Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Joe Biden Will Never Be My President. Never.
I happened upon this most incisive piece by Newt Gingrich and it so clearly and vividly described how I believe so many of us are feeling right now I decided to bring it to your attention.
It is entitled, most aptly for me, at least, and I have a strong sense that it is so for many American citizens in that number of about 74 Million (who knows, really?) who voted for a second term for one of the most productive Presidents in our history “Why I will not accept Joe Biden as president“, and can be found here.
The passage which really struck me, as it so concisely describes my state of mind since I decided I had seen enough evidence (emphasis added in view of the numerous howls from the Loonocracy that there is none) to know that there was credible, provable evidence of deep and widespread fraud, follows:
As I thought about it, I realized my anger and fear were not narrowly focused on votes. My unwillingness to relax and accept that the election grew out of a level of outrage and alienation unlike anything I had experienced in more than 60 years involvement in public affairs.
The challenge is that I — and other conservatives — are not disagreeing with the left within a commonly understood world. We live in alternative worlds.
That phrase is, to put it mildly, as heavily freighted and chilling as one may use in what we all thought was our Constitutional Republic… think about those words: “We live in alternative worlds.” Although Mr. Gingrich did not specifically reference it in his article, I came away from reading it haunted by Mr. Lincoln’s words of eternal wisdom and wondering, as I have many times in the last five years but especially in the last two months, if those words are the perpetual truths many assume they are, how we can possibly stand as a Nation with this jagged tear right down the middle of our sacred fabric?
Another national treasure, Rush Limbaugh, who has our prayers every single day, made a statement recently which struck me as hard as this one did, although it simply put in words what many of us have been feeling for some time: What do we have in common with them? He cited past national emergencies when we Americans all pulled together for a common cause, with a dedication fueled by our common love for the land that we love. As Rush noted, that critical component: love, both for and dedication to America and the idea of America simply no longer exists with a large segment of the electorate who voted for Joe Biden, a man described recently as “a sleazy, corrupt-to-the-bone-marrow lifelong politician, who has accomplished absolutely nothing in his 78 years on Planet Earth.” Speaking for myself, which I fervently hope I may continue to be free to do after January 20, 2021, I cannot understand the thinking of an American citizen who would vote for such a person of proven – time and time and time again, dishonesty and corruption or, as I suspect the case actually was for many, who would be so driven by such a white-hot hatred of a person that he or she would vote against President Trump even if the only choice was to vote for such a dangerously sleazy and corrupt person.
Speaker Gingrich sets the stage:
The left’s world is mostly the established world of the forces who have been dominant for most of my life.
My world is the populist rebellion which believes we are being destroyed, our liberties are being cancelled and our religions are under assault. (Note the new Human Rights Campaign to decertify any religious school which does not accept secular sexual values — and that many Democrat governors have kept casinos open while closing churches though the COVID-19 pandemic.) We also believe other Democrat-led COVID-19 policies have enriched the wealthy while crushing middle class small business owners (some 160,000 restaurants may close).
The rest of the piece, which I highly recommend be read in its entirety, continues to enumerate the many ways the world of the far-left is probably by now irreparably irreconcilable with ours and why we are truly living in two different worlds, separated by oceans of distrust, corrosive venality, dishonesty, corruption, amorality, condescension, hubris, arrogance and utter disdain for our Founding Documents, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, upon which our beloved Nation was built.
Thus I return to the question put by Rush Limbaugh and apply it to myself, as I cannot and do not pretend to speak for others, while noting I know to a certainty that many share these views and I also know to a certainty that if there are any factual errors in any of these statements my colleagues here on Ricochet will quickly bring them to the fore.
What do I have in common with those elites in entertainment, academia, and the media who spent the last four years savagely attacking not only our duly elected President, calling him every name in the book such as Hitler and Mussolini, parading around with a mock-up of his severed, bloody and gory head, and, as their designated “President” “elect” and his communications director did recently, calling us, his loyal supporters names such as “chumps” and “f (C of C)s”?
What do I have in common with those mega-rich tech oligarchs (other than the obvious, as “oligarch” I am definitely not) who think their astonishing wealth gives them the power to not only censor the extremely significant news that both Biden and his son were on the take from China and received at least $5 million from an entity controlled by our most dangerous adversary but who also think they have the power, so far totally unchecked by our less than stellar Congress, to censor the President of the United States, an act of hubris never before seen in the history of our Republic.
