A US Election Issue Explained- Trump is right to challenge!

 

 

The Supreme Court of the United  States

Ben Shapiro today has a clip from Hillary Clinton saying the Trump Presidency has been illegitimate because she had the 2016 election stolen from her.   That is a woefully incorrect statement given Mrs Clinton was a lawyer. One popular NZ Blog site- and its writer should know better- has repeated the same ignorant and incorrect opinion. 

The USA is not a popular democracy: it is a Democratic Constitutional Republic and should not be seen as a popular parliamentary polity like ours. The Democrats disdain for the US Constitution has been alive since Woodrow Wilson’s presidency and was and is constant drum beat refrain for progressives, now liberals, from then on. Democrats do not like the US Constitution's Article 2 section 1 subparagraph 2. That Article says the sate legislatures have the power to determine the nature of the election in their state.

It is not for the State Courts; the Governor; the Lt Governor; the States Secretaries of State; the Board of Electors/Election or the Bureaucrats (as was done in Georgia) to determine the process or change it. There was no delegation or powers either. The Constitutions language is startlingly clear. Changes were effected 2020, one within 90 days of the election (in Nevada) and in two key stone states, Georgia and Pennsylvania, to permit the counting of votes after 3 November are unlawful. In Georgia Democrats have been taking already submitted ballots to electors to get corrections elected AFTER election day.

The Democrats had worked to get laws changed before the election in various states. In Pennsylvania the State legislature would not accept the change and the Democrat lawyers took it to the States Supreme Court (with an elected Democrat majority) which decided to judicially legislate and over rode the legislation passed by the state legislature and the US Constitution.

In Pennsylvania, the states legislature took the issue to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). In its second decision, the first denying a stay of the State's Supreme Court. the Chief Justice, the flip flop, the blade of grass in the wind, Judge, Justice Roberts, failed to up hold the US Constitution's Art 2: astonishing as it is appallingly lamentable.

The minority have kept the case in the list for further hearing. Justice Alito sensibly and rightly maintained the case should have been determined before the election so that the counting process would have been clear. A direction was that the post 3 November ballots were to be kept separate. It now seems that the State's Democrat Sec of State for PA did not keep the ballots separate.

A point should be made: we are hearing "count the ballots" and "count the legal ballots" BUT the issue is which are the legal ballots?

Also, the excluding of GoP observers in PA is appalling blow to transparency. The GoP took that to Court and got a result that GoP observes should and must be permitted. In the face of that obviously fair and just decision the Democrats are appealing that decision. No doubt the Democrats will argue in the Provincial High Street lawyers broken reed style of argument that its observers are the observers. You would think that having Democrat and Republican observers would give credible transparency and integrity to the counting process. But not if your are a Democrat.

The Democrats are gravely undermining the rule of law in the USA. If there is no lawful process, pursuant to the rule of law then Democracy is imperiled. The illegal voting disenfranchises voters. But there will be no requiem for the Constitution and the Republic because Trump Orange Man bad (essentially for not being part of the elitist political establishment of the Philosopher Kings and Queens and their gentry that Fred Spiegel in Revolt Against the Masses has written about) intersectionality and BLM.

Perhaps, as my wife suggests, the Organisation of American States, headquartered in Washington DC, which looks into electoral abuses in Banana Republics needs to be looking into this and perhaps ought to have supervised this election.

Daniel Horowitz's article in Blaze is well worth reading:https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-state-legislatures-rectify-election-fraud?utm_source=theblaze-breaking&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20201106Trending-LegislaturesFightFraud&utm_term=ACTIVE%20LIST%20-%20TheBlaze%20Breaking%20News

Graham Hill
7 November 2020

Election Day-US: a Lamentation

 

 

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6206651272001

"Sky News host Paul Murray says “everything is on the line” as the election marks a fork in the road because the left, which long to tear down the world as it is, is at its craziest and is closer to power than it’s ever been. “As the sun begins to come up in the United States, they will make a choice. And it is a genuine fork in the road,” Mr Murray said."  

Murray says "…they don't think like us…"    I made a similar point yesterday on this Blog.  There is a bifurcation of intellectual perception and  understanding about and of the world.    The left is heavily reliant on a Manichean political/ moral world view and Neo Platonism, which is inherent in contemporary Marxism.  It is a Mind shift as momentous as that from Roman Paganism to Christianity; from Thomistic thought to Newtonian. 

Yuri Bezemov was right in his You Tube clips.  
An academic idea could fall a classical, enlightenment and Christian Constitutional Republic.

The great Professor Thomas Sowell has said that the USA is close to or at the point of no return.  There will be riots as a Trump victory will be, by distortion, treated as 'a coup' by MSM,  the Democrats and Marxist left. 

No one sees it here because the 'Bobble Head'  focus on optics, over substance, which precludes analysis of substance together with the  fact that  input of data for  analysis is filtered out by the media in favour of a narrative. 

Miranda Devine of the NY Post has said on Sky News Australia today  that a Biden win will have  defence and security implications for the  South Pacific.  I have  mentioned that too in a social setting and been dismissed.   Why don't people see this?  I thought Mark Levin in his "Jeremiad" was on target.  But as we know the Jeremiahs were not heard.   The were not heard because of Mill's establishment dormant discourse of opinion.  When they were, it was then  too late.  Truth is a fragile flower, like the Rose of Sharon.

