Elections; The Red Puddle; & Englishmen in Egypt

Nov 14, 2022

Michael Walsh’s Editor’s Column this week is about the state of America’s electoral system.

The System Is the Steal

The nastiest side effect of China's gift to the world, Covid-19, was not the illness itself, nor the deaths (surely over-attributed) it caused primarily among the aged and infirm. Nor was it the unnecessary and unconstitutional lockdowns that accompanied the government-fueled, manufactured authoritarian panic, along with the arbitrary abrogation of fundamental constitutional rights, including those protected under the first amendment: freedom of speech, assembly, and the free exercise of religion—a national disgrace that will live in infamy, and which should never be forgiven.

Nor was it the incalculable economic destruction caused by this unholy concoction of Chinese bat-butt soup, liver of pangolin, and gain-of-function seasonings provided by Chef Boyarfauci, nor the loss of several years of schooling for America's increasingly ineducable youth. Nor even was it the semi-mandatory "vaccines" that don't fulfill any of the traditional metrics for real vaccines, including prevention of disease and its transmission or the granting of future immunity; now the argument has moved to whether they actually kill people, which isn't an encouraging trajectory for something billed as a panacea.

No, the worst damage has been to our political-electoral systems, as the results of the past two elections have made abundantly clear. Forget the nonsense about a "stolen" election; all elections are "stolen," if by stolen you mean that one side won and one side lost, and have been since George Washington Plunkitt was a pup. (For those keeping score at home, Tammany Hall, of which Plunkitt was an outstanding exemplar, was founded by Aaron Burr, the first Democrat Party vice president, national traitor, and murderer of Alexander Hamilton.) Whatever the election rules are—and under our unwieldy system, there are 50 different sets of them—the party that manipulates them best usually wins. And this of course gives the long-practiced Democrats an enormous advantage.

The fundamental principle of all American elections has been to determine as far in advance as possible how many votes the other guy is getting and then come crashing in at the end with overwhelming numbers of newfound votes to close the deal at the finishing bell. You can find them in storerooms, in the trunks of cars; sometimes they fall off trucks, mimeographed and marked in advance to save the poor voter's time. You do whatever it takes, more or less within the limits of the law, and then worry about penalties after the election is safely in the bag.

Permission vs. forgiveness: the fraud, dear Brutus, lies not in the machines but in our electoral system. There is only one way to ensure a free and fair election. But before we get to that, consider this:

Democratic norms are not perfectly realized anywhere, even in advanced democracies. Access to the electoral arena always has a cost and is never perfectly equal; the scopes and jurisdictions of elective offices are everywhere limited; electoral institutions invariably discriminate against somebody inside or outside the party system; and democratic politics is never quite sovereign but always subject to societal as well as constitutional constraints... There is much room for nuance and ambivalence... [and] bending and circumventing the rules may sometimes be considered “part of the game.”

Part of the game? It is the game. There is no perfect "democracy." The system is, in fact, the steal.

Tom Finnerty wrote about the surprising outcome of the midterm elections.

The 'Red Wave' That Wasn't

So the midterms were a disaster. As the night wore on, close race after close race broke the Democrats' way, and some of the contests which were supposed to be close ended up being comfortable Democratic victories. In the House, the GOP actually won the popular vote, with what looks like a 5 percent swing in their direction from 2020. That did not, however, translate to the large increase of seats many were predicting beforehand.

In the end, Lee Zeldin having made the New York gubernatorial race surprisingly close might prove the difference maker -- Republicans picked up several seats in Long Island and the Hudson Valley which went for Biden in 2020. Meanwhile in the senate, poor candidate quality contributed to the loss of winnable seats.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, the decision to nominate Oprahfied celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz turned out as poorly as it looked from day one, notwithstanding the fact that his opponent, John Fetterman, was seriously incapacitated by a stroke towards the end of the primary, compromising his ability to speak publicly or debate. Oz wasn't helped by having Doug Mastriano at the top of the ticket, Donald Trump's hand-picked gubernatorial candidate who ran a terrible campaign.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, retired professional football player Herschel Walker underperformed the state's Republican governor Brian Kemp by nearly five points. As no candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote, that race is going to a run-off, and potentially for control of the senate, but Republicans shouldn't get their hopes up. Without Kemp supporting him (and, perhaps more importantly, without Stacey Abrams depressing votes on the Democratic side) Walker could easily underperform.

Which is to say that we're looking at more of the same extremely tight voting splits over the next two years that we've seen over the last two, with Kamala Harris very likely being called upon to break ties in the upper chamber. Those are going to hurt, especially the judicial appointments. Painful too will be the continued disastrous mismanagement of the country, since the White House no longer has an incentive to tap the brakes. Instead, it will be full steam ahead along the road to economic and social ruin.

Our Founding Editor, John O’Sullivan, discussed the embarrassing spectacle of Britain’s current and recent prime ministers making fools of themselves at COP27.

Boris and Rishi Buy the Pyramids

For a brief moment Rishi Sunak, Britain's new prime minister, looked as if he might resist joining the rush over the cliff of climate catastrophism. Initially he decided not to attend the COP27 "climate change" summit in the former Israeli (now Egyptian) Sinai peninsula resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on implementing the U.N.-brokered plan to cut the world’s carbon emissions to Net-Zero by 2050. Then he said his mind was open to going. Finally he went.

My interpretation of his early reluctance was that he didn’t want “to be trapped into making commitments on Net-Zero that might later be inconvenient to his overall energy and budgetary policies.” If so, that was a very prudent judgment. And to be fair, the Prime Minister resisted a great deal of political and international pressure to stick to it. Then Boris Johnson, his predecessor, announced that he would be attending the climate jamboree. That proved to be the last snowflake that triggers the avalanche. Rishi felt he had to go.

