Be afraid. Be very afraid.
now is the dark night of liberals. every knock on the door makes you fearful and you watch what you say to strangers. RFK Jr. will come for you and force you to drink bleach.
Over 1500 people were pardoned or had their sentences commuted on Trump’s first day as president. They now resent being called to account for their crimes on January 6, 2021. They felt justified in committing trespass, smashing windows, and attacking policemen because they believed the lies that Trump told them. Most of them still believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
These miscreants are sure to seek revenge for being hauled into court, for being thrown in jail or put on probation, for being called criminals when they thought they were the law. They are talking about investigating the investigators, and the FBI agents who brought in the Jan. 6 lawbreakers are being thrown out of the Bureau.
What will happen next to those who investigated the perpetrators of the Jan. 6 insurrection? Their futures will to some extent depend on their behavior towards policemen who do not know them. They cannot expect to be recognized and feted everywhere they go.
The defenders of the Capitol have been haunted by intrusive, repetitive traumatic dreams and a few have committed suicide. Others have retired early.
A few of the attackers have come to grief during attempts at apprehension for fresh crimes and a few have had open warrants that involved deadly force in their service. The rest, however, are pardoned and can go free. Some may have changes to their federal personnel files. They can, however, return to their jobs.
The rest of us must submit to leopards licking our faces.
Be Here Now– photo by Harald Lepisk– courtesy of pixabay.com
It’s already too late to hide from retribution by the winning side. The winners have an active agenda of seeking out and punishing those who have opposed the new regime. The enemies list goes way, way back, to Hillary Clinton days and before.
Then there is the notional “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party”, whose motto is, “I didn’t think they’d eat my face!” The idea is that a “limousine liberal” is all in for this party until the leopards come for her face.
Anyway, I was sixteen in 1970 when a pro-government South Vietnamese “intellectual” group visited Harvard College. They met, about four of them, on a stage in front of an audience of over a thousand young students who booed continuously, so loudly that no-one could be heard. Time magazine did a big story on it, with a photograph of the student audience. My room-mate was shown with his middle finger raised. I was sitting next to him, but I was just out of the frame. So they almost came for my face, or would have, if right-wing doxing had existed then. Surely facial recognition applied to the photo would have identified all the students and allowed them to be expelled.
Protests like that could never succeed at today’s Harvard. The pro-Palestinian encampments that did take place were roundly condemned and the protesters were involuntarily separated from the College. At another college, police withdrew and allowed pro-Israeli vigilantes to attack the encampment.
Watch out, the leopards will come for your face next.
Since I posted that last uninformed screed, I looked up the bullets recovered at the scene, and travelled to the Warren Commission Report. This tome lists a nearly intact bullet (weighing 158+ grains vs a factory bullet weighing 160-161 grains); two large fragments:
One fragment, found on the seat beside the driver, weighed 44.6 grains and consisted of the nose portion of a bullet. … The other fragment, found along the right side of the front seat, weighed 21.0 grains and consisted of the base portion of a bullet.
Three small fragments less than a grain apiece were found under the seat occupied by Mrs. Connally.
In addition, the front windshield was struck from the inside, but not penetrated, by a bullet fragment which may or may not have been recovered.
Finally, a bullet fragment struck the south curb of Main Street and grazed the cheek of a bystander. The curb site was spectrographically examined later and found to contain lead with a small amount of antimony but no copper– the core of a bullet but no jacket. This is not likely to have been from the shot that entirely missed, since that would have been intact.
So the bullets were not at all accounted for.
The nearly intact bullet, said by the Warren Report to have been found when it fell out of Mr. Connally’s stretcher, could not have been the one that struck him as the nose wasn’t dented by impact with his ribs and it lost only a few grains from its factory weight. I suggest that it was planted. The mere possibility opens up a hornet’s nest of issues as the planter had have been someone close like a Secret Service agent.
Multiple lines of evidence point to Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole shooter in the assassination. His motivations as outlined in the Warren Report are also clear. To oversimplify, he wanted to make his mark on history. The only thing that is unclear is whether he had any help or direction.
Another avenue is the Warren Commission’s exploration of Lee Harvey Oswald’s history. Most critical is its mention of his employment at the Texas Book Depository. There is no indication of any help that he had getting the job, although Oswald was using Texas state employment agency help and may have gotten it through them. Nonetheless, it is a bizarre and probably inexplicable coincidence that he took a job at a location that offered him a prime shooting view for a motorcade which hadn’t planned on coming that way when he got the job.
