is SUFFERING. Our economy is in the gutter. Inflation is rampant. Gas prices have reached an all-time high. Ships are unable to unload cargo. Families cannot get needed baby formula. We are an embarrassment around the world. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster that cost us precious American blood, and gave $85 billion worth of the best military equipment on earth to our enemy.

Millions and millions of illegals are marching to the border and invading our country. We have a White House in shambles, with Democrats, just this week, declaring that Biden is unfit to run for reelection. And what is the Democrat Congress focused on? A Kangaroo Court, hoping to distract the American people from the great pain they are experiencing.

Seventeen months after the events of January 6th, Democrats are unable to offer solutions. They are desperate to change the narrative of a failing nation, without even making mention of the havoc and death caused by the Radical Left just months earlier. Make no mistake, they control the government. They own this disaster. They are hoping that these hearings will somehow alter their failing prospects.

A certain Democrat once said, “It's the economy, stupid.” Well, Democrats now seem to think that Americans are “stupid.” They are not. America is crumbling, and Democrats have no solutions. Our nation has no hope of change for the better under Democrat leadership. People are desperate. Rather than solving problems, Democrats are rehashing history in hopes of changing the narrative. During my time in office, our nation was thriving, our economy was strong, and the price of gas was very low. Above all else, we were respected, perhaps like never before. America prospered under the Trump Administration.

The Sham Investigation

The January 6th Unselect Committee is disgracing everything we hold sacred about our Constitution. If they had any real evidence, they’d hold real hearings with equal representation. They don’t, so they use the illegally-constituted committee to put on a smoke and mirrors show for the American people, in a pitiful last-ditch effort to deceive the American public ... again.

Our Constitution protects the right to confront accusers, honors the right to fair trials, and holds the right to legal representation as paramount in our justice system. Equal representation and the opportunity to offer rebuttal evidence is fundamental in our legal process. The Committee has obliterated those rights and is making a mockery of justice. They have refused to allow their political opponents to participate in this process, and have excluded all exculpatory witnesses, and anyone who so easily points out the flaws in their story.

MAGA witnesses were interrogated behind closed doors and ordered to not record their own testimony. Members of my staff, my friends, supporters, volunteers, donors, were subjected to hours upon hours of inquisition – oftentimes having nothing to do with January 6th. Their very lives were turned upside down for obvious reasons. They were told it was an ongoing investigation and any reproduction of the interrogation would be viewed as an attempt to interfere in the investigation. They were gagged, threatened, and in some cases ruined.

Yet, the Unselect Pseudo-Committee has coordinated with their media puppets to broadcast their witnesses on national television without any opposition, cross-examination, or rebuttal evidence. The American public has a right to know the truth and see every witness, but these corrupt officials are trying to force-feed the public with their politically opportune sideshow.

What are the members of this treasonous “Committee” afraid of? Why can’t they let the countervailing opinion be heard? Why are they hiding evidence from the public and only showing information that favors the Democrats’ tall tale? They’re afraid of losing the narrative, because their political opponents could easily show how the committee is lying to the nation and has stripped Americans of their rightful power.

Democrats created the narrative of January 6th to detract from the much larger and more important truth that the 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen. Politicians from both parties, but mostly the Democrats, worked in conjunction with corporate elitists to strip Americans of our right to elect our own leaders. To do so, corrupt officials violated their own state laws.

The separation of powers is designed to make sure that no officials become dictators by granting the authority to make laws with the legislature and execute laws with the executive branch. No one office should have complete power. It must be separated among different offices. In 2020, separation of powers went out the window. The state executive branch, in both red and blue states, decided to completely ignore state laws, make up their own rules, and execute them. In other words, they became the little dictators our Constitution was designed to prevent.

They illegally inflated voter rolls, illegally allowed harvested and stuffed ballots, abused the use of mail-in ballots, physically removed Republicans from counting facilities, abused the elderly in nursing homes, bribed election officials with donations, stopped counting on Election Night, gave Democrats three extra days to harvest ballots, and demanded that the American people believe it was legitimate.

This entire charade of the Unselect Committee is a brazen attempt to detract the public’s attention from the truth. The truth is that Americans showed up in Washington, D.C. in massive numbers (but seldom revealed by the press), on January 6th, 2021, to hold their elected officials accountable for the obvious signs of criminal activity throughout the Election. Those who are supposed to be public servants are using the power of government against the people who entrusted them with the power. We’ve been betrayed.