Even on the day before he set off to Egypt, however, it became clear that his initial prudence was as amply justified as it has been brutally violated. Consider the back story of Britain’s finances. And pay attention because recent news stories may have given you the impression that the short unhappy episode of Liz Truss as prime minister was responsible for the dire straits of Britain’s fiscal situation that includes a budgetary “black hole” of 50 billion pounds, a proposed set of tax hikes amounting to 25 billon pounds, and spending cuts of about 35 billion pounds.

In reality both Ms. Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, are entirely innocent of this Mother-of-All-Shortfalls. They were in office only about a month, and none of their proposed tax-and-spending changes were even introduced in that time. When they left office, they bequeathed to their successors the same exact inheritance of fiscal and monetary problems that they had inherited…. And who is responsible for all those? No one more so than the former chancellor, Rishi Sunak, unless you count his prime ministerial boss, Boris Johnson. They’re starting to look like a tag-team trying to win the race to insolvency before any other national team. And they have jointly taken a giant’s leap forward towards that result by their speeches and, yes, their commitments at the COP27 Summit.

Having pushed Rishi into going, Boris then gave a speech to the summit that pushed his former colleague further into massive financial transfers from the U.K. to developing countries. He did so by making the case that Britain was historically responsible for global warming because it had invented the industrial revolution:

The United Kingdom was one of, if not the first, industrialized nation. The first wisps of carbon came out of the factories and mills and foundries of the West Midlands 200 years ago. We started it all.

Historically speaking, that was nonsense. Even if you think that man-made carbon emissions are the sole cause of "climate change"—which is not the scientific consensus—Britain put extremely small amounts of carbon into the atmosphere for the first two hundred years of the industrial revolution. "Global warming" began in the 1970s, after the spread of modern industry around the world. Nor is it remotely true, as the leftist theory bizarrely embraced by Boris holds, that the industrial revolution was a privileged blight from which Britain and the early industrialized world derived all the benefits while the developing countries got none. Quite the contrary….

Boris himself must have realized that he had just opened a Pandora’s Box full of prospective U.K.-financed transfer payments of incalculable expense to Africa and Asia. For he immediately tried to evade the responsibility he had just conceded by giving it a gloss of technology:

What we cannot do is make up for that in some kind of reparations. We simply do not have the financial resources. No country could. What we can do is help with the technology that can help to fix the problem.

But that realism was too late, as realism usually is for Boris. Leaders of the developing world were soon in full cry demanding the “implementation” of these and earlier promises from Western leaders. Negotiators for the U.K. and its G7 allies in the corridors and back rooms of COP27 were signaling that they were prepared to concede more money for “loss and damage” funds—a bureaucratic term of art now morphing from emergency disaster aid into reparations in disguise. And the bandwagon began to roll.

And Clarice Feldman looked a little more closely into those calls for reparations.

In Egypt, a Sharm El-Sheikdown

Some 200 grifters and blowhards are meeting this week at lovely Sharm-al-Sheik for COP27, a U.N. global warming conference in Egypt. Among the grifters is Venezuelan Marxist narco-dictator Nicolas Maduro. Among the notable attendees are American blowhards John F. Kerry and Al Gore, both of whom seem determined to destroy America’s strength and middle class, stoking exaggerated claims of environmental catastrophe from fossil-fuel emissions. This, while the two of them are each emitting more hot gases than almost anyone on the globe. The idea of this charade seems to be to stick the Western industrialized nations (us) for all the troubles in the Third World, which explains why the countries that emit the most fossil fuel emissions—China and India—don’t seem to be joining the party.

Aside from the slim, well-refuted science behind the claims that the CO2 has caused and will continue to increase, environmental disasters the record is clear that industrialization has led to marked improvements in lives all around the world, improvements made possible by increased capital which industrialization can generate. The site Human Progress tracks a number of indicia which establish that on a material basis the world has much improved, and if you look at the chart there, the number of deaths worldwide which can be attributed to natural disasters has very sharply decreased. So have deaths attributable to pollution.

Improvements in the lives of millions puts paid to the media and grifters' doom tales. World poverty has greatly decreased. From 2012 to 2013 global poverty fell by 130 million poor people. At the turn of this century the aim was to decrease it by half--instead by 2015 only 10 percent of the world’s population lived under the poverty line. China and India, the world’s biggest emission producers, led the way in the dramatic reduction of poverty. Do you suppose they will abandon their reliance on fossil fuels?

The media plays along with scenes of Bangladeshis wading through flood waters and sob stories about Vanuatu sinking forever beneath the waves unless we all turn off our heat and air conditioning and instead bike from the suburbs to the cities. Unfortunately for them, the record does not bear this out.

Take the small low lying reef islands in the Pacific, like the media favorite Vanuatu. They aren’t sinking and CO2 emissions are not responsible for the islands' shifting sizes. Ocean swells seem to partially eroded some western shorelines but the coastlines grew on the leeward sides protected from the swells. Bjorn Lomberg reports a Vanuatan resident was not concerned about global warming there. She and her family wanted running water, a toilet, fixed electricity and a boat to make trips to the clinic faster and easier. She complained that the government taxed the residents but did nothing to provide these essential services.

Thanks for reading, and keep a look out for upcoming pieces by Peter Smith, Rich Trzupek, and Tom Finnerty. And, once again, don’t forget to order our book, Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. You won’t regret it! All this and more this week at The Pipeline!

Michael Walsh at The Pipeline

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