You were warned– it’s another rabbit hole.
We revisit the JFK assassination story today because the last secret files from the government are due to be released very soon. Articles in Vanity Fair explore the story of revelations that have occurred in the last couple of years and what could be released soon from still-secret CIA archives.
The first article, published yesterday, discusses the releases and interviews the “reigning expert” on the story. Jefferson Morley covers the possible documents to be un-redacted and the current state of controversy over the whole affair. Naturally, no-one is completely satisfied with the story so far.
The second article, published in September 2023, covers a book recently written by Paul Landis, a Secret Service agent who was protecting Jackie Kennedy at the time. He was in the car behind Kennedy’s, and Landis witnessed the impact of the bullet that hit Kennedy in the skull and made his brain explode.
He was forced to retire from the Service a few months later, after only four years of service. He suffered from severe PTSD, which was not recognized as a diagnosis at that time. For 50 years, he worked quietly as a security guard and kept secret a tiny detail with enormous significance.
Landis finds the magic bullet
In his book, he finally reveals that he found a spent bullet in the Kennedy limousine. It was lying loose on the back of the rear seat where the vehicle’s removable top attached. It appeared to be nearly pristine. He picked it up, wrapped it in his handkerchief, and shortly afterward placed it on Kennedy’s stretcher next to his body.
This bullet is the one that later was mistakenly said to have been found on Connally’s stretcher. It had a secure chain of custody to the FBI lab, where it was observed to have rifling marks consistent with having been fired from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.
Given that the damage to CE-399 consists of a slight longitudinal twist and compression at its base, that bullet encountered something along its flight path. Whether the intervening objects were Kennedy and Connally as opposed a barrel of water, or a bale of cotton, is the question.https://www.history-matters.com/essays/jfkmed/Breakability/Breakability.htm
This basic fact goes with certain other facts: the wounds to Kennedy’s back and neck, and the wounds to Connally’s chest and knee, were in fact aligned and likely occurred from the same bullet. The photograph above of the tiny model limousine shows Kennedy and Connally in the correct position and, knowing that the fatal bullets came from a little above and slightly to the left of them, indicates how plausible that trajectory is.
Clearly, the bullet recovered by Agent Landis was not the bullet that wounded both Kennedy and Connally. The fact that the bullet was not near where it would be expected after becoming an expended round from Oswald’s shooting, and that there was no blood or tissue associated with it less than half an hour after the shooting, both suggest that the bullet was placed there by a person unknown.
How many bullets were found?
Further, the three rounds known to have been fired have been accounted for: one in Kennedy’s skull, of which fragments were recoverded; one through the windshield into the curb and probably shattered; one into Connally’s knee, massively damaged. If this pristine round is included, that makes four when only three were fired.
So if the bullet was undeniably from Oswald’s gun by the rifling and it was not recovered anywhere near expected, and it was nearly pristine, then some “supernatural” or at least “extraordinary” event/s occurred to put it there. Was it recovered from when Oswald was shooting at the firing range– when he made sure that he made eyewitnesses know he was there? That would account for the deformation present–possibly made by a tool extracting it from the target.
The presence of minimal deformation is not surprising in a bullet expended on a target at a range but it is surprising in a bullet that has encountered tissue and bone. Usually a round that wounds and is recovered shows significant deformation. A round that penetrates the skull and explodes the brain is likely to be fragmented, exactly as occurred in this case. There were large fragments found on the back seat mixed with blood, bone, and brains.
From these facts it is possibly to hypothesize that the first shot hit Kennedy low in the neck while he was slouched over (limited by his back brace) and exited his throat at tracheostomy level nearly in the midline. It is probable that this shot hit Connally too. Their positions line up for such a shot in recreations of their exact locations. It is unclear where that bullet wound up, although X-rays suggest that parts of it remained in Connally’s tissues. That bullet’s trajectory indicates that it suffered little damage going through Kennedy’s soft tissues, but encountered major obstacles in Connally.
