A second lockdown would smother our economic recovery and only delay the inevitable spread of COVID-19.

European countries are imposing harsh lockdowns again as a second wave of COVID-19 spreads throughout Europe. It was a mistake last spring, when most U.S. states followed Europe’s lead in imposing lockdowns during the first wave, and it would be an even bigger mistake to copy the failed lockdowns again today.

I was stunned when Italy imposed regional lockdowns in late February and a national lockdown on March 9. In short order, most other European countries did the same. Then, influenced by the sensational predictions from Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London that more than 500,000 Britons and 2.2 million Americans might die from the virus, the United Kingdom and most of the United States followed suit.

Panic and herd mentality drove policy making in March, and frightened populations ceded their personal, economic, and religious liberties on a scale unprecedented even during wartimes. With eight months of hindsight, it seems obvious that the lockdowns did more harm than good on a number of accounts. Not only did they throw tens of millions worldwide out of work, decimating entire industries (think restaurants and bars, travel, tourism, airlines and aerospace), but they also triggered waves of secondary medical problems, including anxiety and depression, increased substance abuse and domestic violence, and other adverse health outcomes as many surgeries and screenings were delayed or missed.

Some economic damage was inevitable because of COVID-19, but long, indiscriminate lockdowns made the contractions much worse. The simultaneous timing of increased COVID cases and lockdowns in March and April made it difficult to determine which was, in fact, causing more economic harm. But as Southern states began to reopen over the summer, both their COVID cases and economic activity surged. The region had the highest number of daily new COVID cases and the lowest unemployment rate (6.9 percent) in the country.

The lockdowns probably did save hospitals from being overwhelmed in New York City, New Orleans, and elsewhere, but hospitals were nowhere near capacity in most of the United States. In fact, because of the widespread cancellation of non-emergency surgeries, many hospitals were overstaffed and laid off workers.

Europe and the United States are now facing a second wave of COVID-19 infections. Over the last month daily cases tripled in France and increased by a factor of four in England, six in Germany, and ten in Italy, according to the New York Times Covid Case Counter. As a result, the countries are locking down again.

France has closed bars and restaurants and is requiring people across the entire country to stay home. Factories can continue to operate but “non-essential” stores must close. The United Kingdom just announced what amounts to a new national lockdown. Germany has shut down its restaurants, bars, gyms, theaters and hotels, and is now prohibiting gatherings of more than ten people. Protests and riots have erupted in Italy over its reimposed restrictions.

Here in the United States, meanwhile, cases have nearly doubled over the past month. California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and some other Northern and Western states, have kept many of their restrictions in place and are requiring travelers from other states to quarantine. Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and most Southern and Midwestern states have mostly reopened — and some, such as South Dakota, never locked down.

Even with California, New York, and Massachusetts maintaining tight restrictions on personal and commercial activities, the economic recovery — driven in large part by the open states — has exceeded expectations. The United States recorded its most rapid economic expansion in history during the third quarter (July-September) of 2020 — bouncing back at an annualized rate of 33.1 percent. Unemployment, which hit 15 percent last Spring is now under 8 percent nationally, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A second lockdown would smother the recovery while only delaying the inevitable spread of COVID-19.

Instead of following Europe into a second round of lockdowns, the United States should follow the advice of the top scientists and medical experts who have signed the Great Barrington Declaration. They advise avoiding lockdowns and focusing instead on protecting the most vulnerable, letting the disease spread among the young and healthy to build population immunity.

Heeding their guidance would better preserve the economic recovery and more quickly end the pandemic than another round of lockdowns.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/for-better-health-and-a-stronger-economy-dont-lock-down-again/

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Eli Lilly Covid Antibody Drug Gets FDA Emergency Clearence

Eli Lilly & Co.’s antibody therapy was granted an emergency-use authorization by U.S. drug regulators for treating Covid-19, widening access to a treatment that early data suggest is effective in keeping people infected with the coronavirus out of the hospital.

The Food and Drug Administration authorized the experimental treatment, called bamlanivimab, for use against mild-to-moderate Covid-19 in adults, including those who are 65 and older, and pediatric patients, the agency said in a statement.

Shares of Indianapolis-based Lilly gained as much as 5.2% in late trading on Monday. Through the close, the stock had advanced 8.3% so far this year.

The clearance gives doctors an option for tackling the virus in high-risk patients before they’re sick enough to require hospitalization. Other treatments that received the regulatory go-ahead, such as convalescent plasma, a component collected from the blood of recovered Covid patients containing immune factors, and Gilead Sciences Inc.’s antiviral remdesivir, are intended for use in severely ill Covid-19 patients.

The U.S. government will pay Lilly $375 million for 300,000 vials of the antibody treatment. The initial agreement is for delivery over the first two months following a regulatory green light. The U.S. also has the option to purchase an additional 650,000 vials through next June for as much as $812.5 million.

Now begins an even greater challenge: Keeping pace with demand.

“We’re in the middle of this surge in cases, so we have to continue to try to squeeze out as much supply as we can,” Chief Executive Officer David Ricks said in an interview. “We’re loading the trucks right now, so that they can move as fast as they can. We’ve made 88,000 doses that are being loaded tonight, and we about that much inside of a week shipping out to centers across the country.”

The drugmaker has a manufacturing partnership with Amgen Inc., among others, and plans to pursue more collaboration pacts in order to increase supply, Ricks said. “It still might not be enough,” he said.

Experimental antibody treatments could become a powerful component of the arsenal that doctors use to treat the coronavirus. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious-disease official, has referred to antibody-based medicines as a bridge to a vaccine. The class of treatments was thrust into the spotlight when President Donald Trump received an antibody cocktail made by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. after becoming infected with Covid-19.

The therapies, which rely on lab-made proteins that mimic the immune system’s ability to fight off the virus, also are being studied as short-term treatments that could be given to people such as nursing-home residents or staff who may have been exposed during a local outbreak to prevent them from getting sick.

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-11-09/eli-lilly-covid-19-antibody-therapy-gets-emergency-fda-clearance

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Flooding our nation with electoral ballots was a catastrophic mistake

If the current vote totals hold up, Joe Biden will win the presidency. But if there’s any truth to the widespread stories we’re now seeing about voting irregularities and even outright fraud, he’ll take office on January 20 not only as one of our most deeply flawed presidents but also as our least legitimate one.

No one — Democrat or Republican — should feel good about such a prospect, but it boggles the mind that such an inept and uninspiring old candidate could amass three million more votes than a youthful and charismatic Barack Obama posted during his remarkable 2008 campaign — a campaign that was unprecedented in terms of its energy, its mass-movement appeal, and its voter-turnout efforts.

It boggles the mind, that is, if we categorically dismiss the possibility of voter fraud.

We’ve already heard about the Sharpiegate lawsuit in Arizona (disputed though it is) and the hundreds of complaints received by the state’s attorney general’s office. And the ridiculous-on-its-face 88% voter turnout in Wisconsin, which was a whopping 21% higher than its higher-than-average turnout four years earlier. And the goings-on in Georgia’s Democrat-rich Fulton County, where Republican ballot-counting officials were told to go home only to have county officials continue to count votes in their absence. And the efforts of Philadelphia’s vote counters to keep Republican observers from getting close enough to see what’s actually happening with the votes being counted.

Again, if there’s any truth to these allegations, none of them instills confidence in our electoral system. None of them sets the stage for a peaceful transfer of presidential power. And that’s because no one knows where Biden’s record-shattering 72 million (and counting) votes have come from.

Normally in matters of politics, there’s plenty of blame to go around. But the Democrats own this problem entirely. After all, they’re the ones who unilaterally rigged the game and flooded the country with mail-in ballots.

What did they think was going to happen? Exactly what is happening. As National Review’s Andrew McCarthy has noted, this deluge of ballots is part of “a two-step scheme to enable post-election cheating: First, infiltrate as many illegal ballots as possible into the state systems; second, keep chanting that ‘every vote counts’ and demagogue anyone who says otherwise.”

Indeed, charges of voter suppression and election stealing are powerful deterrents.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh comes out and says what a whole lot of us are already thinking: “Mail-in voting and early voting create more opportunities for things to go wrong, either through intentional subterfuge, human error, or other circumstances. This is largely why I hold the scandalous view that all voting should take place in person, on election day. Voting should end when that day ends, and begin when it begins. Exceptions could be made for active duty military and perhaps a few other very limited and carefully selected groups. But the vast majority of people should be expected to show up, in person, on the day of voting to vote.”

All voting should take place in person on Election Day.

No one knows where Election 2020 will take us, but the coming weeks promise to be some of the most bitter we’ve ever experienced as Americans. When we lose faith in our most sacred institutions, we lose faith in the things that sustain us. And we end up in a very bad place.

