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What is strange about our current political climate is not, in my opinion, polarization per se. It is not surprising that people with different interests and philosophies have different policy preferences and priorities. What is remarkable is that increasingly, liberals and conservatives don’t even seem to be living on the same planet. Their political concerns and agendas are largely ships that pass in the night.
Thus, check out the results of this survey, in which Republicans and Democrats were asked how concerned they are about various issues and topics. Some of the questions were asked of members of both parties, while others were unique to one party or the other. These were the Democrats’ top concerns among the questions that were unique to them:
These responses are, I think, mostly delusional. Eighty-two percent of Democrats are “extremely concerned” or “very concerned” about “Donald Trump’s supporters”? What, all 74 million of them? And 79 percent are extremely or very concerned about “white nationalism.” What, exactly, is white nationalism? There was a black nationalism movement some years ago that advocated a separate polity for blacks. There is no such movement today advocating a separate polity for whites. If you ever run across a white nationalist, let me know. I would like to meet one someday.
And on and on. “Systemic racism,” which translates as “nonexistent racism.” “Domestic terrorism,” by which I don’t think they mean Antifa. “Voter suppression.” What voter suppression? This is sheer fantasy. And 39 percent are extremely or very concerned about “capitalism.”
Note how hypothetical most of these supposedly urgent issues are. How many Democrats who expressed grave concerns have any experience of white nationalism, racism, domestic terrorism, voter suppression, etc.? Hardly any. Respondents are basically parroting Democratic Party talking points that are far removed from pretty much everyone’s reality.
These are Republicans’ responses to questions that were asked only of them. There aren’t any surprises here. I would simply point out that they reflect, in my view, real-world issues. White nationalism may be a phantom, but high taxes are a reality:
Finally, here are the top concerns as expressed by Democrats and Republicans, including both the joint questions the unique ones:
It is nice to see that Democrats are concerned about the economic damage from COVID shutdowns. That strikes me as their one point of contact with reality that emerges in this survey.
I wonder, increasingly, whether it is viable for America’s conservatives and liberals to continue sharing a country. It is one thing to disagree, quite another to inhabit different worlds altogether. In my opinion, the Democrats’ world is a fantasy construct. They might say the same about mine, although it seems hard to argue that illegal immigration, high taxes, etc. do not exist. But that reinforces my point. Do we, at this juncture, have not just enough shared experience, but even enough shared epistemology, to jointly govern a country?
Politicians are not, in general, renowned for honesty. Spin is universal and exaggeration goes with the territory. But actual lying–verifiable, damnable lying about an important public issue–is relatively uncommon. Unless we are talking about Joe Biden.
During the campaign, Biden absurdly alleged that President Trump had mishandled the COVID epidemic, and therefore had murdered the several hundred thousand Americans who allegedly died from that disease. The theory was that if Trump had done something differently–God knows what–the U.S. would have been the only country on Earth with zero Wuhan deaths. Reporters went along with Biden’s fantasy.
Since his inauguration, Biden has continued his assault on his predecessor by claiming, repeatedly, that little was going on with regard to vaccinations until he took office, and that the Trump administration “had no plan” to effectuate vaccinations. This, too, is a damnable lie. Biden repeated it today:
Having had enough, the GOP responded via email:
Today, Biden again falsely claimed that they inherited a “mess…from the previous administration, which left us with no real plan to vaccinate all Americans.”
Let’s look at the facts.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed developed a vaccine in record breaking time and was already meeting Biden’s goal of 100 million vaccines administered in 100 days before Biden took office. His own HHS nominee even debunked his claim.
And take a look at the trendlines. As production was ramping up, more people were being vaccinated daily. That’s to be expected, especially as more people became eligible for vaccination. However, there was no change in the rate of increase after Biden took office. In fact, it has recently decreased.
* Doses administered on January 20, 2021 (Inauguration Day): 1.5 million * Doses administered on February 24, 2021: 1.4 million
Here is the chart:
Operation Warp Speed was President Trump’s last and in some ways greatest gift to the American people. Not because COVID is a disease of unprecedented or even unusual virulence, but because shutdowns have devastated the lives of many millions of Americans, especially children. The fact that Joe Biden does not have the grace to acknowledge this, but rather continues to baldly defame his predecessor, is testimony to his low character.
There are a number of ways to look at Joe Biden, but my verdict is this: he is too stupid to be humble.
Tucker Carlson makes a lot of money, so he can afford to live almost anywhere, but lately he’s been living rent-free inside the heads of liberal journalists like Megan Garber of The Atlantic. Some of us can remember when The Atlantic was not a partisan propaganda operation, and it’s sad to them in “skin suit” mode, as Iowahawk would say.
Ever since Carlson rode to the top of the heap at Fox News, he’s had a target on his back, and has manfully stood firm under the scrutiny. And by “scrutiny,” of course, I mean, relentless defamation. Last summer, one of Carlson’s top writers got exposed as a Thought Criminal, and yet the departure of Blake Neff seemed to have no effect on Carlson’s performance. He never flinched, so to speak, and it must be driving his enemies crazy (or crazier, actually, since they were pretty much bonkers to begin with) that nothing they do seems to faze him.