What do I have in common with members of the media and the far-left loon wing of the Democrat Party and some members of the Republican Party, aka Never Trumpers, who sit on the sidelines as piles of evidence are being accumulated of out-and-out election fraud in the form of affidavits sworn under penalty of perjury and other forms of documentary evidence and repeat the mantra “but there is no widespread evidence of election fraud” and cheer as Judge after spineless Judge refuses to even hear the evidence, including, most sadly, our brand new, great, good for the next half-century, “conservative” majority on the Supreme Court?
What do I have in common with those intrepid members of the media who go out to do on the scene reports while standing in front of the blazing St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington and state, on camera, for all the world to see, with a straight face, that the scene behind him is a “mostly peaceful” demonstration? As our friend and colleague, Susan Quinn, recently observed in her excellent post “Will there be justice?”, how do these people sleep at night? How do they explain to their children why they must be so blatantly fraudulent just to make a living?
What do I, admittedly not the most devout or regular churchgoer, have in common with a person millions voted to occupy the most powerful office in the world who holds himself out to be a devout, Rosary praying, Roman Catholic, but who now, as phrased in a recent article, “supports abortion up until college graduation, if the mother finds the child inconvenient.”?
What do I have in common with a woman who used every means at her disposal to get ahead, no matter how unsavory or tawdry, and then proceeded to savagely, cruelly, immorally, attack a candidate for the High Court right in front of his wife and little daughters, and then gloated about it, and who also not only did not raise a single question about the Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters burning down American cities across the land but who also helped raise bail money to get them out of jail, almost certainly never to be seen again by the Court system? I well and truly pray I would never have a single thing in common with such a despicable person, even if she may possibly be (probably?) the President of the United States within the next four years.
What do I have in common with a large, muscular, strong ox of a man in a Law Enforcement uniform who wrestles with a young, small mother sitting in the stands watching her son play football — without, qeulle horreur!, a piece of cloth over her face– putting her in handcuffs in front of her fellow parents (including several large men who, disgracefully, did nothing to help her) and, perhaps more to the point, what do I have in common with despicable, power-mad “leaders” like Cuomo, Wolfe, Whitmer, Murphy, DeBlasio, and, sadly, many others who ordered this kind of barbaric behavior?
Would that I could have a more positive outlook as we move into a New Year, carrying so many good promises if for no other reason than not being named 2020, truly annus horribilis, but also bringing us the closest thing we have ever had to a Marxist administration. A year in which the person elected to occupy the Oval Office, the most powerful office in the world, is not in full possession of his cognitive faculties and, at times, simply does not know where he is. A year in which the Biden Administration, an oxymoronic phrase if ever there was one, will be staffed with so many Obamatons as to make it, in effect, Barack Hussein Obama’s third term, a thought which should frighten any citizen with a sentient mind.
Like so many of us, I spent the last four years on that roller coaster ride of watching in awe the boundless energy and creativity and drive and determination of one of the great Presidents in our history while almost simultaneously praying that someone would please, please shut down his Twitter account and take away his phone. I related in a post recently the one emotion one could never fully realize unless they attended one of his rallies– the pure, unadulterated outpouring of love this President’s supporters feel for him. It is a true phenomenon to see and experience for oneself.
Positive outlook? Thank you, but I think I’ll let that cup pass me by.
Sincerely, Jim
Published in General
Huh? Their reason for existence is money. They are whores. So the reason for their existence has not gone away.
On the other extreme, Could anyone have done better? Could anyone elected as Trump was have found anybody to trust and think and act in accordance with the national interest and take the MSM torrent of ridicule, contempt and lies? And the bureaucratic state’s resistance? And congress’ lawfare? Who could have done better? Which candidate that Trump beat in the primaries would have done even half of what Trump actually did, and still be standing?
This is my way of saying: Hindsight is easy. I couldn’t have done better, could you? If not you, then who?
Election fraud. Bribery. And for some, Treason.
Jim:
Rather than ask what you have in common with a bunch of people with whom you manifestly have little in common, why not ask what you have in common with all the rest of people of the US who voted against Trump?
Ask me what I have in common with Mark Zuckerberg, and my response is “not much, he’s a spoiled sociopathic computer geek.”
But instead ask me what I have in common with my next door neighbor, who loathes Biden passionately, but loathes Trump more, and my response is “we have a lot in common, far more than our property line.” Ask me what I have in common with my best friend of the last 30 years, who refused to vote Trump or Hillary in 2016, and refused to vote Trump or Biden this year, and I lack the space here to do so. Ask me what I have in common with my sister, who did vote for Trump in 2016, but was so disgusted by his own behaviors that she voted for Biden instead this year as the best guarantee to be rid of Trump, even if Biden turns out to be a train wreck – again I lack the space here to do so.
