Election Skimming Program Exposed in NH

I have been patiently hoping for some truth to emerge out of the murky 2020 election.  Some flares have been lit in Arizona and Michigan, and a lamp lit this week in Georgia, and a few candles in places like Pennsylvania and, improbably New Hampshire.  This last one involves an audit in Windham, New Hampshire, a town of 14,853 people, which has long been a stalwart Republican stronghold in an otherwise Democrat state.  The pattern of election skimming shows up very clearly, as explained in an article at American Thinker An election audit in New Hampshire may be the pebble that diverts the stream.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  

Windham, New Hampshire, a town of 14,853 people, has long been a stalwart Republican stronghold in an otherwise Democrat state. As was the case throughout New Hampshire, it relied on AccuVote machines to collect and tally its 2020 votes.

When the election in Windham ended, Kristi St. Laurent, the Democrat candidate, had lost by only 24 votes. With that close a margin, she naturally demanded a hand recount.

The hand recount revealed something peculiar: St. Laurent hadn’t lost by 24 votes; she’d lost by 420 votes. In a small election, that meant that her margin of defeat wasn’t 0.005% but was, instead, 9.6%, which is a significant loss.

That same recount revealed an even greater anomaly: across the board, in every Windham election, Republicans had been shortchanged, and Democrats had been overcounted:

Windham NH results


Windham election results by Ken Eyring.

Those kinds of numbers manifestly demanded a full recount, which is what’s happening now in Windham. And as with counts and recounts elsewhere, funny things are happening — not funny-ha-ha, but funny-peculiar:

An audit team sent to conduct a forensic examination of the 2020 election results in Windham, N.H. started the process off well enough on Tuesday. But by Wednesday, they hit a major snag: The live stream cameras that had been broadcasting the audit room around the clock went offline for close to 90 minutes, potentially obscuring any problematic intervention.

The team decided Thursday morning to reinspect the ballot machines on camera in an attempt to maintain observers’ faith in their process. They needed to determine whether the machines had been tampered with over night when the cameras mysteriously went down.

Even if the camera failure is nothing, the consistent Republican deficits cannot be shrugged off as a series of random errors. When a “mistake” repeatedly runs in only one direction over a separate series of events, the hand of man becomes apparent.

New Hampshire was called for Biden, but if the “mistake” was state-wide — that is, if Republicans were undercounted and Democrats overcounted in every county — perhaps Biden didn’t win New Hampshire. And if he didn’t win New Hampshire, maybe he didn’t win in some other states called for him, either.

Our elections need to be tightened — and doing away with voter ID is not the way to do it. Although I seldom look to England for anything good lately (sorry, England, I once loved you as only a true Anglophile could), its approach to voting is superb and getting better. Funnily enough, though, that’s one policy that the left — which is always anxious to show how badly America measures up to the rest of the world — doesn’t want to copy.

Update on Georgia Election Audit:

Georgia Judge Calls For Emergency Audit After Suspicious Discrepancies Found

Back in March, a judge gave an order to unseal absentee ballots in Fulton County so a government watchdog can investigate allegations of voting fraud in the November election.

A lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court contends that fraudulent ballots were cast and other irregularities occurred as workers counted ballots at State Farm Arena on election night. Those allegations were investigated and dismissed by the secretary of state’s office. Nonetheless, Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero — who is overseeing the case — said he’s inclined to order the ballots to be unsealed and reviewed by experts hired by Garland Favorito, a voting-integrity advocate.

And today, May 21, 2021, the same judge went even further called for the motion to unseal ballots after suspicious discrepancies were found.

During a hearing, VoterGA.org lawyers “described large discrepancies (21%) between the number of ballot batches reported by the GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who certified the election, and the number of ballot batches actually provided by court-ordered access in the previous April hearing in the case,” according to CD Media.

“A high number of ballots appear to have been counted twice,” said one witness.

VoterGA.org has been examining the ballot images at a low resolution since the hearing in April, and declared they need the actual physical ballots to understand the number of counterfeit ballots certified.

Favorito is seeking to review absentee ballots in Fulton County. He says county workers likely fabricated ballots and counted some ballots multiple times on election night. As evidence, his lawsuit cites video of the counting, as well as sworn statements from people who were present.

The observers were suspicious of ballots that were printed on a different stock of paper than regular ballots, appeared to have been printed instead of marked by ink in a voter’s hand or were not creased, indicating they had not been placed in an absentee ballot envelope and mailed.

Background from previous post  Election Skimming Program Detected

Update Nov. 13, 2020 at the End

Dr.SHIVA LIVE: MIT PhD Analysis of Michigan Votes Reveals Unfortunate Truth of U.S. Voting Systems

MIT professor Dr. Shiva and colleagues discovered a pattern in Michigan voter data whereby tens of thousands of Trump votes were taken away and added to Biden totals.  As the video describes the program was designed to skim more votes away from large pools of Trump votes and avoid small pools, in order to be less noticeable.  The proportion of straight ticket Republican voters serves as the indicator of precincts where larger numbers of Trump only votes can be switched to Biden only votes (only refers to a vote not part of a party line ballot.  The linear relationship is quite striking and abnormal.  The more voters in a precinct voted Republican party line, the more Trump only votes in that precinct were taken away.

From Jo Nova website:

A “Transistor Function” algorithm has been used to alter voting patterns in Michigan. It has a “Weighted Race” feature.

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, an MIT engineer and Fulbright Scholar, with Phil Evans B.S.E.E. and Benny Smith (election commissioner and data analyst) have back-analyzed the pattern of voting in Michigan and figured out the electronic algorithm used to alter votes. Voting patterns are distorted in a way that can only be explained by a linear transformation (an algebraic equation) and he can approximate that equation and slope of the line. This means he can calculate how many votes were flipped and he does, and it’s massive.

This one form of fraud alone is enough to flip the election to Biden. That’s without all the postal vote backdating, the dead people voting, the out of state votes, the discarded ballots, the crooked media coverups, the pollsters fakery and the Pfizer hiding of the Covid Vaccine news. Trump won the election despite all the other trickery. If there had been real media coverage, honest vaccine headlines, exposure of Hunter Biden and honest polling the election probably could have been called by 8pm on Election day.

The action analysis starts at 13:30 minutes.

In disconcerting news, votes are stored as a decimal fraction. They are not even trying to record votes as whole numbers, as individual choices.