We’re in a heck of a mess. And we have the Democrats to thank for it.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/74697-our-fatally-flawed-voting-system-2020-11-05

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IN BRIEF

Trump campaign releases initial list of dead Georgia residents that "voted" in 2020 election (Just the News)

Texas social worker charged with 134 counts involving election fraud (CBS DFW)

Belly laugh of the week: Top officials claim 2020 Election most secure in U.S. history (AP)

Biden under pressure from the Left to erase student debt (Washington Examiner)

Biden likely to scrap parts of Trump decision to pull troops from Germany (Washington Examiner)

Seven deleterious things Biden could do with a Democrat-controlled Senate (Daily Wire)

2020 election results set Republicans up for success in 2022 and beyond (Washington Examiner)

"The message wasn't right": Election losses leave stunned Democrats rethinking path forward (Washington Examiner)

Spendthrifts Pelosi and Schumer see $3.4 trillion as "starting point" for next COVID stimulus (Disrn)

Justice Samuel Alito rips Supreme Court for not considering church coronavirus lawsuits (Washington Examiner) | Alito warns of dangers to free speech and religious liberty (Fox News)

Trump eyes digital media empire to take on Fox News (Axios)

Parler adds five million users as conservatives grow tired of censorship (LifeNews.com)

Feds strike deal to make vaccine free at major pharmacies (NY Post)

"Cancel traditional Thanksgiving": Chicago issues stay-at-home advisory (Washington Examiner)

Sweden imposes partial lockdown for first time (Daily Caller)

Great timing: Georgia secretary of state to quarantine, wife tests positive for coronavirus (Fox 5)

Massachusetts prepared to legalize abortion up to moment of birth (Disrn)

California set to reopen strip clubs before churches (Free Beacon)

Appeals court rules Harvard doesn't discriminate against Asian American applicants (NPR)

Excerpt: "Proponents of ending race-based considerations at U.S. universities were unfazed by Thursday's decision and plan to bring the case to the Supreme Court."

Michael Cohen's bogus book about Trump is being made into Hollywood movie (Daily Mail)

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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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Arthritis drug 'cuts elderly Covid-19 deaths by two-thirds', say researchers - raising hopes that it will save the most vulnerable

An arthritis drug has been found to cut deaths in patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19 by a remarkable two-thirds – giving medics a powerful new weapon in their armoury against the disease.

The daily pill, first earmarked as a potential Covid game-changer by a British firm, reduces deaths by 71 per cent in those with moderate or severe illness, researchers say.

Importantly, it works in the elderly, raising hopes that it will save the most vulnerable.

Called baricitinib, and marketed under the brand name Olumiant, it is a relatively new drug for rheumatoid arthritis that has been available for only three years.

But in February it was identified as a strong candidate to help treat what was then the new threat of Covid-19.

The drug was picked out by London-based BenevolentAI, which examined thousands of existing medicines for signs they might combat Covid.

Its artificial intelligence program predicted baricitinib would ‘reduce the ability of the virus to infect lung cells’.

Now the idea has been validated with pan-European researchers, led by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, reporting baricitinib slashes death rates in those admitted to hospital with the disease by two-thirds.

Last night NHS cancer specialist Professor Justin Stebbing, of Imperial College London, predicted that baricitinib would help save thousands of lives.

The results, in the journal Science Advances, come from patients hospitalised with Covid-19 pneumonia at two hospitals, in Italy and Spain.

Professor Volker Lauschke, of the Karolinska, who led the study, said: ‘These results are especially encouraging seeing as the study included a large cohort of elderly patients, a group often excluded.’

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8949605/Arthritis-drug-cuts-elderly-Covid-19-deaths-two-thirds-say-researchers.html

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Positive lessons conservatives can learn from Trump

Like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher before him, Donald Trump has redefined conservative politics throughout the Western world. Every centre-right party in the West now has a Trumpist faction. Like Reagan and Thatcher, some of Trump’s policy achievements are unlikely to be reversed.

Of course, Trump is no Reagan or Thatcher. It’s easy to forget both Reagan and Thatcher were furiously vilified by the left when they were in office. Reagan was portrayed as a simpleton — “It’s what he knows for sure that just ain’t so,” Walter Mondale wisecracked. Thatcher was regarded as a warmonger, a heartless destroyer of communities and would-be authoritarian, and Thatcherism was an analogue for fascism.

Reagan and Thatcher each won multiple elections, cementing their revolutions. Each was succeeded by a paler, plainer associate.

Reagan and Thatcher behaved properly in public and private life. No one could say that of Trump. Reagan was widely loved.

Trump is still in office. His strange purge of the upper echelons of the Defence Department may be just spite. But they could indicate a big surprise, possibly a sudden withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan.

Overall, it’s not likely, but it is possible. Trump’s actions here, as elsewhere, are weird.

Ultimately, Trump will likely accept Joe Biden’s victory. But still we should marvel at the closeness of the result. Last time, Trump won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, which put him over the top in electoral college votes, by a cumulative sliver of 77,000 votes.

This time he’s behind in Pennsylvania by a bit under 60,000 votes, in Georgia by 15,000 and Arizona 11,000. Those three states would have given Trump victory. In an election of just under 160 million voters, Trump will lose office by a cumulative total of less than 90,000 votes; 90,000 out of 160 million. If it was a fluke for Trump to win in 2016, it’s a fluke that he lost this time.

And, as widely commented, the overall results were very shabby for the Democrats. The Senate now stands at 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats, with two Senate run-off elections in Georgia in January. The Democrats lost the governorship in Montana and did not win one from the Republicans. They did not capture a single state legislature from the Republicans, including critical states like Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. They lost eight or more seats in the House of Representatives and now have a narrow and vulnerable majority there.

Trump went backwards in his share of white male voters but went up with Hispanic voters, black men and most other demographic groups. Trump lost, Biden won. It was a narrow result. But beyond the presidency, the Democrats did very poorly.

Out of all this cross-grained complexity and electoral ambivalence, how is it that Trump has transformed conservative politics?

First, there are two lessons out of the Trump phenomenon that conservatives definitely should not learn.

One is that to be successful, a conservative leader or movement must be as aggressive, crude, dishonest and offensive as Trump. That would be a disastrous lesson, for conservatives and for democracy.

However, there is an opposite lesson that also should not be learnt, and that is that in order not to be like Trump, conservatives should not fight, should not be aggressive politically as opposed to personally, should not campaign for cultural values as well as economic or defence policy, that in order not to be Trump they need to become like Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep, famous for his perennial ‘umbleness.

American conservatism has a huge effect on conservatism all over the Western world. It wasn’t always thus. Because it is so self-consciously a nation of the New World, the US was often thought not to be really conservative at all in the European sense. It lacked traditions of throne and altar, and of close ethnic association with nationality, as in German Germans, Italian Italians and so on.

Today conservatism right throughout the West is profoundly influenced by the US and very often defined in US terms. American conservatives have big think tanks, a continuing conservative rural base, private universities and liberal arts colleges, a thousand journals and a vast multiplicity of activist groups to draw on.

They also have a much higher degree of religious belief and practice than European nations, or Australia. And right throughout the West there is a close correlation between churchgoing and overall conservative attitudes.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Christianity, in most policy areas, does not adjudicate definitively between centre-right and centre-left parties. But it is a simple sociological fact that one of the best predictors of conservative social and political attitudes in countries with predominantly Christian backgrounds is frequency of church attendance. And the US still has a much higher rate of church attendance than most Western nations, with a very few exceptions such as Poland. What should conservatives therefore make of the Trump period?

First, of course, Trump is not likely to leave the scene. He has just received more than 72 million votes for president. His overwhelming desire to be the centre of attention means that he will surely tease Americans, and torture the Republican Party, with the prospect of running again for the presidency in 2024, when he would only be Joe Biden’s age now. Indeed, if Biden survives four years in office and runs for a second term, Trump at 78 could still be the youth candidate.

Or if Kamala Harris succeeds Biden as the Democrats’ candidate, will she be able to win states like Pennsylvania and Michigan against Trump? This will be especially the case if Biden’s pro-regulation, pro-green policy bent has damaged US economic growth.

Trump’s likely presence on the national and international stage, perhaps at the head of a new right-wing cable news network or other media ventures, makes it all the more important that conservatives learn the real lessons of the Trump presidency.

Conservatives who dislike Trump must recognise the real achievements of his presidency: lower taxes; deregulation; high economic growth before COVID-19; better enforcement of American borders; conservative black letter law judges; three new Middle East peace deals; a positive revolution in Israel’s position in the Middle East; containing Iran; calling out China; trade deals that help American jobs; onshoring of more manufacturing production in the US; a higher defence budget; putting pressure on NATO countries to increase their defence expenditure; stronger support for pro-life measures and movements than any previous president. It would be a strange conservative who held that list of achievements as nothing. Equally, however, those conservatives who have fallen in love with Trump should acknowledge his substantial failures and disasters.

His response to COVID-19 was chaotic, ineffective, counter-productive on key measures like mask wearing and social distancing generally, and politically calamitous. It’s wrong to blame Trump personally for most US virus deaths, it’s right to say his response was ineffective and chaotic. As well, needlessly and constantly, Trump tells lies. He seems to lie as often as he tells the truth, and indeed seems indifferent as to the difference. He even boasted to Bob Woodward in the book, Rage, that he lied about the severity of COVID in order not to alarm the nation.

Trump often lies about international affairs, as in his ridiculous early boast that he had removed the North Korean nuclear threat by his love-ins with Kim Jong-un.

Trump’s administration was needlessly unstable, with a bewildering and dangerous turnover of key personnel in defence and national security areas in particular. He trashed the value of alliances.

There was also a consistent vindictive nastiness to Trump. It’s one thing to be nasty to The New York Times. It’s quite another to express contempt for the war service of Senator John McCain, who spent five years as a prisoner of war being brutally mistreated by North Vietnamese communists and refusing early release, insisting instead that, according to the rules of war, combat pilots should be released in the order in which they were captured.

And for all that some of Trump’s achievements need to be recognised, his ultimate political fate was that with positive economic reviews, and all the advantages of incumbency, he was still defeated by Biden, who took five states Trump had won in 2016 and won the popular vote by more than five million.