Unless and until you come to grips with why so many people – beyond the hard left, beyond the SJW jackboots, beyond the others you name – were just as motivated to vote out Trump, come hell or high water, you will struggle. So long as you cannot get beyond blaming fraud, deceit, elitism (a charge which sticks to nobody I know among Biden voters), or whatever other external factors you choose to name, you will struggle. Until you actually talk to these people, and listen to them, and try to see what they saw in Trump, you will remain distraught and perplexed.
There is a world of people out there who saw those rallies entirely differently. And frankly, that “love” you cite as so exhilarating for you, by turns annoyed and even terrified others.
We spent 8 damned years condemning the cult of personality around Obama as dangerous. We cannot claim that others would not see the same behaviors around Trump as equally so.
I keep thinking of Venezuela. Thy protested in the streets. But were shot at. They might have saved themselves and their country if they had had weapons, too.
You miss the point of David’s criticism – Trump alone was responsible for that ass Spicer. Trump alone was responsible for the psycho Mooch. Trump alone gave Bannon access.
And only Trump would have hired these people, and many other weirdos and grifters besides, in the first place. None of the other 2016 primary candidates would have made such awful hiring mistakes.
Neither would they have challenged a 50 year foreign policy consensus on the Middle East. Trump was a tragically flawed figure who did a lot of good and a lot dumb things. He apparently is extremely hard to work for; however, at the same time the entire administrative state acted in the name of the president to thwart his agenda. That is a dramatic departure from the Constitution and that needs to be reckoned with as well.
There was much for both good and ill. But even in my own little corner of the manufacturing world I saw with my own eyes that a lot of that administrative resistance was in no small part due to what can best be called erratic incompetence at the top. The tariff war with China, for instance, has been a costly boondoggle for manufacturing because it was rushed through, ill-conceived, poorly executed, and obviously packed with grift at multiple levels. It’s no small wonder that the government agencies resisted Trump – not when many of his directives were chaotic, unclear, and self-conflicting moving targets in the first place. If you’re going to reform a system, you need to do better than just wildly swinging hammers around and hoping that you manage to break the “right” parts along with everything else you’re smashing. And you don’t have a right to engage in petty name calling or denouncing people as traitors when they have legitimate reasons for resisting – yet this is what Trump did time and again, and that needlessly added to his enemies people who might otherwise have been critical allies.
Fair enough on those points. Certainly his so called “Muslim Ban” was poorly executed policy as was his much of his trade war, yet that isn’t really what I am talking about here. The FBI apparently actively broke the law to pursue his administration. It appears as if the Pentagon may have falsified information to keep him from moving more quickly on his troop draw downs. His confidential communications with foreign leaders were leaked, in one case to cause a pretext for impeachment. His tax returns were leaked presumably by someone in the administration. In the first place this is unlawful activity. In the second place we didn’t elect people in the administrative state, they are not allowed in the system to substitute their policy preferences for the elected officials, no matter how bad those may be. If they are then we don’t live in a Republic any longer, I am at a loss as to precisely what form of government we are in. I am much more interested in this than anything else at the moment.
I don’t know how politically aware your sister is, perhaps a lot, but the Media and google and social media played a game-changing process that reportedly altered the election by 32% swing — that is, 16% of people sat that if they had known about even one of several things that were blocked on social media or not reported on by the MSM they wouldn’t have voted for Biden. That would have changed the election even with the massive fraud.
Again, though, this is blame shifting. It’s saying “Well, she would have voted for Trump but she was gullible and fooled, but had she known…” You immediately question her knowledge, intentions, and indeed her personal agency in this, and assume that somehow, but for the nefarious agency of [insert name here], she would not have been fooled.
This is exactly what I’m talking about in warning people to come to grips with what happened and why.
Why automatically assume that she was mal-informed, and therefore not making a rational moral judgement? Why automatically assume that she was not somehow in possession of the same information? Why automatically assume she was somehow mentally or morally incapable of arriving at a different decision than the one you favored?
You cannot solely blame “the media” for this, and exculpate Trump from his own failures.
All valid concerns. But…
Also, all sadly all too precedented. Not necessarily precedented in being actively directed at a sitting president (usually this crap is done by a sitting president), but even that is arguable when you look at what happened to Nixon both in office, and in the years afterwards.
In 1964, LBJ actively used the CIA against Goldwater. Who else did he spy on, or worse?
Obama was certainly drone happy against US citizens in questionable circumstances (undeclared wars, for instance).
Hillary happily used the FBI to build up opposition research on her enemies.
And so on, and on, and on, and on. It goes back for a long time. Sometimes it was better, sometimes it was worse.