The dashed orange line should be a flat line, instead the downward slope “cuts in” and votes are increasingly distorted in precincts where more Republicans vote.  The ratio depends on the percentage of Republican voters in a precinct. The more Republicans there are, the more likely they are to abandon Trump and vote a Biden-then-Republican ticket.

The slope of that line is “too perfect” — it’s almost perfectly linear. The transistor effect kicks in and shows that the same algorithm was used in different counties across all precincts. The pattern is non-random. Even if you wanted to believe that Rep voters were tired of Trump it would not happen in a perfect line that depended on the number of Rep voters around you. (45 mins.)

Update Nov. 13, 2020


Paul Sperry writes at RealClearInvestigations, Pro-Biden Bug Also Suspected in Georgia’s Vote-Counting Software. Excepts in italics with my bolds.

A curious thing happened as Fulton County, Ga., election officials counted mail-in ballots at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena in the days after the election. In the early hours of Nov. 5, a surge of some 20,000 mail-in votes suddenly appeared for Joe Biden, while approximately 1,000 votes for President Trump mysteriously disappeared from his own totals in the critical swing state, where Biden holds a razor-thin lead.

A poll watcher noticed the suspicious shift in votes while monitoring the interim election results on the Georgia secretary of state website.

“I concluded from looking at these results that this was an irregularity, since there was no obvious reason for President Trump’s totals to have decreased while former Vice President Biden’s totals increased dramatically,” Voter GA co-founder Garland Favorito swore in an affidavit he filed this week with the secretary of state’s office.

Favorito suspects a variety of factors, including that votes were “artificially inflated” for Biden while using the same Dominion Voting system used by Antrim County, Mich., which erroneously transferred 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden. Last year, Georgia contracted with Dominion to automate vote tabulations in all 159 of its counties.

“The software appears to have thrown votes from Trump to Biden here too,” he said in a RealClearInvestigations interview. “Or Biden ballots were manufactured.”

The large disparity of gains between the two candidates “was something I had never witnessed before in my years of election monitoring,” said Favorito, a career IT professional who has been a leading advocate for election integrity in the state over the past two decades. He says he is not a Republican or Trump supporter.

On Nov. 10, Favorito sent his affidavit to Georgia Secretary of State recommending a full, by-hand ballot recount. The next day, his office announced it will conduct such an audit for the presidential race. Biden currently leads Trump by more than 14,000 votes in the state.

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The Actual Letter from 120 Generals and Admirals

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Notably, biased journalists like those at Politico published their own disparaging comments about this open letter, including ad hominem attacks against some of the signers.  Read below the actual text of the letter and judge for yourself whether their concerns are reasonable, despite the backlash from progressive media. Thanks to Thinking Conservative for posting the letter.  My bolds added.

Open Letter from Retired Generals and Admirals

Our Nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.

During the 2020 election an “Open Letter from Senior Military Leaders” was signed by 317 retired Generals and Admirals and, it said the 2020 election could be the most important election since our country was founded. “With the Democrat Party welcoming Socialists and Marxists, our historic way of life is at stake.” Unfortunately, that statement’s truth was quickly revealed, beginning with the election process itself.

Without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect the “will of the people” our Constitutional Republic is lost. Election integrity demands insuring there is one legal vote cast and counted per citizen. Legal votes are identified by State Legislature’s approved controls using government IDs, verified signatures, etc. Today, many are calling such commonsense controls “racist” in an attempt to avoid having fair and honest elections. Using racial terms to suppress proof of eligibility is itself a tyrannical intimidation tactic. Additionally, the “Rule of Law” must be enforced in our election processes to ensure integrity. The FBI and Supreme Court must act swiftly when election irregularities are surfaced and not ignore them as was done in 2020. Finally, H.R.1 & S.1, (if passed), would destroy election fairness and allow Democrats to forever remain in power violating our Constitution and ending our Representative Republic.

Aside from the election, the Current Administration has launched a full-blown assault on our Constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner, bypassing the Congress, with more than 50 Executive Orders quickly signed, many reversing the previous Administration’s effective policies and regulations. Moreover, population control actions such as excessive lockdowns, school and business closures, and most alarming, censorship of written and verbal expression are all direct assaults on our fundamental Rights. We must support and hold accountable politicians who will act to counter Socialism, Marxism and Progressivism, support our Constitutional Republic, and insist on fiscally responsible governing while focusing on all Americans, especially the middle class, not special interest or extremist groups which are used to divide us into warring factions.

Additional National Security Issues and Actions:

Open borders jeopardize national security by increasing human trafficking, drug cartels, terrorists entry, health/CV19 dangers, and humanitarian crises. Illegals are flooding our Country bringing high economic costs, crime, lowering wages, and illegal voting in some states. We must reestablish border controls and continue building the wall while supporting our dedicated border control personnel. Sovereign nations must have controlled borders.

China is the greatest external threat to America. Establishing cooperative relations with the Chinese Communist Party emboldens them to continue progress toward world domination, militarily, economically, politically and technologically. We must impose more sanctions and restrictions to impede their world domination goal and protect America’s interests.

• The free flow of information is critical to the security of our Republic, as illustrated by freedom of speech and the press being in the 1st Amendment of our Constitution. Censoring speech and expression, distorting speech, spreading disinformation by government officials, private entities, and the media is a method to suppress the free flow of information, a tyrannical technique used in closed societies. We must counter this on all fronts beginning with removing Section 230 protection from big tech.

Re-engaging in the flawed Iran Nuclear Deal would result in Iran acquiring nuclear weapons along with the means to deliver them, thereby upsetting Mideast peace initiatives and aiding a terrorist nation whose slogans and goals include “death to America” and “death to Israel” . We must resist the new China/Iran agreement and not support the Iran Nuclear Deal. In addition, continue with the Mideast peace initiatives, the “Abraham Accords,” and support for Israel.

Stopping the Keystone Pipeline eliminates our recently established energy independence and causes us to be energy dependent on nations not friendly to us, while eliminating valuable US jobs. We must open the Keystone Pipeline and regain our energy independence for national security and economic reasons.

Using the U.S. military as political pawns with thousands of troops deployed around the U.S. Capitol Building, patrolling fences guarding against a non-existent threat, along with forcing Politically Correct policies like the divisive critical race theory into the military at the expense of the War Fighting Mission, seriously degrades readiness to fight and win our Nation’s wars, creating a major national security issue. We must support our Military and Vets; focus on war fighting, eliminate the corrosive infusion of Political Correctness into our military which damages morale and war fighting cohesion.

