The truth out of both barrels

Joe Biden is a senile, feeble old fraud, incompetent even at the height of his powers, dumb every dumb day of his dumb life, and a lying, corrupt career politician. All he says is scripted and all he does is stage-managed. Biden's campaign was to not campaign, and his program is unpopular and unworkable billionaire Bolshevism. Joe Biden cannot command the respect of his party or the love of his voters, and his "election" is a fix and a fiction. 

The Democrat Party are godless and lawless, and for the first time in three decades I say Democrats are evil. In this worst year of our lives the Democrats became fully and finally the party of political violence, political extortion, partisan application of the law, partisan censorship, and by year's end the party of election fraud, effecting the abolition of the republic with the spectacular stealing of a national election. The Democrat Party in 2020 suspended freedom of assembly and the right to worship, and abolished freedom of speech and the right to vote. In 2020 Democrats smashed small business and un-degreed labor literally as well as figuratively, while the billionaire class who run the party grew fatter off the party by a third. Democrats monopolize the institutions and the establishment, and abuse them at every turn; they care only for power. Democrats are totalitarian, they conspire with totalitarians, and they aspire to totalitarianism. Their every utterance is lies, their only defense censorship and false witness. And the heart of the Democrat Party is hate, hate for Christians and Christianity, hate for whiteness and Western Civilization, and above all hate for America and all things American.  

   

God damn the fraud Joe Biden and God damn the anti-democratic Democratic Party. God damn the lawless establishment and God damn the godless elite. God damn the corrupt rich and God damn the incompetent ruling classes. God redeem us from our own clueless and craven old guard. And God save the Republic. 

The best of them shrugged

Now they tell us. Now they tell us, Trump was right, hydroxychloroquine is safe and effective against coronavirus, after shrieking that Trump was "killing us" with chloroquine. Now they tell us, Trump was right, we have our vaccine by the end of the year, after calling him a liar and taunting us that no power on earth could produce a working vaccine for a novel virus in a matter of months. And now they tell us, Trump was right, Biden is corrupt and compromised, after assuring us the story was "Russian disinformation". 

So we can only expect that once they've pushed Trump out of power on fake votes they'll tell us, Trump was right, the election was stolen, after rolling their eyes that there was "no evidence of fraud". Once it's safe, after they can't do a blessed thing about it but talk. Maybe they'll hold hearings, maybe they'll even open investigations -- more likely investigations of the sort that run discreetly for two years before being retired without charges -- and surely they'll appear on the talking heads shows, talking about it. But when they might've done something about it, when they might have exposed the fraud and expunged it, the best of them shrugged and the worst of them lied, until not only was the election stolen but the criminals had got clean away, and in the confusion the republic was switched for a one-party state.  

What Trump forgets about his last four years, in a couple hours of talking about it, would itself amount to a great presidency, but that president of whom Egypt's President al-Sisi observed, "This is a man who does the impossible," is to be pushed out into the wilderness on fake votes. And a senile, corrupt, lying old fraud with an unpopular and unworkable Billionaire Bolshevik program, is to be installed on those same fake votes in total power.

 

If the fraud were exposed and expunged, and Trump's rightful victory restored, the Democrats would scream murder, they'd smash up and burn down the cities -- again -- and America would be staring at something like a second civil war. But if the Republicans are robbed of their rightful victory and the republic itself abolished in the process, they only grumble a little and slump away, then "congratulate" the fraud and tell us how "proud" we all are of the "first female vice president", never mind that most of us voted for the man on the ticket. So the legal challenges are dismissed unheard, the witnesses to the fraud are censored by Big Tech, and the Big Press assure us there's "no evidence of fraud", while the clock ticks away to the ratification of that fraud and with it the abolition of the republic. Run out the clock, let the baby have his bottle, and kiss the ring: not a one of which cliches are found in the hearts of great and good men.

"The center cannot hold. ... Everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." That was Yeats on Europe between the world wars but it might just as well be America in the terminal two months of this annus horribilis assoluta of 2020. The trouble is, Yeats' observation was followed by rather a bad patch.

Clean as Pilate's hands

Dismissed unheard, dismissed unheard; more votes than voters and a thousand witnesses to the theft, but every plea to the law is dismissed unheard. They censor our speech, they steal our votes, and at last to complete the injury with insult, they deny us our day in court. And still we don't riot and loot or smash and burn or batter and kill: we're Americans and Christians, not Democrats and animals.  

The witnesses are censored by Big Tech and the statistics blockaded by the Big Press, while the black robes play out the clock, ticking down the weeks and days until the fraud is formalized: the case of Donald J. Trump and the People of the United States v. the anti-democratic Democratic Party and the abolition of the republic, is hereby dismissed unheard. 

Yet another shrug by the Roberts Court, yet another plea for sunlight on this stolen election, dismissed unheard. It's the way with Chief Justice Roberts, to search a case for some technicality by which to deliver to the Democrats the political victory they demand, without conceding the law, and here that technicality was standing: to shrug that Texas and those states which joined it as parties to the lawsuit hadn't the standing to bring the suit, and dismiss the case unheard. No evidence and no argument, no facts and no law, no decision and no judgment, no truth and no justice -- but no mess. The Roberts Court is kept as clean as the hands of Pontius Pilate.

 

Election law was rewritten in the states in question to make of the voting and counting a pig's breakfast of fraud, by officers of the state other than the state legislatures, which legislatures are invested by the United States Constitution with unitary authority to write and rewrite election law. Then to compound the unconstitutionality, the administration of the voting and counting was applied unequally, in keeping with the unequal treatment in all things circa 2020: Democrat counties and Democrat voters and Democrat votes afforded gracious accommodations denied to the unapproved classes, which the Supreme Court held in the presidential election of 20 years prior -- when the double-standard was niggling as against the sewer that is 2020 -- transgressed the Constitution's "equal protection" doctrine. So to hear the suit would have been to find for the plaintiff, and that would've been frightfully messy, displeasing every person of power and influence from New York to Beijing, whose black little hearts are set so on a "Biden presidency".

The state legislatures in five of the six states corrupted by big-city Democrat machines are Republican, the state legislatures are invested by the Constitution with authority on remedies for corruption in elections, and those five legislatures may yet act to put right what's gone wrong, but they hadn't the fortitude to act and were wanting a prod from the Supreme Court, and instead the high court has signalled the stand-down. Weak as water, weak as water, in the words of Mrs. Slocombe.

It is now not a preposterous proposition, that within these next months and years we may be witness to the fall of America as the last godly power on earth and as a country even recognizable as America. The Democrat Party have got away with stealing a national election, sheltered even by certain weak-sister Republicans despite that the Democrat votes are statistical impossibilities -- 174,384 votes in Michigan alone that don't tally with the voter rolls -- and we can only expect that they'll move now to institutionalize the fraud in American elections as well as to pack the electorate with tens of millions of spare Democrat voters from the Third World. And if Trump is pushed out on fake votes for at least four years then there'll be no leader left to stand against China: China this year has wrecked 188 countries with impunity, and come out the other end the stronger for it; in four years of "China" Joe Biden, China might easily be master of the world.

The thing now is to pray and to fight. To hold the line in the Senate -- and if the Democrats can't cheat then they can't win those two runoffs for Senate in Georgia January 5 -- followed by a rearguard campaign against this coup d'etat, lawful obstruction -- legislative and judicial -- at every turn, and the light of righteous truth, showing Biden for the corrupt, senile old fraud he is and showing the Democrats for what in 2020 they've become, the party of political violence and partisan censorship and election fraud: vicious and violent, anti-democratic and un-constitutional, and un-American.

Shadows of things that may be

They tell me it's Thanksgiving. And of course the day after Thanksgiving is the unofficial first day of Christmas. Well, the second-best-known Christmas story -- not to say there's any great Christmas feeling in me just now -- proposes that visions may be "the shadows of the things that will be, or...shadows of the things that may be, only," and hopes for those things that may be. And in that spirit I pray God that my visions of late are shadows only of what may be.

It's not science but it's political science: Trump won, and he won big or else the fraud wouldn't be so spectacularly obvious, with more votes than there are voters in swing-state dirty-Democrat big cities. For proof positive I can't improve on this, that the state of Pennsylvania issued 1.8 million absentee ballots, but counted 2.5 million. It's a fix. 