So I glanced at Memeorandum this afternoon and saw a link to Megan Garber’s article, “American Cynicism Has Reached a Breaking Point,” which is . . . something else. What triggered Garber was Carlson’s Tuesday monologue in which he mocked CNN’s Brian Stelter for claiming that the QAnon conspiracy theory is being spread by the “right wing” and “radicalizing Americans.” And let’s just make clear that there is no amount of mockery greater than Brian Stelter deserves. He can never be mocked too much or too often. For some reason, however, this Carlson monologue inspired Megan Garber to write a 3,000-word essay in which she mentions a lot of things that have nothing to do with Tucker Carlson, but never once does she mention the name “Brian Stelter.”
What lies at the heart of Garber’s grievance — other than the fact that Tucker Carlson hasn’t been banished from TV, deplatformed on social media, and generally silenced — is that millions of Americans don’t believe Joe Biden actually won the 2012 election. As I have elsewhere explained, skepticism toward the 2020 election is entirely justified, once you realize that Biden’s combined margin in four states — Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada — adds up to slightly more than 75,000 votes. A little less than 13 million total votes were cast in those four states, which means that the average margin was around 0.6%. Flipping those four states from Biden to Trump would have shifted enough Electoral College votes to re-elect Trump. If you don’t think Democrats could find a way to fabricate an extra 12,000 Biden votes in Georgia or Arizona, you suffer from a deficit of imagination.
So while I certainly do not claim to have specific proof that the presidential election was “rigged,” it seems to me ludicrous for liberals to claim it’s a “conspiracy theory” to doubt the outcome. And that’s what the liberal media’s endless blabbering about QAnon is really about. What they’re saying is, “See? These right-wing kooks believe this bizarre stuff about satanic cannibal pedophiles, which is just slightly more outrageous that believing that Biden didn’t win the election.”
QAnon, in other words, is a special breed of “squirrel.” On the one hand, calling attention to a kooky fringe belief distracts from the real issues surrounding the 2020 election (e.g., universal mail-in balloting as an avenue for fraud) while, on the other hand, it serves as a convenient smear to discredit anyone expressing skepticism toward the result. If it can be shown that some election skeptics are also into QAnon, then it is easy to imply that every election skeptic is a conspiracy theorist.
Megan Garber does not want to give an inch to anyone who doubts the legitimacy of Biden’s election, and therefore she dubs anyone expressing doubt about the result as promoting “The Big Lie”:
Cynicism, at scale, makes democracy’s most basic demand—seeing one another as we are—impossible. And America, at the moment, is saturated with it. Cynicism makes daily appearances on Fox (and on Newsmax, and on One America News Network). It was the molten core of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the only real message Rush Limbaugh had to give. It lurks in the language of QAnon. It lives in the Big Lie. It seethed in the violence of the Capitol insurrection. It has made suspicion an easy sell.
Do you see how easily she slides from one thing to another? Fox News, NewsMax and OANN are all part of the same vast iceberg of right-wing “cynicism,” which connects Trump to Limbaugh to QAnon to “The Big Lie” to the Capitol “insurrection.” So if you ever listened to talk radio, you’re a deluded conspiracy theorist, and if you ever watched NewsMax, you’re complicit in the January 6 “insurrection.” It’s all connected, see?
Do you see how the rage at Tucker Carlson — from Megan Garber, from Brian Stelter, from every other liberal journalist inside whose head Carlson has been living rent-free for months — is driven by fear? If these liberals were really confident in the effectiveness of their influence, if they really believed they were capable of persuasion and that the facts were on their side, why would they care what Tucker Carlson says?
I don’t lose any sleep over the fact that millions of people watch Rachel Maddow. It doesn’t bother me that people I disagree with have TV shows with enormous audiences. As much as I despise the New York Times, I haven’t organized a campaign to get them kicked off Twitter.
What bothers Megan Garber is the haunting fear that most people aren’t really buying what she’s selling. Her fear about the Capitol “insurrection” has little to do with any actual crimes committed by the 800 or so people who trampled down the barricades on January 6. Her fear is based in the knowledge that there are tens of millions of Americans who, while they might not be willing to storm a police barricade, nonetheless have some basic sense of agreement with those who did. These tens of millions of law-abiding citizens might frown on the rowdiness of the mob that rioted at the Capitol, but they harbor profound doubts about the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Garber knows this, and she realizes that it is basically impossible to overcome those doubts. There is no way you’re ever going to convince me that the vote total in Fulton County, Georgia, was legit, and I know that there are many millions who would say the same thing.
You can send a link to this post to Megan Garber on Twitter and ask her: Do I seem stupid? Am I ignorant? Uninformed? Deranged? Am I crazy — and are the many millions of others who agree me also crazy — to suspect that the Magical Mail-In Ballot Bonanza was a pre-planned fraud?
Sweetheart, I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.