The “Rule of Law” is fundamental to our Republic and security. Anarchy as seen in certain cities cannot be tolerated. We must support our law enforcement personnel and insist that DAs, our courts, and the DOJ enforce the law equally, fairly, and consistently toward all.

The mental and physical condition of the Commander in Chief cannot be ignored. He must be able to quickly make accurate national security decisions involving life and limb anywhere, day or night. Recent Democrat leadership’s inquiries about nuclear code procedures sends a dangerous national security signal to nuclear armed adversaries, raising the question about who is in charge. We must always have an unquestionable chain of command.

Under a Democrat Congress and the Current Administration, our Country has taken a hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyrannical government which must be countered now by electing congressional and presidential candidates who will always act to defend our Constitutional Republic. The survival of our Nation and its cherished freedoms, liberty, and historic values are at stake. We urge all citizens to get involved now at the local, state and/or national level to elect political representatives who will act to Save America, our Constitutional Republic, and hold those currently in office accountable. The “will of the people” must be heard and followed.

 

Biden Turns Gift into Train Wreck

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Ben Shapiro comes to the same conclusion but with a different metaphor in his article Biden Sets Everything on Fire at Town Hall.  He does provide a photo of the feckless Conductor.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

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Joe Biden is the luckiest man to ever assume the presidency.

He succeeded an unpopular figure. He was inaugurated just two weeks after the dramatic storming of the U.S. Capitol by extremist Donald Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification of the 2020 election, which was also the beginning of the year after widespread race riots. He inherited COVID-19 vaccines and a vaccine rollout plan, and could rightly expect to ride the tsunami of natural economic recovery that was predicted for the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic; he inherited a series of historic Middle Eastern peace deals.

In other words, President Biden had it easy. All he had to do was nothing. He could expect a new era of good feelings emerging from a tumultuous time. He could expect a booming economy, a more peaceful Middle East, a solution to the pandemic. All he had to do was calm the waters.

This, after all, was what Americans voted for: not a transformational figure or a figure of radical change but a stodgy, supposedly empathetic grandfather figure who could barely be bothered to leave his basement for the entirety of the presidential campaign. Normalcy could be restored by installing a nearly inanimate object as president.

Instead, Biden has served as a facade for the most radical administration in modern American history.
And America is already paying the price.

In his first few months in office, Biden rammed through a $1.9 trillion spending package that completely rewrote the bargain between individuals and the state, shifting the incentive structure for people to go back to work. He simultaneously proposed another $4 trillion in spending — to go along with the annual $4 trillion budget. The result: skyrocketing inflation in commodities, along with dramatic labor shortages resulting in an April shortfall of three-quarters of a million new jobs.

Simultaneously, he downplayed the efficacy of a vaccine he insisted was the key to ending the pandemic. His Food and Drug Administration pressed pause on a highly successful vaccine based on six cases of blood clots; his Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rewrote its school reopening guidelines, apparently with input from the teachers unions. He wore a mask publicly despite being vaccinated, despite being outdoors, despite being indoors with others who had been vaccinated — and declared such activity “patriotic.” The result: widespread vaccine hesitancy and a tremendously uneven national reopening, with red states going back to normal and blue states continuing nonsensical shutdowns.

He ramped up the rhetoric with regard to racial polarization, injecting the terms “anti-racist” and “equity” into every element of federal policy, supplanting meritocracy and individual rights with equality of outcome and outright discrimination. The result: undercutting police forces nationally, resulting in a continuing crime wave in America’s biggest cities.

And he abandoned the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, refunding the Palestinians with money that will obviously go to terrorist groups and defy the Taylor Force Act; making concessions to the Iranian terror regime; and pressuring Israel. The result: riots in Jerusalem, chaos on the Temple Mount and an increase in regional Iranian aggression.

We’re only four months into Biden’s presidency. He’s going for broke: He wants his legacy, and if that legacy comes at the cost of the economy, the polis and international stability, so be it. If the conflagration we’ve seen thus far is any indicator, Biden won’t leave a lot standing when he’s done.

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The True Cost of Imaginary Money

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Lionel Shriver explains in his Spectator article The true cost of make-believe money

Biden commands trillions in the way previous presidents have commanded billions

I like Bill Maher. He’s a rare practicing left-wing comic who’s actually funny. But last week, his routine on cryptocurrency hit eerie harmonics.

That monologue was broadcast in the same week Joe Biden promoted the third of his gargantuan spending programs, bringing his first 100 days’ total discretionary spending proposals to $6 trillion. (Context: total US GDP is $21 trillion.) This lavish largesse would be slathered atop the annual (and growing) nondiscretionary budget of nearly $5 trillion, against $3.5 trillion in tax revenue.

Let’s tweak Maher’s routine, then:

‘I fully understand that our financial system isn’t perfect, but at least, or so I’ve imagined, it’s real. But the American dollar increasingly resembles Easter bunny cartoon cash. I’ve read articles about Modern Monetary Theory. I’ve had it explained to me. I still don’t get it, and neither do you.

‘Dollars are now made up out of thin air and comparable with Monopoly money. We thought we knew that money had to originate from and be generated by something real, somewhere. Modern Monetary Theory says, “No, it doesn’t”… Or as another analyst put it, “Quantitative easing is an open Ponzi scheme”. The Federal Reserve is like having an imaginary best friend who’s also a banker.

‘Our problem here is at root not economic but psychological. People who have been raised in a virtual world are starting to believe they can really live in it. Much of warfare is a video game now; why not base our economy the same way? The conjuring of “borrowed” money from ether, only to have that debt swallowed by a central bank and disappear, is literally a game.

‘Do I need to spell this out? There is something inherently not credible about the Fed creating not just hundreds of billions, but trillions in wealth, with nothing ever actually being accomplished, and no actual product made or service rendered. It’s like Tinkerbell’s light. Its power source is based solely on enough infantilized citizens believing in it.’

Somehow that monologue isn’t as funny in the second version.

While Maher decries the electricity squandered on crypto ‘mining’, at least the color of the Fed’s money is genuinely green. Tap a few keys, and voilà: trillions from pennies on the energy bill. So in the past year, the Fed effortlessly increased the world’s supply of dollars by 26 percent and is on track for a similar surge in 2021.

But is drastic monetary expansion truly without cost?

I’ve made Maher’s Tinkerbell analogy myself, but to explain how traditional currency functions. I noted in an essay accompanying my novel The Mandibles, about America’s 2029 economic apocalypse: ‘Currency is a belief system. It maintains its value the way Tinkerbell is kept aloft by children believing in fairies in Peter Pan.’