Nonetheless, there are important positive lessons for conservatives in Trump’s politics. One is that nationalism and patriotism are powerful forces that galvanise voters in a positive direction. This is a deep insight that conservatives should embrace more energetically. It is a cleavage between left and right in modern Western politics. Pope Francis, undoubtedly a good and holy man but a pontiff with a left-wing view of politics and economics, in his latest Encyclical, Fratelli tutti (All Brothers), argues for a kind of world government of technocrats to solve international problems.

At the kindest, you would have to say that this formulation is unrealistic, given how despotic and dysfunctional so many national governments are. But it’s also wrong in principle. Pope John Paul II, also a good and holy man but one with a conservative view of politics, argued in his Encyclicals that family and nation were natural states of humanity. They were mechanisms of human solidarity, not to be despised.

Similarly, however coarsely, Trump vigorously rejects the toxic notion that Western societies today are responsible for historic misdeeds of centuries ago, or that their national stories are inherently and intrinsically evil. Trump is not well equipped to make these arguments intellectually, but instinctively he wants to fight such culture wars. He’s right to do so.

Many conservative leaders are scared of these conflicts. But the more they give in to the cultural left, the more they are endlessly apologising, inviting defeat. Conservative politicians shouldn’t make these issues the centre of their politics, but they shouldn’t be scared of them. A bit of fight is no bad thing.

A lesson which it is astonishing that Trump should teach us is that conservative parties must seek out ethnic minority voters.

Trump went backwards with white men but came within an ace of winning a second term by increasing his vote with Hispanics and blacks. He won something like 40 per cent of Hispanics in Florida but also a large share in Texas.

Democrats have thought for decades that demography is their friend. They’re wrong. Conservatives should never accept a vote is lost to them on the basis of a citizen’s ethnicity. Hispanics are natural Republicans — they love the military and enlist in disproportionate numbers, they love religion, family is the centre of their life, they run many small businesses. They don’t necessarily favour illegal immigration. In opposing illegal immigration Republicans must support legal immigrants.

Republicans have been poor at seeking out Hispanic and black voters just as Liberals in Australia have been poor at seeking out ethnic Indian and Chinese voters. Boris Johnson’s government is good at this, as was Canada’s last Conservative PM, Stephen Harper. So long as conservatives are truly colour blind in civic matters, their values should resonate with ethnic minorities much more powerfully than woke, left-liberal, postmodern identity politics obsessions. Most minority voters like law and order.

For all that, economics is the key to everything. Trump had powerful appeal to minorities, and to mainstream voters, because prior to COVID he had provided jobs and wages were rising.

Conservatives must be pragmatic. They are patriotic and socially conservative but they should not be wedded to any government ideology, whether it’s libertarianism, free markets, social welfare cuts or anything else. Trump in 2016 appealed because he promised results rather than dogma.

Finally, conservatives need leaders who command the public square. If in our culture it is now impossible to have cut-through, like Reagan, unless you are nasty, like Trump, then we are in a mess.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/us-election-2020-positive-lessons-conservatives-can-learn-from-trump-politics/news-story/0f168cdefc3bfd14d6e1993bba7b3dfc

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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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National Election Fraud: Evidence of National Chicanery During America’s 2020 Presidential Election

Below is part of a large study of election fraud. See the original for links

Regardless of where one falls politically, the sanctity of the vote is a bedrock of a functioning representative democracy. Voters have to believe their vote matters. And that the vote is free, fair, and accurate.

The basic facts of the 2020 American Presidential election are concerning because mounting evidence indicates there’s been a concerted effort by state Democratic Parties to flip the election from President Donald Trump to former Vice President Joe Biden in a number of key swing states with the help of notoriously corrupt Democratic Party machines in at least five American cities — Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, and Atlanta.

Here are the basic facts of the case: On Election Night when America went to bed, President Trump had a commanding lead in virtually every swing state, as well as Virginia, which no one expected him to win. However, when America woke up the next day, we found that he’d lost these leads, largely on the basis of mail-in ballots found in the middle of the night and out from under the watchful eye of legal election monitors.

What’s more, these massive caches of votes – almost all of which were for former Vice President Biden – came via large dumps primarily from the five aforementioned cities in states predominantly run by Democratic governors.

When one looks at the statistical likelihood of the reported turnout, the numbers are so improbable they’re more at home in a one-party state like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or North Korea.

What’s more, Biden’s victory does not square with the results of the Republican Party nationally: Republicans won 28 of 29 competitive House seats and Democrats were unable to flip a single state legislature. Joe Biden secured a scant three of the so-called “Bellwether Districts” that almost always choose the winner, one of which was in Delaware. Judicial Watch found 353 counties in 29 different states who had higher than 100 percent turnout.

Anecdotally, swing states tend to follow Florida in terms of swinging left or right. This is particularly true in Michigan, which has voted in lockstep with Florida since 1968. Nearly three dozen states had counting machines connected to the Internet during the election, which is inherently insecure. Joe Biden’s lead among mail-in ballots was massive in two states — Michigan and Pennsylvania — while it was in the single digits in most states.

Evidence of chicanery, irregularities, and outright manipulation have poured in from a variety of states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas, New Jersey, Nevada, and Arizona. This evidence could easily be dismissed as simply weird if one is being generous or naive.

While much of this took place at the state level, there are also irregularities that are occurring across state lines and these are worthy of consideration. It’s not evidence per se, but there was a massive spike in the number of Google searches for “election fraud punishment” in swing states in the 30 days leading up to the election.

Below we explore the details and the data of what happened across the nation on Election Day, with flagrant and often sloppy irregularities occurring from coast to coast. Elsewhere we explore similar efforts in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia.

All of the posts in this series will be updated as more credible information is uncovered.

The General Landscape of American Election Fraud

The media is trying to weave a narrative with ever-shifting goalposts. They began by saying that not only did voter fraud not happen, but that it’s impossible. Now, they have shifted their story to saying that there is always minor fraud, but that it never really matters much.

The Heritage Foundation has identified 1,200 elections where voter fraud made the difference in recent decades, long after the era of Jim Crow when election theft was de rigueur. Of these, fully 15 were thrown out specifically because of cheating by mail-in ballot.

Mail-in ballots are largely banned in Europe, where voter ID requirements are likewise the norm. Florida has been recognized specifically as an offender.

Another narrative in the controlled media is that illegal aliens and other non-citizens don’t vote. This is patently untrue. In fact, they vote at alarmingly high rates. A 2019 study found that approximately 2.2 percent of respondents admitted to voting illegally, which implies a little under a million ballots cast by non-citizens every year.

The counterargument is that respondents are either lying or misunderstood the question, but this is simply not true — those who conducted the study verified their votes.

So we can see that electoral fraud is not only impossible, it is common. It is not negligible, it has determined elections in living memory. With this as our backdrop, we will now investigate voter irregularities throughout the nation during the 2020 Presidential election.

What Constitutes Evidence of Electoral Fraud?

Before going further, it is worth discussing what constitutes evidence for electoral fraud. Well, the Carter Center has a set of standards that they use to determine whether or not there has been electoral fraud somewhere.

These are the standards used by globalists to determine whether or not elections they disapprove of have been conducted fraudulently. Several of them are present in the contested states:

* Counting procedures should be verifiable.
* Votes should be presented for independent review.
* Elections should be subject to recounts.

Additionally, the Carter Center states that it is the right of dissidents to challenge and question the results of an election that they believe to be fraudulent. Harassing dissidents is considered evidence of chicanery in and of itself.

“Effective redress” is the term they use and it is considered by the Carter Center to be vital for establishing an election as legitimate. The resistance of the Democratic Party to recounts and audits should be a red flag in and of itself.

There are also mathematical anomalies that are worth looking into because, regardless of turnout and outcome, elections will follow certain patterns. One of these is that, because of mail sorting, mail-in ballots will consistently show the same ratio of support for each candidate. We did not see that, however — there is a significant spike in support for Biden and fall off in support for President Trump as Election Night dragged on.

Indeed, in Wisconsin, this anomaly became massive around 4 a.m., the same time that the massive ballot drops without supervision began. The same phenomenon occurred in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, all four of these states with copious amounts of electoral chicanery and irregularity. Virginia was another state with similar mathematical irregularities.

Benford’s Law is another area where we see mathematical irregularities. Put simply: When we have large datasets of numbers, there is a pattern we can find with regard to the final and penultimate digit of each number in this data set.

Benford’s Law analysis is one of the first things run by forensic accountants looking for financial malfeasance or tax cheating.

Many of the electoral tallies in disputed states violate Benford’s Law — but only for Joe Biden, whose distribution more closely resembles the curve when people type “random” numbers in. President Trump, Jo Jorgensen, Howie Hawkins, and Kanye West’s numbers do not violate this law, but former Vice President Biden’s do in disputed areas.

The Wikipedia article about Benford’s Law was altered and locked after several enterprising Twitter users began investigating this strand of the 2020 election theft.

The Glitch From Coast to Coast

One recurring theme throughout the 2020 election is the glitch. There have been a number of glitches, many detailed in our series on irregularities in different states. This, in and of itself might not be cause for concern — however, in every case, these so-called “software glitches” favor former Vice President Biden at the expense of President Donald Trump.

Again, we have detailed these in our state series article, but we will mention some here just to give you a general idea of what has been going on with these “glitches.”

One in Michigan sent 6,000 votes to Biden that were meant for Donald Trump. Another in Wisconsin, robbed Donald Trump of 19,500 votes. Another similar glitch in Georgia saw an unspecified number of votes go to Biden that were, once again, meant for the President.

