Election 2024
Positioning for election 2024 is already started; the campaign will heat up very quickly after November 2022.
- October 23, 2024: Trump, tariffs, and the war on American workers
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If someone were to say that war raises prices, so a country shouldn’t attack a country that has attacked them, it would seem almost a non sequiter. The first statement is almost certainly true, but it has no bearing on the second. If you’re attacked, you defend yourself or you die. Who cares about higher prices at that point?
One of the most interesting policy changes under Trump was regarding tariffs. Trump was willing to use tariffs as weapons to get better foreign trade deals. The general wisdom among the beltway crowd is that the best tariff policy is for America to remove them all unilaterally. Whether that’s true or not is a pure non-sequitur if other countries are using tariffs and dumping as weapons of war. It also makes the very elitist assumption that the only policy you can have is to remove them or have them permanent.
The justification for a failure to respond in kind is that tariffs on raw materials, for example, means that non-US companies get resources cheaper than American companies do. Which in turn means that they can make things cheaper, and be more successful. When we raise the price of raw materials only in America, we raise the price of every American-made good made from those raw materials everywhere in the world.
That means lost jobs, because it means American-made products are more expensive both in the United States and outside the United States.
But none of that matters if jobs have already been lost and are continually being lost because other countries—and even DC politicians and bureaucracies—are waging war against American workers.
It’s even worse if many of those jobs being lost are introductory jobs in higher-wage industries. Introductory jobs are essential to building a manufacturing base. Low-wage introductory jobs in restaurants, on farms, and in neighborhoods train kids to interact with customers and to manage and perform a job’s responsibilities. Higher-wage introductory jobs in manufacturing, in farming, and increasingly in data management and low-level programming, teach young adults resource management, interpersonal dynamics with other workers, and responsibility to the employer, the customer, and to their family.
The latter jobs also teach the basics of their industry in the real world. These jobs are essential to an economically sound America, and an economically sound America is essential to a secure America.
- October 9, 2024: Trump, destiny, and the flood
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Don Surber recently wrote:
…the Lord did not deflect that bullet just to have The Donald lose on November 5th. I agree with Steve Hayward, who wrote, “I continue to think he is going to win, because I have a near mystical belief that he’s a world-historical figure of destiny.”
I’ve seen a lot of variations on this. But just because God spared Trump’s life in the face of deliberately malicious incompetence, does that mean God’s plan is for Trump to win? I understand the logic, but I think it’s dangerous to try to guess the Lord’s plans rather than take the opportunity to do what is right.
And there’s been a lot of sitting back and not doing what’s right lately.
In 2020 the Left fostered a global pandemic and blocked the most obvious and safest therapeutics. They deliberately destroyed cities with riots and plundered the savings of the poor. They stole a landslide election and criminalized any attempt at discussing what happened. In each case they not only lied about what they were doing, they made no attempt to cover the obviousness of their lies.
That was not a slowly boiling pot. It’s as if God used Trump to goad them into making their evil obvious. And yet what have we done in response? It’s difficult not to think of the parable of the drowning man. What if the Lord’s plan is to make obvious what His people should do?
Chesterton’s quote about the sphinx in The New Jerusalem is on-topic:
I delicately suggested to those who were disappointed in the Sphinx that it was just possible that the Sphinx was disappointed in them. — G. K. Chesterton (The New Jerusalem)
Eight years of economic disaster from 2008 to 2016. The beltway class was practically gloating about the permanent decline of American exceptionalism. But what followed under President Donald Trump were four years of economic boom, even under an unprecedented shutdown. And then a return to Democrat policies restored economic disaster again. The beltway class like to say that decline is inevitable, but it sure looks like policy makes a difference in whether or not we’re a declining or a booming country.
- July 13, 2024: Walk toward the fire
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“Fight!” (Photo by Evan Vucci)
An assassination attempt against a former president and current candidate must not be forgotten.
- Mark Steyn: “The other night my youngest expressed a wish to see The Manchurian Candidate—the original, of course. And, as great as it is, its famous ending seemed an artifact of a lost and somewhat innocent age: a man is able to stroll into a political rally and access easily a high-up vantage point with a direct line of sight to the nominee. Couldn’t happen now… And yet it just did.”
- Mark Steyn: “As for the no-greater-threat-to-our-republic bollocks, it’s just a few weeks since a would-be assassin put a bullet through the ear of the alleged greatest threat. That day provided a telling contrast… it quickly became clear that the Secret Service and other elements in the federal government created the conditions that permitted that bullet to hit a former president in the head (and kill an American citizen). Consider the implications of that, especially if you’re the family of Corey Comperatore. That’s a far ‘greater threat to our republic’ than the man those corrupted alphabet agencies failed to protect.”