In the novel, a fictional economics professor pontificates: ‘Money is emotional. Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it’s worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it. Economics is closer to religion than science. Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper. Likewise, creditors have to believe that if they extend a loan to the US government they’ll get their money back or they don’t make the loan in the first place.

So confidence isn’t a side issue. It’s the only issue.’

My confidence is going wobbly. Biden commands trillions the way previous presidents have commanded billions, while the public is so dazzled by zeros that they don’t know the difference.

I’ve my quibbles with the particulars. Spending in inconceivable quantity courts waste and fraud. Biden’s American Families Plan casts so many freebies upon the waters as to constitute a de facto universal basic income, and government dependency doesn’t seem characteristic of a good life. Pandemic-relief unemployment supplements (which many Democrats would make permanent) are so generous that small businesses can’t find employees willing to work even for two to three times the minimum wage. Biden is effectively reversing Clinton-era welfare reforms, which moved so many poor Americans from state benefits to self-respecting employment. Financing all these goodies by hiking corporate taxes is popular, but only because few people realize that every-one pays corporate taxes through lower pension-fund returns, job losses from corporate flight, lower wages and higher prices.

But it’s the bigger picture that unnerves me. Zero interest rates have installed an accelerating debt loop. Governments, companies and individuals borrow because money is free. Central banks won’t raise interest rates, lest the cost of servicing all this burgeoning debt bankrupt the debtors. Governments, companies and individuals borrow still more because money is free. The Federal Reserve has already announced it won’t raise interest rates even if inflation climbs, while refusing to cite what level inflation would have to hit before reconsidering. I’ve plotted this story before. It doesn’t end well.

Background on Modern (Magical) Money Theory see MMT: Magical Money Theory

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California on the Road to Ruin

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The Golden State is a shining example of paradise lost by wrong policy choices pursuing a “woke” agenda.  Since the Biden-Harris regime intends to Californicate the entire nation, it is critical to understand and avoid the wrong road taken.  David L. Bahnsen writes at National Review The Great California Exodus.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds. 

A look at why droves are leaving the state

What caused and continues to cause the exodus out of California is not tax burden, or regulation, or cost of living, or housing prices. Rather, it is the burden, and regulation, and cost of living, and housing prices, and more.

There is no evidence that the declining appeal of staying in California is simply a tax protest. On top of being walloped by taxes, one takes fiscal hit after fiscal hit — property taxes that average $5,000 per year for a lower-end middle-class home with no frills and that can easily approach $10,000 per year for the most mundane of tract homes. Utili­ties, car registration, insurance, and education expenses are all in the top decile.

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One is being asked to pay a lot more to live in California, and yet education results are abysmal, crime rates are unacceptable (the state has the 14th-worst rate of violent crimes per capita), the electricity grid is a debacle, and the job market has hollowed out. (The CEOs of great California companies have maintained homes in Menlo Park or Palos Verdes; recent factory or plant expansions of the companies have gone to Nevada, Arizona, and Texas.)

The value of living in California has declined but the cost has not been correspondingly reduced; in fact, it has exponentially increased. A business cannot survive when it raises prices while simultaneously making a worse product. Neither can a state.

California made a choice to adopt a cost structure perfectly tailored to the needs of its public-employee unions. (The same could be said of Greece.) Policy-makers have made a conscious decision to make no effort whatsoever to diversify the state’s revenue base. The extreme revenues that highly specialized companies in Silicon Valley have earned bought legislators time as they came out of the great financial crisis. But the dysfunctional dependency on a technology tax base in the go-go 1990s and the subsequent dot-com bust taught Sacramento nothing. Today, the state depends on a revenue base narrower than ever before, even as debt levels, pension-funding needs, and infrastructure needs are at code red. One need not ignore the blessing of high capital-gain revenue when Big Tech flourishes, but to assume that the gravy train will continue is perilous.

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For the leftist ideologues who have brought about the exodus, an unexpected turn of events is taking place. The Left underestimated the impact of the pre-pandemic outmigration. It was never good for the fiscal and cultural health of the state that so many, after weighing the pros and cons, voted with their feet. One can be forgiven, however, for thinking that the Left was not all that shaken up by 650,000 middle-class people per year realizing that, in Texas or Arizona, they could buy more house for less money, with a smaller tax burden and greater job prospects for their kids. The “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” mentality of so many lawmakers was hardly disguised, especially while another social-media company was making an IPO or a new venture-capital fund was ringing the cash register.

But the newest development in the Left’s fatal designs for this state is a game-changer. It is no longer just a family of four making $90,000 per year packing up the U-Haul and headed to Utah for a better life.  The leftists themselves have had enough. The tech wizards of Palo Alto realize they have artisanal coffee shops in Denver, too. The cultural appeal of California has spread outside its own borders. Middle-class traditional families had already made the cost–benefit analysis of leaving the state, but now the gravy train has caught on as well. The Hewlett-Packards and the Teslas and select Silicon Valley gurus capture headlines now as they pack their own version of a U-Haul. What lies ahead for the state is ten years of a slow build of this same dynamic — even the cool kids are getting out of Dodge.

Legislators make conscious decisions sometimes. So do middle-class families. And guess what? So do hip, tech-savvy Millennials.

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American Covid Phobia

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Kylee Zempel explains in her Federalist article Americans Are Irrationally Afraid Of COVID Because The Ruling Class Has Demonized Risk

‘Why do so many vaccinated people remain fearful?’ David Leonhardt asks with a straight face in Monday’s New York Times newsletter.
Let me tell you.

Leonhardt opens with a story about judge and Yale University law professor Guido Calabresi, who for 30 years has been telling his students a tale he crafted about a god who came to society to propose an invention that would make their lives better in nearly every way. It would afford them extra quality time with loved ones and enable them to see sights and perform tasks they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.

The cost? The god would select 1,000 young people to strike dead.

The professor would then pose the question to his students: Would you take the deal? The students’ answer would almost always be no. “What’s the difference between this and the automobile?” Calabresi would ask, revealing the moral of the story.

Leonhardt concludes in the Times that we accept the cost of automobile fatalities because it has always been an aspect of our lives. A world without cars and thus the risks they carry is a world we really just can’t imagine for ourselves. Our comfortability with vehicles, Leonhardt says, is an example of human irrationality when calculating risks. While people tend to focus on minuscule risks such as airplane crashes or shark attacks, we gloss over much riskier activities such as driving.