There appears to be a pattern here. Were these all bona fide mistakes, we would likely find votes that were meant to go for Joe Biden going to Donald Trump before the situation was corrected. But we are unaware of any such error in favor of the President.

The common denominator? The voting software used to calculate the vote made by a company with deep connections to the DNC.

The Turnout That Wasn’t

The DNC’s victory in the 2020 Presidential election relies heavily upon a massively increased turnout, again centered around a handful of large cities controlled by the Democratic Party. One example of this is 90 percent turnout in the entire State of Wisconsin, which would not only be the highest level of turnout in American history, but also comes close to the 92 percent average in Australia where voting is mandatory. In the city of Milwaukee alone, the turnout was 84 percent.

Compare this turnout to Cleveland, a culturally comparable city not in a swing state, which had a comparatively scant 51 percent turnout. This is an important city to draw a contrast with because, while it is a Democratic stronghold, as are most large cities, and it has a similar minority population, it was not in a state that was considered in play this election. Democrats attempted to steal the election by fabricating astronomical turnout in urban areas they control in swing states.

The turnout gambit becomes even more laughable when one considers that Biden is one of the least invigorating Democratic candidates since John Kerry or Mike Dukakis. Yet somehow this candidate was able to increase his vote above what Barack Obama enjoyed, with some districts in Milwaukee putting up more votes than there are registered voters in the area.

A broad study conducted by Judicial Watch found that 353 counties across 29 states had turnout exceeding 100 percent of registered voters. Eight of these had turnout exceeding 100 percent across the entire state: Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

Perhaps more damning, the study was limited to 37 states publishing their voter registration data. This means that, of the 37 states that Judicial Watch had access to, 78 percent of them had turnout exceeding 100 percent.

Vetting of Mail-In Ballots

The American public was warned for months in advance that mail-in balloting, illegal throughout most of Europe, is inherently insecure and lends itself to the kind of mass voter fraud that we are seeing in action right now.

But the mail-in ballots that we are seeing in this election are not just nonspecifically “suspect.” They are rife with irregularities and a lack of accountability that should cause them to be closely investigated, audited and, where appropriate, thrown out entirely.

Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania are particularly questionable. This is a state where Biden enjoyed a 60.5 percent lead in mail-in voting. More damning is the fact that many of these ballots seem to have arrived before they were even sent, arrived the same day or arrived within one day of being sent. This is an abnormal amount of processing time, especially when we consider the surge in mail due to the election.

James O’Keefe found two whistleblowers at USPS, one of whom was willing to come forward, who told of backdating ballots. This whistleblower was intimidated by the feds and it was falsely reported that he recanted his report.

Vetting of mail-in ballots is particularly important because they are widely open to electoral fraud, as we have discussed above. So it is troubling that we have multiple reports, including in the form of sworn affidavits presented before the court, of poll watchers being thrown out, mocked, intimidated and even physically assaulted during the course of counting mail-in ballots.

Of special note is the strong resistance to poll workers in swing states to allow anyone to watch them. In Pennsylvania, poll workers were caught on video expelling poll watchers despite knowledge of a court order preventing them from doing so. Reports of expelled poll watchers were part of the lawsuit filed in Michigan and there were similar reports out of Georgia. This raises the obvious question — why don’t they want anyone watching them?

More HERE

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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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As coronavirus rages around Europe, Slovakia launches a daring mission to test every adult

A little blue form can change the way you live in Slovakia. The COVID-19 certificates are being issued to everyone who participates in an enormous testing program — designed to reach every Slovakian over the age of 10. That's roughly 3.8 million people.

Those who test negative can avoid a lockdown, but those who refuse to be swabbed are required to stay at home.

For economics student Viktor Frühwald, the decision to get tested was an easy one. "I can go wherever I want because I'm safe," he told the ABC.

Staff at shops, bars and restaurants can ask to see patrons' blue certificates before granting them entry.

"It's an experiment for sure," he said. "[But] it's better for everyone to know if they're infected or not."

Another student, Dorota Bartkova, said she hoped the mass testing program would help her country control the virus. "I think it's a good time for us, for our country to do the screening of the population," she said. "I want to do my part.

"And, of course, I want to be involved in normal life, again, to do shopping and go to work and school."

At a testing centre in the town of Zvolen, Maria Zvalova closes her eyes and winces slightly as a swab is inserted into her nose.

Fifteen minutes later, she is given her blue certificate to prove she tested negative. She said she hoped it would provide some extra freedom and peace of mind. "We are grandparents and our family contact is limited," she said. "Now, it's about my health and the health of my partner."

The Slovakian Government hopes to lead the world in mass testing.

Luxembourg previously announced a similar strategy, although its population is just 600,000 people.

Two rounds of testing were held over the last two weekends with 3.6 million people – two thirds of the population – taking part on the first weekend in November and just over 2 million tested last weekend.

Participants are swabbed through their nose and their sample is analysed using an antigen test, which looks for specific proteins on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Unlike a PCR test, it does not need laboratory analysis.

However, what Slovakia's antigen test gains in speed, it loses in accuracy. "The test can detect maybe half the real infectious people," said Marek Plesko, a doctor swabbing patients in the central city of Banska Bystrica.

"So, if someone receives a negative test he or she cannot be satisfied they are not a virus spreader."

Slovakia recorded just a handful of daily cases over the European summer, but late last month they surged to more than 3,000 a day. In the latest round of rapid testing, 13,509 samples (0.66 per cent) returned a positive result.

Mask are compulsory in public and social interactions are limited to six people.

Dr Plesko said the mass testing program risked undermining the public health guidance if people put too much faith in the accuracy of the tests and assume they've not infected. "They have to be careful and still comply with regulations."

Dorota Bartkova agreed. "Psychologically, it can affect people and they will not accept the rules," she said. "So I think it would it would be good to present [to] people that it's only screening and the sensitivity of this is not 100 per cent."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-11/slovakias-daring-coronavirus-strategy/12867004

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The economics of plague

Boris Johnson’s decision to lock down England again until December 2, is economically and scientifically bizarre. It is based on advice from the faulty mathematicians at Imperial College, who proved to be hopelessly in error when the COVID-19 pandemic first arrived in March. It will damage the British economy, and probably kill more people than it saves. We seem to have completely lost the calm efficiency with which we faced plague outbreaks in 1665.

The Imperial College forecast of COVID-19 mortality in March, prepared by Neil Ferguson, who had a track record of erroneous forecasts, predicted COVID-19 would take 500,000 lives in Britain in 2020 –ten times the actual number – and resulted in a nationwide lockdown. An initial short lockdown was defensible; we did not know either the mortality or the transmittability of the new disease. However, after an achingly slow and partial reopening, another Imperial College forecast of 4,000 deaths per day has caused Boris Johnson to lock the country down again. This will do untold economic damage; it will also cost lives, as necessary medical tests will not be carried out and fragile personalities left in isolation will succumb.

In March, it was defensible to get the forecast wrong; it is not defensible now. At that time, we did not know the mortality rate from Covid-19; the World Health Organization, another bunch of bunglers, was claiming it to be around 4% and implying the case fatality rate (measuring known cases) in the early outbreak was equivalent to the infection fatality rate (measuring all cases). Now we do know the infection mortality rate, at least to a moderate degree of accuracy; it is between 0.4% and 0.6%, depending on what you assume about the medical treatment available to the patient. The very old suffer higher mortality, but in the cold mathematical calculation, they have fewer years of life to lose, and hence their premature death is less important than that of a younger person. (I speak as one of the vulnerable ones, being old, fat and diabetic.)

The central error in both the Imperial College forecast, apart from the mortality rate, is the mathematical curve that an epidemic follows. Contrary to popular delusions in the mass media, its spread is not exponential. Instead, as the Nobel prize winning Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford University School of Medicine explained, epidemics follow a Gompertz curve, a function identified by Benjamin Gompertz (1779-1865), under which the rate of spread falls exponentially with the current size of the infected population. Hence, instead of spiraling out of control and producing 4,000 deaths per day in Britain’s 70 million population, it naturally slows when the infected population is large, reducing the new infections rate and the death rate.

The most unpleasant feature of the epidemic, however, is that, after the spread has slowed and infections have declined for a few weeks, it can speed up again, because the number of people who are then infectious is much lower. This gives rise to the “waves” of infection seen in all countries since COVID-19 first appeared; while each new “wave” can produce more cases than the previous one (because testing is better), its mortality is less – partly because of improved medical knowledge and partly because the population as a whole has acquired a partial immunity to the infection.

“Experts” will always produce forecasts that require you to up-end the economy and devote your entire attention to their nonsense. In epidemiology as in global warming, they should be ignored, or preferably de-funded.

COVID-19 is not especially lethal, nowhere near as lethal as Ebola or even SARS, the Chinese coronavirus that spread earlier this century. However, it is especially infectious; it spreads more rapidly than most other known viruses and is infectious for up to two weeks before symptoms appear (if they ever do; there are many asymptomatic patients). Since it also appears not to bring its victims long-term immunity, it is likely to recur in large waves for the foreseeable future. Eventually, we will discover a vaccine that is fully effective against it, or effective enough to prevent it spreading rapidly through the populace. However, it appears likely that the first vaccines will not have a high level of efficacy, and hence while dampening the worst epidemics will not eliminate the disease from the population – any more than flu vaccines, even if universally administered, would completely eliminate flu from the population.