Trump swept handily the principal perennial swing states of Ohio and Florida which decide every other presidential election and where the voting and counting are clean, but somehow lost; Trump carried 18 of the 19 bellwether counties which project every other election for president, but somehow lost; Trump excelled his popular vote from his electoral-vote landslide of four years prior by not less than 11 million votes, for the greatest gain by an incumbent president in the history of the republic and far and away the most votes for an incumbent, but somehow lost; Trump carried 84% of counties, a greater preponderance of the map of the United States than any losing candidate for president, but somehow lost; Trump won a greater share of nonwhites than any Republican for president since 1960, doubling his black vote after being damned daily for four years as "racist", but somehow lost; and Trump carried great gains for Republicans in Congress and the state legislatures, 27 toss-ups for House out of 27, in defiance of the junk polls and clueless "experts", but we're meant to believe the man at the top of the ticket who carried those down-ballot Republicans on his coattails, somehow lost his re-election. 

 

There is no accounting for those and any number of further irregularities and anomalies and impossibilities, save for Democrat Party election fraud. 

It was a refrain with me these four years, that everything and everyone are against Trump but the people, but in America the people are enough; what I hadn't reckoned on is that the people aren't enough if the votes of those people are washed out in a fetid ocean of Democrat fraud. 

They say this election is stolen and manifestly it is that, but it's worse, it's the latest and maybe the last of many phases in a four-year, unremitting coup d'etat, the Russia hoax and the impeachment-without-a-crime and the other, lesser entries in the day-and-night campaign to overturn Trump's election and now also to veto his re-election with fake votes by the millions. But more even than that, this stolen election is the abolition of the republic: the anti-democratic Democratic Party have fixed it to where they can't lose; when they're repudiated by the people in a great reckoning, they walk away claiming a great victory. In the space of one election cycle they've reduced the United States to Venezuela, reduced the Great Republic to a one-party state. They've done to America as Hugo Chavez did to Venezuela, and complete with his "Smartmatic" system. 

Elected office was all we had left: unelected power and influence are monopolized like never before since modernity, by the Left. Big Tech and the Big Press, the culture (or rather the debased counterculture which supplanted American culture half a century past), Big Business, the bureaucracies including especially the Deep State, institutional education, etc., etc. -- generally the institutions and the establishment and the elite in America, 2020, are doctrinaire leftists and partisan Democrats using and abusing their power and influence day and night to promote Democrats and destroy Republicans. 

And for the Left in America, 2020 there is no God and no law and thus there is no restraint. The Left are post-Christian, and disdain as fairytales that there is a God, a Heaven and Hell, a cosmic right and wrong and an eternal reward and punishment. The great monsters of history are un-Christian or pre-Christian or post-Christian. And today also the Left are untouchable to law enforcement: a Democrat administration spying on and conspiring against a Republican presidential campaign, or a looter and rioter and arsonist whose crimes are in support of a national Democrat political campaign -- for Democrats in America, 2020, there is no law. And so we play Marquis of Queensbury because we're Christians and patriots, while they get away with murder. In this black month of November, 2020 the Democrat Party dumps millions of illegal ballots onto a national election, to claim total power and enact a Bolshevik revolution they never let on about in the campaign, and why wouldn't they, when for them there is no God and no law?

Even in easier times I don't know which way to turn except to appeal to history, but there's no very obvious antecedent for 2020, not in four centuries of American civilization. In former times we'd be girding by now for civil war; I don't expect a second civil war, but for the first time since 1865 a second American civil war is not a preposterous proposition.   

There is a silent majority: they endure the abuse that's heaped on their heads daily by the elite, and they keep their heads down and their mouths shut; they observe their laws and pay their taxes and mind their manners -- but they vote. The one power left to the silent majority, until sometime after Election Day 2020, was the vote. So what are the silent majority to do, when that one power left to them, is stolen from them?

The once and future president

I write this on November 24 in the lengthening shadows of Democrat judges dismissing unheard Trump's legal challenges to the spectacular fraud in Biden's marginal and fictional victories across six states, any three of which would flip the election: the cases go unpresented, discovery unordered, fact and law undecided, and above all the audits of those mountains of fraudulent votes go uncalled, all while the clock ticks away to December 14 and the meeting of the electoral college. But if Trump is pushed out on fraudulent votes in January then I take for granted that in two years he'll again declare formally his candidacy for president, that the Grand Old Party which he rebuilt and which he owns will again nominate him, and practically by acclaim, and that Trump will as Laura Ingraham has observed in not so many words, tower over the feeble old fraud occupying Trump's rightful place in the Oval Office, Trump as not only a president-in-waiting but a champion and hero, savior and martyr to The Forgotten Man, and a Rushmorean colossus, casting a long shadow over and dwarfing the pretender to the presidency.

In that event Trump may in those two years before he campaigns again for president, campaign for cleaning up the dirty Democrats' comprehensive corruption of our elections, indicting and hounding those rotten, thieving machine-Democrats in the six states that stole his election and getting up campaigns against them. Trump may well determine the Republican primaries for the 2022 midterms starting in not much more than a year, and months later campaign for Republicans in the general elections which on the level of House districts are not so easily rigged by the dirty, anti-democratic Democratic Party. It may even be that Trump sets himself up as something of a shadow president, a true and rightful once and future president, daily dashing Biden's brains. It's not inconceivable that Trump who is after all a multi-billionaire businessman and master of mass media, might in those years found an alternative media empire to break the Big Media monopoly. And on his way out the door Trump must set in motion an independent investigation of this stolen election, of the sort that can't be conveniently retired.

I take for granted that a Biden presidency would be four years of pain; Biden has promised America a "dark winter", which may be read as a metaphor for his would-be presidency beyond its grim gray January and February: at home punishing economics, a fusion of big government and big business, lording over the law-abiding but lawlessness in immigration and criminal justice, "woke" hectoring and political and cultural persecution, etc., etc., while abroad Biden brings a glorious summer for Xi and Kim and Putin, the Ayatollah and the international jihad, as in the eight years of Obama-Biden before the advent of Trump and America First. That the Biden program is anti-populist and unpopular was confirmed by the Biden campaign's not letting on what he'd do as president: Naomi Wolf -- feminist leftist, partisan Democrat, and elite's elite -- wrote on Biden's approach to coronavirus that had she known what Biden would do as president she never would've voted for him, and one suspects she's not alone.

Joe Biden is a rumor of a man filling out a narrow-shouldered bespoke business suit at the top of the Democrat ticket, who says nothing and does nothing but what is scripted and stage-managed for him. Biden always was a buffoon; anymore he's a senile buffoon. Biden is as feeble and frail as his arthritic toddling. By dollar value at least Biden was far and away the most corrupt vice president in the history of the republic, his policy for sale to any crooked character from Beijing to Burisma, and the truth of his corruption will not be denied by Big Tech censorship and Big Press blockades. Biden's program is the Bolshevik Revolution of Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez which had been repudiated in the very Democrat presidential primary. Biden's campaign was a lie and his program is anathema to the people. Biden can't command the respect of his party or the love of his voters. Biden concedes that he's unfit to complete two terms, and more Americans than not aren't confident he'd make it even so far as four years. And that Biden's fictional victory has been won for him by big-city Democrat-machine ballot-box-stuffing grows more spectacularly obvious by the day, washing out the will of the people in a fetid ocean of Democrat fraud. 

 

As I come to the end of this writing the news comes over the transom that for only the first time in these three weeks since Election Day, the Trump campaign will be permitted to put its case of a stolen election to a court, that court being a state court in Nevada. Also the Trump campaign has announced public hearings on the corruption of the election before the state legislatures in three more of the six states in question, the state legislatures being invested by the Constitution with sole and unitary authority over elections, and five of those six states having elected Republican legislatures, because the dirty Democrat big cities can't rig the elections in all those little legislative districts. It may of course be that it's too little, too late, the clock is ticking and the fix is in, but it must be said, at the risk of mingling my metaphors: they never have beaten Trump yet, not after nine innings. We may be into the ninth inning by now, but the ballgame has a few plays left in it, and Trump's not one to go down with the bat on his shoulder. 

