Science Matters

Daniel Gelernter has some interesting ideas about where things may be headed in this turbulent time in US politics.  His article is Why Is the GOP Glad Trump Lost?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Establishment Republicans will learn the hard way how very much they have lost in helping Joe Biden win the way he did.

A little after 2 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, protesters crashed into the U.S. Capitol and forced a halt in the certification of the electoral vote. As the Senate reconvened that night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), speaking as though he had just survived 9/11, condemned the “thugs” waving flags who had forced them to run away for a few hours. Man of the People Mitt Romney, who probably will not repeat his mistake of flying commercial, called the Capitol storm “an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States.”

If you wonder where these big politicians were last year when people were having their businesses closed down by government mandates or watching their cars torched by Antifa with Molotov cocktails, the answer is they were most likely in incredibly comfortable homes, enjoying taxpayer-guaranteed salaries and genuinely insane expense accounts, secure in the knowledge that, whatever happens—whether they return to Capitol Hill for the rest of their lives or are forced one day into semi-retirement on K Street—they will never again have to live like “normal people.”

And when they blame President Trump for the Capitol protest, they are doubly foolish and doubly deceived.

First, they implicitly deny that these protestors had any reason to be upset. Even the CHAZ protestors who demolished central Seattle were granted the presumption that they might have had reasons, however misguided.  But the Capitol Hill protestors had already been told, repeatedly, by the news media, social media, and their political leaders, to shut up and go home. And yet they didn’t—so it must be Trump’s fault.

The idea that a large part of America genuinely could be infuriated by the behavior of our elected officials has not dawned on them. When they get yelled at on planes, they think, “Why don’t my constituents believe me? Why don’t they trust me? It’s Trump’s fault!”

But they never ask themselves if they might have given their constituents legitimate reasons not to trust them. Did they ever, for example, vote to send a $10 million check to Pakistan and a $600 check to some Americans? Would that upset anyone?

Today, these politicians are breathing a sigh of relief—their second mistake: “My constituents trusted me before Trump came,” they think. “Now that he’s on the way out the door, they will trust me again!” They believe that Trump not being president means that they can go back to vacuuming up money and power just as before. They think Trump is finished.

In reality, they are finished.

Trump could have announced the formation of a new political party. A majority of Republican voters probably would have followed him. Eventually, after a few election cycles of mutual destruction, the rest of the GOP reluctantly would acquiesce in a new party which would likely have many of the same ills as the old. Instead, Trump has made clear his intention of primarying every Republican who opposed airing election fraud claims in court.

Career GOP politicians will spend the next several years watching “their” party rapidly remade in what they mistakenly believe to be Trump’s image. But it is actually the image of a large part of America that feels totally ignored.

The principals that Trump represents do not start and end with Trump. Limited regulation, limited government, low taxes, fair trade, stricter immigration laws, belief in God and in the earnest goodness of the average American, a weariness of foreign wars and entanglements: You might call it George Washington conservatism. These ideas have been absent from politics for at least 30 years, as voters had a choice between the party of big government and the party that claims to prefer limited government but also embraces big government.

These are the ideas Trump has expressed and on which he governed.. America First: You mind your business and we’ll mind ours.

If a politician rolls his eyes at that suggestion, he’ll never understand why the people don’t want him. He’ll never understand why those angry Americans were at the Capitol the other day. He’ll never understand why he lost his seat and had to become a highly paid consultant instead of a highly paid public servant.

When Trump tells his supporters that the journey is only beginning, the leftist media and conservative elite bite their collective nails—Does this mean Trump will come back? Not necessarily. It means that the movement Trump has started will go on no matter what—it means that America will come back.

We’ve been terribly governed for large parts of the last century, and before. How would you feel if one day the government told you you weren’t allowed to buy or drink alcohol, and that if you owned a distillery you’d just lost your livelihood? Of course that happened in 1920, and most Americans responded by quietly disobeying the law. Most politicians also disobeyed the law, but in much greater comfort and with the tacit approval of their friends in law enforcement. The arrival of organized crime in America was an unintended consequence.

How would you feel if the government declared that employers couldn’t raise wages? That happened in 1942. Employers skirted the law by creating the concept of “health benefits,” which did not count as wages. That had the unintended consequence of spawning a monster health insurance industry that destroyed private medical care in America.