Since the Unselect Committee refuses to allow their political opponents to participate in the hearings, the public likely won’t hear from the many patriots who contradict the lies being broadcast – at least not in these hearings. This is all a ridiculous and treasonous attempt to cover up the fact that Democrats rigged the Election and are siphoning Americans’ freedoms and power for their own benefit.

Without the ability to have political, legal, or witness representation from conservatives in this Kangaroo Court, it’s up to American patriots to arm themselves with the information. This hearing isn’t about January 6th, it’s about November 3rd, and here’s what happened.

Stop the Count

On Election Night, America watched as my lead grew and grew over Joe Biden, as I was set to claim another victory. By the morning of November 4th, the day after the Election, I led by 700,000 votes in Pennsylvania [1], 300,000 in Michigan [2], and hundreds of thousands in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin [3]. Then, the same “little dictators” who destroyed the separation of powers made the treasonous decision to stop counting [4]. These same states, who had counted millions of ballots in a single day, had to stop counting in order to count a few hundred thousand ballots over the next four days to call the race on November 7th [5].

Why would it take four more days to count a few hundred thousand votes when they had counted millions in one day? They needed time to traffic the ballots and manipulate the outcome of the Election. The Swamp was so determined to keep their stranglehold on power that they delayed the results of the Election so that they could find, manufacture, or produce more ballots, after they knew how many they needed to beat me. They cheated! There’s no reasonable explanation for why it took so much longer to count the few remaining ballots as opposed to the millions on Election Day – other than they needed to traffic more ballots, and it took four days to produce the ballots and do it. They couldn’t have done it without an elaborate ballot trafficking scheme.

Ballot Trafficking

Highly respected True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips showed the nation exactly what the Democrats’ illegal ballot trafficking scheme looks like. They spent years investigating election crimes, and their hard work provided America with the indisputable proof so many had been waiting for. True the Vote cooperated with Dinesh D’Souza to produce the blockbuster documentary 2000 Mules, which provides video evidence of the ballot trafficking scheme Democrats have created.

Engelbrecht and Phillips used geo-fencing data that they purchased to isolate and identify potential mules. Like drug mules, in this context, mules are those paid to illegally traffic ballots from nonprofits organizations and drop them into the ballot drop boxes. The search criteria they used was to isolate cell phone data that had been to 10 or more ballot drop boxes, while also visiting at least five identified nonprofit organizations during a two-week period [6].

There’s no legitimate reason for any individual to visit 10 or more ballot drop boxes. Why would anyone need to vote 10 times? Couple that with the idea that the same individuals are also visiting the offices of liberal nonprofits in the same time period.

At least one whistleblower at one of the nonprofits in Yuma came forward and confirmed that these organizations act as trafficking hubs for the mules to pick up the ballots to drop off at the drop boxes [7]. One woman in Arizona has already plead guilty to a Class 6 felony for participating in this ballot trafficking scheme [8]. And Democrats are getting tax write-offs for this behavior!

True the Vote and local law enforcement have the video surveillance showing the mules dropping many ballots into the drop box, which confirms the geo-fencing data that Engelbrecht and Phillips had gathered. This is the same surveillance evidence that the FBI has used to identify January 6th protestors [9]. In fact, the FBI has used this same type of evidence in 45 of the criminal cases against January 6th protestors [10].

Yet, the dishonest media puts experts front and center to tell America that True the Votes’ evidence is unreliable [11]. It’s the exact same evidence the FBI used against January 6th protestors! How can the evidence be an indispensable tool to identify January 6th protestors, but when applied to ballot traffickers, the science is unreliable and not precise? The hypocrisy is stifling! The Swamp has blown the bottom out of how low they’ll go to deceive the American public in order to keep their vice-grip on power. Thankfully, Americans are taking responsibility for what they believe, and simply no longer believe the narrative.

The truth is, according to Joe Biden, that the Swamp has created the “most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics” [12], and it centers around ballot trafficking.

The Math

The illegal ballot harvesting operation is an insult to the democratic process, but the kicker is the media feeding us the bogus line that this was the most secure election in U.S. history. What a load of bologna! The data shows us how compromised the system was. The math shows us that it changed the outcome of the Election.