“One way for a risk to become salient is for it to be new,” Leonhardt says, likening the salient risk of Calabresi’s fable to COVID-19. “That’s a core idea behind Calabresi’s fable. He asks students to consider whether they would accept the cost of vehicle travel if it did not already exist. That they say no underscores the very different ways we treat new risks and enduring ones.”

Americans Used to Embrace Risk

Leonhardt’s assessment might be true to an extent. But the fact is that vehicles, which have always been risky, do exist, meaning that Americans at one point were willing to take that risk. At the turn of the 20th century, Calabresi’s fable wasn’t a fable at all. It was a reality, and Americans decided the risk was worth taking.

Thus the explanation can’t just be that we assign different treatments to “new risks and enduring ones.” It’s that Americans of today are orders of magnitude more risk-averse than our predecessors, and thus are more paralyzed and less productive. For a virus, Americans have chosen to cater to the most irrationally COVID-terrified voices among us, making us not only more paralyzed and less productive, but also increasingly less free.

COVID Terror Isn’t ‘Natural’

That’s where Leonhardt’s analysis almost completely diverges from reality. Irrational fears about COVID-19 are not “natural,” nor are they merely the result of salience and newness. It isn’t inherent in the human spirit to be terrified of things that pose such little risk for so much of the population.

These irrational fears are manufactured. They’re instilled by folks like Anthony Fauci, who said just last week that “No, it’s still not OK,” when asked whether vaccinated or unvaccinated Americans should be eating and drinking inside at restaurants and bars. Infection counts are still “disturbingly high,” he said, again fueling the fire of illogical COVID terror.

“Even after you’re vaccinated, social distancing, wearing masks are going to be essential,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki warned in February. Meanwhile, corporations and the federal government are teaming up to make you prove you’re not unclean with a “vaccine passport” so you don’t pose an existential threat to your fellow citizens, blue-state leaders and bureaucrats are double-masking even after they’re vaccinated and saying “it is possible” we’ll still be wearing face masks in 2022, and Biden’s COVID adviser is saying the pandemic in the United States is still a “Category 5 hurricane” even after millions of Americans have been inoculated.

So no, it isn’t “natural” that the vaccinated continue to cling to irrational fears. It’s a direct result of scare-mongering and lies and an unwillingness to do any type of risk assessment until a Pfizer cocktail is coursing through one’s veins. It’s the predictable outcome after a year of terrifying rhetoric and fudged data, in which The New York Times itself played a role (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) — and continues to.

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Resist the Culture of Fear

Either the Times author is too simple to connect those dots, or he’s part of the media and “expert” ruling class that still wants Americans to buy into their social experiment so they can keep normal citizens on a short leash as they craft the culture they desire of herders and sheep, haves and have-nots, and engineers and cogs.

Leonhardt is right about one thing: Most COVID fears are completely irrational. But The New York Times doesn’t get credit for pointing this out more than a year after the world went into lockdown and lives have been destroyed. When conservatives and Americans of goodwill tried to make risk assessments early on, they were excoriated by the corporate press for being selfish and conspiratorial murderers and rubes.

The irrationality of COVID fears didn’t start with the vaccine — and won’t end with it either. Today’s risk-averse Americans have decided en masse that safety is paramount, risk is unacceptable and therefore freedom is dangerous, and dissenters are malicious.

This brings us all back to Calabresi’s fable. American greatness, with pandemics as with automobiles, doesn’t come from 21st-century Yale students afraid of their own shadows. It comes from the types of Americans who can identify the dangers of the Model T, recognize that risk-taking is the sine qua non to human progress, and say, “Bring it on.”

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Voting Systems Connected to Internet

More discoveries regarding computer voting systems used in the 2020 US elections.  Patrick Colbeck reports Modem Chips Embedded in Voting System Computer Motherboards.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  H/T Gateway Pundit

While all of the attention has been focused upon manipulation of election results via software, there has been very little attention paid to hardware. Malware can be embedded in hardware as well as software. That’s why the following discovery unearthed by Attorney Matt DePerno during his investigation into Antrim County election fraud is so important.

What was discovered?
SEE Exhibit 6 in Antrim County Lawsuit

ES&S DS200 voting machine was found to have a Telit LE910-SV1 Modem Chip installed on its motherboard
Chip utilized a commercial Verizon SIM card with an Access Point Name (APN) configuration specific to the ES&S DS200 provisioning.

chip-1

ESS DS200 Motherboard with Telit LE910-SV1 Modem Chip

What does the Telit LE910-SV1 Modem Chip do?

-Enable communication between voting system equipment and election servers
-Designed to operate on a virtual private network
-Testing has revealed that the same SIM card could be used in a separate wireless hotspot device. This device could then join the same APN as the ES&S voting machines.

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Why is this important?

– ES&S equipment is used in eight Michigan counties: Alcona, Bay, Emmet, Grand Traverse, Kalamazoo, Macomb, Mason, Roscommon
-It demonstrates that computers can be connected to internet without any discernable ethernet or external modem connection
-It demonstrates that Dominion Voting Systems are not the only electronic voting system with security vulnerabilities
-It is very difficult to detect unless you pry open the machine case to investigate the hardware
-It drives the imperative for disciplined hardware certification as well as software certification
-Anyone with access to any SIM card could have pre-programmed access to the APN.
-It demonstrates how electronic voting systems could be connected to the internet with minimal risk of detection.

Additional Reporting on Michigan Election Fraud Attorney Matthew DePerno Releases Michigan Elections Forensics Report – 66,194 Unregistered Ballots Tallied in JUST 9 COUNTIES

Background from previous post Data Mining for Election Fraud

cb010621dapr20210105104502

Jay Valentine explains in his American Thinker article Election Fraud Hotspots – 10% of the Data are 70% of the Fraud  Jay is an expert in uncovering insurance fraud and points out that the same analyses will disclose fraudulent ballot patterns. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The more our team looked at the 2020 election fraud from publicly available records, the more it appeared to have similar characteristics to property casualty insurance fraud.

Beginning in November, like many citizens, we witnessed election fraud possibilities any sentient person would investigate. Having backgrounds in fraud detection, particularly in the property casualty insurance business, Medicaid fraud, and cyber fraud, gave us a curiosity that never dissipated.

Our interest is 100% in data analysis. That means looking at the actual votes, the addresses, the information about ballots reported to Secretaries of State. While there are all kinds of other fraud, the best way to light it up is with data analysis.