The second shot may have gone through the windshield and hit a curb in front of the limousine. A fragment from this round hit a pedestrian on the cheek. The third shot hit Kennedy in the occipital bone, fragmented, and blew his brain apart, spraying it all over a state trooper on a motorcycle behind him. His scalp and hair, mostly intact, fell back over the wound and obscured it while he was being transported and treated at the hospital. That is why there was no brain in the materials recovered at autopsy and preserved– no actual mystery there.
There is thus little reason to question the thesis that Oswald fired all three of the shots fired that day, and that he had no direct accomplices. There is reason to suspect that he felt he was acting in the interests or at the direction of some organization, but what that entity would be is unknown. Again, it is unclear what organization would like to feel that they were deliberately engaging the services of an assassin, trained by the Marines, who had already taken a shot a a retired general recently and gotten away with it.
The presence of this “magic bullet” suggests that Oswald was supported by a group who knew he was going to shoot and furthermore had the opportunity to physically place the bullet in the limousine within minutes after the shooting (if not before). This person would almost have to be an insider like another Secret Service agent assigned to the same detail. This narrow window to place the bullet makes the whole theory a little less plausible.
Why kill Kennedy?
There is no shortage of parties who had a motivation to do away with President Kennedy. It could be the CIA, pro-Castro Cubans (in retaliation for failed plots against Castro), the American military, the Russians ( or Soviets, as they were known), or any of a number of other lesser known groups with low ethical standards.
It is clear that the CIA had Oswald under surveillance for months before he shot Kennedy. He was picked up by CIA surveillance of the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City and relayed to headquarters, who as it turned out, already had a file on him. The CIA was watching Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. It is alleged that his pro-Castro pamphlet distribution on the street and appearances on local talk television were publicized to call attention to him.
Whether the CIA surveilled Oswald closely enough to know anything about his steps seems unlikely. He went to mail-order a rifle, tried to shoot a retired general and missed, then went to a rifle range to sight it in. He obtained a job site overlooking the motorcade route at a spot where it was forced to slow down by a sharp turn. The motorcade route had not been finalized until a week before the assassination, so it is likely that simple opportunity placed a decisive role.
It seems unlikely that they watched him that closely. He did proudly display his new rifle and a newspaper for a photograph taken in his yard. How did he get a job at the Texas Book Depository a few weeks beforehand? Was it a fateful coincidence or did he have help? Maybe he thought it up himself and researched the routes that motorcades take.
There’s a lot here that provokes massive scrutiny and speculation. The subject certainly tried to pull me down a rabbit hole. Feel free to write a movie script based on the “magic bullet.”
The End of the World As We Know It
A recent article in The Independent with the same title as the above says that we are close to a tipping point between extinction and evolution to a greater plane. It draws together a number of recent insights on the issues of climate extinction and human evolution which are of interest to the casual reader.
The article notes that the Earth has reached a population of 8.2 billion humans, close to or beyond its carrying capacity. Researchers forecast cessation of population growth over the next 50 years, at about 10 billion people, followed by a gradual decline. Population decline has already begun in China and several other countries– South Korea is the worst. The decline is correlated with increased living standards. It is related especially to education for women and the development of universal birth control.
The article reminds us that if we continue current practices we will continue to rapidly degrade the environment and cause intolerable heating of the entire globe. The article describes the possibilities as evolution away from the internal combustion energy paradigm and survival, versus submission to an authoritarian government that chains us to the old paradigm and extinction.
We have seen that denial has successfully delayed action to combat climate change for 50 years. For a few years we were permitted to hope that action would finally begin, but denial has reared its ugly head again in the US. We have elected a president who calls climate change a hoax. As close as we are to a tipping point (although how close is unknown) we will only be closer after four more years.
If we don’t act, temperatures will continue to rise with the sea levels and all life on Earth will suffer the agonies of the damned. Extinction would naturally follow if this process is allowed to continue.
The article quotes a well-known expert:
“Industrial civilisation is facing ‘inevitable’ decline as it is replaced by what could turn out to be a far more advanced ‘postmaterialist’ civilisation based on distributed superabundant clean energy. The main challenge is that industrial civilisation is facing such rapid decline that this could derail the emergence of a new and superior ‘life-cycle’ for the human species”, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, the bestselling author and journalist who is a distinguished fellow at the UK-based Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, said in a statement.
Dr Ahmed has written a paper, published in the journal Foresight, hypothesizing that we are close to a tipping point based on an analysis of multiple global crises that are currently befalling us.