Looking at just the known traffickers Engelbrecht and Phillips identified, the 2000 mules, we know they averaged 38 drop box visits averaging five ballots per box [13]. That totals 380,000 illegal ballots inserted into the Election via the drop boxes. We also know they targeted specific counties in order to impact the outcome of the Election. Many of those counties were separated by only a few thousand votes.

Based on the data, Georgia had 250 mules average 24 drop boxes with five ballots each, totaling 30,000 illegal ballots [14]. The margin of victory in Georgia was only 11,779, meaning that ballot trafficking alone would have changed the outcome of the state. There was a lot of other suspicious activity in Georgia, but the trafficking, by itself, was sufficient to change the outcome. Georgia’s 16 electors should not have gone to Biden.

A similar story occurred in Arizona. Two hundred identified mules averaged 20 drop boxes and five ballots each [15]. That’s a minimum of 20,000 illegal ballots. The margin of victory in Arizona alone was 10,457, meaning that ballot trafficking alone was enough to flip the state. Arizona’s 11 electoral votes should not have gone to Biden.

True the Vote identified 1,100 mules in Philadelphia alone, each averaging 50 drop boxes and five ballots per box. That’s 275,000 illegal votes. The margin of victory in Pennsylvania was only 80,555, meaning the ballot trafficking scheme in Philadelphia alone was enough to flip the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The Commonwealth’s 20 electoral votes should not have gone to Biden.

Those three states show that the illegal ballot trafficking scheme alone sufficed to change the outcome of the Election. But what about the other states?

Michigan had 500 mules identified, averaging 50 drop box visits, and five ballots per visit for a total ballot harvest of 125,000 ballots [16]. Biden’s margin of victory in Michigan was 154,188. That means the ballot harvesting scheme, at a minimum, narrowed the results so that operatives at the polls only needed to manufacture a little over 29,000 votes statewide. We all saw as citizens in Detroit protested outside the TCF center [17], because Republicans were excluded from the process in one of the most corrupt areas in the country [18]. What were they doing inside? Did they discard Republican ballots? Did they print new Biden ballots? No one has been allowed to investigate in Michigan.

Engelbrecht and Phillips identified 100 mules in Wisconsin that averaged 28 drop boxes and five ballots per box [19]. That’s 14,000 illegal votes. The margin of victory was 20,682. That leaves only 6,000 votes for Democrat operatives to make up by either adding Biden votes or discarding Trump votes. We know that Democrats abused the elderly in nursing homes that easily could have generated more than 6,000 illegal votes [20], likely more. They had to cheat in multiple ways to steal Wisconsin, but the evidence of foul play surpasses the margin of victory in Wisconsin by thousands of votes.

With just Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, and there were others, the Electoral College vote would have been Trump 279 to Biden 259. But they cheated. And now look where we are as a country!

But What If There Were More

What if True the Vote’s criteria to identify the mules was too conservative? Rather than using the requirement to identify someone who went to 10 drop boxes with five or more visits to the liberal nonprofits, what if they looked for people who went to five drop boxes? It’s highly unlikely that anyone would need to go to five drop boxes while also visiting nonprofits in the same time span. The data is astonishing! Rather than 2000 mules, the number jumps to 54,000 mules [21]! And how about if they widened the search even more? The numbers become astronomical, and the results would be a landslide victory for Trump. It is all on live tape produced by the government.

Continuing the conservative estimate of just three ballots per mule with 54,000 mules, the numbers spike tremendously. In Wisconsin, 83,565 illegal votes were trafficked, more than four times the margin of victory [22]. In Georgia, 92,670 illegal votes were trafficked, more than eight times the margin of victory [23]. In Pennsylvania, 209,505 votes were trafficked, more than double the margin of victory [24]. In Michigan, 226,590 votes were trafficked, tens of thousands of votes over the margin of victory [25]. In Arizona, 207,435 votes were trafficked, almost 20 times the margin of victory [26]. Using this slightly less conservative calculation, coupled with the geo- tracking data, the same used by law enforcement, I decisively won all of the contested states. The final electoral count should have been Trump 305 to Biden 233 [27].

It’s also highly likely that True the Vote did not uncover 100% of the mules, making the numbers much larger than a landslide in scope, and that there were many more mules out there affecting more of the Election than we realize. This was not a close Election.