One problem that has caused Boris Johnson to lock down Britain is the inadequate capacity of the National Health Service. Since 1948, British health care has been run on a Soviet style central planning model, with market forces playing no role (not that U.S. health care is a perfect free market model, far from it). As a result, Britain has only 6.6 intensive care unit beds per 100,000 population, compared to 34.7 ICU beds per 100,000 in the U.S. and 29.2 per 1200,000 in Germany, a well-run hybrid system that has coped well with COVID-19. Naturally, as in all centrally planned economies, this has produced a severe shortage of beds when the healthcare system is put under the strain of a novel virus. The normal NHS approach, of lining all the patients up in a lengthy queue of several months and ignoring those who die before treatment can be received, works poorly in this case; too many patients die for lack of ICU facilities.

The system has had eight months to prepare for a recurrence of Covid-19. For a fraction of the cost of the idiotic economic bailouts that are now being brought again into action, additional temporary ICU facilities could have been prepared, as they were in New York in April under the magnificent leadership of President Trump (who the world is going to miss badly after January 20). In 1665, the British political system knew that flexibility was required, moving the entire seat of government to Oxford when plague struck. Under the socialist dead weight of the NHS, no such flexibility appears to be possible.

While the world has been spared a pandemic of this nature since 1918’s Spanish influenza, it should be prepared for future recurrences. There remain large parts of the world where living conditions are overcrowded and sanitary conditions poor, and in those areas, diseases can always mutate and spread themselves into the general population. One behavioral change that would mitigate this is a drastic reduction in international air travel – COVID 19 spread throughout the world within weeks because of the ubiquity of mindless international travelers, especially among the student population. While domestic quarantines can do little to limit the spread of a disease once it has entered the population, international ones can certainly slow its initial transmission. The fact that Italy, for example, was full of Chinese workers from Wuhan on temporary visas is a pathological side-effect of excessive globalization that we should prevent.

There is a blessed Darwinian rule of thumb relating to naturally-generated pandemics: either their mortality rate is high, or their infection rate is high but not both. If the disease has a high mortality rate, it is unlikely to be especially infectious, or to have a latency period as long as COVID-19, because it would quickly create a local desert and run out of victims. Thus, lockdowns are almost always futile; a disease like COVID-19 can beat them, and the economic and medical damage done by the lockdown is far greater than its benefit.

https://www.tbwns.com/2020/11/09/the-bears-lair-the-economics-of-plague/

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IN BRIEF

The Fight for Georgia: Democrat candidate Raphael Warnock slammed police, honored Jeremiah "God D—n America" Wright (Daily Wire)

Leftists invite voters to exploit the Peach State's weak residency rules to stuff ballot boxes (Tennessee Star)

Pennsylvania received 10,000 mail-in ballots after polls closed on Election Day thanks to court-sanctioned "grace period" (Washington Examiner)

The Pennsylvania lawsuit explained (Power Line) | A user's guide to the PA challenge (Washington Examiner)

In 353 U.S. counties, 1.8 million more voters registered than eligible citizens (Daily Wire)

Trump legal assault exposes election shenanigans — but faces high hurdles (Washington Times)

Biden in September: I will not declare victory until the election is independently certified (Breitbart)

Lincoln Project backstabbers face backlash for urging people to harass Trump's legal team (Sara Carter)

GOP Senate would leave Biden to pursue tax agenda through administrative action (Washington Examiner)

Biden coronavirus adviser wants U.S. to distribute vaccine globally before it's available to all Americans (Fox)

Black Lives Matter pens letter to Biden and Harris: "We want something for our vote" (Daily Wire)

Mitch McConnell unanimously reelected GOP leader — hopefully long term (NY Post)

California voters reject revamp to property tax system (Fox Business) and expanded "rent control" (NR)

Vatican's Theodore McCarrick report says Pope John Paul II knew of misconduct allegations nearly two decades before cardinal's removal (Washington Post)

Authors retract study showing efficacy of mask mandates — as Biden pushes nationwide requirement (FEE) | On the flip side, CDC report says masks protect wearers and everyone else (NBC)

U.S. gets scolded by tone-deaf China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran on human rights at UN (Examiner)

Japanese town deploys "monster wolf" robots to deter wild bears (OAN)

Policy: Trump's greatest achievement: The president has exposed the rot and corruption of our ruling class (American Mind)

Policy: Why a Biden presidency would be a gift to Iran (FrontPage Mag)

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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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Trump was a valuable aberration, never a long-term option

One opinion

Veni, vidi, vici. Donald Trump came, he saw, he conquered. Not for long. But long enough to leave a substantial legacy. Like a case study in Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction, the deal-making entrepreneur came, he saw and he disrupted many of the political and policy baselines that had been the received wisdom.

But the chaos candidate asked too much of voters at the 2020 election. Most people can hold their noses for only so long to avoid his badmouthed, bad-mannered, boorish, bullying and often deranged behaviour. Another four years was beyond the pale.

Trump was always going to claim, with scant evidence to date, that dark forces stole high office from him. Mr Fake News warned us that he is a bad loser. His behaviour confirms why a blustering, self-obsessed and insecure man who tweets in capital letters like a madman is an aberration, not a long-term option for Republicans.

That said, his legacy is undeniable. Before his arrival, the Republican Party was dangerously uninterested in the dislocation felt by millions of Americans, economically and culturally. It isn’t any more. Voters who were forgotten by the Republican establishment were out-and-out despised by the other side. Demo­crats, and Hillary Clinton, learned the hard way that dissing possible Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” was not a path to victory.

Trump’s legacy is that the Democrats chose Joe Biden, a working-class kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who was able to reconstruct the blue wall of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that Trump, the disrupter, breached in 2016.

On policy, the disrupter-in-chief challenged a cosy consensus that China’s economic growth — the communist country is now the second largest economy — would bring it closer to the West. Trump confronted China’s gaming of its “developing country” status, where countries self-declare their status to the World Trade Organisation to attract “special and differential treatment”. It is obscene that some of the wealthiest WTO members — including Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Israel, Kuwait, Brunei and Qatar — self-declare as developing members to avail themselves of special treatment that applies to sub-Saharan Africa.

Trump has reminded Europe and NATO to fund more of their own security. Europe is learning from Trump that every country needs to secure its own borders.

He shook-up the media, too, even if that didn’t last long. After his 2016 win, The New York Times and Washington Post delivered grovelling apologies for not under­standing or caring about large swathes of the country who voted for Trump. If they do not glean anything from the fact Trumpism was not trounced at the ballot box last week, Trump’s case to voters will remain powerful: the country is at risk of being stolen from mainstream voters by big bus­iness, big media and cultural elites.

It is Trump’s legacy, too, that Americans voted in record numbers. Just as Trump was a necessary jolt to the system, Biden’s win is a sensible shift in this political cycle, signalled by him securing not only the electoral college votes but also the largest popular vote in US history. Even so, Democrats should be wary of gloating. After all, Trump won the second largest popular vote recorded.

Just as Democrats regrouped around Biden after Trump’s win in 2016, Republicans now can search for a longer-term alternative to Trump. Sound economic policies, tackling PC culture and identity politics, and a nation’s security cannot rely on a foul-mouthed bully who lacked grace and decency in the highest job. His vulgar contempt for the country, not yet conceding defeat, confirms why Americans voted strategically: on personality, they categorically fired Trump. But Biden was not handed a resounding policy win.

No Republican standing for re-election in the House of Represen­tatives lost their seat. With Dem­ocrats losing at least seven, their majority is reduced to the thin­nest margin in decades. No wonder centrist Democrats are coming for house Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Republicans look set to maintain their Senate majority, too. There are more GOP governors than Democrat ones and Republicans control most state legislatures.

In other words, Americans do not want to veer wildly to the left. The results are an invitation to moderates on both sides to take steps to lead the country out of a period of profound polarisation.

Doubt there is a constituency for a depolarisation project? Notice that woke folk didn’t get a blank cheque from voters even in California. A state measure, Proposition 16, would have introduced race-based preferences into state education, hiring and contracts. Supported by most of California’s political and business elites, it was rejected at the same ballot box that swung Biden’s way.

Writing in Politico Magazine, Michael Grunwald summed up the election this way: “Trump called Biden ‘the most boring human being I’ve ever seen’, and a majority of the country seemed OK with that. Normal is underrated in politics, and norms are underappreciated until they’re gone,” he wrote. “While Trump’s great-again message evoked a certain kind of nostalgia for an America before diversity workshops and gender-neutral bathrooms, Biden evokes a different kind of nostalgia for an older brand of politics.”

Biden delivered a pitch-perfect speech on Sunday, pointing out the need to start healing divisions in America. Not just in America, in fact. “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric,” he said, “lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again and to make progress. We have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies.” It’s schmaltzy. And it’s true. Many of us are exhausted, disappointed and bewildered by the confected and downright crazy Armageddon arms race launched by the extremes of both side of politics, and not just in the US but in Australia too.

Just as Trump’s win in 2016 was not the end of the world for the left, neither is his defeat the end of Western civilisation for the right. Biden said he understood the disappointment of Trump voters: “I’ve lost a couple of elections myself. But now let’s give each other a chance.”