What about because Trump actually was properly elected, but Biden probably wasn’t?
You used your sister as an example and I just referred to it. I was talking about the 16% who said that the media adversely affected their decision-making.
And I apologize if I sounded like I was putting down your sister, and I specifically never assumed she was mal-informed. Nonetheless, my apologies. But most if not all of Trump hatred revulsion and disgust is misplaced, and most of it is the result of Media slander and false aspersions. That I will say.
Fair enough however that is the equivalent of saying realistically the system has been sick for a long time. It just appears to have gotten worse. I suspect Biden’s administration will be even more brazen in their abuses of power. The media will not call them to account and the Republican party will not hold them to account. Nor will the Never Trump right really care about most of it. As I said initially there is still a country called the US on the map; however, it is not a Constitutional Republic anymore. I don’t know exactly what I would call it a Statist Oligarchy may come closest. In classical terms Fascism would probably come pretty close; however, that term is probably too overloaded and incendiary at this point to be useful.
There is a deep rot in the US, I think, and it is old.
Released moments ago (emphasis mine):
Signed by several Pennsylvania legislators.
But will that legislature send an alternate list of electors? If not, I don’t see how it matter if they’re “shocked” or “alarmed” or anything else.
Orange Man
Bad GoodGreatStart at 1:51:50
They want charismatic leaders that whip up collectivist plans. They want everybody to row the socialist boat. They want more and more non-public goods. It will all work out just because they thought of it and they all love each other or whatever.
We want guys that will do a certain job within this ever more screwed up system. Economics, culture, the bureaucracy, education, etc. (I phrase it that way because I think it’s really stupid for Republicans and libertarians to be overly idealistic right now. The system is too far gone. I have posted over and over about it.)
This is exactly what I have noticed interacting with my commie brother-in-law.
If you like that part, back it up a little bit for more context.
That whole show is excellent on why it’s so complicated for Republicans and libertarians right now. (There is a part about Brexit that may not be that relevant.
Then throw in O’Sullivan’s law about how everything moves left all of the time.
This is what overly idealistic Never Trumpers don’t get.
Ultimately I care less about that than I do about the steps the legislature takes to ensure this doesn’t happen again. This election is for all intents and purposes over. Any last minute maneuvering is unlikely to alter the result at this point. What matters now is making sure that this tactic is taken away from the democratic party’s arsenal going forward and that elections are cleaned up. Additionally a lot of work has to be done to repair the “rot” that @Skipsul has described in the administrative state so that elections matter again. There will be no deus ex machina that delivers us from a Biden administration. The key now is to find new ways of fighting and to try to ensure the damage done by Biden and/or Harris is as minimal as is possible. In four years some Republican is going to need new tactics and strategies to overcome the media advantage the left has. It is up to our state legislatures and/ or governors to take steps to ensure the integrity of the vote. I think the PA legislature is Republican controlled they should immediately start impeachment proceedings against the Secretary of State. They should make sure she pays a political price for her role in this. I would also suggest if the legislature believes the State Supreme court usurped its authority in Pennsylvania start working on impeaching some of them as well. We need to stop fighting this election and start working to keep the next one from being stolen.
The Constitution cannot function as intended in this situation. You can’t have four companies controlling the public square and largely controlling the government in other ways and expect not to have problems.
Never Trump is very dense about this topic.
Ditto.
Another member here called her “an authoritarian with no principles”.
When she gets a hold of the justice system, this could be really, really bad.
If her primary motive is just to keep moving up, maybe she will move right on some things. Then she will go completely nuts in her second term.
Similarly, GA should look into impeaching their shadow governor.
I just heard a new one from Newt Gingrich. He says that Zuckerberg’s money deployment violated the 2002 voting rights act. The Republicans are idiots if they don’t force every single legal and public relations lever on this guy. Breitbart News has excellent coverage.
This will be a lot easier after the bond market collapses. I don’t see much happening before that.
A lot of those guys had terrible personal balance sheets. One wonders how much they have solved that and what happens going forward.
These people do not have a correct assessment of anything. I don’t have the slightest idea of what to do about it.
The problem is since she wasn’t elected that isn’t truly possible. If she is still in the GA legislature she should be censured at least, although that should have been done long ago. GA should probably also look at impeaching their Secretary of State. I don’t believe he was complicit in fraud; however, I do think he isn’t very good at his job. Also entering into a consent decree with Ms. Abrams probably exceeded his authority, so some rebuke is needed. At the very least that consent decree needs to be nullified with legislation. If it can be proven that Ms. Abrams violated election laws in GA they need to throw the book at her.