Not just the statistical stuff with the graphs and Greek symbols, but old fashioned rows and columns. Nothing illegal, just the same public data Google uses to profile someone for new running shoes.

sk040121dapc20210401124505

If Jesse Morgan did drive a tractor trailer truck with 100,000 ballots from New York to Pennsylvania, how can we find out? Chris Wray and our hardy pals at the FBI may not want to open that truck’s back door, but we do – with database analysis.

Every one of those ballots has a person’s name and address. The ballot is cast, illegally for sure, and counted. The local government is involved as well as the U.S. Postal Service officials at that particular location. That makes this sovereign, industrial election fraud.

They can hide the truck. They can claim it never happened. They cannot hide the record of the ballot.

Imagine yourself trying to fake 100,000 ballots. Even with some of your pals, lots of them, sitting around tables with pizza and Cokes and #2 pencils, it’s daunting. Every ballot needs to tie to an address. Each ties to a name. This is fraud infrastructure.

While you and your friends are filling out 100,000 ballots with Biden circles, do you think you took the time to use a different, real address for every one of them? Or, more likely, did you use a small group of addresses over and over? You get the picture.

If you filled out birth dates, did you use a different one every time you thought about it? How about those surnames? They are tied to real people and they better live in Pennsylvania.

We are getting reports some Secretaries of State are modifying mail-in ballot data to hide the tens of thousands of ballots received before they were sent.

This is a very bad idea.

Fraud data is like the world’s messiest crime scene.

Think of your worst nightmare crime scene with blood, bullet casings, broken furniture, spatterings, and that is how complex a fraud database is. If a criminal alters a crime scene, they always make things worse for themselves. They leave traces of who they were. More troublesome, they leave traces of what they are trying to hide.

We are thrilled people are trying to alter data after the fact.
They are leaving tracks like a dinosaur walking through a field of peanut butter for database tracking.

Citizen election fraud investigators are coalescing across multiple states sharing information, fraud profiles and actual data. We are helping with fraud investigative expertise and search technology beyond anything commercially available.

Our thesis is that 70% of all 2020 election fraud will be tied to 10% of the records. Like insurance fraud, election fraud has cultural affinities. It also has geographic patterns and links to a small number of people who deliver the overwhelming amount of fraud.

Cultural affinities?

We broke a major insurance fraud ring showing a group of Somali immigrants, living in the same building, driving the same car, had scammed a major insurance company. Sure they did, they knew each other. This happens all the time; the data show it.

Election fraud is no different. People who hang out together may have similar world views. If they are aggressive enough to join in an election fraud conspiracy, they don’t bring in strangers, they bring in friends and family. This kind of relationship shows up as a hot spot in data visualization.

Data visualization shows hotspots – like red wine stains on a white tablecloth.

Isn’t it interesting that 634 people with the same birthday, including the year, live at these seven addresses? Digging deeper, look, the address is not a physical location, it is a UPS store with mailboxes. That’s a crowded P.O. Box!

Look here, different family members live in different mailboxes with the same surname. The mailboxes are consecutive numbers, too! That’s so convenient for Thanksgiving dinner!

This is what industrial fraud starts to look like and there are plenty of data from December Secretary of State data files to prove this.

In fraud analysis, connections count big time. Industrial fraud is by definition a connected enterprise with a few actors driving lots of transactions. As we build a likely fraud database, think more of Ancestry.com rather than those rows and columns.

mrz033021dapr20210330044511

Ancestry.com allows you to build a family tree. As you build it, your family connects to other families. Those families add their long lost relatives you did not know existed enriching the tree. Connections count.

That is what an organic election fraud database starts to look like. Here, let’s do one!

Billy X has 239 people living in his one-bedroom Pennsylvania house and they all voted. All public information. Billy should be proud of his diligence.

We connect Billy via 100 social media posts floating on the internet using a web crawler. Look, Billy is a steward for the local trade union. He hates Trump.

Data visualization indicates Billy corresponds with Sally B. and Mortimer W. They live in Virginia. They too, hate Trump; so says social media. Our new friends in Virginia interested in election fraud start adding their data about Sally and Mort. Here are two addresses for Sally and they tie to over 600 registered voters. Mort has over 150 living in his one bedroom flat.

This is how it looks, folks. This is just the surface of what can be found from current, available, public records, social media and internet communication. We can go hundreds of layers deeper and it is delivered in the blink of an eye.

So when you freak out about H.R. 1, which is terrible, remember, they may have Marc Elias in their corner but the Patriots have data, technology, and adversaries who leave dinosaur tracks.

My Comment:  Those of us who watched the 2020 election go off the rails are waiting and hoping for the perps to be caught.  Forensic audits with competent analysts are under way in Arizona  with Maricopa officials trying to block it.  Ballot audits in Montana and New Hampshire turned up irregularities large enough to change the results.  The ‘Scan the Ballots’ Effort Is Moving Forward In Georgia Involving Jovan Pulitizer’s Technique of Forensically Reviewing Ballots from the 2020 Election (here).  The Georgia exercise shows what is a proper election forensic audit.  A 2020 audit will review all the ballots, not just a sample. Every ballot will be reviewed for the paper the ballot is on, the ink used, the shape of the circles being filled in, the sequence of the ballots, the creases in ballots, etc. This type of physical review, just of the ballots, will identify invalid ballots. These ballots can then be reviewed and eliminated if no proper excuses for their oddities are available. This can be done for every ballot in every audit.

A random thought:  What if Pelosi dropped her idea of contesting the Iowa seat won by a Republican by six votes because she was warned what an in depth analysis would show?  And another: What if Biden’s handlers are in such a rush to overturn everything because they know what kind of dirt will be coming out in coming months?

filtering_the_biden_fauset_small20210331015603

Beware Biden’s Push for a Global Taxation Regime

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Dan Mitchell writes Three Reasons to Reject Biden’s Tax Harmonization Scheme for “Global Minimum Taxation”.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some images.

Way back in 2007, I narrated this video to explain why tax competition is very desirable because politicians are likely to overtax and overspend (“Goldfish Government“) if they think taxpayers have no ability to escape.

The good news is that tax competition has been working.

As explained in the above video, there have been big reductions in personal tax rates and corporate tax rates. Just as important, governments have reduced various forms of double taxation, meaning lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains.

Many governments have also reduced – or even eliminated – death taxes and wealth taxes.

These pro-growth tax reforms didn’t happen because politicians read my columns (I wish!). Instead, they adopted better tax policy because they were afraid of losing jobs and investment to countries with better fiscal policy.

