Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Editorials: Where I rant to the wall about politics. And sometimes the wall rants back.

Election 2024

Jerry Stratton, July 13, 2022

Positioning for election 2024 is already started; the campaign will heat up very quickly after November 2022.

July 13, 2024: Still Standing
Donald Trump: “Fight!”: Donald Trump gets back up after assassination attempt. Fist in the air, shouts “Fight!” Photograph by Evan Vucci.; assassination; President Donald Trump

“Fight!” (Photo by Evan Vucci)

  • 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.”
  • 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.”

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June 5, 2024: Roundup of Reactions to the Democrat’s Latest Corrupt Lawfare
Rabbit Coming Through: A rabbit facing the swamp: “I’m comin’ through.” Tagged with “#courage”.; courage; bravery; rabbits; hares

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.”
If Biden actually won: “They wouldn’t be trying so hard to throw Trump in jail, if Biden actually got 81 million votes.”; Joe Biden; vote fraud; clean elections; President Donald Trump

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.

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September 21, 2022: Betrayal is bad advice
Trumpit: A trumpet over an American flag, with the link to hoboes.com/trumpit; Election 2016; President Donald Trump

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.

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July 13, 2022: Who is Trump running against?
Gary Gygax: Know the Rules: Gary Gygax: To play a game intelligently, you have to know the rules.; rules; Gary Gygax

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.

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