His analysis says that civilizations evolve through a four-stage life-cycle: growth, stability, decline, and eventual transformation. These stages are not necessarily consecutive; decline may be followed by regrowth if the civilization is dynamic enough. Or a polity could transition directly from growth to transformation directly if a truly destabilizing event occurs. Transformation may mean extinction or it may involve evolution into a species more suited to its environment.
At the moment, our industrial, internal combustion civilization is going through a decline. Growth has continued year on year up to now. Industrial activities, specifically the burning of coal, oil, or gas, and the manufacture of cement have raised the concentration of carbon dioxide (among many other pollutants) higher every year. Even the rate of increase is increasing. This has caused climate change with predictable (and predicted) results: a 1.5 degrees Celsius warming of the globe so far, as of 2023.
Multiple simultaneous global crises signal that we are walking off a cliff. For example, the back to back hurricanes in the Southeast US, the floods, droughts, and wildfires in Europe, the latest fires in Los Angeles. These are natural disasters that may have occurred at any time in the past– but 50 years ago they would have been much less severe. Climate change has already caused a 20-25% increase in storm and fire severity.
Our survival is dependent on our adopting, rapidly and on a massive scale, non-carbon dioxide producing energy sources. We could do this beginning today; little new technology is needed. Right now, China is producing mass quantities of photovoltaic cells and batteries at very low prices. If we bought these items and installed them in every home, we could produce enough energy to abandon polluting facilities in a few years. Instead, we are barring Chinese EVs, solar cells, and batteries with obstructive tariffs.
The point is that if we don’t evolve soon, we will become extinct. We will all die, our children will die, and pretty soon there won’t be any people left. By the time that happens, the Earth will be a pretty unpleasant place.
Followers of political news will by now know of Donald J. Trump’s announcement of his intention to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Mr. Kennedy has no medical degree nor any other scientific training, a fact which makes him completely unqualified to be in charge of a large number of scientists.
Kennedy is also well known for his claim that vaccines cause autism, a claim that has been thoroughly debunked. The original article alleging autism from vaccines, in 1998, has been retracted and the doctor who wrote it lost his license in the UK– but that didn’t change Mr. Kennedy’s mind. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association with 95,000 subjects, published in 2015, definitively ruled out vaccines as a cause of autism. That didn’t change his mind either.
Among other changes that Mr. Kennedy has announced is a plan to substantially reduce the National Institutes of Health’s emphasis on infectious diseases, switching to an emphasis on chronic disease, lifestyle diseases, nutritional issues, and especially alternative and complementary medicine. This prompted my belated tribute to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss, in anticipation of the overthrow of his scientific observations on germs.
Mr. Kennedy is apparently unaware of the numerous divisions within NIH that specifically address such issues as degenerative and autoimmune diseases, aging, toxic substances, nutrition, and so on. There is even a branch for alternative and complementary medicine. It’s not well funded and is ostracized by actual alternative practitioners, but it does focus on non-mainstream medicine.
Back to Semmelweiss (1818-1865). He was a Hungarian doctor who practiced in Vienna, Austria, at a maternity hospital (details of his life are available on Wikipedia). The germ theory of disease was not fully accepted until the 1880’s and doctors were not advised that germs could contaminate any surface. Doctors in his time did not wear gloves, gowns, or masks, and they used no disinfectants. Neither did they wash their hands.
Semmelweiss was impressed by the high incidence of childbed fever at his hospital. About one in ten of the women who delivered babies at the hospital died of the fever. More patients came down with the fever in the doctor’s wards than in the midwife’s wards (roughly 8-12% for the doctors and 3-4% for the midwives). The disease also killed a few of the staff. This happened to Semmelweiss’ colleague after he was inadvertently poked with an instrument during an autopsy. The doctor’s hand became swollen and red, and he soon died with a high fever and signs of sepsis.
Semmelweiss himself did the autopsy on his colleague, and he was struck by the similarity of the disease between the women at his hospital and the young doctor who succumbed after being poked. He immediately theorized that some maleficent particle had been transferred from the deceased autopsy patient to the doctor’s hands, to his blood, and to the next female victim. The doctors did autopsies in the morning and worked on women in the afternoon, without washing their hands or changing their coats (the midwives did no autopsies, which accounted for their lower death rates).