Now for the bad news.

There’s been an ongoing campaign by high-tax governments to replace tax competition with tax harmonization. They’ve even conscripted international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to launch attacks against low-tax jurisdictions.

And now the United States is definitely on the wrong side of this issue.

Here’s some of what the Biden Administration wants.

The United States can lead the world to end the race to the bottom on corporate tax rates. A minimum tax on U.S. corporations alone is insufficient. …President Biden is also proposing to encourage other countries to adopt strong minimum taxes on corporations, just like the United States, so that foreign corporations aren’t advantaged and foreign countries can’t try to get a competitive edge by serving as tax havens. This plan also denies deductions to foreign corporations…if they are based in a country that does not adopt a strong minimum tax. …The United States is now seeking a global agreement on a strong minimum tax through multilateral negotiations. This provision makes our commitment to a global minimum tax clear. The time has come to level the playing field and no longer allow countries to gain a competitive edge by slashing corporate tax rates.

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As Charlie Brown would say, “good grief.” Those passages sound like they were written by someone in France, not America

And Heaven forbid that countries “gain a competitive edge by slashing corporate tax rates.” Quelle horreur!

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There are three things to understand about this reprehensible initiative from the Biden Administration.

  1.  Tax harmonization means ever-increasing tax rates – It goes without saying that if politicians are able to create a tax cartel, it will merely be a matter of time before they ratchet up the tax rate. Simply stated, they won’t have to worry about an exodus of jobs and investment because all countries will be obliged to have the same bad approach.
  2. Corporate tax harmonization will be followed by harmonization of other taxes – If the scheme for a harmonized corporate tax is imposed, the next step will be harmonized (and higher) tax rates on personal income, dividends, capital gains, and other forms of work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.
  3. Tax harmonization denies poor countries the best path to prosperity – The western world became rich in the 1800s and early 1900s when there was very small government and no income taxes. That’s the path a few sensible jurisdictions want to copy today so they can bring prosperity to their people, but that won’t be possible in a world of tax harmonization.

bok-c-main

 

Data Mining for Election Fraud

cb010621dapr20210105104502

Jay Valentine explains in his American Thinker article Election Fraud Hotspots – 10% of the Data are 70% of the Fraud  Jay is an expert in uncovering insurance fraud and points out that the same analyses will disclose fraudulent ballot patterns. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The more our team looked at the 2020 election fraud from publicly available records, the more it appeared to have similar characteristics to property casualty insurance fraud.

Beginning in November, like many citizens, we witnessed election fraud possibilities any sentient person would investigate. Having backgrounds in fraud detection, particularly in the property casualty insurance business, Medicaid fraud, and cyber fraud, gave us a curiosity that never dissipated.

Our interest is 100% in data analysis. That means looking at the actual votes, the addresses, the information about ballots reported to Secretaries of State. While there are all kinds of other fraud, the best way to light it up is with data analysis.

Not just the statistical stuff with the graphs and Greek symbols, but old fashioned rows and columns. Nothing illegal, just the same public data Google uses to profile someone for new running shoes.

sk040121dapc20210401124505

If Jesse Morgan did drive a tractor trailer truck with 100,000 ballots from New York to Pennsylvania, how can we find out? Chris Wray and our hardy pals at the FBI may not want to open that truck’s back door, but we do – with database analysis.

Every one of those ballots has a person’s name and address. The ballot is cast, illegally for sure, and counted. The local government is involved as well as the U.S. Postal Service officials at that particular location. That makes this sovereign, industrial election fraud.

They can hide the truck. They can claim it never happened. They cannot hide the record of the ballot.

Imagine yourself trying to fake 100,000 ballots. Even with some of your pals, lots of them, sitting around tables with pizza and Cokes and #2 pencils, it’s daunting. Every ballot needs to tie to an address. Each ties to a name. This is fraud infrastructure.

While you and your friends are filling out 100,000 ballots with Biden circles, do you think you took the time to use a different, real address for every one of them? Or, more likely, did you use a small group of addresses over and over? You get the picture.

If you filled out birth dates, did you use a different one every time you thought about it? How about those surnames? They are tied to real people and they better live in Pennsylvania.

We are getting reports some Secretaries of State are modifying mail-in ballot data to hide the tens of thousands of ballots received before they were sent.

This is a very bad idea.

Fraud data is like the world’s messiest crime scene.

Think of your worst nightmare crime scene with blood, bullet casings, broken furniture, spatterings, and that is how complex a fraud database is. If a criminal alters a crime scene, they always make things worse for themselves. They leave traces of who they were. More troublesome, they leave traces of what they are trying to hide.

We are thrilled people are trying to alter data after the fact.
They are leaving tracks like a dinosaur walking through a field of peanut butter for database tracking.

Citizen election fraud investigators are coalescing across multiple states sharing information, fraud profiles and actual data. We are helping with fraud investigative expertise and search technology beyond anything commercially available.

Our thesis is that 70% of all 2020 election fraud will be tied to 10% of the records. Like insurance fraud, election fraud has cultural affinities. It also has geographic patterns and links to a small number of people who deliver the overwhelming amount of fraud.

Cultural affinities?

We broke a major insurance fraud ring showing a group of Somali immigrants, living in the same building, driving the same car, had scammed a major insurance company. Sure they did, they knew each other. This happens all the time; the data show it.

Election fraud is no different. People who hang out together may have similar world views. If they are aggressive enough to join in an election fraud conspiracy, they don’t bring in strangers, they bring in friends and family. This kind of relationship shows up as a hot spot in data visualization.

Data visualization shows hotspots – like red wine stains on a white tablecloth.

Isn’t it interesting that 634 people with the same birthday, including the year, live at these seven addresses? Digging deeper, look, the address is not a physical location, it is a UPS store with mailboxes. That’s a crowded P.O. Box!

Look here, different family members live in different mailboxes with the same surname. The mailboxes are consecutive numbers, too! That’s so convenient for Thanksgiving dinner!

This is what industrial fraud starts to look like and there are plenty of data from December Secretary of State data files to prove this.

In fraud analysis, connections count big time. Industrial fraud is by definition a connected enterprise with a few actors driving lots of transactions. As we build a likely fraud database, think more of Ancestry.com rather than those rows and columns.

mrz033021dapr20210330044511

Ancestry.com allows you to build a family tree. As you build it, your family connects to other families. Those families add their long lost relatives you did not know existed enriching the tree. Connections count.