And by way of a postscript, this is highly speculative, but assuming Trump is pushed out on fraud and mounts his return, I'd prefer for his vice president to see Senators Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley. I esteem Vice President Pence and adore him, he's a fine veep and a fine man, a vice president and governor and Congressman and Congressional leader, and a good Christian and great American; but what Mike Pence is not is a force of nature, where Hawley and Cotton are forceful, intellectual young Trumpians with the fire in the belly, who might be expected to fight harder and fare better in the election of '28. I'd be perfectly contented with Pence for veep in Trump Mk II, but I'd sooner we set ourselves up for another presidency with a young lion.

Winning the election after the election

Addendum, November 11: It’s as Mark Steyn concluded, the United States general election of 2020 is the greatest electoral heist since the advent of democracy. And as of November 11 the scale and weight of the theft are crashing over the press blockade. It was some days before Trump and his captains found their feet and assembled the first tranches of evidence that the election was heisted, but a week after the day, the case is coming together, and the Trump campaign are demanding not recounts but audits: throw open the ballots, all of ’em, examine them, compare them against the voter rolls, and expunge the fraud.  

Biden’s margins in half a dozen swing states are tenths of a percent, the fraud in those states dwarfs the margins, any three of those states would flip the election, and every fraudulent vote is a vote for Joe Biden. In the swing-state dirty-Democrat big cities which Biden owes for his unofficial and fictional victory, voter turnout runs as high as an impossible 90%, as compared against 50-60% elsewhere -- i.e., there are more votes for Biden than there are voters. It's a fix.  

The thing now is to pray for Trump and his lawyers and at least as much for the Republican officers and volunteers and the witnesses and whistleblowers in the half-dozen states in question, that they have the head and the heart, the will and the wherewithal to expose the fraud and expunge it. Keep the powder dry and keep the faith; Trump is in the White House and he means to get comfortable there.

Trump won and he knows it. He knows too what he's up against, but they never have beaten him yet, not after nine innings, and he's halfway there already: he took on all comers and won the people for the presidency. Now if he can smash the rotten system that stole his victory, he'll be a two-term president as big as Mount Rushmore, and the republic will stand. God bless Donald Trump and God save the Republic. 

Addendum, November 8: Before the coming of coronavirus, some jurisdiction in New Jersey went over to voting by mail, and in one election there the ballots were opened and examined, whereupon it was concluded officially that forged, fraudulent ballots amounted to 10% of the vote. Then came coronavirus, which was taken by Democrats as license to do as they'd wished to do anyhow and institute voting by mail, in states enough to decide the election for president. And now that the Democrats and the press (but I repeat myself) have declared the election for Biden -- unofficially, marginally, and after four days of counting -- if the dodgy ballots are opened and discovered to be fraudulent in numbers sufficient to overturn the unofficial, fictional declared result, we'll be looking at civil war: the cry would be that Trump is a "tyrant", abolishing democracy, when of course he'd be insisting on faithful democracy over election fraud. They've fixed it to where if we win the election, we lose the country. Still, the country that voted Trump know they voted Trump, and they won't be told by Wolf Blitzer or Chris Wallace that they wanted Joe Biden for their president.

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Something is rotten in the state of Pennsylvania, and in Michigan and Wisconsin and Nevada and Georgia, if not also Arizona. They're winning the election after the election, as they had planned and we had feared. It does not stand to the reason of political science that President Trump should lose his re-election, in consideration of the following: 

 

-Trump excelled his popular vote from his electoral-vote landslide of four years prior by something on the order of 10 million votes, for the greatest gain by an incumbent president in the history of the republic and far and away the most votes for an incumbent 

-Trump swept handily the principal perennial swing states which decide every other presidential election, namely kingmaker Ohio and third-most-populous Florida -- where the voting and counting are clean

-Trump carried 18 of the 19 bellwether counties which project every other election for president 

-Trump carried 84% of counties, and no candidate for president has yet lost his election, who won so great a preponderance of the map of the United States 

-Trump won a greater share of nonwhites than any Republican for president since 1960, doubling his black vote after being damned daily for four years as "racist" 

-On his coattails Trump's Republican Party carried 27 of 27 toss-up races for U.S. House, dropping not a solitary incumbent, and coming within something like 21,000 votes out of 150,000,000 of knocking Pelosi off her perch after just two years

-On his coattails Trump's Republicans held the Senate despite drawing the lion's share of the defending contests in the cycle, and against a nationalized Democrat campaign prepared to throw $108 million at one little old seat (see January addendum below)

-And the president's party flipped three state legislatures, with not a Republican legislature lost  

The incumbent Republican president who manages all that, wins his re-election. It's not science, but it's political science. So how is it that several days after the vote we are assured confidently that this incumbent Republican president has effectively lost his re-election? Surely if Joe Biden had rightfully won the presidency then he'd have swept Ohio and Florida and carried the bellwethers, he'd not have surrendered his party's overwhelming advantage since the '60s among nonwhites, he'd have carried along with him a Democrat Senate and a majority in the House at least as big as the one he started with, and he'd not have dropped state legislatures. And so it only follows that suspicion should fall on the corrupt Democrat big cities in the critical states which is where Biden has run up his marginal, fictional lead, after Election Night and over charges of fraud which already have mounted into a mountain. 

But in the worst case wherein Trump loses the election after the election, eked out by big-city Democrat corruption, and on the strength of Big Tech censorship and Big Press blockades, Deep State conspiracy and sabotage, and more generally the unremitting labors for half a decade of practically every living elite, every man and woman with power and influence, using and abusing that power and influence day and night to destroy Trump utterly and to drag Joe Biden's decrepit carcass over the finish line like some ghastly enacting of Weekend at Bernie's -- if after all that Trump is finally eked out by election fraud in the dirty Democrat big cities, then surely they'll not have seen the last of him. He shall return.

 

Trump is eligible for two terms as president and they need not be consecutive terms; he wouldn't be the first president to serve nonconsecutive terms. And Trump alone has founded a mass movement and built the Grand Old Party up and out, and it's on his coattails that Republicans overperformed down-ballot. Trump owns the people of the Republican Party, even if the party muckety-mucks hate his ever-living guts, and if Trump declares again for Republican nominee for president then the man hasn't been born who can stand against him. 

  

And Joe Biden always was a buffoon -- his vote on the bin Laden raid was "No" -- and now he's a senile buffoon, dumb and feeble, pristinely without principles -- he's been on both sides of every issue over his half-century in national politics -- by dollar value at least he's the most corrupt vice president in the history of the republic, his policy was for sale including to the Beijing regime and he's compromised with China and lesser bad actors, and what is worse, Biden sits now at the top of a Billionaire Bolshevik program, unworkable as policy and unwinnable as politics: as president and commander-in-chief Joe Biden would be a wreck.    

And anyhow Biden is pledged to stand down if elected after four years, not to say Democrats ever are held to their promises. So if Trump is pushed out then he'll be breathing down Biden's neck from Day One, and a couple years thereafter Trump may well declare his candidacy for president. And I'd venture one further: president or ex-president, in the 2022 midterms Trump may well get up a campaign against Democrats at the state level, to clean up the corruption in our elections: "Kick out the rotten, anti-democratic Democrats who steal your votes."

I pray for President Trump and his captains and foot soldiers and for the Republican officers and volunteers in the swing states, and above all I pray for truth and justice: every corruption exposed and expunged. 

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Addendum, January 2021: For some time after Election Night the country and the world took for granted a Republican Senate, but as ever the counting continued until the Democrats got their way, and Georgia's highly unusual twin elections for U. S. Senate were kicked to runoffs on January 5. If the Democrats picked off both Republican incumbents, and if their stolen election for president were upheld, then they'd seize total power to remake America into Venezuela in just the first months of 2021, with the barest majority possible in the U.S Senate of 50-50 with the tiebreaker to the vice president. 

Georgia's elections in November had been easily the crookedest in the country, with more varieties of fraud than in any other single state, but extraordinarily not a solitary reform was enacted before the elections in January. And it was a good deal worse than that: when on New Year's Eve, for instance, a state Senate subcommittee by unanimous vote at last ordered an audit of the Democrat dummy ballots in Fulton County -- i.e., the dirty Democrat big city of Atlanta -- the ballots in question were hauled away in rental vans and literally shredded, within hours of the order and before the order could be executed. Then when Homeland Security seized the shredded ballots, the FBI re-seized them, and re-shredded them. Because America now is Venezuela.