Tucker Carlson’s mockery of Stelter annoys people like Megan Garber because she knows we’re all laughing along with Tucker. And in laughing at Stelter, we’re also laughing at anyone who takes him seriously. Now let Megan Garber write another 3,000 words about that.
Do you remember the scene from the old movie “The Ten Commandments” when the pharaoh Rameses struck Moses’s name from every edifice in Egypt? Joe Biden is doing much the same with President Trump’s executive orders. On Wednesday he revoked even more of them — seven, to be exact.
One of the orders that Biden revoked is one that you probably didn’t know about: an order called “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” So what’s wrong with beautiful architecture?
All The Things are wrong with it, if Trump promoted it. You know the rules.
In his original order from December of 2020, President Trump said that federal building “should uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, and command respect from the general public.” Thus, he wanted architects to design buildings in the classical style, much like the Capitol Building, the White House, and the Lincoln Memorial.
So what would be wrong with designing federal buildings in the classical style? There are few structures in the nation which are as awe-inspiring as the Lincoln Memorial, pictured above. I visited the memorial on a very cold day at Christmastime last year. No matter how many time you’ve seen pictures of it, there is nothing like experiencing the grandeur of the building in person.
Yet there are those — modern architects, mainly — who love those Soviet-style block monstrosities. And they hate the Trump order. As Robert Ivy of the American Institute of Architects said:
“Though we are appalled with the administration’s decision to move forward with the design mandate, we are happy the order isn’t as far reaching as previously thought.”
Now he doesn’t have to worry about it. Joe Biden revoked Trump’s narrow-minded, reactionary order.
That’s just one of the orders Biden revoked on Wednesday. He also reversed Trump’s actions singling out the cities of Seattle, Portland, New York City, and Washington, DC, for the riots which broke out in those locales.
Trump had issued a memorandum seeking to identify city governments that permitted “anarchy, violence and destruction.” Remember how Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan called her city’s chaos the “summer of love”? Trump called it “anarchist,” and thought that he might withhold federal dollars instead.
But on Wednesday Joe Biden gave those cities a break. Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes said he was “glad to have this nonsense cleared from the decks.” Not the nonsense from the rioting, mind you.
Joe Biden didn’t stop there. He cut Trump’s order called “Core Principles for Regulating the United States Financial System.” Its first goal? To “empower Americans to make independent financial decisions and informed choices in the marketplace, save for retirement, and build individual wealth.” Encouraging citizens to be financially independent, without the government? This shall not stand!
He also cut an order from April, 2018, which sought to reduce poverty. How? By improving economic independence. Trump also sought to cut wasteful spending within federal programs. What does Joe Biden have against that? Short answer: it would reduce bloated programs that Democrats love.
Another memo on Biden’s chopping block was a Covid-related order that directed federal agencies to provide exemptions from some regulations, especially for small businesses. The goal was to support economic recovery. But Donald Trump promoted it, so it’s gotta go.
Finally, the biggest reversal of the day was Joe Biden lifting the ban on some green card applicants from entering the US. Trump had placed the ban last year, saying that it was needed to protect American workers during the pandemic:
“By pausing immigration, we will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. . . It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker.”
But Biden said that the ban “not advance the interests of the United States.” In fact, he said it “harms the United States.” How? By keeping family members apart, he said.
Plus:
“It also harms industries in the United States that utilize talent from around the world.”
Forget American workers who may just be returning to work after Covid-layoffs. Gotta bring in that “talent from around the world.”
This is about bringing in as many immigrants as possible. It also echoes Biden’s plan to provide an eight-year path to citizenship for people living illegally in the US. The thinking is that all those newly-minted, perhaps illegal Americans would become faithful Democrat voters.
So Joe Biden continues to chop away at Trump’s legacy. Does he consider the consequences of what he’s doing? Rather he burns with such hatred for Trump that he, like the Egyptian pharaohs, seeks to erase Trump’s footprint from American history.
COVID-19 was the best thing that could have happened to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, according to one of his closest advisers.
A new book revealed that Anita Dunn made the comment in private to “an associate,” according to the Guardian, which obtained a copy, at a time when the United States was struggling with rising death tolls, a shattered economy, and a health system close to breaking.
The details are contained in Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. It is the first major book on the 2020 election and is due to be published on March 2.
It describes how Dunn said, “COVID is the best thing that ever happened to him,” in comments the authors suggested “campaign officials believed but would never say in public.”
That private thinking reflects what many political analysts said at the time, that the rampant pandemic undermined then-President Donald Trump’s solid economic achievements and standing in national and battleground state opinion polls.
But the comments could be seized on by Biden’s critics that his campaign used the suffering of the public in the opportunistic pursuit of power.
Dunn worked as interim communications director at the White House under President Barack Obama in 2009 before returning to the private sector. In 2020, she again took on the role of communications director for the Biden campaign before being appointed co-chairwoman of the Biden-Harris transition team.
Last month, she joined the White House as a senior adviser.po
A post-mortem examination by Trump’s chief pollster concluded that the former president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis was a critical factor in his defeat. It found that the handling of the pandemic was the top issue for voters and that in states that “flipped,” Biden carried those voters by a margin of nearly 3-1.