If he is serious about transforming the teleprompter stuff into action, he could start by reminding his party and the broader liberal-elite hegemony that if you deem certain views deplorable, don’t be surprised if another deplorable populist exploits genuine voter frustration. Can Trump supporters give Biden a chance? Many won’t, especially those in the media. They have invested too much, often their careers, in Trump and Trumpism to admit when he crossed countless lines of basic decency. They emboldened Trump to descend into the final Borat-style farce of claiming hundreds of thousands of votes were stolen from him. His blinkered boosters have ensured he is a laughing-stock, despite his legacy elsewhere.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/us-election-2020-trump-was-a-valuable-aberration-never-a-longterm-option/news-story/59fc1d97ed47db710ff131ee5cb3af66

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Wait Just a Minute! Some Very Good News May Be Coming

Like many, I spent the last few nights waking up at 2:03 A.M., no reason, then looking at my phone for news, any news, that might be positive for President Trump. I survived on Rush, Bongino, Mark Levin. When the news continued to be ugly, I even checked in on ridiculous bloggers promising that ballots were watermarked and D.J. (our household name for a president we love) was actually launching a sting on the Deep State.

Enough already. Stop the madness.

Hey, I have a degree in statistics, and I have some level of critical thought. If there is such pessimism in my tribe, I am not going along.

So today, I started to dig into the numbers, and as I did, I fought my confirmation bias at every step.

I realized that I, like millions of others, had been numbed into despondency by the overwhelming press, media, social media push to certify President-Elect Biden. (I put that in there so you can see how repellent it is.)

Hey guys, this thing is not only not over; it is scary for Biden. I mean really scary, and most of all, the media know it. Thus, the rush to get everyone in line with the narrative that a 78-year-old, early-dementia former V.P., who could not draw a crowd larger than a dozen, just beat D.J. in a fair election.

Process that for a moment.

Start with Pennsylvania. Biden, as of this writing, is at 290 electoral votes. Pennsylvania is 20.

I read the Justice Alito opinion, and it is pretty clear that he wants the after election night at 8:00 P.M. votes separated for a reason. Biden is going to lose at the Supreme Court, and they know it. Four justices already said the Pennsylvania Supreme Court cannot adjust voting rules. A new arrival, Justice Barrett, says she is there to apply the rules in the Constitution. OK, wanna bet she does?

Remove the after 8:00 P.M. ballots, and Biden loses Pennsylvania. Biden 270.

Let's visit Nevada. I have lots of friends in California who have condos in Nevada to evade state taxes. There are not a couple of people doing this; there are tens of thousands. Everyone knows it, and California seeks them out.

Our old pal Harry Reid knows it as well, and he apparently has them voting in droves in this election. Probably not a big D.J. constituency. Within 72 hours of the election, the Trump team found, validated over 3,500 of them. I do not suspect that Trump's people stopped counting.

Every one of these is a ballot reduction for Biden

Nevada, as of now, is well within reach for DJ and the Trump team — particularly when the California crowd is reduced. And a few of them may testify since a false vote is a very bad thing, with jail time if convicted. Maybe a bigger story here.

Remember where we are, people. Biden is at 270 after a highly probable Supreme Court decision (read Alito and concurring opinions).

Lose Nevada, lose the election.

But wait: it gets better.

Let's visit Wisconsin. Right now, it is 20,000 votes in Uncle Joe's direction. Lots of stories out there, well below the Google fold, that there are way more Wisconsin votes than there are registered voters. OK, maybe the dead can vote up there — probably a Midwest thing.

Well, last night, we found that Wisconsin election clerks were told, and followed the direction, to modify mail-in ballots and fill in the blanks where witnesses left out critical info.

I am sure it was just a good customer service thing and they meant no harm. The problem is every such ballot is now toast.

There were "thousands" of such prima facie wrongful votes. Oops. Biden up 20,000 — now that number is in question. No more truckloads of votes coming in, so every ballot D.J.'s team eliminates gets President-Elect Biden one step closer to former V.P. Biden who lives in a basement. Not good here.

North Carolina. That one pretty much looks like as though it is over and D.J. won it. Fox News is rumored to call it for Trump around April 2021.

Remember where we are here. Biden is probably going to lose Pennsylvania, so if he loses even one state, even one Electoral College vote, ouch!

Either D.J. wins outright, or it goes to the House, which means that D.J. has four more years.

We're not done yet.

Michigan. Oh, yes, the land of the "glitches" in the voting machines. Six thousand votes for Trump given to Biden in one of 47 counties where that software is used. About 150,000 votes in Biden's favor right now.

Google the 130,000 Biden votes that showed up in the middle of the night, and you can see how the wonderful people at Google are fact-checking this "debunked" story. In fact, for fun, Google "Michigan voter fraud," and you get literally three pages of "this was fact checked and proven to be false." Why would Google be so assiduous?

They too see that if Amy votes with the four, Biden is one vote away from the basement.

Lawsuits in Michigan and the other states are being launched, and discovery will take place. Google will not be there.

Voter fraud is kind of like larceny. A little is OK. It is even kind of entertaining.

Dead people have been voting for a hundred years in Democratic cities. It is such a constant that one would think the Republican Party would consider a Dead Voter Outreach program to get their share.

But voter fraud on this scale is just not sustainable. It does not pass the common sense test.

We have bloggers with lots of time on their hands going through voter rolls and showing that person after person who voted in a swing state also fought in the Civil War or maybe the War of 1812. It was funny at first, but the overwhelming number now goes beyond humor and rubs our faces in it.

I think D.J. has to swing one state. Actually, one electoral vote. Not only is this thing not over, but the Biden team must be sweating bullets.

Voter fraud at scale seemed like a really cool idea until D.J. went to the mattresses. Now that he is fighting it out one voter at a time, with the Supreme Court likely to create the starting point at Biden 270, Biden has everything to lose.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/wait_just_a_minute_some_very_good_news_may_be_coming.html?fbclid=IwAR06_ADeOOH5aMv8yRbTlq-D_J8u2ioPWOtPu2-IAkqzI9ww8akGVge_F6U

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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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The coronavirus tradeoffs

“It’s precisely because COVID-19 has shown us that life is so fragile that we should make a priority to actually live it.” —New York Post columnist Karol Marcowicz

No doubt Marcowicz will be pilloried for her above sentiments, but she is only restating in far more personal terms an immutable reality expressed by Hoover Institution senior fellow Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.”

Is a nation where fear has been relentlessly cultivated for almost a year ready to deal with that? In the long run, we’re all dead. But what about the interim between now and then? Should you attempt to maintain some semblance of normalcy, or submit to the demons of isolation, loneliness, and boredom, along with all the possible pathologies such misery engenders?

For many Americans, the answers are elusive for one overriding reason: The coronavirus has been the most politicized affliction in the history of the nation. And perhaps the most damning part of that politicization has been the twisted effort to raise the importance of death by coronavirus over death by anything and everything else. Thus, while America is bombarded with a steady diet of coronavirus death totals, deaths from suicide, drug overdoses, and, most especially, the thousands of Americans suffering from serious conditions who died as a result of delaying or not seeking care have been largely suppressed. This suppression has occurred despite the reality that the levels of excess deaths not related to the coronavirus — but directly related to what columnist Jeffery A. Tucker labels “disabled human freedom and social functioning” — are nothing short of astounding.

Nonetheless, they remain largely irrelevant, because in modern-day America, where there is politicization, Big Tech/Leftmedia censorship of “unreliable” viewpoints follows in short order. “Experts” and “outliers,” labeled as such insofar as they serve or don’t serve the interests of our Ruling Class corporate oligarchy, have been quickly identified as those to be revered or despised.

That many of the revered, such as the World Health Organization or Dr. Anthony Fauci, have blatantly lied or flip-flopped? That the effectiveness of certain drugs was promoted or dismissed based largely on political considerations? That social distancing has been measured not in terms of science but in terms of what more than 1,000 health professionals considered “legitimate” large gatherings against “racial injustice” versus “illegitimate” large gatherings such as church attendance or political rallies derided as “super-spreaders”? That the quest for a vaccine has already been reduced to political and racial considerations about its potential effectiveness?

While this orchestrated cacophony remains ongoing, one thing is appearing more certain than ever: The chief culprit behind the literal reordering of our entire society remains largely unaccountable. No matter how many Americans die, how hard our constitutional rights are trampled, and how much our economy has been shattered — to the point where some sectors may never recover — our elitist oligarchy and its useful idiot political allies in both parties remain “bullish” on China.

How grotesque is their capitulation? More than 5,400 Americans were killed in the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks combined. As of this writing, more than 230,000 American have died of coronavirus — as in more than 40 times the number killed in the two worst domestic attacks this nation ever endured.

How is this reality not part of the political equation going forward? Because when push comes to shove for the nation’s globalist elites, American lives are more expendable than Chinese market share.

Moreover, the most serious question surrounding the pandemic remains unanswered. What if an effective vaccine is never produced? Even now, according to CDC estimates for the 2018-19 season, the flu vaccine was only 29% effective. Even if a coronavirus vaccine doubled that level of effectiveness and everyone received it, more than two-fifths of Americans would remain vulnerable to the virus.

Have Americans faced the possibility that there’s no end to the pandemic for the foreseeable future? The antipathy directed at those who suggest herd immunity is the answer — as in the idea those who even broach the subject “don’t care how many people die” — is disingenuous. No matter how unpleasant, there may be no other choice available, other than societal suicide.

It has been less than a year, and “pandemic fatigue” is already an integral part of the national equation, especially among younger Americans who face the possibility of never going through the myriad of social rituals that transitioning to adulthood normally involves.

At what point does the seemingly quixotic and dubious effort to “flatten the curve” completely flatten all hope for the future?