Defying the Odds

There were 19 counties in the U.S. that voted for the winning Presidential candidate since 1980, they’re known as bellwether counties [28]. I won 18 of the 19 bellwether counties [29]. Eighteen of the 19 counties who consistently vote for the winning candidate voted for me, yet we’re supposed to believe that Joe Biden won the Election?

Joe Biden, a candidate who never left his basement and can’t speak without a teleprompter, outperformed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their two high-charged elections [30]. Biden even outperformed Obama in black communities, but only in important swing states. Isn’t that amazing? It’s impossible.

Basement Biden earned more votes than Obama in Fulton County, Ga. (Atlanta) by 131,733 (53%), and Wayne County, Mich. (Detroit) by 1,917 (0.3%) [31], which are the two largest black populations in the United States [32]. Biden also earned more votes than Obama’s 2012 campaign in Cobb County, Ga. by 89,321 (52%) [33], and Oakland County, Mich. by 85,093 (24.4%) [34]. Either there’s a lot of black voters in America who identify more with Joe Biden than Barack Obama, or Democrats are stealing black votes – and we all know the answer to that.

Apparently, Joe Biden is twice as popular in Arizona as Barack Obama, even among black and Hispanic voters. Sleepy Joe earned a total of 1,040,774 votes in Maricopa County, Ariz. (Phoenix). That’s 508,490 more votes than Obama earned in 2012 (532,284), nearly doubling Obama’s 2012 performance in the key swing state. Biden’s unbelievable success of outperforming Obama continues in Las Vegas, Nev. [35], Madison, Wisc. [36], Green Bay, Wisc. [37], and a number of other cities across the country. It didn’t happen.

In Pennsylvania’s six largest counties, Biden supposedly outperformed Obama’s 2012 record setting numbers in Philadelphia by 46,766 (8.3%), in Allegheny County (Pittsburg) by 80,914 (23.2%), in Montgomery County 91,950 (40.4%), in Bucks County 45,114 (28.2%), in Delaware County 41,618 (25.2%), and in Lancaster County 28,739 (32.99%). The trend continues to many of Pennsylvania’s smaller counties [38]. Across the Commonwealth, Biden earned 550,781 more votes than Barack Obama in 2012 [39].

Zuckerbucks

Mark Zuckerberg contributed $419 million dollars to election initiatives around the country [40]. Supposedly, the money was used to make elections safer as a result of the China Virus (COVID-19). However, the money was not primarily used for China Virus protection, although some did go for that purpose. For example, in Wisconsin, the money was conditioned upon the five largest counties adopting a Democrat only initiative of the Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan (WSVP) [41]. The five key counties, Milwaukee, Kenosha, Madison, Racine, and Green Bay, became known as the “Zuckerberg 5” [42].

Zuckerberg funneled his money through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a liberal nonprofit based in Illinois, which received the lion’s share of the money, at least $350 million [43]. CTCL is a radical leftist organization filled with Obama Foundation fellows and Obama appointees [44]. Almost all of the money went to Democrat-run and controlled areas. Very little, for cosmetic purposes only, went to Republican areas. They threw us a bone.

According to the Special Counsel report in Wisconsin:45

“[A]nother election purpose existed as evidenced by the documents obtained by the Special Counsel. That other election purpose was to fuse together the CTCL, their allied private corporations, the Zuckerberg 5, and $8.8 million of private funding into joint operations in that group of cities, where the focus would be on facilitating increased in-person and absentee voting, particularly in their “communities of color.” See, e.g., App. 7-27 (WSVP). From the beginning, the purpose of the WSVP contract and its private funding was for the Zuckerberg 5 to use CTCL’s private money to facilitate greater in-person voting and greater absentee voting, particularly in targeted neighborhoods.”

Based on the Special Counsel’s report, liberal nonprofits funded by Zuckerberg – who was also trying to control the election narrative on his social media platforms – lied to the public about the real use of their money. Why would they need to lie if they weren’t doing anything wrong? Because they were doing something wrong and they knew it. They knew the money was conditioned upon their ability to control the election process. The Special Counsel further states in his findings [46]:

“Any agreement where a city’s election officials receive CTCL or other’s private money to facilitate in-person and absentee voting within a city facially violates Wis. Stat. § 12.11’s prohibition on election bribery under Wis. Stat. § 12.11.