And so it was with a sickness in our stomachs that patriots watched Election Day and Election Night, and the morning after, when the November heist was reprised note-for-note, complete with the inexplicable and impossible deductions of large, round figures from the televised vote tallies for the Republican, and with even the banishment of Republican poll-watchers from the counting in Fulton County. When the Republican Defense Committee secured an emergency order from the nearest superior court judge, commanding the dirty Democrat county to honor the law and assure a clean count by permitting observation by the accredited partisan poll-watchers, the decree was disregarded, and there's an end to it.     

Then Michigan is one of those six to ten states claimed for Biden but won rightfully by Trump, and in Michigan the Republican for Senate polled ahead of Trump, presumably because he's a black Detroiter and appealed to some number of black Detroiters who wouldn't also pull the lever for Trump. But Senate elections are statewide elections, as are elections for president, and the Republican for Senate was washed away with Trump on the ocean of Democrat fraud. Making at least three stolen Senate seats and making all the difference, between power and total power.

A partisan's accounting of England's part in civilization

The proto-Renaissance that was the Gothic High Middle Ages starting in the 12th Century, centered on France, and the Renaissance proper was concentrated in certain of the Italian city-states circa 1500, but it strikes me that civilization since the Fall of Rome owes more to a newer and more peripheral nation, without so long or deep a pedigree in painting and sculpture and the fine but less practical arts. 

There is no England before the Fall of Rome, and for centuries thereafter it's a fledgling proposition. But from 793 with the sack of Lindisfarne, to the Battle of Stamford Bridge a quarter of a millennium thereafter in 1066, England performs its first great service to civilization, by absorbing the worst of the the forces of destruction and darkness that were the Vikings, and ultimately killing them or driving them out or converting them. Which is not to say that England volunteered for Viking duty: England's outsized part in that story was a function of its geography, being as it was the first lush and rich land on the route westward from Scandinavia. And it's not to say either that the Vikings never got around to the rest of Christendom: the Norsemen terrorized the edges of the Continent along the coasts and rivers, and colonized corners of Scotland and Ireland and France. But with the Muslim menace corralled by Byzantium to the east, and in the west turned back by the Franks at Tours in 732, the last enemies to Western Civilization were the last pagans in Europe, and it was England that those Vikings battered against hardest and longest.  

Now for this next chapter I take for granted that the Protestant Reformation was the first of three great leaps to modernity. The Reformation was not conceived in England, although England claims some formidable antecedents to it, not least the Lollards and John Wycliffe. But with England's break from Rome in the middle-16th Century, the Reformation is harnessed to a great power, and half a century hence, after the Armada, a transatlantic and imperial power.   

In the next century it was England alone that took the second of my three great leaps to modernity, in the English Civil War. The English Civil War made a democracy of England, and England -- directly and otherwise -- made democracies of the world. It is of course true that some Greek city-states before Philip and Alexander, and Rome before Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus -- the city-state and not the empire -- were democratic, and some of the city-states of Italy in the centuries before the English Civil War were republics, even if only in name. But the first true and enduring national democracy is England. And the democracies of the world today overwhelmingly were instituted or guaranteed by English-speaking power, or inspired by English-speaking democracy or influenced by it. Democracy speaks English.

But the third great leap to modernity, is modernity; it is altogether new, and was altogether English: the Industrial Revolution. The machine and automation, mechanized transit, mass production, availability and affordability, etc., etc. -- these are among a relative few altogether novel developments since the dawn of civilization, their gift is the easiest and richest and longest life since the Garden of Eden, and they owe to an explosion in thinking in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, in England. 

And that's to say nothing of the language and literature of England which are without rival in the world and in history, or the British Empire which was the greatest the world has known, or Britain's part in the happy endings to the world wars and the Napoleonic Wars and the War of Spanish Succession, or the Magna Carta and the rule of law, or England's great universities, and much else besides. I bow to no man in my appreciation for Renaissance frescoes or Gothic flying buttresses, but since the Fall of Rome, to my way of thinking, civilization has owed more to that funny little country of Viking-slayers and reformers and Parliament and machines.

You're not the caboose, sweetheart, you're the engine

(Nota bene: This post was written well before Election Night 2020, when evidently a switch was thrown at FNC HQ converting Fox News to CNN-3, with the consequent fall of Fox News and corresponding rise of Real America's Voice and One America News among an expanding universe of alternative conservative TV news.) 

  

...Or, an open letter to Fox News. The New York Times is not worthy of the name "newspaper", not in 2020, and The Washington Post is the property and pet of Jeff Bezos who's converted it from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism. The papers and ABC and NBC, CBS and PBS, and obviously CNN and MSNBC, not to forget NPR which is that much worse than its PBS companion in taxpayer-subsidized broadcasting, and not to mention the flotilla of second-hand news like "Newsy" that follows in the wake of the big press, are not "biased", not anymore: they're a party press as in a one-party state, propagators of official information and approved ideas as in an authoritarian or totalitarian system. For years by now they've devoted themselves to hoaxes and non-stories and half-stories, they've liberated themselves of their standards including especially on sourcing, and the best that may be had out of them is half the story. 

We are arrived at last at the worst of all worlds. In the 19th Century the press were partisan but they wore their partisanship on their sleeves, and both sides were well represented: Mudville, USA had a Mudville Democrat and a Mudville Republican, and the citizenry of Mudville were at liberty to read one or the other or both papers and judge for themselves. Then early in the 20th Century came the Progressives and their reduction of all pursuits to sciences, including in a new professional, impartial, and clinical press. But ours is not the 19th Century or even the 20th (more's the pity); it is of course that debased age called the 21st Century, and in our time the press combine the worst elements of the 19th Century and the 20th: the monopoly on information of an institutional press as in the 20th Century, with the partisanship of the 19th Century party papers -- and just the one party. 

And then came Big Tech. The internet which within my time online had been an alternative to the establishment press, was captured fully and finally by the establishment, when Google and Twitter and Facebook among others turned their monopolistic powers to partisanship, and partisanship for the party of the elite and the establishment, namely the Democrats. Burying or forbidding alternative sources, wiping posts and videos, suspending and purging accounts. The power of the internet and of monopolistic forces of exponential influence, now is harnessed to the party press and to The Party.

 

But not a perfect monopoly: there is of course Fox News. A relative few websites of relative obscurity produce news and analysis to counter the establishment press, and talk radio carries on in its good work, and more than that Trump himself, alone among Republicans since Reagan, smashes through the press blockade, but in the way of news institutions to speak of which are not captured by The Party, there is only FNC. Television and radio, print and online, the one great counter to the establishment in information today is Fox News Channel, on cable and streaming, on digital radio and online. 

And in the same way that the import of Britain in the Second World War was magnified by its standing alone against fascism, after the Fall of France and before Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor, Fox News in this Cultural Revolution that is 2020 is amplified as the one indispensable force for truth and ideas. And Fox News today may amount to the most influential collection of reporters and analysts since electronic communication: the Republican Party is the winningest party in the greatest nation, and its leader at present is a force-of-nature president with an executive energy like no leader since the last man to get his face onto Mount Rushmore, and yet for news which is not a Democrat campaign to destroy them utterly, Trump and his Republican Party are left with little old Fox News and precious little else, so that Fox News fairly monopolizes the ear of the winningest party and its force-of-nature president. Within these two weeks, Trump ordered an end to the "anti-racism" training of the executive branch into prejudice against whites and whiteness, merest days after the outrage was broadcast on Tucker Carlson Tonight. 

 

The trouble is, Fox News doesn't know its own strength. Some figures at Fox News apprehend the singularity of their placement; the aforesaid Tucker Carlson who leads the Fox News primetime has carried the Right and the republic intellectually for some months since the first of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and riots in late May and early June, and his issues are just that, the issues he reckons to be worthy of his attention and his viewers'. But too many Fox Newsers seem to imagine it's their place and purpose to reproduce the front page of The New York Times; their issues are whatever it is the Democrats happen to be banging on about at any given moment, through their party press.  