Faced with a threefold difference in mortality rates between midwife’s wards and doctor’s wards, Semmelweiss knew there was something wrong. That something was the autopsies on victims of childbed fever, now known to be usually caused by a virulent Streptococcus bacterium.
Semmelweiss knew that a solution of chlorinated lime was already used at the hospital to remove the stench of death, so in 1847 he ordered the doctors to start washing their hands with this stuff after doing autopsies and before touching patients. The death rate in the doctor’s wards fell to below the rate in the midwife’s wards.
Semmelweiss was rewarded for pushing this innovation by being fired from the hospital and blacklisted in Vienna. He had to return to Hungary and his work was attacked in medical journals. He didn’t publish his results in a journal until 1861. The underlying identity of the “maleficent particle” on the doctor’s hands was not identified until Pasteur established in the mid-1860’s that germs caused many, if not most, fatal diseases in that era (now the fatal diseases are mostly cancer and blood vessel blockages from atherosclerosis).
After he returned to Hungary, Semmelweiss continued his revolutionary practices and saved many women from the fever. However, he continued to face opposition and lashed out at his detractors. His mental health deteriorated after 1861, until he was committed to an insane asylum in 1865. He was beaten by the guards, treated very harshly (as was normal in those days), and suffered a wound on his right hand which quickly became gangrenous (infected). Two weeks after he was admitted, he died of the infection– something that could have been prevented if his theory had been accepted.
Joseph Lister was the first to successfully use antiseptics in surgery, first with phenol, then carbolic acid. He used carbolic acid on wounds in 1865 with great success. Ironically, Semmelweiss went mad and died in an asylum the same year.
An extensive reference to this sad tale is found in an article in Forbes published eight years ago that you may or may not find interesting:https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/02/09/a-history-lesson-on-the-dangers-of-letting-data-speak-for-itself/ The author, Brent Dykes, has a blog on how to tell effective stories with data. He organizes the storytelling into data, narrative, and visuals.
The article is a speculation about why Semmelweiss failed to convince his colleagues that his theory was correct. He had eighteen months of data showing the drop in death rates after introducing chloride of lime, and its resurgence when handwashing stopped. At first, the doctors lost 12.2% from infections in the wards. After they started handwashing, the rate dropped to 2.2%. Death rates in the midwive’s wards remained at roughly 3-4%. You would think that such numbers would be instantly convincing. But no. He was ridiculed and demeaned in the press.
The attitudes of many contemporary doctors are summed up by a quote: “Doctors are gentlemen and gentlemen have clean hands.” While Semmelweiss had many followers among his close associates, others dismissed the idea of invisible, impalpable particles on people’s hands and clothes. They were unable to understand new concepts like germ theory– on which his results did not depend but which explained how his results worked.
The post by Mr. Dykes is supplemented with basic graphs that instantly show the obvious reductions in death rates. 150 years ago, such graphs were as scarce as hen’s teeth, and were not used in Semmelweiss’ article. The first such illustrations are landmarks like the cholera maps drawn by physician John Snow in London in 1854. These showed the dynamic locations of cholera cases in relation to local water pumps used by every member of the community. Florence Nightingale used charts in 1858 to show how unsanitary conditions were contributing to the spread of wound infections among soldiers in Crimea.
The article by Dykes points out four ways in which Semmelweiss’s data failed to break through to the general public:
First, timeliness of publication: it was fourteen years before Semmelweiss’ data was published in book form, in 1861. Prior to publication, he transmitted the information by word of mouth and his auditors often misinterpreted, exaggerated, or minimized what he meant. The second or third-hand voices about his work muddied the impact of his story.
Second, Mr. Dykes blames the “curse of knowledge” and the ignorance of his audience. The curse was that he forgot what it was like to not know what he knew. He became impatient with those who wouldn’t accept his simple handwashing advice. He thought the worst of them and, instead of trying to persuade them, he insulted and demeaned them. This simply alienated them.
Third, Semmelweiss lacked a good story to weave into his results. He should have invoked the women who were saved by preventative hand-washing. Numbers of deaths alone are not emotionally charged. In addition to numbers, he should have invoked names and relationships, asking his audience, “What if this was your mother?”
Fourth, the data was not visualized in graphs, being presented mainly in data tables. This was due to the low level of graphics development generally at that time. Today, you could highlight a row of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet and convert it to a graph in moments. In 1850, Semmelweiss had nothing to work with as an exemplar so it wouldn’t even come to mind. People have difficulty visualizing what a number means: 4 and 9 are just numbers until it’s pointed out that 9 is more than twice 4.
