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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
This is all true, but I don’t have a big problem with Bannon, myself.
Trump didn’t know what he was doing and a lot of good people were afraid to get involved.
I don’t have a head for remembering all this stuff, but according to Breitbart and the Armistad Project Pennsylvania and Georgia really screwed up.
Great comment.
This is a very big deal.
The Constitution cannot work in these circumstances.
At that time Hearst was one of the dominant figures in American media, and very keen on a US war with Spain. The Hearst family’s lock on the US media seemed unbreakable, as they owned papers (at that time the only mass media) from coast to coast, and even the papers they didn’t own often took their cue from Hearst, either in support or opposition (how do you like that? Your enemy is so powerful that he can control your headlines because you have to respond).
Then there’s this from Abraham Lincoln, from 40 years before.
This is what I cannot and do not understand. I know a lot of people–very good friends and family members–who saw the elections in these terms, as you have so well described: Clinton versus Trump and then Biden versus Trump. And certainly the press was happy to describe the elections in those terms.
The reality of American life, however, is vastly different from these descriptions of it, and until these past two elections, I had always believed that voters saw past the individuals who were each party’s candidate into the differing governing philosophies of the two parties.
The Republican Trump administration has done an excellent job in keeping the regulation-strengthening and tax-raising Democrats at bay. They have promoted small- and medium-sized business-favoring policies. They have promoted American-centric interests internationally.
If there is a cult of personality operating within the realm of politics, I think it is in the get-rid-of-Trump-even-if-it-means-voting-for-a-Democrat Republicans.
The time and place to get involved in choosing who will represent the party is in the primaries. Once the election moves beyond that point, it becomes about the parties. One party is moving faster than the other party toward making the United States a Western European-style welfare state. The choice was not Biden versus Trump. It was, “How much work do I want to do at the state and local level to change the leader of the Republican or Democratic party?”
BINGO
Nobody is going to do this, but I really recommend listening to this three part series about Hoppe. I really think Republicans would get their bearings better if they listened to Austrians and David Stockman more. Nobody ever does this but you really need to watch the David stockman interview on real vision. It will cost you a dollar.
In a few words, you may have distilled one of the deepest problems in this entire debate, and that is if people are “terrified” at the love Americans feel for their duly elected President, there is, and I say this most respectfully, terribly amiss with those people. You speak of the Biden voters you know–and here, I’m at an admitted disadvantage as here in the Florida Panhandle, they are scarce as hen’s teeth– so I would pose this question to you about them: how many of them love that broken down, corrupt to the bones, dishonest old pol who has never accomplished anything in his 47 years at the public trough? I confess to understanding very little about politics—we have a joke around here that my vote for someone is quite often, if not usually, “the kiss of death” for them and my one run in politics, for the Louisiana Supreme Court, was an unmitigated disaster– but I do know one thing and that is it is impossible to imagine anyone “loving”, or even admiring, Joe Biden and that criminal enterprise which is his family. But, that’s just me, I guess.
I admire, and appreciate, your even handed treatment of your friends and neighbors and have no reason whatsoever to doubt their good faith in voting against the President–emphasis, of course, on against— as was their absolute right as American citizens. I did not see, however, any mention of any of your neighbors voting for Biden for any positive reason. As to how I feel about a lot of “Biden voters”, I will detest and abhor, until my last day, the actions of “Biden voters” who destroyed this entire election–through fraud and corruption.
I understood that and took no insult – my point anyway was that our side has been blaming “the media” for not getting a fair shake since pretty well forever. People ranted that “the media” cost McCain in 2008. People ranted that “the media” cost Romney in 2012. People ranted that “the media” caused the 2000 Florida debacle, or gave Kerry more legs than he should have had in 2004. The Left noticed (far too late) that Trump that “the media” gave Trump all the attention he wanted in 2016. I heard plenty about “the media” in 1996 with Dole too.
Yet in hindsight we can all point out that Bush was milquetoast and pulled punches in both elections, McCain ran a terrible campaign, Romney had all the charismatic appeal of wet cardboard, and all the empathy of a telephone pole. Dole’s campaign in ’96 was nothing more than a prolonged and agonizing retirement party.
And after every one of those elections you could find polls of people where some X% would have flipped their votes if only they had known about this or that.
We can blame “Media slander” all we want, but we have to play the hand we are dealt. Trump figured it out in 2016 and edged out a narrow technical victory. But you will always have some part of the electorate who is impenetrable, and votes on sentiment or kneejerk reaction, and who later proclaim “Gosh! I had no idea!” That cannot be helped. Blaming the media every time is like a football coach who always goes into a game against a team with a strong ground game and insists on ordering his defense against their passing game, or like a general who refuses to acknowledge that since he’s outgunned he’s going to need to change his tactics.