And so it's my plea to Fox News first that they recognize the collapse of the establishment press around them; the establishment led by the Old Gray Lady are decayed and debased, and Fox News is not obliged for its direction to their front pages and needn't necessarily even acknowledge their half-stories and non-stories and hoaxes. And then I say it's past time Fox News felt its oats: FNC is at least as justified in driving the news as any decayed organ of the establishment. China for instance is objectively an issue, in the real world and to the real people in it, not least China's deliberate killing and sickening and terrorizing of the people of the world, and its crushing of the world's economies and bankrupting of the governments, by means of the Chinese invasion that is coronavirus, and yet the press have practically raised a blockade against information unhelpful to the Beijing regime; so smash the blockade, interview the whistleblowers and compile the facts and bang the drum. May it be that what is news, but shut out of the news, is Fox News.   

Get it through your pretty little heads that anymore you're not the caboose, sweetheart, you're the engine, and get to driving.

Urgency and clarity, leftism and totalitarianism

Addendum, September 3: "They don't tell little lies" 

 

What scale of electoral catastrophe must the Democrats be reading in their internal polling, to provoke them to their novel strategy as of this writing, of campaigning as the Republican Party? Evidently the Democratic National Convention was a more comprehensive disaster than even I had reckoned on, and the Republican convention a greater triumph, because in the week after the RNC the Biden campaign has recast itself, as the Trump campaign. 

 

Joe Biden or anyhow his campaign, as of this writing, is campaigning against the Democrat destruction of Democrat cities, and the Democrat lockdowns in Democrat states, and expects us to believe the Democrat rioters are Republican rioters and the Democrat lockdowns are Republican lockdowns. It's as Tucker Carlson observed not long ago, "They don't tell little lies in the Democrat Party." To which I would add only, "...and they think we're stupid."  

The premise of the Biden campaign manifestly is that the people are staggeringly, toweringly, mouth-breathingly dumb: the Biden campaign has quit damning Trump for his championing of the re-opening of America with its schools and its sports, long enough to blame him for the Democrat lockdowns of the schools and of sports. The same Biden campaign which had only just threatened a needless and disastrous new and national lockdown. Lies in election campaigns are ordinary enough, but lies on this order of magnitude are not found in free societies; this is Hitler blaming Churchill for the Holocaust.   

No-one is more surprised than I to say it, but as of the Republican National Convention of August 2020, the Republicans are not the Stupid Party. My unsolicited advice for the GOP posted hereunder went unread so I can take no share in the credit for this reborn Republican Party so smart and so sharp, but I pray God they make a habit of this. The Democrat convention was an unforced disaster, bleak and grim, making out that America is irredeemably wicked and wants tearing down and rebuilding in the profane image of the Left, and forgetting the rules of a national political convention that it must be an event and a show. 

But more than that, the Democrats in four days of primetime never said peep about two of the maybe four great questions of the campaign, namely the destruction of the big Democrat cities, and the menace and evil of China who only months ago sprayed their contagion deliberately to every corner of the planet, to wreck the economies of the world and bankrupt the governments, and to kill and sicken and terrorize the people of the world. The DNC was a fat lob-ball hanging over homeplate, and Trump and the Republicans in their convention smacked the cover off it. 

And don't take my word for it: the next week Joe Biden himself was aping the Republican National Convention. Which brings me to the object of this addendum. Among the reasons for my conservatism is my confidence and even my faith in the people of this greatest nation that ever there was, that they're quite the most extraordinary race, that they know better what's good for them than their elite, and that they most emphatically are not stupid. And consequently it's my conviction that a national political campaign which depends for its premise on the towering stupidity of the people, is bound to lose. But it's up to Trump and his campaign and to Republicans and conservatives more generally to say the words.

The American press in 2020 are functionally a party press as in an authoritarian or totalitarian one-party state; their purpose at present is to drag Joe Biden's carcass over the finish line and to destroy utterly Trump and all his works, so they can scarcely be expected to explain to the people that Biden is lying to them, lies on a scale unknown in American elections. And so I propose, in the spirit of my unsolicited advice just below, a 15-second spot for full saturation at once, bearing in mind that a lie in a campaign is an opportunity, that to demonstrate to the people that the other fellow is lying to them, may be to bury him electorally:

    

"They don't tell little lies in the Democrat Party. 

Joe Biden expects you to believe that the Democrat rioters are Republican rioters, and the Democrat lockdowns are Republican lockdowns.

Joe Biden is lying to you, and he thinks you're stupid.  

I'm Donald Trump and I approved this message."

  

Urgency and clarity

-Support for law enforcement and punishment for law-breaking always and everywhere.
-A Made in America Policy to repatriate American manufacturing from China.
-A moratorium on immigration at least until the United States is returned to full employment.
-Assurance of protections for pre-existing conditions.

Four little lines. Write them up into a joint, national platform for President Trump and Republicans standing for Congress, and the republic is saved. And that's to start; I offer herewith several useful points which it may behoove the winningest party in the greatest nation to commit to memory and to recite with some regularity. 

Biden's official platform may be the first major-party platform for president which itself is the case against its candidate:

-Biden promises to legalize the estimated 22 million illegal aliens and suspend enforcement of immigration law.
-Biden promises to abolish bail nationwide.
-Biden promises to abolish nationwide the single-family-dwelling zoning that preserves suburbs.
-Biden promises to abolish "shareholder capitalism".
-Biden promises to reconsider the wages of whites to adjust for "systemic racism".

That oughtta suffice to drive Biden's share of the vote to 20%, and it's found in black-and-white among the hundred-some-odd pages of Biden's official campaign platform, if only some Republican someplace would utter the words, sometime before election day.

A little take-no-prisoners sloganeering:

-Wherever Democrats can't lose elections, life becomes unlivable.
-Where Democrats have the run of the country, the country looks like the loser in a war.
-Life under Democrats in 2020, in a word: You may not get a haircut but you may smash up and burn down the barbershop.
-The rioters and arsonists and looters and statue-topplers are Democrats to a man, and the politicians who stand down their law enforcement for the mob also are Democrats; to reward the party that smashes up and burns down the country with total power to "reimagine" our country and our lives, would be to hire the pyromaniac as chief of the fire department.   
-Vote Democrat for the race war, violence, destruction, lawlessness, poverty, decay, squalor, and general societal collapse.
-Vote Republican to Make America Great Again; vote Democrat to make of it a Third World squat.

And on foreign policy:

-Biden was Obama's point-man on Iraq; he left us with a third Iraq war.
-Biden was Obama's point-man on Ukraine; on his watch Russia invaded Ukraine.
-Biden was Obama's point-man on China; he gave the country away to China for $1.5 billion to his son's phony firm.

Republicans generally have made a serviceable job of recounting Trump's triumphs, his renaissance in the economy and the national power in the three years before the Chinese invasion that is coronavirus, but they neglect some points that aren't to be neglected, not least:

-After two years of Trump America exported more energy than we import for the first time since the 1950s.
-In three years of Trump America built 12,000 factories with a net of half a million jobs in manufacturing.

-Obama-Biden left America and the world with a third Iraq war; Trump had won that war in his first eleven months, and a year later he had made the difference in Syria, vanquishing ISIS which was born under Obama and thrived so long as Obama was commander-in-chief.  

Urgency and clarity, there's no urgency and clarity. The old hands are slow hands; they speak and think about the election as though 2020 is 2008 and Republicans will roar back soon enough even if they do drop this one, but very plainly the Democrat plan is that if the Rs lose this vote then they'll never win another: the Biden platform promises to pack the electorate with tens of millions of new Democrat voters from the Latin American Third World, and be assured that's one campaign promise they'd get around to in time for the next election. So that if election night is a bad night for Republicans then the country goes the way of Seattle and Portland, Chicago and Baltimore, California and New York, where Democrats can't lose and Republicans need not apply, and wherever Democrats can't lose elections, life becomes unlivable.

The Democrats promise to snatch away the very suburbs and security of white America, so that there'll be noplace but the hills to run from the race war, no remit from the cultural revolution, no refuge from the terror. But those designs of the Democrats are themselves the case against the Democrats. Urgency and clarity: they'd carry a Republican repudiation of the Democrats and the Left on November 3, if only some Republican someplace would utter the words, sometime before election day.