It may very well be that, going forward, therapeutics mitigating the effects of the virus rather than eliminating it are the only answer. That most Americans don’t want to hear that is unsurprising, because it will require people to make choices they would dearly love to avoid. Thus, for every Karol Marcowicz who chooses to see those who matter on Thanksgiving, possibly for the last time, there’s a California Governor Gavin Newsom who decrees that gatherings (implicitly including Thanksgiving) must be celebrated outdoors, for a shortened period of time, and limited to three or fewer households, even if that means some family members can’t attend.

And that’s assuming Americans will be allowed to make any choices for themselves. The autocratic tendencies of several politicians cannot be denied, even to the point of advocating for the familiar police-state tactic of snitching on one’s fellow Americans for failing to follow their diktats.

What level of control — and surveillance — sold as concerns about health will Americans tolerate? It is already clear, despite no mention whatsoever in the document itself, that millions of Americans are willing to embrace the suspension of constitutional rights as a tradeoff for dealing with a “national emergency.”

National emergency as defined by whom, and based on what? There are strong indications that the coronavirus mortality rate will decline to flu-like levels. What then? And since widespread draconian lockdowns, better described as a “template for oppression,” are still being implemented — despite all the scientific evidence of their deleterious and often deadly effects — what else, even something wholly unrelated to disease or healthcare, can be declared a national emergency in order to implement the same kind of oppression? Oppression inevitably accompanied by economic and social catastrophe?

Will Americans ultimately allow government to define what “actually living” means?

“We all miss normal and long for its return,” Marcowicz writes. “Even all the side pleasures of COVID — the baking and the togetherness, the empty subways and the beautiful outdoor dining set-ups — only manage to somewhat mask that we yearn so badly for our lives, our real lives, the ones hopefully waiting for us on the other side of this.”

We’re already on the other side of this and our real lives have been irrevocably changed. And realistically speaking, anything resembling normalcy going forward will come down to one overriding choice: allowing our yearning to conquer our fear.

That’s the ultimate tradeoff — all the distractions and machinations in the world notwithstanding.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/74683-will-americans-choose-to-live-or-simply-exist-2020-11-05

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GOP Adds at Least 11 Women to House

The strong performance of Republican congressional candidates may be one of the most unexpected and even shocking outcomes of the election, especially for House Democrats. Not only did the Democrat Party fail to expand its majority by “double digits,” as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been predicting, but they lost a net total of five seats with a real possibility of losing another five or six. So much for a blue wave. If anything, this wave was red.

Even worse for Democrats is that the ones leading this red wave were women. The number of female Republican representatives in the House has at least doubled with the addition of 11 members.

Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who helped lead the effort to recruit more women candidates, called it “the night of Republican women.” She added, “Despite the media and the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] issuing demeaning comments and saying it wasn’t possible, look at the outcome. We are going to have incredible women who have earned this victory themselves in these districts in the next Congress.”

Stefanik argued that one of the biggest motivating factors that pushed more Republican women to run was the hubris of the Democrats’ identity politics. “One interesting theme in my early conversations with these women candidates on the Republican side is that [they said] the party of Nancy Pelosi does not represent the vast majority of women in America,” she explained. “The Democratic Party does not have a monopoly on women candidates or women voters.” Amen to that.

Also of significance, these wins serve to double the number of pro-life women in the House. “The surge of victorious pro-life women candidates in the U.S. House is a stunning blow to Nancy Pelosi and her pro-abortion agenda,” asserted Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List. “So far, we have more than doubled the number of pro-life women in the House, with more races to be called. Seven pro-life women candidates flipped pro-abortion Democrat-held seats.”

Will mainstream media pundits celebrate this important increase in the number of women representatives as they did in in 2018? Given the mainstream media’s distain for Republicans, don’t bet on it. That said, while it appears there will be little celebrating for Republicans and conservatives when it comes to the presidential election results, there are some significant bright spots that shouldn’t be missed.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/74695-gop-adds-at-least-11-women-to-house-2020-11-05

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The Left Threatens GOP: 'We Have a List' and You'll Never Work Again if You Helped Trump

Former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden used the power of the office to spy on the media and political enemies, including, of course, Donald Trump. Obama kept a disposition matrix, an assassination list. And now the D.C. Left is trotting out a new list. It goes something like this: If you complain about potential voter fraud in the 2020 election, you’ll never work in this town again and if you ever worked for Trump, you’re through.

The threat has been issued by Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who explicitly threatens to cancel any Republican “making baseless allegations of fraud,” among other things. Of course, as per usual, they’ll decide the meaning of “baseless,” thank-you-very-much. In fact, Jen will probably pull a Crazy Hirono and DM Merriam-Webster demanding they change the definition of the word “baseless” or “fraud” before the deadline. Or else.

The Lincoln Project, and their siren, Tokyo Rose Rubin, have held themselves out as principled conservatives. Their principle is pretense. The organization has been anything but principled, what with claiming that Trump’s a secret Russian agent, and worse disinformation, such as he won’t leave if he’s defeated, and will change the law to stay 12 years. We’re talking unhinged here. Their purpose in life is to troll the president and if the lo-fo crowd buys their agitprop, so be it.

Being the “principled conservative” that she is, Rubin is more than happy to pile on.

“Any R now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into “polite” society. We have a list.”

And she’s not alone in keeping a list. My colleague Stacey Lennox points me to this AOC tweet followed by a blue checkmark named Michael Simon, who’s starting an entire project to keep track of people who deigned to become Trump supporters. They’re finished.

Simon is a former Obama administration analytics guy who has started the “Trump Accountability Project” to keep a list of, as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez calls them, “Trump sycophants.”

He was right there to pick up what she was throwing down. “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets [sic], writings, photos in the future,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.

Simon responded, in a now-deleted tweet:

Yes, we are. The Trump Accountability Project (@trumpaccproject) [sic] Every Administration staffer, campaign staffer, bundler, lawyer who represented them – everyone.

And what will they do with such information? As Tokyo Rose Rubin pointed out in her above tweet, anyone supporting Donald Trump should “never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society.”

We have a list.

Diversity of opinion will not be tolerated. Because of your views, you’ll never work in this town — or anyplace in the business world, universities, or board rooms.

We have a list. It is the disposition matrix of people with different political views. They won’t kill you, just your livelihood.

Like the good totalitarians they are.

https://pjmedia.com/election/victoria-taft/2020/11/06/the-left-threatens-gop-we-have-a-list-and-youll-never-work-again-if-you-helped-trump-n1130593

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IN BRIEF

Biden to increase H-1B visa limit, remove country quota for green cards (Economic Times)

Campaign manager says the Left's puppet is "going to make good" on "incredibly progressive" agenda (The Hill)

Seven big items on the White House agenda (Daily Signal)

"Extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive": AOC lashes out at Democrat Party (The Blaze)

Fox News wrongly called five Democrat pickups in House in addition to early Arizona call (Power Line)

Dr. Fauci said Trump "asking for trouble" with "super spreader" rallies — but silent on Biden celebrations (Fox News)

"Since this was developed under Trump & because of his leadership, will Kamala Harris & the other Dems who said they wouldn't take a 'Trump vaccine' still refuse, or are we just going to pretend none that happened?" —Allie Beth Stuckey

"You are about as smart as a clump of sand if you think the timing of this announcement is a coincidence. They waited until the media declared Biden the winner. Then we hear about the vaccine." —Matt Walsh

Tropical Storm Eta makes landfall in south Florida (Fox News)

Snippet: The reason our democratic republic has functioned as well as it has for the past 231 years is because of our trust in the electoral process. When confidence in the election process disappears, confidence in the legitimacy of government disappears with it. It is a very potent way to destabilize a democracy.

Policy: The constitutional way to defeat Cancel Culture (Heritage Foundation)

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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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The surprising stock market

I follow only the Australian stock market but it generally mirrors Wall st. and I gather that it is still doing so at the moment

The surprise is how robust stock values are at the moment. The lockdowns knocked about 12% off the value of my portfolio but the election has substantially reversed that. My portfolio is now only about 6% down on where it was

There were a lot of pundits who said the market was in for a big fall. So what happened? It seems to be that investors now expect gridlock in American politics. And gridlock is something conservatives rather like. If there is no agreement in politics, no new laws will be passed and no new regulations will be issued. That means that businesses have to cope with market challenges only, not political changes. While the politicians are squabbling with one another, it gets them off the back of business

There was a good example of that during the British prime ministership of the unfortunate Theresa May. Her weak leadership plus a near balance in the House of Commons meant that very little got done politically. And British business boomed at that time.

So it seems that U.S. business is expecting something similar now. And that expectation will be well and truly fulfilled if, as expected, the GOP retains control of the Senate.

And over the last 4 years the GOP has very largely become the party of Trump. His attitudes and policies have not only won huge approval among the GOP rank and file but have also percolated into the thinking of most Senators, the contemptible Mitt Romney being the obvious exception. But even waverers like Romney, Collins and Murkowsky have generally gone along with the rest of their Senate colleagues anyhow. So a Senate dominated by Trump thinking will be a total roadblock to any of the insane new legislation that Biden has proposed.

And note that the GOP has also done well both in the House and in picking up State governorships. So even if sufficient new votes are "found" to deny the GOP complete control of the Senate, Congress as a whole will end up finely balanced and should as such fulfil its traditional role as a brake on change. Getting a majority for anything in either house is not easy. Only measures with a considerable degree of consensus behind them normally get up.