”The CTCL agreement facially violates the election bribery prohibition of Wis. Stat. § 12.11 because the participating cities and public officials received private money to facilitate in-person or absentee voting within such a city. Any similar agreements in the 2022 and 2024 election cycle would also be prohibited election bribery.”

According to Wisconsin’s Special Counsel, the money was intended to impact in- person and absentee voting, which would have a direct impact on the outcome of the Election [47]. Also, according to Wisconsin’s Special Counsel – that’s bribery.

Zuckerberg should be criminally prosecuted. Election laws prevent individuals from donating more than $5,000 per year [48], yet Zuckerberg gave $419 million.

And it’s not just Wisconsin. CTCL provided funds, according to their form 990 they filed with the IRS, to 47 of the 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. [49]. For example, before the 2020 Election, the group gave $45 million to Georgia, $38.6 million to Texas, $25 million to Pennsylvania, $25 million to New York, $7.5 million to Ohio, $21 million to New Jersey, $16.8 million to Michigan, $21 million to California, and $5 million to Arizona, among others [50]. Did all the grants to the states have strings attached? Or was it just Wisconsin?

How unfair and illegal is this? How do you win an election against this? But we did, getting almost 75 million votes, the most in history for a sitting President.

Pandemic of Injustice

Beginning the night of November 3rd, Americans knew there was something wrong going on. Almost immediately, citizens around the country started filing lawsuits seeking information and clarification about the Election.

The year leading up to the Election had been a year of violent liberal assaults on cities around the country. Democrats made it known that they would rather burn cities to the ground than allow for a civilized political process. They knew their policies were failing, citizens weren’t buying their hype, and they were losing their influence. So, they spent the year creating an atmosphere of fear, and that’s the environment in which concerned citizens were forced to file their lawsuits.

Judges, including Justices of the United States Supreme Court, were scared. Some were political hacks who refused to be the sole arbiter of such a strong political issue. It was liberal fearmongering. Rumors circulated that the Justices devolved to shouting and argued intensely over how to handle the Texas v. Pennsylvania case [51]. Ultimately, the Justices yielded to the same fear mongering tactics Democrats had deployed for years. They punted and threw the case out on standing. Following their lead, every lower court threw the cases out on standing, and usually without barely even looking at them.

Some of the cases had well established grounds for standing, and one had even been in open litigation for 10 months before the court reversed itself and threw it out. Specifically, that happened in Georgia, where a court had ruled that the plaintiffs were entitled to review the original ballot images after granting them access to the files. Then, defendants stalled for months. Ten months after the initial filing, the court decided the plaintiffs no longer had standing [52]. What?!

On November 4th, 2020, Antrim County, Michigan announced that 16,047 votes had been cast and Joe Biden received 7,769 and I received 4,509 [53]. In 2016, I had received 62% of the vote in Antrim, making the 2020 results particularly surprising. Mr. Bailey, an Antrim County voter, made some phone calls and the Antrim County clerk double checked the results, and issued new results.

A closer look showed 18,059 votes cast in Antrim County [54]. Joe Biden received 7,289 votes, and I received 9,783, meaning I won 54% of the vote, which still seemed odd compared with the 2016 results. This also doesn’t account for the difference in the number of votes cast. Why were they short, and where did the new votes come from?

Antrim County checked a third time and found 16,044 votes cast and that Joe Biden received 5,960, while I received 9,748, winning 60.75% [55]. Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan Secretary of State asserted the error was simply a clerical error, because the clerk failed to update the Mancelona Township tabulator prior to Election Night for a down ballot race, and that the correct count was always on the tabulator tape. She insisted that the Antrim County Clerk simply made a mistake, and this was not a cause to look closer at every county in Michigan. Benson shut the discussion down, but Bailey continued to fight in court [56].

Matt DePerno, Bailey’s lawyer, aggressively pursued discovery in the case and successfully won a motion to audit the election machines in Antrim County. On April 9th, 2021, DePerno released an exhibit in the Bailey case, with additional findings from the experts examining the evidence, which found that, despite critics saying otherwise, the voting machines were connected to the internet, and the officials knew they were connected [57]. The exhibit produced email communications from Election Night discussing the terrible internet connection [58]. This also highlights the weird disinformation campaign waged immediately following the Election to dispel the belief that machines were connected to the internet, despite the fact that it was true [59].