Leftism and totalitarianism

The impulse of leftism always and everywhere is to totalitarianism. Leftism is not an understanding that any ordinary soul arrives at by living and learning, but a construct and a conceit, and a program for the national suicide: "We must fling our borders open wide to the numberless masses who hate us and all we hold dear"; "We must empty the menaces to society from the jails into the society"; "We must stand down our law enforcement for the vicious, violent mobs who smash and burn our cities"; etc., etc. Because leftism is a suicide pact for a nation, no nation can be expected to accept it, and so the nation must be tricked or trained into leftism; leftism must must be taught and it must be enforced. And because leftism must be taught and enforced, to seize a society and to hold it, leftism must necessarily descend into totalitarianism.

Hear the screams and answer them; The lockdown Left; Accessory to the crime of coronavirus; Sucker subscribers; Round is for squares

Hear the screams and answer them 

Two of the three battles in the war for the future, to my way of thinking, and the two that are fought on the field of politics and government, are cutting very emphatically rightward since the bug. USA Today-Ipsos finds the people want a moratorium even on legal immigration and from all countries, 79-11% -- i.e., the people are far to the right of the rightwardmost president on his rightwardmost issue. And it's 90% in the Pew poll who recognize China as a threat. The people are screaming for an assertive conservative ascendancy in the national politics, to slam shut America's door, if not also to starve out the illegals and bolt the door behind them, and to break from China and break Chinese power. I pray God that Trump and his campaign, and every Republican standing for Congress, hear the screams and answer them, and that Trump carries a workable Republican majority in the House as well as the Senate on his coattails come November 3. Sina delenda est.

The lockdown Left  

To every conservative the lockdown was an emergency measure at the height of a crisis, a calculated overreaction, a blunt instrument and a necessary evil, to be enforced by voluntary compliance and never punitive coercion, and above all to be dismantled at the first opportunity. But for the Left the lockdown was a new way of life, an opportunity to reset society and "reimagine" it (in the words of Andrew Cuomo of New York, America's foremost governor-jailer), an excuse to make a welfare case of every able American, a cover for enacting the totality of the leftist program having nothing to do with coronavirus, and a license to indulge every abusive impulse in their petty, vicious leftist souls, to punish conservative America and impoverish business, even to suspend democracy and liberty (the mayor of New York only the other day forbade protests indefinitely).

I can't claim to have familiarized myself with the polling on the question of lockdowns and lifting them, but I know well enough that the lockdowns were blunt-instrument emergency policy, that if we don't get back to business we'll be eating dirt for dinner, and that the people want their lives back and they never elected some governor to "reimagine" their society. The abuse and the malice and the brutal stupidity in the lockdowns by Democrat governors and mayors and lesser enforcers have been an education in 21st Century leftism, and in an election year too.

The accessory to the crime that is coronavirus

One out of three ain't good: the World Health Organization at its top turns out to be unconcerned for "world health", although it is at least an "organization", but then so is the mob. The globalists like the WHO, the Left and the press, even The Great Gates, turn out in the end to be China-ists, frantic to rescue Chinese communism and Chinese power.

In this costliest crime in history that is coronavirus, the "World Health" Organization is an accessory, at every turn promulgating the propaganda of the Beijing regime under their United Nations imprimatur, spreading China's lies and its disease and advancing the Chinese conspiracy: the WHO insisted for a month and a half after China knew better, until it was too late on January 22, that coronavirus was not communicable between humans; they scolded the governments of the world to keep our doors open wide to travel from China and thus to the infection of our societies by a Chinese disease more contagious than flu by 300%; they counseled us counterintuitively that masks were bad, as China hoarded masks; and then once China had sprayed its contagion to every corner of the planet, the WHO screamed "3.4% mortality!" -- the figure claimed in that time by China and catastrophically worse than the true rate which looks to be something nearer to half a percent, as was reckoned by the CDC from the first -- and the world outside China duly collapsed in panic, our economies and governments and societies pulverized like hasn't been seen since the Second World War at least.

"Dr." Tedros is the first director-general of the WHO who's no doctor: he's an Ethiopian Maoist recognized as a fellow-traveler by the Chinese Communist Party and installed at the top of the WHO in '17 in a Chinese power-play; he belongs to a political party recognized by the State Department in his time as a terrorist organization; and Tedros' greatest work in medicine before ascending to director-general of World Health was sheltering his government in Ethiopia from political difficulty by concealing no fewer than three outbreaks of cholera, by conveniently re-classifying the cholera mortality as death by diarrhea.

The very name "COVID-19" was a favor by the WHO to the Beijing regime, to obviate the source of the virus in a word untranslatable into Mandarin. The WHO at its top manifestly cares nothing for the world or for health, and as the criminal in the crime of coronavirus is the Beijing regime, so the WHO is the accessory to that crime, without which China could not have hoped to drag 180 countries down with it into its horror and ruin.

Sucker subscribers 

The third of those three battles in the war for the future is perfectly impervious to elections, namely the battle to break the monopoly of the Left on the institutions. Since the advent of Obama a decade ago leftism as an electoral proposition has turned ever more rarefied and less populist, ever more abhorrent to the masses who are not elites, ever madder, ever more a pact for national suicide; but in that same time leftism as the doctrine and dogma of institutional America, big business included, has gone from prevailing ethos to monopoly of thought. And no institution in America is more driven by leftism and more a driver of leftism than the artless art and unentertaining entertainment that is film and television.

Television and film in America, 2020 is uniformly unworthy and unwatchable, uniformly the doing of mediocrities and poseurs and pygmies, and unremittingly political. It's my fear that the unwatchable in movies and shows is by now effectively subsidized, by the untold millions of subscribers to the big streaming services, who'll pay their monthly or yearly subscriptions without a thought to the unnumbered unwatchable titles produced or purchased on the strength of those subscriptions. You wouldn't watch it but you'll pay for it, because if your subscription doesn't roll over then you're bereft of that one show you care for.

And so the market is abolished, and we forfeit our right to vote with our feet. The audience is the elites who produce and purchase the titles, with their elite preferences and prejudices and preoccupations. If it meets with the approval of the muckety-muck at Netflix then it's a sale, and the sucker subscribers will cover the cost even if they can't stand to look at the first frame.

Round is for squares

The trouble with the fashion elite, excepting that rarefied, Lagerfeldian class of elite fashion, is that they're mad for novelty, and never get around to the question of "But is it good?" In the same way that the Left believe in change for its own sake, the fashion elite are believers in novelty for its own sake. Introduce a square wheel and they'll pronounce that round is for squares, and never mind that a square wheel can't roll.

China and the bug: Not so much theory as conspiracy

So the rightward-most, righter-even-than-Trump-and-Hannity, hard-Right and alt-Right, "fear-mongering" and "warmongering", "xenophobic" and "nativist", "racist" and "white nationalist" and "yellow peril"-ist, anticommunist China-hawk, red-in-tooth-and-claw-red-state-redneck, Peasants Party Freedom Caucus Radical Republican, conservative-to-out-conservative-the-conservatives, all-American rah-rah-siss-boom-bah America Firsters, WERE AGAIN THE ONLY ONES TO GET IT RIGHT, and we had it right from the first, back when "coronavirus" was a punchline of the Left and the elite, who conceived it as a sort of hoax of "racist" Republicans. The bug came from the lab.

Coronavirus is not less than the costliest crime in history.

"If the Chicoms truly believed China's 'wet markets' were the source of this virus which hit China first and hardest, then would it not behoove them to shutter those markets, and inasmuch as the totalitarian dictatorship of China has permitted the reopening of the wet markets nationally, what are we left to infer about Beijing's understanding of the true cause of coronavirus?"

"The government of China damned Trump for slamming America's door on China, and threatened the lesser leaders of the lesser nations against doing as Trump had done, long after China's leadership understood that travel abroad from China would spray their contagion to every corner of the planet, so does it not stand to reason that the communist regime in Beijing calculated that coronavirus had knocked China prostrate and the best they could do was to drag the wide world down with them?" What I didn't appreciate by the time I wrote that latter conjecture was that China had forbidden travel from Wuhan to the rest of China, at the same time they demanded travel from China to the wide world including direct from Wuhan.

