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This week’s episode is a Biden-free zone, so if you’re looking to avoid the Biden-Afghan collapse story, this is the show for you.
Instead we decided to circle back return to an argument Steve was losing badly at the end of last week’s episode with Michael Anton, and go into greater depth on the meaning of equality in American political thought. To recap, Steve argued that the critics of “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence—from Tocqueville to today’s “paleoconservatives”—have a point, at least historically considered, and that the simple and laudatory instinct of Americans that “you are not the boss of me” is insufficient and prone to the defects of cognitive dissonance.
So Steve decided to enlist a witness on his behalf—the voice of Harry Jaffa himself. Using some excerpts from an audio recording of a lecture Jaffa gave in 1972 on “What Is Equality? The Declaration of Independence Revisited” (you can find the full audio recording here) Steve and Lucretia work through some of the complications of the idea of equality and especially its directly related principle—the “consent of the governed.” Bottom line: this matter is complicated. As Jaffa wrote elsewhere: “Free government would be an absurdity did it require citizens all like Abraham Lincoln; yet it would be an impossibility if it could not from time to time find leaders with something of his understanding.” The trouble is, our entire education system, from K-12 through college, is today now determined to convey only anti-democratic principles, in service of a totalitarian misunderstanding of equality. We have work to do.
Maybe we just need to screen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance more often. It’s how this episode opens.
(P.S. The fine article “Why Are Elites So Hostile to Merit-Based Hiring” by our young friend Deion Kathawa that we mention at the end of the episode can be found here.)
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Trans-Siberian Orchestra ringtone, eh? That’s good.
Well, Lucretia, I agree that we’ll never know some things about the election, like Biden’s true popular vote total. (Perhaps, in the eschaton, G-d will find that we still care enough to be curious and will let us see the rest of the story.)
But can we know whether illegally cast or counted votes exceeded the Biden margin of victory in multiple swing states? Yes. I think we already do know that.
Can we know whether electronic fraud happened? I don’t know (yet), but I think it’s possible to know. I hope to know; I intend to know, inshallah.
Can we know with certainty? No. This doesn’t meet Descartes’ standard for knowledge. But we can have good probabilistic evidence. That’s good enough knowledge for science and religion, so I reckon it’s good enough for politics and history.
And we can definitely know that electronic voting machine reform is desperately needed. G. K. Chesterton was right, as usual.
https://ricochet.com/1033553/g-k-chestertons-take-on-electronic-voting-systems/
I thought were weren’t getting any Burke, but thanks Lucretia for the mention at the end. Stealing from Steve
Listening to the two of you is an excellent education. I took 30 years ago the University of Chicago Basic Program, and you remind me of those excellent classes.
As long as the probability confirms a preponderance of the evidence, it’s sufficient for civil litigation. The problem is how to award damages. In breach of real estate contracts, the measure of damages is (understandably) specific performance – the property must be surrendered to the successful plaintiff. If only there were such a remedy available to voters – or more particularly to states whose electors were cheated, in some cases (e.g., Pennsylvania) by blatantly, publicly unconstitutional actions.
What Richard Easton said – and I’m highly envious of that shout-out from “Lucretia.” I’m pleased to be one of the 12 subscribers, by Steve‘s estimation – I’m in pretty good company. An impressive Dirty Dozen, by my lights.
Impeachment, as far as I know, is all there is at this point.
With an nom de plume like “LibertyDefender” you deserve and will get a shoutout! We have already taped this coming week’s podcast, so be patient! And thanks for listening!
It disappoints me greatly that there is not more discussion from those on our side about the insidious effects on our republic when citizens are suspicious that widespread voter fraud has occurred. The left understands this concept implicitly; hence their (mostly successful) attempt to suppress every legitimate investigation, audit, or even questioning into the 2020 debacle. They saw the success of the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax in undermining voter confidence in the integrity of the 2016 election, and are determined to suppress all public debate regarding election fraud in 2021.
Conservatives at the national level, as usual, are succumbing to the left on this issue; most too fearful to challenge the orthodoxy that there simply was no election fraud. My only slight hope is that conservatives at the state/local will recognize that ensuring election integrity is not only necessary for them to win elections, but for us to remain a self-governing people.
This description understates the severity of the problem (I don’t mean this as criticism). The left has created a network of systems where not only is voter fraud enabled, it makes voter fraud inevitable and the systems are designed to conceal any evidence of voter fraud. Take for instance the vile system of “ballot harvesting.” We saw in 2018 a clear example of how pernicious that system is, when in the several days following election day, every single congressional district in Orange County, CA flipped from Republican to Democrat. Even overlooking the fact that the result obtained days after the polls closed, reasonable minds cannot differ (a legal standard) that this outcome could not occur absent . . . well, let’s say absent something happening outside of the polling places, something that had never happened inside any Orange County polling places in decades.
But what was that something? Was it ballot harvesters collecting ballots from senior living centers after advising the seniors how to vote? Was it ballot harvesters delivering those ballots to those same seniors? Was it ballot harvesters, knowing the names and addresses of those seniors, skipping the steps of delivering and collecting ballots, and simply completing the “harvested” ballots for them? We have no way of knowing. But we do know that the whiny, pro-same sex marriage, pro-legalized pot, open borders isolationist pacifists at the CATO Institute blamed Trump.
Expand that system nationwide, and you get what few besides Victor Davis Hanson mention: a hundred million ballots mailed to voters who did not request them –
Instead we get mealy-mouthed Republicans parroting “there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.”
(We also get stout-hearted indefatigable conservative warriors saying “the Dems stole the election fair and square,” but that’s a different mud wrestling match for a different day.)
I certainly do not take these remarks as a criticism; I only would say that the analysis of election fraud posted by you, Saint Augustine, and a few others on this site cannot be improved upon by me. My point was merely that the second order effects of election fraud are well understood by the left: hence their unending efforts to pin election fraud falsely on Trump and then pivoting to deny against all evidence, indeed refusing to allow that there even might be evidence, that election fraud occurred in 2020. Why is our side overwhelmingly populated by pus-ies?
Steve. Lucretia. More of this, best thing I’ve heard all week.