One day in the future Americans might be told that their guns are illegal and must be turned in—and the government would probably discover that Americans somehow own vastly fewer guns than was thought. And that might have the unintended consequence of all those missing guns showing up one day in the hands of a well-regulated and very displeased militia.

Americans will not submit themselves to laws that they, on a large scale, think unjust. Nor will they submit themselves to be governed by leaders whom they, on a large scale, do not believe are elected. In 1960, Nixon decided it would be best to hush up his having been cheated out of the presidency. He was well-intentioned, but he was wrong. Trump knows that stealing an election isn’t a personal affront—it’s an attack on every American who casts a ballot. Precisely the opposite of the media’s demented obsession, Trump is one of the very few people in politics who understand that it isn’t just about him.

By pretending that it is all about him, our big-shot politicians have an excuse to ignore the Americans whom Trump has represented.

But the George Washington conservatives are awake now, and they will find other voices, and more voices. Trump will be with them, but they will find new leaders as well. They don’t want much—put in a single phrase their demands boil down to “Leave us alone!” A Biden Administration, unelected though it may be, can survive if it listens to that very basic demand. But the GOP will learn the hard way how very much they have lost in helping Biden win the way he did.

See also posts by David Gelernter (Daniel’s father?):

The Real Reason They Hate Trump

How Science Is Losing Its Humanity

It was always fashionable to trash talk Trump, but to my surprise it has only grown in political correctness post election this year.  For those who wonder why they are so consumed with the need to disparage him, Conrad Black explains in his article today: Establishment’s Threat of Impeachment a Confession of Failure.  An excerpt below is in italics with my bolds and images.

It all begs the question of why Trump’s enemies are still so fanatical in their efforts to separate him from his huge following and destroy him politically, in Stalinist fashion. In part, the Democrats seem now to be addicted to the practice of distracting the public from the political unacceptability of their own program and record by a febrile defamation of the president.

He is not and never in his adult life was a racist or sexist. He has a number of annoying mannerisms. They can be seen by everyone and voters decide for themselves whether they outweigh the president’s better qualities and achievements.

The obsessive desire to destroy Trump even as he leaves the presidency cannot be based on anything but fear of a man who has successfully defied the political establishment, exposed it as substantially a failure, and exploited the fact that the pre-Trump status quo was despised by a majority of Americans.

The logical and creditable response to the collapse in the prestige of the country’s orthodox leaders is to raise their game, put up better candidates in both the parties (not the dismal selection of senatorial candidates available to Georgia’s voters last week), and produce some original policies. Instead, they have just tried to stone to death the person who did produce original policies.

Serving the Country Well

The political establishment has tragically missed the point: if it had been serving the country well Trump would not have been elected four years ago.  If he had not been a capable president most of his policies would not have been effectively endorsed in the congressional and state elections across the country. Those whom he displaced would not have had to resort to such extremes to evict him from the White House.

Polls indicate uniformly that barely 10 percent of Americans respect the legislators in the Congress and no more than 15 percent of Americans believe their media. Even the questionable election revealed that 48 percent of Americans preferred Trump to the candidate of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia and the media and social media, despite the Democrats’ huge financial advantage and wall-to-wall media defamation of the incumbent.

The pre-Trump decades brought endless, fruitless war in the Middle East, with an accompanying humanitarian disaster; the greatest economic crisis in the world in 80 years; more than ten million unskilled illegal migrants flooding across the southern border; immense trade deficits; alarming advances by China at America’s expense; and Trump’s predecessors were swindled by North Korea and Iran.

Trump addressed these problems; the dire predictions of his dangerous incompetence came to nothing, his vote total grew by 20 percent between elections, and his party did well in congressional and state elections.

Yet his opponents didn’t respond with better candidates or policies, they exhumed the defeated candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and set them atop a Sanders-Warren far-left program, ignored the worst rioting in the country for over fifty years, apart from defunding police and engineering huge spikes in violent crime, and exploited the COVID crisis to adopt election laws that incite the inference that the election has been stolen.