It took the first two years of his presidency for Obama and his supporters to get Obamacare through, during which little else got done

And I haven't even mentioned yet the now very conservative Supreme Court. The one big thing that conservatives wanted from Trump was to rebalance the Supreme Court and he achieved exactly that. And the Supreme court has a proven ability to knock on the head any adventurous legislation or regulations -- JR

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Brash and bold, Trump’s legacy will endure

Donald Trump has transformed America. The election is gone, Trump is still there. At time of writing, the odds favour Joe Biden getting across the line. Trump’s huge vote and Republican advances in congress could be seen as a moral victory. But Trump is not remotely interested in moral victories.

Everyone’s calculations got thrown out this election because people who voted on polling day voted Trump, while those who voted by mail-in ballot voted Biden. Therefore in some states Trump had leads of hundreds of thousands, which withered when the mail votes were counted.

The purpose of Trump’s allegations are twofold. One is to give some momentum to the legal challenges his campaign has launched against counting certain votes that they claim came in too late or were otherwise invalid. It is perfectly legitimate for Trump to pursue all legal avenues.

However, even if they have some modest success, these actions won’t get so many votes excluded that it changes the result.

Second, Trump sets up the narrative that the election was stolen. This enables him to stay the centre of attention and continue what he loves most, wage a campaign of grievance.

There is a theoretical, extreme scenario in which Republican state legislatures, say in Georgia, decide votes have been rigged and so choose only electoral college delegates who will support Trump as president. It’s technically possible but pretty much inconceivable if courts have ruled the votes valid.

One of the ironies of Trump’s likely defeat is it means the Republican Party is not rid of Trump. He can threaten to run for the presidency again for the next three years. If he had won the presidency, at least the Republicans could start to sort themselves out about who they can run next time, and on what basis.

But Trump’s legacy for the Republicans, for America and for the world is huge. It does not hinge on this one set of comments.

Let’s consider them one by one: Trump’s legacy for democracy, for America, for conservative politics and for the world.

First of all, consider Trump’s vote. Biden won the popular vote. He has about 74 million votes now and by the end of all states doing all their counting will have probably a couple of million more. He already has more votes than have ever been cast for any presidential candidate previously in US history. On any measure, that is a huge achievement for Biden. If as seems likely he inches ahead in the electoral college and becomes president there can be no doubting the legitimacy of his presidency, nor his singular place in the history of American presidential elections.

Guess who has the second highest popular vote in US presidential history? One Donald J. Trump. He has about 70 million votes now and he too should end up with a million or two more by the end. More people voted for Trump than ever voted for Barack Obama, the previous record holder, or for Hillary Clinton last time, or for any other president.

Not only that, Trump clearly held up the Republican vote. It’s still murky but it seems that the Republicans have held control of the Senate and have actually picked up a net gain of six seats in the US House of Representatives. It’s possible that two senators will have to go to run-off elections in Georgia on January 5. The Republicans would need to win one of them to retain control of the Senate.

This is because Georgia has a provision that if the winning candidate does not win 50 per cent, a run-off is held. Would Georgians vote to constrain a Biden presidency with a Republican senate? Would they vote to make it more likely a Biden presidency could get key legislation passed? What role will Trump himself play in such an election?

But let’s stick with Trump’s vote for a minute. According to the US liberal establishment, the nation was reeling under its moral revulsion at Trump and his Republican enablers. This is plainly just not true. Republicans picked up a state governorship in Montana and now control the governor’s mansion in 27 of 50 states.

Not all the seats in the House of Representatives are decided, but one projection suggests the Democrats will end up with 226 and the Republicans 209. It is rare for a president to sweep to power and his party lose seats in congress. That suggests Biden was more popular than the Democratic Party and its far-left platform.

It is also important because in two years there will be a mid-term congressional election. In these, the president’s party normally loses seats. This happened in huge bad results for Democrats in Bill Clinton’s first mid-term election in 1994 and similarly in Barack Obama’s first mid-term in 2010. Obama was personally popular yet Democrats lost 63 house seats in 2010. There is every chance that in two years Biden could be president, but the Senate, the house and a majority of state governors all Republicans, with the federal court system and the Supreme Court mainly peopled by judicial conservatives.

There are lots of reasons for conservatives to be deeply worried about the long-term effects of Trumpism. Electoral failure does not seem to be one of them. As one wag put it, the election was a contest between those who disliked or hated Trump’s personality, as opposed to those who disliked or hated the Democrats’ swing to the left. Democrats talking of socialism, defunding the police and ending fossil fuels is enough to make voters very wary. Commentators routinely decry gridlock. But Americans vote for gridlock quite deliberately. In Maine Biden trounced Trump in the presidential vote. But Republican senator Susan Collins trounced her Democratic challenger. Despite the heightened partisan divides of America, millions of Americans voted deliberately to put Biden in the White House and make sure he couldn’t do anything.

Even people who like Trump find him exhausting. The mood of America may have been quite well captured in these paradoxical results: we want a sleepy old guy who is kindly and snoozing in the White House, and a congress and judiciary that keeps him paralysed. In this time of ideological turmoil, we vote deliberately for do-nothing government. Elmer Fudd in the White House, Deputy Dawg in the Senate, Yogi Bear in the house and Dudley Do-Right in the judiciary. Put sports back on the front page (except when it’s taking a knee).

Trump also has changed the content of conservatism in some positive ways. Trump will get 47 or 48 per cent of the vote in the end. This actually understates his support. Because of the structure of the electoral college, he didn’t campaign at all in California or New York or even Illinois. If he had campaigned in those states he wouldn’t have won them, but he would have tightened the popular vote considerably.

America is just about a 50-50 nation and Trump was considered the best man by roughly half America. If polls tell you otherwise ignore them, for in this election the polls proved themselves worthless, systematically understating not only Trump’s vote but the conservative vote generally, and by appalling margins.

The old ideological construct of the pre-Trump Republican Party is dead. It won’t come back. Trump himself is much less an international outlier here than is often claimed. The old Tory dispensation is dead in Britain. Boris Johnson won his huge parliamentary majority on the back of Brexit and support from northern working-class England and in exchange his policies included a lot of big government and intervention for working-class people, including industry policy. Scott Morrison was returned to government by provincial Queensland seats and working-class Tasmanian seats and he has put all ideology in the bottom drawer if not altogether the dustbin of history. His government is taking direct measures to revive manufacturing.

Centre-right parties around the world are seeking and gaining the support of working-class people while centre-left parties are dominated by green, woke identity-politics, climate-change crusades, and draw their support from upper-income, service-industry, limousine liberals.

The poorest three states in mainland America are Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia. They all voted overwhelmingly for Trump and now always vote Republican. The states at the other end of the income scale, the wealthiest states in America — Maryland, New Jersey, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Connecticut — now always vote for the Democrat in presidential elections. US citizens with average incomes and below overwhelmingly donated money to Trump. Those with above average incomes overwhelmingly donated money to Biden. Trump also got more non-white voters than any recent Republican. They’re not that woke either.

The old Republican program was free trade, low taxes, lower spending, cuts to welfare to reduce the deficit, globalisation, strong defence, global security leadership, border control. Trump is an outlier in his often gross rhetoric. But in his actual policies, he is fairly normal contemporary centre right. He junked the version of free trade that saw the US obey the rules but endure enormous trade deficits with China and other nations that don’t obey the rules. For Canada and Mexico Trump didn’t embrace protectionism but negotiated a better deal. He wants a much bigger manufacturing industry and lots of manufacturing jobs. He kept border control and low taxes and, pre COVID-19, his tax cuts produced a booming economy. But he won’t cut welfare because he now represents millions of people who are on welfare or might go on welfare one day.

Trump kept the commitment to strong defence and the military budget reflects that. But he doesn’t like providing security to allies who don’t bear their share of the burden. Some reaction like this was bound to come eventually. The failing here is not primarily Trump’s, but rather that of free-riding US allies.

But here is one Trump innovation. He utterly, straightforwardly, vigorously, contemptuously rejects the politically correct, woke culture. In my view he does this coarsely and crudely. But as one wag put it, Trump is the only middle finger ordinary Americans had available to raise at the preening left-liberal establishment which holds that they are all racists and their national sentiment contemptible.

Can a more mainstream Republican, who doesn’t have Trump’s genius for making himself the centre of attention, overcome the enormous financial advantage the Democrats now have? Big tech, social media and almost all mainstream media went all in for Biden. Social media crossed a dangerous Rubicon when it started censoring Trump and mainstream newspapers and conservatives if they weren’t backing Biden.

This is the most sinister, anti-democratic and genuinely disturbing development of this election. Trump was never an authoritarian leader. He doesn’t control the military, the media, the judiciary or a mass movement in the streets, and he has never disobeyed a court ruling against his administration. The real danger of US authoritarianism now comes from the alliance of political power in Biden and the Democrats, with financial power in Big Tech, media power in social and mainstream media, and cultural power in Hollywood. They share ugly, coercive conformism.

Which is why Republican control of the Senate and so many state governorships is so important, and so healthy.

In international affairs Trump damaged American soft power. But hard power is more important than soft power. Trump built new leverage against China, Iran, Mexico, NATO partners, even multilateral institutions which desperately want the Americans back. If Biden is smart he will use that leverage to achieve US policy aims, not just give it away in a silly desire to reverse everything Trump did.

Out of office, Trump has the potential to be wildly destructive, not least of Republicans. But so far, his legacy is mixed, by no means all bad.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/us-election-2020-brash-and-bold-trumps-legacy-will-endure/news-story/0321856a15d41e46f1fc1190293580a6

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http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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