Voting machines send the tallies, via the internet, to allow the totals to be counted faster. Connecting them to the internet does create some vulnerabilities, but does not mean any malicious activity actually took place. So why all the drama? Why all the hype from election officials across the country trying to convince the public the machines were not connected to the internet when they knew that they were? Why not just say that the machines were connected to the internet, but no security breaches occurred...if that was in fact true? Was it true?

DePerno continued to release exhibit after exhibit detailing technical specifics of anomalies and irregularities raising questions from the 2020 Election [60]. The corrupt media continued to ignore and bury the story, and hurled insults at DePerno and his case. The court eventually dismissed the case, but not based on any of the evidence DePerno had amassed. It dismissed the case on procedural grounds: the plaintiff was asking for an audit of the Election, and the Democrat Secretary of State told the court she had already conducted an audit. Therefore, the court ruled, the case was moot [61]. No evidence presented, no witnesses to testify. Just, case dismissed. As usual, saved by the court.

Cases around the country received the same treatment. Courts didn’t want to be the sole arbiter of such a massive political issue, but they also shouldn’t be afraid to do their job. State legislators, members of Congress, senators, governors, secretaries of state, and many other state and federal officials should do their jobs and protect their citizens’ right to vote. But, the Swamp runs deep. I guess that turning around an election was a step too far.

As we near the midterm elections, we’re watching the Swamp creatures circle the drain as true Americans step up to replace the corrupt Establishment with patriots who will fight for our freedoms.

The Establishment is holding on as tightly as they can to their power as they watch it slip from their grasp. Our country is in a nosedive. Americans are struggling to fill their gas tanks, feed their babies, educate their children, hire employees, order supplies, protect our border from invasion, and a host of other tragedies that are 100% caused by Democrats who obtained power through a rigged election, and the people of our country are both angry and sad.

Americans have very real pressing concerns about the basic necessities of life. What is Congress doing about it? They’re doing everything they can to ignore and distract from the very real pain that they have caused this country. They want to talk about anything but the 2020 Election results and the fact that they are the cause of our country’s problems.

Nobody brings this up, but as President, I suffered years of vicious lies, scandals, and innuendo concerning a fake and contrived narrative of Russia, Russia, Russia. The entire Russia Hoax was a concoction made up by Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party. It was used as an excuse for her loss, but endured throughout my entire Administration.

It was a fake and fraudulent narrative, and now they’re trying to do it again.

Many other forms of cheating surfaced during 2020. Republican challengers were excluded from the process, bullied, and berated. Corrupt officials moved to centralize the vote count away from precincts, making it easier to cheat. Some areas are reported to have had more votes than voters! That raises some questions. These are only a few of the many forms of cheating that took place in, what I call, the Crime of the Century, and its cover up by the American media.

This is merely an attempt to stop a man that is leading in every poll, against both Republicans and Democrats by wide margins, from running again for the Presidency. The reason I am leading in the polls is because Democrats have caused record inflation, sky high gas prices, energy dependence on our adversaries, the education system is in crisis, illegal aliens are invading our border, the supply chain has crippled our way of life, parents can’t get baby formula, mandates have crippled businesses, and our way of life has been crushed by government regulations. The United States is being destroyed.

The Democrats know that I would correct all of this, and they are doing everything in their power to stop me – but we can’t be stopped. We have to Save America.

[sources]

1. https://www.pennlive.com/elections/2020/11/trump-is-up-big-in-pa-but-biden-remains-in-striking-distance-with-14m-ballots-to-count-reports.html

2. Navarro, Peter. (2021) The Immaculate Deception. Pg 4. https://peternavarro.com/the-navarro-report/

3. Id.

4. CNN, Fox Business, and NBC News announcements, collected in 2000 Mules at 00:02:42

5. https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/

6. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:25:10

7. 2000 Mules at approximately 01:03:20

8. https://www.azag.gov/press-release/guillermina-fuentes-enters-guilty-plea-yuma-county-ballot-harvesting-case

9. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/capitol-attack-cellphone-data.html