This guy is really smart.
Nobody has a plan.
If inaugurated, Biden will always be to me “Fake President Biden” or “President-by-Fraud Biden”.
The most confounding thing about this past election to me is this: The national unemployment rate is at about 6.7 percent. That is astoundingly low after the year we have had with the pandemic. It is reason enough, all by itself, to keep the current Republican administration in place. The Trump administration has done an incredible job keeping the U.S. ship afloat over the past year.
Remember the adulation for Obama? The messianic language he used? The insistence that anyone who opposed his policies really only opposed them because they were voiced by a black man? That didn’t creep you out? That didn’t strike you as amiss? Did you not find aggravating how, for 8 years, people lambasted you and people you knew as racists for not supporting Obama? Did you not find insulting how opposition to Obama was deemed unpatriotic?
Trump’s rallies, while differently oriented, were nonetheless often using very similar language, tactics, and rhetoric, directly associating Trump’s policies with Trump himself, and opposition to Trump’s policies with opposition to Trump himself.
If you were repelled by Obama, but drawn to Trump, when both used very similar strategies, then you shouldn’t wonder or find anything amiss with other people who were drawn to Obama while repelled by Trump.
And frankly, we should all be worried when Presidents make their policies personal like this – it is divisive and damaging to body politic, and makes even constructive criticism from one’s own side nearly impossible. Obama is infamous for surrounding himself with stooges who wouldn’t gainsay him, just as Trump is infamous for firing people who kept crossing him for good or ill.
There are good and bad forms of love Americans can feel for their presidents, but any president who goes out courting love in place of respect is entering dangerous waters.
And if you felt strong love for Trump, it should not surprise you that others felt strong emotions the other way – those who demand strong love (as both Trump and Obama have done) are going to get strong emotions back from people – love and hatred both.
And this is something we should all take comfort in. This election was about Trump. And that means Biden, for all the votes he got, has no real mandate. If he acts like he does, the backlash in the next couple of years will be epic – if only the Republicans aren’t stupid, and only if Trump gets out of the way.
The odds on the first part are roughly zero; on the second part, only slightly higher.
Steve Bannon was mentioned. I really think he’s right about most things. His economic guy, Curtis Ellis, is excellent. I find him very hard to argue with. Listening to those guys and former Rep David Brat, I think are quite persuasive about the current situation.
I understand the point, but I see a big difference. Many, many people who support Trump do so because of his policies while wishing someone would take away his telephone and make him stop tweeting. We supporters accept his personality flaws while we appreciate his fighting spirit, because we see him as fighting for us and his policies worked for us as a whole. It is not about the same messianic idolatry that Obama’s supporters accorded him while his policies failed them.
I agree with this. But to the extent that there are cults of personality on both sides, I see Trump’s as resulting from his policies and Obama’s as from the hope of a successful Black president to bring an end to racial division in which he failed miserably, among other things spawning the Marxist BLM organization.
Agreed. I don’t remember the book or author; however there was a pretty detailed account of Media Bias a while back that went on to argue it has about a 2-3% effect on elections. Republicans need to bake that into the cake and move on. The other key thing is unlike Bush, Romney, or McCain the Republicans must not base decisions on how it will play in the media. That is a losing game. As for a strategy to overcome that effect we don’t have one yet. Someone is going to have to come up with something. Whining about it isn’t going to cut it.
This needs to get resolved, because that is not what Tim Groseclose says. I think he puts it in double digits.
That may be true, but that’s not how it appears to outsiders.
LOL
Did Biden voters simply “wish away” the fact that they were not voting for Biden to be President, but for a person even more dangerous in her ruthlessness than Hillary, a statement I never thought could be possible to make with any seriousness?
With respect, as I have stated before, about your observations about the Biden voters you know, and not meaning any personal disrespect to any of them, here goes: do they read anything at all? Do they even try to understand what is right in front of their very eyes about that [C of C] Kamala Harris? Can they not see that moves are already under way to lay the groundwork for the 25th Amendment and get good ol’ Uncle Joe out of the way just as soon as possible so we can have a truly Marxist/socialist government? When I see statistics like the one quoted above, that 17% of Biden voters would not have voted for him had they known about the Ukraine-China-Joe-Hunter-Jim Biden-payoffs in the millions by a Moscow oligarch’s wife, I have to ask, and here I really am trying to be as diplomatic as I know how to be (a very low bar, admittedly)– were they in a cave for the months leading up to Nov. 3? How could they not have known that good ol’ Uncle Joe bragged, on camera, at a public gathering, about using a million dollars of our money to get a prosecutor fired in Ukraine who was, by sheer coincidence, I am certain, investigating his pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow (an appropriate word for Hunter) son?