And they got a free pass when the Supreme Court declined to hear the complaint from Texas supported by eighteen other states that four states had failed to assure a fair presidential election. Trump’s 74 million supporters were left with nothing to do except protest.

Only Alternative

In falsely accusing Trump of inciting insurrection, they have again ignored the public desire for better government and have effectively confirmed Donald Trump as the only alternative to the present familiar source of poor government. Joe Biden’s response to the outrages at the Capitol were that Trump had deliberately incited it, that the motives of the rioters were racist, that the Capitol Police were racists, that Trump was reminiscent of Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, and then Biden called for national unity.

Trump made a serious mistake in imagining and publicly asking that Vice President Pence reject the determination by the Senate of the Electoral College vote. Pence had no authority to do anything of the kind. But Pence’s election was as much violated as Trump’s and if he attends the inauguration now, Pence will be choosing the Democratic antics over this own party and needlessly compromise his political future.

Impeachment is nonsense, Trump won’t resign and an inept government won’t be able to use defamation and dirty tricks as a substitute for public service for long.

If Trump is the only person who can defend the people against incompetent administration, cowardly legislators and jurists, and a system that has become largely rotten and doesn’t run honest elections or even fair trials, (98 percent conviction rate and a quarter of the world’s prison population), while a totalitarian woke media and dictatorial censors of social media silence dissent, his influence will rise and not be dissipated.

John Solomon writes with perspective about what happened along with advice for the future of the republic in his article How the GOP lost control of Washington, and what comes next.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

News Analysis: Democrats owned the narrative and rules of the 2020 election. Will Republicans learn from it?

The November election (and Tuesday’s Georgia curtain call) wasn’t won and lost by the tactics, spending, individual players and messaging in the weeks before Nov. 3, according to interviews conducted with more than three dozen frontline players.

Rather, its outcome was cemented long before Labor Day 2020 by a Democratic machinery of former Barack Obama proteges, like David Plouffe, John Podesta, David Axelrod and Stacey Abrams, who worried far less about the tactics of ads, travel (Joe Biden hardly did!) and fundraising and far more about the strategy of how to control the narrative and the rules that would shape the outcome.

They even told the Republicans and the public what they planned to do. Just read Plouffe’s book, “A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump.” They even boastfully predicted days before how the vote count would roll out on election night and for several days later. Trump would lead early, and Biden would surpass late, they said.  They were right. Why?

Change the Rules in Your Favor

First and foremost, they usurped the powers of GOP-controlled state legislatures in the five battleground states and rewrote the rules of how votes would be cast and counted, using the pandemic as an excuse.

Mail ballots could be sent to everyone, even if they didn’t ask for one, and wide swaths of Americans could vote by mail. Voter ID requirements could be suspended for those who felt homebound by COVID’s wrath. Mobile ballot boxes could be deployed. Spoiled ballots that legally were supposed to be discarded could be “cured” by election clerks. Legally required voter roll purges could be skipped. And a single billionaire could donate $350 million directly to the election clerks, judges and vote counters in the states, requiring them in some cases to register voters, and create more poll locations in Democratic strongholds.

And Republicans — who controlled the legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona and the constitutional right to set the rules — hardly put up a fight. Instead, they urged their voters not to take advantage of the loosened rules and to vote the old-fashioned way. They, in the words of the Trump-loving Georgia Democrat Vernon Jones, simply unilaterally disarmed.

Democrats understood that in a pandemic and in an America with millions of new millennial, urban and minority voters, the easier you make casting a ballot the more likely a low-propensity voter is to vote. Send it to them, help them register, make easy drop-off locations or the mailbox the final destination, and voters will vote a lot more willingly.

In other words, the liberal brain trust engaged in cutting-edge warfare, while Republicans tossed their comfortable set of horseshoes from the 1980s, hoping the good old recipe of evangelical GOTV, direct mail, talk radio and Fox News would deliver yet another election win as it had done for decades.

It didn’t.

To be fair, Donald Trump mustered — by a mile — the largest national vote ever assembled by a Republican at 75 million-plus voters and barnstormed the country, risking COVID and criticism without fear. Kevin McCarthy picked an all-star slate of candidates and picked up seats. Mitch McConnell raised a ton of money, and Ronna McDaniel put together one of the most impressive get-out-the-vote efforts ever assembled.