- Ace: “…what motivates most assassins is the feeling that their actions will one day be praised as heroic and courageous. And the New York Times and Dallas Morning News are telling all potential assassins that they don’t need to wait for history to vindicate them: They are ready to vindicate them right now, and praise them as heroes for taking that glorious shot.”
- Austin Ruse: “Good Lord Almighty, that man is a legend. He gets shot, gets up almost immediately, with blood running down his face, throws his fist in the air and shouts ‘fight, fight, fight.’ Donald Trump is a legend.”
- Julie Kelly: “The party that claims ‘political violence’ and ‘domestic violent extremism’ pose a dire national security threat has not mentioned the July 13 attempted assassination of the former president.”
- Judicial Watch Statement on the Assassination Attempt on Former President Donald Trump: “Americans can be assured that Judicial Watch has already initiated an independent investigation into today’s events.”
- June 5, 2024: Roundup of Reactions to the Democrat’s Latest Corrupt Lawfare
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There are a lot smarter people than me commenting on the necessary response to the witch hunt in New York City, so I’m going to lead with them.
- Ace: “Enough of the compromised fake Republicans at National Review and Commentary. Man up or get out.”
- Bookworm: “It’s to be hoped that, by turning Trump into an outlaw, the Democrats both bit off more than they can chew and woke the sleeping giant. Plus, they inspired memes…”
- Daniel Greer: “Citizens have seen politically motivated judges & prosecutors warp statutes, lawmakers remove protections to target disfavored individuals retroactively, and executives selectively ignore the plain text of the law they’re sworn to uphold. How will Texas’ public servants respond?”
- Sarah Hoyt: “…if the verdict weren’t a foregone conclusion, they’d have tried to make the trial more plausible.”
- William A. Jacobson: “Lawfare very easily can become warfare when people lose trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect against political persecution.”
- Robert Stacy McCain: “…the problem with writing about this trial is that the English language doesn’t have enough synonyms for bullshit.”
- Brooke L. Rollins: “This accommodation must stop. We will not last if we continue giving them the civics of comity while they give us the hard hand of lawfare. Let them live under the rules they impose upon us—upon ordinary Americans.”
- Mark Steyn: “A governing party of a serious nation so indifferent to elementary maxims of prudence that it's prepared to invent out of whole cloth crimes with which to convict the leader of the opposition is not one you'd want to bank on to keep us from stumbling into, say, a third world war… right now there is no law in America, and, in consequence, no politics. So there is no point in pretending you enjoy benefit of either, and in doing so you're just part of the problem.”
There’s a lot of truth to this meme: Democrats are certainly acting as if Biden didn’t actually win.
This two-tier policing, where one side commits actual crimes and goes free, and one side is criminalized for what aren’t even crimes, has to go. All extradition requests to states like New York and DC must be actively refused. Those states cannot be trusted to exonerate the innocent any more than they can be trusted to lock up the guilty. Their goal is demonstrably to free dangerous criminals—and to lock up innocent people for the crime of holding different political views.
And everything to the institutional left is political. They will not permit a course correction.
While the verdict in New York City was no surprise given the corrupt instructions from the judge, it was still disappointing that there were not enough old school independent New Yorkers to at least provide some dissent from the swamp.
But that’s how the American judicial system works nowadays. Any jurors willing to examine the evidence against the government’s position and the lack of evidence for it would have been weeded out during jury selection.
Mark Steyn pointed out the further aid to corruption, that prosecutors are allowed to throw multiple dubious allegations against the defendant like strands of spaghetti against a wall, in the hope that one of them will stick—both in the jury’s mind and in the public’s. If this is allowed to stand it will grow far worse in New York and other Democrat-run states. Jurors there won’t even be required to agree on which strand of spaghetti they’re convicting on. Even now we don’t know what the actual crime is that Trump has been convicted of. New York and DC and every place that Democrats take over have become insanely Kafkaesque.
- September 21, 2022: Betrayal is bad advice
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A lot of the people who voted for Trump—and who campaign for Trump locally—are people who don’t normally vote. A lot of the pundits on the right don’t seem to understand this. They give it lip service but they don’t seem to either understand or care what that means going forward.
The reason these voters don’t normally vote is a simple cost-benefit analysis. They don’t believe their vote matters. If their vote doesn’t matter, why waste time voting? More importantly, why get invested in an outcome that is predetermined?