The bottom line is that people weren’t ready for the germ theory. A lot of people still aren’t. I feel bad when I think it, but the truth is that half of people are below average. This means that a significant number of people will not understand even the simplest logical argument.
Therefore, when you tell someone that Trump is a liar, they don’t make the connection to his promise to lower prices of consumer goods. He is lying, and he is not even going to try to lower the price of eggs and bacon. If he was successful in lowering grocery prices, it would be a sign of deflation, which is a disaster for the economy since it would mean that nobody has any money to buy groceries at the normal price. That’s too complicated of an argument.
So this is why Trump was re-elected: his propaganda was aimed at the lowest common denominator. Besides being all-pervasive, lying without shame, and loudly repeating the same lies over and over, his propaganda was the best lies available. There is no way to beat him or the forces he represents without engaging in a more effective propaganda campaign. Sadly, we must pander to the lowest intelligence and blanket the airways with repetitive stories and claims. The four factors in Mr. Dykes’ article are a good framework: early publication (post on social media first and frequently), persuasive communication instead of argument (don’t insult your audience), tell a story about identifiable people who are affected by your issue(what if this happened to your mother?), and finally, use the best visualization methods available, like videos, TikToks with music, and line graphs.
Remember, as Voltaire said, “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” (thanks to Mr. Dykes for the quotations)
Women are being trolled with the taunt “Your body, my choice” and President-elect Trump has announced his nomination of Matt Gaetz, former congressman, for Attorney General of the United States. Gaetz will be completely focused on revenge. In addition, Trump states that he intends to pursue recess appointments immediately and asks the Senate to go into recess for the minimum two weeks needed.
We should also note that Mr. Gaetz was supposed to receive a report this week on the House Ethics Committee’s long-running investigation of his participation in drug and under-age sex parties while he was in Congress. He resigned just a few hours before the report was to be delivered, putting himself out of the reach of the investigation.
Mr. Trump has successfully engaged in the same behavior, stalling the four criminal cases against him until the clock runs out. He has made full use of the Democratic administration’s almost two-year delay in delivering indictments for his incitement to insurrection and retention of classified documents (with obstruction).
It is clear that Biden’s main fault was that he was too nice. Biden should have allowed or prompted his Attorney General to proceed immediately with the case against Trump. Biden should have trumpeted his own accomplishments, loudly, far and wide. Where is his press conference announcing that the economy of the USA is the “envy of the world” (per the Economist magazine)?
One last question: why didn’t the Harris campaign know that there were ten million Democrats who planned to sit out the election– the ten million that Harris needed to win?
It is clear from the final voting numbers that Trump retained all but a couple of million of his die-hard followers– he received almost the same number of votes in 2024 as he did in 2020. But Harris in 2024 received over ten million votes less than Biden in 2020, indicating that many Democratic voters sat out the election.
It was also clear from Trump’s campaigning style that he had no interest in courting voters beyond his hard base. He made it all about his grievances and revenge, and allowed the voters to pursue their prejudiced views on inflation and immigration. No-one who voted against him before would ever vote for him again.
It may have been a mistake to campaign with never-Trump Republicans. The time may have been better spent trying to find and motivate those Democrats who were not going to vote at all.
The less said about the new Health and Human Services chief, the better.
More than 10 million voters who tapped Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris in 2024, and as a result Trump swept all the swing states and won a popular majority. Trump received about the same number of votes as he did in 2020: 72-74 million.
From these numbers, we know that the same people who voted for Trump in 2020 voted for him in 2024. He only lost a couple of million votes in the interim, despite all the publicity surrounding the incident of January 6, 2021, the loss of civil suits for fraud and sexual abuse, and a felony conviction for election interference (the coverup of a sexual encounter, i.e. adultery).
We can assume that these voters have an almost psychotic devotion to Trump and were unaffected by his many scandals.
But the loss of more than 10 million votes (they’re not through counting all the mail-in ballots) by Harris from Biden’s win demands explanation. For some reason, these people seem to have not voted at all.
There are four factors that may have prompted nominally Democratic voters not to tap Harris: inflation, immigration, gender, and ethnicity.