But all that could not overcome the advantage of a rewired electoral system in the five battlegrounds, as the Georgia runoffs showed Tuesday, said Tom Price, a former congressman and Trump Cabinet secretary.

Democrats “leap-frogged Republicans’ process, strategy, technology and tactics, and that is to the credit of folks on the Democratic side,” Price told Just the News. “They have perfected harvesting, I believe it is harvesting, of absentee ballots, and I think the numbers will show in these runoff races, the same as they did in November, that Republicans who lost by close margins won the vote on Election Day, won on early voting in person and lost heavily in absentee ballots.”

Control the Narrative by Means of Media Allies

Secondly, liberals spent two decades building an alliance with the mainstream media, the social giants and the search giants and the permanent government bureaucracy until they could control the narrative, even when it wasn’t true. They had it perfected by the time Donald Trump took office.

Those who objected were canceled and shamed. Intelligence and law enforcement and private investigators were misused to create false realities. True facts and legally protected speech were outright censored long enough to create the narrative needed to win.

Trump colluded with Russia, and bribed Ukraine to investigate his political opponents … though he didn’t. The Hunter Biden corruption story was Russian-fed conspiracy theory …. though it is really true, and he was under criminal investigation the last two years … American towns could be burned to the ground and police defunded because a Kenosha, Wisc., officer shot an unarmed man … who turned out to be wanted by police and armed with a knife.

Owning the information superhighway of the 21st century, like the rules of the election, was far more powerful than choosing where to run ads, campaign in person or spend money.

Liberal Donors Contracted Returns on Their Investments

Finally, the liberal oligarchs club — George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Mike Bloomberg et al — spent more than ever to win. But they also transformed the way political donations were spent by imposing corporate governance and specific returns on investment.

Every recipient had to deliver very specific outcomes to keep getting money, governed by lengthy contract-like documents. And the outcomes and deliverables were mapped to the two larger goals of controlling the narrative and the rules of the election.

Advice:  Act Now to Change the Rules and Own the Narrative

That’s what interviews with three dozen experts revealed. So what do those same experts advise Republicans do to change their fortunes?  Exactly what the Democrats did. Don’t point fingers, change the rules, and own the narrative, they said.

Reset Rules for Fair Elections

Phill Kline, the former Kansas attorney general, led the Amistad Project’s efforts to challenge some of the Democrats rule changes. He said the the GOP legislatures in the key battlegrounds must reassert their constitutional right to set the rules of election.

Universal mail ballots can be ended, limited only to those who absolutely need it. Voter IDs can be mandated. Exemptions and legal settlements could, by law, be required to be approved by the legislature. Setting the rules of the election are easy if there is a will, Kline added.

“I think the discipline of the party should be all about de-powering Washington and empowering the states, especially the state legislatures,” Kline told Just the News.

Secondly, conservatives need to build their own information ecosystem that rivals what liberals have: a vibrant press that covers conservatives honestly, and powerful delivery channels that can rival YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

New services like Rumble, Parler, Real America’s Voice, Citizen Free Press and CloutHub are incubating and attracting millions. They need to be grown and spread to tens of millions along with trusted news sources so conservatives have as big a bullhorn to the next generation of GenZ, millennials and cable-cutters as they have had to Boomers, talk radio and Fox News fans, the experts said.

“We are just playing to a draw,” Price explained. “We are not reaching a lot of folks. And we have to be creative about how we reach them, and I think we’ve got to be able to control a lot of that messaging, and right now we just don’t.”

Finally, conservative donors need to have a new approach, stolen from the ROI model of the Soros and Bloomberg NGOs, so their millions don’t just enrich consultants but have measurable outcomes in setting the rules and narratives that win the next elections. Everything from civic education and empowerment for state legislators to media-platform building needs to be funded, the experts said.

“Funding on the left seems much more strategic than funding on the right, which is predominantly tactical,” explained Steve Hantler, who advises several high-net-worth conservative donors. “Liberal elites have for decades controlled the levers of power in education, media and entertainment and have used that power to indoctrinate generations of Americans against America’s founding values.

“Now is not the time for for hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Now is the time for honest, critical self-evaluation.”