In 2016, Trump made an implicit promise—and probably an explicit promise occasionally, I don’t follow Trump’s speeches closely, and he is very outspoken. That promise was, come out and vote for me, and this time, your vote will count. In 2016, a few people took him up on that promise; he barely made good on it. In 2020, a lot more people took him up on that promise. Whether or not he failed depends a lot on what he does and what the Republican Party does going forward.
When I wrote in Who is Trump running against? that “Telling Trump to betray the voters is bad advice” these are the people who would be betrayed if Trump “moved on” from talking about fraud in 2020. The fraud to overcome his 2020 surge was in-your-face blatant. Fraud in 2020 was so blatant that it provided us an opportunity to reform the voting process and vastly reduce fraud going forward.
More importantly, it gives us an opportunity to acknowledge to people who believe their vote doesn’t matter that they were right, that we hear them, and that we’re doing something about it. The press and the beltway would very much like to stifle that conversation. If we want to keep those voters engaged and voting, we must not give in to that stifling. We must acknowledge that fraud exists and we must not let the press and the beltway get away with their national forgetting. Trump especially needs to both keep that conversation going and continue pressuring states to reform their voting processes.
If, instead, Trump “moves on”, these people will go back to complaining that their vote doesn’t matter. And it will be far more difficult to convince them otherwise in the future because they will remember what happened in the middle of the night between November 3 and November 4, 2020. They will remember that rather than fixing a system that encourages blatant fraud, everyone who could do anything about it just… moved on.
- July 13, 2022: Who is Trump running against?
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President Trump has been taking flack for his endorsements lately. Honestly, looking at endorsements like that of Mehmet Oz over Kathy Barnette, I can understand it. But I completely understand his withdrawal of support from Mo Brooks, who went on to lose his primary. The media is describing Trump’s unendorsement as “a personal grievance”, but the issue is far greater than mere personalities.
Watching state secretaries of state and county elections officials stonewall basic election integrity checks—the kind of basic fraud checking that any business does to verify that what comes in matches what goes out—it’s become increasingly obvious that election fraud in 2020 was not your standard margin of fraud.
Election fraud has never been something we should ignore. And yet not only is the left telling us to put fraud behind us, supposed conservatives in the beltway are also demanding that we put fraud behind us. The scuttlebutt about Trump’s not endorsing Mo Brooks is that Brooks switched from talking about the steal to advising that we put the steal behind us. The news media is calling it a “personal grievance” between Brooks and Trump.
I don’t know how much or even whether Brooks backed down from acknowledging the 2020 steal. I don’t live in Alabama and can’t trust anything the media says. But the 2020 election steal is not “a personal grievance”. If Brooks is really telling us to put concerns about an obviously stolen election behind us, he’s wrong, and dangerously so. Putting fraud behind us threatens every future election.
That’s the kind of thinking that helps conservatives continue losing. And it’s the kind of advice Trump doesn’t take well, for good reason. Conventional wisdom is that Trump has to focus on his opponent, not on election fraud. But that’s a drastic misunderstanding of what this election is about.
Trump wasn’t running against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and he isn’t running against Joe Biden in 2024. Biden1 is going to lose worse in 2024 than he lost in 2020. That doesn’t mean the Republican candidate will win. Whatever candidate the Republicans put up in 2024 is not running against the Democratic candidate. They’re running against the establishment that put Biden over the top even though Biden lost. Running against Joe Biden is running against the wrong person. Trump appears to recognize that his true opponent is not Biden, and that he can’t win if all he does is beat Biden.
More elections
- Texas 2023 legislative priorities
- The Texas legislature is in session now for 2023; other than special sessions, it won’t meet again until 2025. Everyone has their priorities. Here are mine.
- Write your rep on ballot security and open elections
- Your state should be a model of secure, open, and self-auditing elections. Here’s a sample letter to your representatives.
- Bean counting and ballot counting
- We treat money far more seriously than we treat the future of our country.
- Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
- John Fund’s Stealing Elections is a concise, easy-to-read description of just how much of a disaster is looming toward us when vote fraud finally catches up to a major election—as may already have happened in places like Florida.
- The endless campaign
- Should we have endless political campaigns? That’s the Barack Obama plan, but is it right for American politics?
- Three more pages with the topic elections, and other related pages
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
Blogroll
- According To Hoyt
- Ace of Spades HQ
- The Anchoress
- John Hayward
- Legal Insurrection
- National Motorists blog
- The Other McCain
- samizdata.net
- Sultan Knish