Let us objectively consider these issues: they were all pounded upon, over and over again, by the Republican propaganda machine.
Inflation was primarily a result of the pandemic, which caused an increased demand on shipping and at the same time forced shutdowns, sickness of employees, and quarantines. These factors dramatically increased shipping costs and led to rises in prices for many goods, almost all of which are shipped from somewhere. As a result, inflation was worldwide and has barely subsided at the present moment.
In fact, the US suffered less from inflation and recovered faster than almost all other countries. The inflation rate climbed to 9.1% in 2022. It has dropped to 2.5% in the last few months. The overall increase in the price of food from 2020 to now was 25%. The raw numbers are painful, but our relative standing among world economies is exceptionally good.
Republican propaganda made it seem as if Biden was personally responsible for inflation and could have controlled it if he wanted to. In fact, our country did better than most countries in response to the worldwide problems, so Biden should get credit for that. The failure was in not taking propaganda advantage of these accomplishments.
With “irregular migration” (viz. illegal immigrants) the situation has been very different. The Biden administration made few public statements and appeared to do little to combat large numbers of immigrants until it tried to pass comprehensive border legislation, apparently at the last moment. Trump blocked this legislation although it provided a close approximation to Republican demands, and used the persistence of the problem for propaganda.
Too late, Biden introduced executive actions which successfully closed down the border. For the last few months, border activity has been very low. This accomplishment was not publicized (possibly for fear of putting off liberals?)
Republican propaganda made it seem as if Biden was personally responsible for letting murders, rapists, and people carrying fentanyl in backpacks into the country, and then giving them welfare.
Propaganda surrounding these issues didn’t improve Trump’s numbers despite its evocation of the fantasy of murderers from Mexico. But apparently it suppressed Democratic enthusiasm for voting.
Harris did not make propaganda of hers being a new policy approach. She even refused to criticize anything Biden had done: “I wouldn’t change a thing.” She should have separated herself from Biden and announced reversals in policy on the margins at least.
The last two issues, gender and ethnicity, were played upon crudely by Trump. Did they also dampen Democratic enthusiasm for voting? Probably, there was an element of misogyny and racism in the results.
Who falls for propaganda? Poorly educated people. These people are also more likely to be racist and misogynist. The voting breakdown bears this out, with Trump support concentrated among people with a high school diploma or less, and Harris support in the college educated. White women and young people as a whole broke for Trump. We can surmise from this that the lower a person’s intelligence (as reflected in their educational achievement), the more likely that person is to succumb to propaganda. Women– white women?
The issues of inflation and irregular migration, as propagandized to people of low intelligence, combined with the inherent bias of the American public against women and nonwhite ethnic backgrounds, may account for the collapse of Democratic support in 2024. There is no need to infer failures to campaign properly or faux pas, nor the influence of Biden in whatever way. These factors alone explain the difference.
I am deeply disappointed in the American public. At the same time, I can comprehend the baleful influence of the Republican propaganda machine in turning gullible people away from the Democrats. The policies of Republicans have also weakened education all over this country, especially in the public schools. A poorly educated people of subnormal intelligence are the ideal subjects for propaganda.
The failure of the Democratic campaign was primarily ineffective propagandizing. I would suggest a study of the existing literature on effective propaganda. We can begin by studying Goebbels, Hitler’s indispensable propaganda minister.
The Republicans certainly have studied Goebbels, and there is evidence that Trump has studied Hitler’s speeches. His first wife said he kept a book of the speeches at his bedside, and it is apparently the only book Trump has ever studied in depth.
There is a crying need for effective propaganda against the Republicans. This material need not twist the facts far, as there is abundant objective evidence for the advantages of Biden’s and Harris’ policies over Trump’s.
I predict that the Trump administration will immediately develop violent internal conflict and pervasive dysfunction due to the appointment of multiple incompetent apparatchiks (Trumpists).
As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often does rhyme.”
photo illustration courtesy of pixabay.com and Erika Wittlieb
Trump knows he is losing.
/”It appears that trump now knows he will lose the election. Nothing he says is designed to attract additional votes. He simply wishes to create as large a fire as he can on the way to defeat.” –MHW, Chicago, IL
World War III may have already begun.
“We are the greatest nation in the history of the world. That’s a fact.” –President Joe Biden
“The United States is going to hell.” — ex-President Donald Trump
Conrad Theodore Seitz 