In light of that and of the explosive developments of April 15, and considering that China at that same time lied to the WHO and through the WHO to the world to conceal the scale of coronavirus, I'd be a fool if I didn't suspect that China's campaign to keep the borders of the world open wide was a calculation, a policy to infect every country on every continent with the Chinese disease, to play the Maoist and seize the opportunity to do to the world deliberately what China had first done through negligence and incompetence to itself.

Now to the question of coronavirus as good-faith medical research, or research for purposes of biological warfare. In 21st Century China all advanced technology and all advanced knowledge is military advancement. Western businesses with operations in China, businesses even which don't make for a very obvious military application like Google, are subject to China's "forced transfer of technology" policy, whereby any technology or knowledge developed by those businesses and unknown to China, is seized by  Chinese authorities for the People's Liberation Army. Forced technology transfer is no mysterious or obscure feature of business in China; it's been the fraught subject of Sino-American trade negotiations.

So the dear reader will pardon me if I can't accept that the Maoist dictatorship of China who seize even innocuous technologies for their People's Liberation Army, would never dream of a military application for their own research into viruses, viruses including the Wuhan coronavirus which has just now flattened every economy and society and government worth bothering about, and bearing in mind that global dominion is the express object of the government of China, stated in so many words and repeated routinely.

And at all events the question as a practical matter in the here-and-now, is moot: "If coronavirus is not a Chinese biowar program gone awry, how would it be any different if it were?" "If a general marched into a lab and ordered the boys in the lab coats to isolate or manipulate a virus for flattening an enemy society in the space of weeks, how would the virus they worked up look any different from coronavirus?"

As of April 15 in this annus horribilis of 2020 it is established that the worst estimation of China and the bug, was the truest. Then later that same day the news comes over the transom that China is testing The Bomb, notwithstanding the conventions against nuclear tests.

Coronavirus may be our last but best hope to break from China and to break China, to break communist Chinese power. Sina delenda est.

Leftism as luxury in the crisis of coronavirus, and the Chinese infection as invasion

Leftism as luxury in the crisis of coronavirus

I can't know the future but this I know: when the people are reminded that the world is more lions than lambs and more thorns than roses, when they're reminded that our Garden of Eden was built and must be kept up and the wilderness kept out, then they are reminded also that leftism is a luxury, and their impulse is to conservatism. I've studied it as closely as I've studied any mass phenomenon in history, and for one chapter of my life I lived it: when the people are reminded of their fragility they run to the strong, paternal arms of conservatism. "Conservatism" means literally to save and preserve; it's an impulse and a philosophy, and in America it's also the winningest political proposition.

Which brings us to the present crisis. As late as March 11, when America fell fully and finally into the panic of the pandemic, the WHO declared Europe the epicenter of the pandemic, and President Trump moved to slam shut America's door to Europe, the Democrat House of Representatives damned Trump's America First defense of the people against the virus, and moved in their No Ban Act to forbid his exercising that plenary power of the presidency to seal the border for the national defense. When on January 31, just ten days after the first confirmation of coronavirus in the United States, Trump declared a public health emergency, instituted the first system of quarantines in half a century, and slammed the door on China, the now-presumptive Democrat nominee for president Joe Biden damned him as "xenophobic" and "hysterical" and "fear-mongering". As late as that aforesaid March 11 the Democrat mayor of New York urged the people of New York to go out on the town, in keeping with the campaign by New York Democrats since January 31 to defy and damn those measures to save the people from the virus, as "xenophobic" or "racist". New York by now accounts for a third of the U.S. mortality from coronavirus.

By March 22 the Democrat House had been in recess for their spring break for a week, while the Republican Senate and Trump White House had worked day and night for seven days until they concluded a compromise, consensus coronavirus relief and recovery bill, cowritten and approved by Senate Democrats; and then on Sunday night Nancy Pelosi jetted into Washington from San Francisco, and blew it up. The Pelosi Democrat House declined their consent to the relief and recovery, unless and until their demands were met as follows: racial quotas and racial reports and racial enforcement in big businesses accepting federal loans; "carbon reports" on all civilian flights and "carbon offsets" for every breath of fuel in American commercial aviation in just five years; more tax credits for wind and solar; free college for students carrying student loans; the rewriting of election law to benefit Democrat candidates in the 50 states, which presumably is not even within the federal jurisdiction; the rewriting of collective bargaining to benefit Democrat unions; the extension of visas for lawful immigrants and the waiver of immigration law for illegal aliens; bonus funding for cities defying the enforcement of immigration law; free cellphones for Democrat constituencies; free retirements for employees of "community newspapers"; the absorption by the federal taxpayer of the debt accumulated by the post office; and $35 million for the Kennedy Center, among still more demands having not a thing to do with coronavirus or its economic ruin.

The Democrats had miscalculated three ways, at least: the country had no patience now for political games and political blackmail; had the country wished for that wish list then they'd never have made a Senate leader of Mitch McConnell and a president of Donald Trump; and the country couldn't afford that wish list even when we were richer than ever we were, on the day before the bug, so astronomical boondoggles and burdens like that Democrat Wish List look as remote as the stars, now we're spending half again as much as we spend on everything in a year, on a single bill to yank us from the hole China has landed us in.

In the event the bill as passed that Friday was ninety-some-odd-percent as agreed on Sunday; Pelosi had succeeded mostly in delaying the emergency measure by a week, and a week in the coronavirus crisis might as well be a year. Pelosi's Democrat House played the neighbor to a house afire, who saunters over and offers to help pull the family and dog and prized possessions from the burning house, but not before we sign three little papers: we'll carry his mortgage, we'll pay out the lease on his car, and while we're about it we'll put his rotten kid through college too.

Unless the press have managed to conceal all that from the people, the lesson can only be, leftism is a luxury. And just now we're sold out of luxury. 2020 already has been a year of twists and Election Day is seven months off yet, so I can't claim to know the future, but I know Donald J. Trump is the singular president for this crisis and the recovery from it too, and I believe the average American can't fail to notice that despite the best efforts of the press who stand between the people and their president, and I know that to be reminded of our fragility is to be reminded of our conservatism.

The Chinese infection as invasion 

Now that even India, on the point of overtaking China as the world's most populous country, has fallen to the bug, complete with nationwide shuttering, it strikes me that this global pandemic and global depression must be the greatest devastation all told since the Second World War. We're assured that this uncommonly contagious, novel, lethal virus which has devastated the planet like no outbreak in 101 years at least and which by China's own admission first manifest a matter of miles from one of China's virology labs and a matter of yards from another, is not a Chinese biowar program gone awry or in any way deliberate, but how would coronavirus be any different if it were a Chinese biowar program gone awry or if it were the deliberate devastation of the globe by a communist dictatorship open in its ambition for global dominion?

And for our purposes now the question is moot: it is inarguable fact that as late as January 14 China lied and the World Health Organization at the United Nations promulgated the lie as medical science to the world, that coronavirus was not even contagious among humans. As late as middle-January in this year of 2020 China insisted and the WHO accepted that there was "Nothing to see here, folks." It is inarguable fact that well after the Chinese leadership understood the nature and scale of coronavirus, they damned Trump for closing America's border to China and threatened lesser leaders in lesser nations against doing as Trump had done, leaving the world open wide to this Chinese invasion. China sprayed its contagion to every corner of the planet, and wittingly.

And tabulating the dead and wounded, the terror and horror, the strain and dislocation, and the economic ruin, even the military deployments in combating the contagion, how in its effect is coronavirus different from a war waged on every continent at once, by China? How in its effect would coronavirus be any different, if it weren't an infection but an invasion, by hostile forces of the People's Liberation Army, of the wide world? Had the People's Liberation Army invaded every continent in January then surely some agreement and alliance would've formed against China, and some action been taken. And so again I ask, how in its effect is China's coronavirus any different from a Chinese war on the world?  

The "divided country" comes in for a comeuppance; Impeachment impeached; What they don't remember and I can't forget

The "divided country" comes in for a comeuppance

The conventional wisdom has it that ours is a "divided country", and conventional wisdom is only mostly bollocks, so it may be that this is one of those twice-a-day when the stopped clock gets it right, but it's past time the conventional wisdom came in for a comeuppance.