10. https://screenrant.com/google-geolocation-capitol-riots-warrants/

11. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-usa-mules/fact-check-does-2000-mules-provide-evidence-of-voter-fraud-in-the-2020-u-s-presidential-election-idUSL2N2XJ0OQ

12. Joe Biden - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGRnhBmHYN0

13. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:48:06

14. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:49:29

15. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:49:53

16. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:48:44

17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR08Np0hseY

18. https://rumble.com/vpokri-republican-workers-blocked-from-participating-in-2020-election.html

19. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:49:07

20. https://rumble.com/vpevd4-wisconsin-assembly-committee-on-campaigns-and-elections-nov-10-2021.html ;
https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552/osc-second-interim-report.pdf

21. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:50:49

22. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:51:15

23. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:51:17

24. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:51:20

25. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:51:24

26. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:51:26

27. 2000 Mules at approximately 00:51:30

28. https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_38192161-1b4b-4d96-a057-ee0726691742

29. https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_38192161-1b4b-4d96-a057-ee0726691742

30. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/joe-biden-popular-vote-record-barack-obama-us-presidential-election-donald-trump/

31. https://www.politico.com/2012-election/results/president/michigan/ ;
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/michigan/

32. https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/georgia/ ;
https://www.politico.com/2012-election/results/president/georgia/ ;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_large_Black_populations

33. https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/georgia/ ;
https://www.politico.com/2012-election/results/president/georgia/

34. https://www.politico.com/2012-election/results/president/michigan/ ;
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/michigan/

35. https://www.politico.com/2012-election/results/president/nevada/ ;
https://silverstateelection.nv.gov/county-results/clark.shtml

36. https://elections.wi.gov/sites/elections/files/County%20by%20County%20Report%20-%20President%20of%20the%20United%20States%20post%20recount.pdf ;
https://www.politico.com/2012-election/results/president/wisconsin/

37. https://elections.wi.gov/sites/elections/files/County%20by%20County%20Report%20-%20President%20of%20the%20United%20States%20post%20recount.pdf

38. https://www.politico.com/2012-election/results/president/pennsylvania/ ;
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/pennsylvania/

39. https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/pennsylvania/ ;
https://www.politico.com/2012-election/results/president/pennsylvania/

40. https://nypost.com/2021/10/13/mark-zuckerberg-spent-419m-on-nonprofits-ahead-of-2020-election-and-got-out-the-dem-vote/

41. https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552/osc-second-interim-report.pdf (pg 22)

42. https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552/osc-second-interim-report.pdf (pg 23)

43. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/943242106/how-private-money-from-facebooks-ceo-saved-the-2020-election

44. https://www.techandciviclife.org/board-of-directors/

45. https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552/osc-second-interim-report.pdf (pg 23)

46. https://legis.wisconsin.gov/assembly/22/brandtjen/media/1552/osc-second-interim-report.pdf (pg. 17)

47. Id.

48. https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate-taking-receipts/contribution-limits/

49. https://ballotpedia.org/Center_for_Tech_and_Civic_Life%27s_(CTCL)_grants_to_election_agencies,_2020

50. https://ballotpedia.org/Center_for_Tech_and_Civic_Life%27s_(CTCL)_grants_to_election_agencies,_2020

51. https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-responds-to-claim-that-john-roberts-shouted-at-other-justices-over-texas-lawsuit_3624378.html

52. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/judge-dismisses-georgia-lawsuit-alleging-fraud-2020-election-2021-10-13/

53. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20423487-bailey-v-antrim-county-complaint

54. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20423487-bailey-v-antrim-county-complaint

55. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20423487-bailey-v-antrim-county-complaint

56. https://www.depernolaw.com/bailey-documents---may-2021.html

57. https://www.depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/[9_ex_7_antrim_michigan_forensics_report_[121320]_v2_[redacted].pdf ;
https://www.depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/[12]_ex_10_penrose_1.pdf

58. https://www.depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/[12]_ex_10_penrose_1.pdf

59. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/online-vulnerable-experts-find-nearly-three-dozen-u-s-voting-n1112436 ;
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/20423772/antrim-county-forensics-report.pdf

60. https://www.depernolaw.com/bailey-documents---may-2021.html

61. https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/18/michigan-judge-antrim-county-election-lawsuit/4980333001/

PDF: https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/06/Statement-by-Trump-1.pdf