That is what an organic election fraud database starts to look like. Here, let’s do one!

Billy X has 239 people living in his one-bedroom Pennsylvania house and they all voted. All public information. Billy should be proud of his diligence.

We connect Billy via 100 social media posts floating on the internet using a web crawler. Look, Billy is a steward for the local trade union. He hates Trump.

Data visualization indicates Billy corresponds with Sally B. and Mortimer W. They live in Virginia. They too, hate Trump; so says social media. Our new friends in Virginia interested in election fraud start adding their data about Sally and Mort. Here are two addresses for Sally and they tie to over 600 registered voters. Mort has over 150 living in his one bedroom flat.

This is how it looks, folks. This is just the surface of what can be found from current, available, public records, social media and internet communication. We can go hundreds of layers deeper and it is delivered in the blink of an eye.

So when you freak out about H.R. 1, which is terrible, remember, they may have Marc Elias in their corner but the Patriots have data, technology, and adversaries who leave dinosaur tracks.

My Comment:  Those of us who watched the 2020 election go off the rails are waiting and hoping for the perps to be caught.  Forensic audits with competent analysts are under way in Arizona  with Maricopa officials trying to block it.  Ballot audits in Montana and New Hampshire turned up irregularities large enough to change the results.  The ‘Scan the Ballots’ Effort Is Moving Forward In Georgia Involving Jovan Pulitizer’s Technique of Forensically Reviewing Ballots from the 2020 Election (here).  The Georgia exercise shows what is a proper election forensic audit.  A 2020 audit will review all the ballots, not just a sample. Every ballot will be reviewed for the paper the ballot is on, the ink used, the shape of the circles being filled in, the sequence of the ballots, the creases in ballots, etc. This type of physical review, just of the ballots, will identify invalid ballots. These ballots can then be reviewed and eliminated if no proper excuses for their oddities are available. This can be done for every ballot in every audit.

A random thought:  What if Pelosi dropped her idea of contesting the Iowa seat won by a Republican by six votes because she was warned what an in depth analysis would show?  And another: What if Biden’s handlers are in such a rush to overturn everything because they know what kind of dirt will be coming out in coming months?

filtering_the_biden_fauset_small20210331015603

How to Know a Liberal from a Leftist by Asking

Denis Prager explores how to query a friend, relative or colleague to see if they are open to discussion, or locked into a fixed ideology.  His article is Questions to Determine Whether a Friend or Relative Is a Liberal or a Leftist.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The great tragedy of our time is that liberals vote left.

Virtually every value liberals have held for a century is now held by conservatives and scorned by leftists. Therefore, America, in serious jeopardy of being lost, will be saved when people convince the liberals in their life that the left, not the conservative, is their enemy.

This process begins by establishing whether a friend or relative is a liberal or a leftist. If it turns out that he or she is a liberal, it is worth engaging in respectful dialogue on the issues of the day. If the friend or relative is a leftist, you can probably only talk about innocuous subjects such as the weather (though not about global warming) or sports (though not about players taking a knee during the national anthem). If you talk about the great issues of the day with a left-wing friend or relative, that could be the last time you talk to each other. He or she is likely to unfriend you not only on social media but also in life. Leftists generally do not dialogue; they dismiss.

Here are questions you might want to pose to friends/relatives to determine—as much for them as for you—whether they are liberal or left.

Race
  • Many universities now have all-black dormitories, and some have all-black graduation exercises. Do you support these developments?
  • The University of California has declared this statement racist: “There is only one race—the human race.” Do you agree with the University of California, or do you agree with the statement?
  • Is the goal of being “colorblind”—doing one’s best to ignore a person’s color and concentrating only on the person’s character and personality—a noble goal or a racist one?
  • Do you believe the color of a person’s skin tells you anything of importance about that person?
  • Do you agree that all white Americans are racist?
  • If your answer is yes, would you tell the millions of blacks in Africa and the Caribbean who wish to emigrate to America that they would be making a poor decision? If not, why not?
  • Is it possible for a black person to be a racist?
  • Is it racist to claim that Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the greatest music ever composed?
  • Is the national anthem racist?
  • If your answer is yes, what would you like to put in its place?
  • The English department at the University of Pennsylvania removed its painting of William Shakespeare because he was a white European male. Do you agree with that decision?

America
  • Do you agree with The New York Times’ “1619 Project” that America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619 with the first arrival of black slaves in North America, and that the Revolutionary War was fought in order to preserve slavery?
  • Should statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln be taken down?
  • Has the United States, overall, made the world a better place?
  • Would America be better, worse, or the same as now if all Americans dropped their religion and became secular?
  • Has capitalism been a net-plus for America and the world?
  • Everyone would like to improve America. Some would like to, in their words, “fundamentally transform” it. Would you?
  • Could a good person have voted for Donald Trump in 2020?
  • Do you believe that CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the rest of the mainstream media are biased toward the left or try to present the news as accurately as possible?
  • Should America have full control over its borders to prevent illegal immigration?
  • There are between 11 and 30 million people in America who entered the country illegally. Should they all be put on a path to citizenship?
  • Should those who enter America illegally be called “undocumented immigrants” or “illegal immigrants”?
  • Do you believe police departments should be defunded, or at least have their budgets severely cut?
  • Should the government provide vouchers to enable parents to choose what school their child attends?
  • Which school do you believe is more likely to be attacked by a gunman: one that has a sign in front that reads, “Gun-Free Zone” or one that reads, “This School Has Armed Personnel”?

Men and Women
  • Should it be legal for a teenage girl to have her breasts surgically removed because she identifies as a male—or should there be a minimum age of 18 or 21?
  • Schoolteachers have been told to stop calling students “boys and girls” because a student might not identify as either male or female. Do you agree with this policy?
  • Should biological males who identify as females be allowed to compete against biological females in sports?
  • Is the statement, “Men give birth” science-based?
  • Do you agree with the practice of inviting a drag queen into public libraries and elementary school classrooms to conduct a “Drag Queen Story Hour”?

    Speech
  • Do you believe that free speech allows for hate speech, or should hate speech be banned?
  • If you believe hate speech should be banned, who do you believe should determine what is hate speech?

You might want to send these questions to the people in your life whose views are to the left of your own.

At best, you (and they) will realize that you have more in common than either of you previously thought. At the very least, their answers will bring you both clarity. And at worst, they will explain why there is a rift between you—and why you might want to restrict communication to weather, sports, recipes, and warm memories.