I sometimes wonder whether those people who cry "divided country" are less than proficient in the language, and sometimes whether they were born yesterday: I've heard "divided country" invoked to account for what is plainly "polarization", not division among the people but disparity between the parties, and I've heard "divided country" as though it were some singular feature of our age, that we were skipping along in contented comity until The Advent of The Orange. It was a handful of votes in one state that decided the presidency in 2000, then in '12 the presidency was decided by something like 400,000 votes spread over four states -- I could go on, but that "divided country" business would seem to obtain with some frequency in just these two decades, two presidential elections of four before Trump's.

Then there are the great questions of the age. Securing the border was the principal cause of the Trump campaign, and manifestly that's a question of national consensus: the Democrats won the House in '18 promising "border security", in maybe the boldest fraud and most perfect inversion of the truth I've seen in 14 election cycles. Some part of Trump's presidency has been given over to confronting China, another of those great questions of the age untouched before Trump, and on China the Hate Trump Party take care to pose for the people as standing with Trump, so I can only conclude that Trump's taking the lead pipe to China's kneecaps also is a point of agreement. Trump's disruptive, revisionist policy on trade has passed its Congressional tests with near-unanimity so again I can only conclude that trade is still another question of national consensus. And there is the rebuilding of the forces and of the roads and bridges, Trump's issues and consensus issues.

And as ever, "It's the economy, Stupid," and on that point don't take my word for it: Jim Cramer who's no great friend to Trump concluded late last year that Trump's economy is "the best of our lives." Only lately Gallup found that "personal satisfaction" was never higher, an impossible 90%. So presumably the Trumpian economic program which has wrought what may be the greatest and broadest and deepest prosperity in any society at any age, is another of those questions of national consensus, and not a small one. Anyone might point to questions that split more evenly, but there's more consensus where that came from.

It strikes me that the claim of a "divided country" coincides very neatly with the election of Donald Trump, and that it would make a convenient means for those people who claim it, of denying Trump's triumph and their defeat. If the country is "divided" then there's no winner and no loser, we haven't won and they haven't lost. Maybe they're right, maybe we're split up the middle, but we'll know soon enough, on Election Night in nine months, whether they've not lost and we've not won.

Impeachment impeached

If I were King of America, I'd decree two changes at least to the impeachment of a president. First, no 24 hours unbroken of arguments in the Senate trial, but the morning for the prosecution and the afternoon for the defense, then the defense gets the morning and the prosecution takes the afternoon, and so on. Under the rules as approved by the Senate in 1999 and affirmed in 2020, the defense sits silent for the better part of a week while a mountain of half-truths and untruths out of the other side go unanswered, and without provision for interjecting with objections, then when finally the defense gets its at-bat, there's no provision for the prosecution to answer any points of fact and arguments out of the defense which had been unknown or unanticipated.

But more than that, I'd amend the Constitution to make a partisan impeachment a practical impossibility: removal demands a vote of at least two-thirds in the Senate, so apply that same threshold to the House, raise the bar for impeachment to two-thirds and there'll be no more of this pointless, baseless partisan impeachment paralyzing the national government. Impeachment and removal are reserved for the most extraordinary national emergency and national consensus, and the two-thirds threshold for the Senate reflects that, but then that standard is exploded by the low bar in the House, a simple majority of fifty-plus-one partisan pygmies.

Unless the partisanship and paralysis that was the impeachment of President Trump is punished by the people in November, and brutally, the House Democrats like the teenager whose keys to the family car are snatched away by the grown-ups, we've no right to be surprised if impeachment takes its place as just another tool in the box for hysterical partisans in the House of Representatives, and at all events the threshold is set so low as to invite abuse.

What they don't remember and I can't forget

A vote in my high school history class in Canada a couple years after the Gulf War of 1991 went something like 28-2 against George H. W. Bush's declining to "roll onto Baghdad" and "finish the job"; America was held by the class to have been mistaken in not carrying the Kuwait war over the border into Iraq to tear down the monstrous and menacing Saddam Hussein regime and institute a decent national government in its place -- and those two dissents were the exceptions that proved the rule, namely me and a friend of mine seated next to me and watching my vote. Until '98 it was America's not going to war in Iraq that was Canada's indictment of America. And in America for a decade before the Iraq War of 2003 the consensus had it that we had been mistaken in not "rolling onto Baghdad". I lived it and I can't forget it.

The air strikes and air wars against Iraq carried on through the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, including a matter of days before Clinton's inauguration in January of '93, and in December of '98 when Clinton ordered a three-day air war on Iraq a matter of hours before the scheduled vote on his impeachment. And in later years it was practically daily that Hussein's forces fired on allied aircraft patrolling the No-Fly Zone which Hussein had conceded by treaty, with practically daily return fire.

As a young conservative and a contrarian I only ever resisted the consensus that Iraq ought to have been invaded and its regime toppled, for the reasons that it looked to be a bigger and messier business than it was worth, and that there had been cause for hope within Iraq of a coup or revolution. Until in 1998 the accumulation of Hussein's defiance of the United Nations weapons inspections and the routine air strikes and air wars to keep him in his box, with the recognition that Hussein had consolidated his power, tipped the balance of cost and benefit, for me and for the Congress and president. It was 1998 that a Republican Congress and Democrat president committed the United States as national policy to regime change in Iraq, seconded emphatically by Britain's Labour Prime Minister Blair.

And whatever became of those weapons of mass destruction by the time American forces swept over Iraq in '03, it was no fantasy and no lie that Hussein was armed with WMDs because he had put them to use -- ten times. Then there are the resolutions of the UN Security Council which Hussein had defied, or the great majority demanding the Iraq War before the war, including Joe Biden and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, and the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force which was America's declaration of war on the Hussein regime, passed by a Republican House and Democrat Senate.

And that's off the top of my head, two decades hence. Our effort in Iraq, first tearing down one of the more monstrous and menacing regimes since 1945 and then instituting in its place a living democracy, was not some conspiracy on the people and the world by some cabal of "neocons", but the enactment of the consensus of a decade.

China the pretender, and the manifest superiority of feet and inches

China the pretender

Twice in the 20th Century Germany bid fair to master the world, and no sooner had we put paid to Germany than Russia threatened global dominion through its empire called the Soviet Union, but we faced down communism until that madness too collapsed. It's within my time, the '80s and into the '90s, that the conventional wisdom had it that we were being overtaken by Japan, which by the middle-'90s was an amusing remembrance. And in the '90s too the European Union was thought or hoped to be the future, a United States of Europe to overtake the United States complete with a unitary European armed forces, but Europe is decadent, weak and soft, and it always was a crazy-quilt of tribes, millennia before Brexit was a twinkle in the eye of Nigel Farage. Always the realities are reasserted, always America finds its feet and knocks the other fellow from his, always the challenger to Anglo-American ascendancy is seized by its own demons and cast down again into irrelevance or worse. 

So now that China takes its turn, I can only bet on form. When it'll come, or how, I cannot conceive, but in the end China is a big country with problems to match, a Third World country with 24-karat fillings, and the vote to shake the earth on November 8 of 2016 may turn out to have been the beginning of the end for China's good run, a run on artificial and transient advantage: currency manipulation and books-cooking, patent-thievery and corporate espionage and the outright seizure of Western technology by the People's Liberation Army, administrative convenience for Western supply lines, and above all sweatshop wages that could be had also in India or Indonesia or Vietnam, even. We've let it go too far for too long -- Clinton steered us wrong on China, and Bush and Obama drifted along that wrong turn -- and there may be a price to be paid for that, in troubles I shudder to consider, but in the end we won't be speaking Chinese.

The manifest superiority of feet and inches

Obviously the foot is a practical and human everyday unit of measure, where meters are too big and centimeters and millimeters too small, but more than that, the metric ten divides evenly only into halves and useless fifths; the Anglo-American twelve divides evenly into halves and thirds and quarters. A quarter of ten is 2.5; a third is 3.333333333 to infinity. And then for measures of less than an inch the principle is simple, sensible doubling: half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth. A little more than a half is three-quarters; a little more than three-quarters is seven-eighths; and a little more than seven-eighths is fifteen-sixteenths. And that's to say nothing of the poetry in "five-foot-two" or "inch by inch".