Mr. Jefferson said: “wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government; … ” It is hard to overlook the fact that 17% of the Americans who voted against President Trump did so without making what seems to me, at least, the most minimal effort to be “well informed”, and when I use the word “minimal”, I do so advisedly as all they had to do was look at one news site, listen to one non-mainstream-media outlet, and they would have been quite well informed of what a sleazy group of people they voted into the most powerful office in the world.
Here, I am not playing the “blame game” which I see, justifiably, discussed in many of the comments. I am simply saying that our Founding Fathers expected us to have certain responsibilities as citizens, and being well informed was one of the most basic. Based on the evidence I see out of this nightmare of an election, millions of citizens chose not to make the effort. Our Republic, if indeed that is still what we have, cannot last unless we take responsibility for our own duties.
I respectfully disagree; see comment above.
I think it’s a tough thing to measure. While I personally lean more towards Groseclose, in no small part because he has done years and years of research on this, at the same time I think, operatively speaking, the amount matters less than recognition of the effect and understanding its sources.
For instance: I have a relative who is a conspiracy nut (UFOs, FEMA camps, Kennedy assassination, chemtrails, pizzagate, secret nephelim overlords, you name it). What’s [grimly] hilarious for me is that which conspiracy theories they currently favor vary over time, and they often act like they have no memory of other ones they once held to. This is not an unintelligent or uninformed person, nor is this someone you could describe as indiscriminate in their sources. They are, in fact, highly selective of their sources, and that’s the problem. They’re so sure that they cannot be fooled that they only trust news sources that would make Alex Jones blush, and will defend those sources by saying “I read them because they don’t want me to.”
The problem here is that this person relies on a loosely woven web of non-disprovable hypotheses. Facts do not matter. Worse yet, facts are often an enemy. So is logical deduction. Emotive illogical induction – basically emotional inference and loose coincidence – is all they trust. They have built a story, a narrative, in their mind, and it explains everything. The only way to pierce that thick skull is to get them to believe a better story – not better facts, not more logical statements, but a better story. They need a mythology more compelling than the lunacy they currently believe.
Now this is an extreme case, but useful because it also illustrates the opposite problem: the indifferent. Just as my relative cannot be persuaded by anything that comes from “the man”, so too the indifferent, the ones upon whom “the media” has the most influence, cannot be persuaded by anything. Like my relative, their beliefs are basically the same sort of loosely woven tangle of non-disprovable hypotheses. Argument will not move them. Facts will not move them because they do not deal in facts, only feelings and sentiments. Even if what they think they believe is entirely self-contradicting, you won’t untangle it by reason. You might get through (strong emphasis on “might”), with a more compelling story that better organizes their disordered intuitions.
This reminds me when I asked my PhD liberal brother-in-law to define “assault weapon”. LOL He went crazy.
Yes, they do. But they see the dangers of Biden as overstated compared to the dangers they perceived from Trump. Just as Trump voters saw the potential dangers of Trump in 2016 as being more worth the risk than the known dangers from Hillary.
Personally speaking, that’s rich coming from Jefferson, considering what did as President (I’m firmly in the camp of those who consider Jefferson a terrible president). But more to your point: the American electorate has been, by and large (and with a few moments of self-awareness brought on imminent danger), ignorant, corrupt, foolish, vain, and self-destructive for many generations now. And every expansion of the voting franchise has made it worse. But, thanks to the horribly racist uses of things like literacy tests in the Jim Crow South, any notion of restricting the franchise is now immediately denounced as racist – just look at the resistance to voter ID, and the push for universal mail-in ballots as examples.
I’d argue that the franchise ought to be restricted to those over 25, that all absentee ballots ought to be banned without any exceptions, and that voters need to be required to register for each and every election, each and every time, complete with a fingerprint and photo ID, no later than 2 months before each election.
Government Is How We Steal From Each Other™
All Journalists Are Statists™
Thanks for the author’s name. I didn’t remember it being that high; however, since I didn’t remember much other than the thrust of the argument I’ll take your word for it. It doesn’t change my prescription. Factor it in and figure out where we go from there. The Media isn’t going to change and we aren’t going to change the American people enough to overcome that effect in the short term. In the long term maybe conservative media can have an effect, but “it ain’t there yet”.