We are in the 'Valley of Cultural Death' with a Dionysian heedless, Leeming like, rush of ignorance, inexperience and gross mis-perception of reality as a mental  construct.

4 November 2020

A reply to Olivia Pierson on the US Election

I wrote this as a reply in support of  Olivia Pierson's  article posted on Solopassion on 2 November:

 Is it not an odd thing that our own oil/gas industry was squashed. To be self sufficient in gas/oil is a strategic necessity. The US was meeting emission levels that were below what the Paris Accord stipulated and was a net exporter of oi.

The election is also about:

1. the coastal elites v the interior, the hollowing out and impoverishment of the interior has been simply immoral, added to which is the disdain-hatred- of the interior as Deplorables;

2. Those who work with their brains and iPads v those who make things and work with their hands;

3. Those who have had their minds shaped by neo Marxism critical theory and pursue constructed (Neo Platonic idealism) theories v those who think inductively based on evidence- the division which boils down to Socialism/Communism v old fashioned Liberalism and Conservative values- the value of telling the truth of family, of history and past human experience and distilled though based on that experience;

4. Collectivism v individualism- social justice v actual justice, the rule of law and due process. The Constitution- Justice Felix Frankfurter said that without 'fairness' and due process one does not have democracy. The Progressives plan to dismantle the Constitution looks like a giant step to take over the government and its branches and impose Identity Socialism. The Marxist critical theorist always expose power as bad but what they propose is a grab for power at the expense of civil rights and liberties, right down to how many people one can have in your home!

I was laughed at and scoffed- then marginalized - for saying earlier in the year by a Wellington liberal- beltway- Trump- is -vile -"'splaining-elite" that the US republic was on a precipice but it now seems more apparent.

National Pulse today carries a story that Micahel Bloomberg is funding a "Don't accept the election result campaign and the Transition Integrity Project has been advocating taking it to the streets and another group is actively seeking "action" in DC tomorrow. Shops etc are being boarded up.

Sir Robert Jones has opined that Biden is innocuous. If you only read NZ MSM you can be forgiven for that opinion. The failure by MSM and Big Tech has never been more apparent. The attitude after arrogance and ignorance, is that you don't need to know, you don't need a free press and free speech (thus freedom of conscience) and privacy because we have the TRUTH. It cannot happen here you say? When the firearm issue was alive in 2019, our PM said we need to change people's behaviours-that means one's opinions and how one thinks.

Trump is blamed for divisiveness, hate and tyranny but it seems to have emanated from the bitter losers of the 2016 election: the state oligarchy, the Democrats and the Alliance of Bias: the media and Big Tech.

Timely article by Olivia.

What passes for News- RNZ's Trump Derangement Syndrome

 

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-...

"Look, I won't pretend to be impartial - I moved to New Zealand in 2006, and Donald Trump has created an America I hardly recognise, a con man's ignorant fantasyland. I hope he loses the election decisively, and this whole episode is seen as a misguided wrong turn for America."

Might not the 'con man' be the Democrat contender? The man who changed the near civil tone of SCOTUS Appointees to hearings of personal destruction 'inquisitions" starting with the late Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas J and on...

The candour if not being impartial is most welcome: misunderstanding the US Constitution is not.

If it were not for how the senate is appointed, an intended design in the union, the interior would be subject to coastal dominance, and largely disenfranchised. But of course the people who live in the interior don't matter to the writer of the article.

The existence of Trump is a function of historical causation from the previous 8 years, now exacerbated by the left ward drive to socialism. Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Eastern Europeans look on that with justifiable horror from historical experience.

It is presently a tight race, and US MSM is pushing for Biden. It has to be doubted if Biden, should he win will survive for long and fall to Nancy Pelosi's 25th Amendment Commission and be sent home for mental capacity.

The election does have, as the writer says, an existential element, from the non Democrat and "progressive" side it is about the survival of the Constitutional Republic given the proposals of packing the Supreme Court for ideological conformity and judicial legislation; adding two states- DC and Puerto Rico, dismembering the Electoral College and having senators appointed differently. The executive, the legislature and the Court are not the property of a party but of the people. The constitution's sources from Stoic elements to Montesquieu was designed to hold back faction and popular furor.

One will never see on RNZ's web site a view from the other point of view or even a glimmer of what Trump has achieved in office.

Graham Hill
Nelson
1 November 2020

The Social Justice Litmus Test

 

The BLM protest last Sunday in Wellington had a highly intelligent and formidable speaker.   She laid into the system and the structures of power.  When you hear those words one knows that the dead hand of a wearisome ideology of critical theory, neo-Marxism is present.  The dialectical theory of Hegel, and the unfortunate inheritance from Plato, lives on in the simplistic mechanical calculus which reduces life to the trite oppressor/oppressed paradigm which concludes with its predicted premise.

Social Justice Warriors might be better advised to dump the tower of Babel and look at the matter with an authentic voice.   I recall once seeing Dun Mihaka betrayed by stumbling over Marx’s dialectical materialism theory when it would have been better to hear what he had to say and propose from lived and factual experience.

It is a tower of babel because anyone who has read postmodernist texts and neo-Marxist theory knows that first, it is a jumble of jargon, hence the duping of periodicals with bogus articles and secondly the writing is endlessly loaded with citations of names: Marcuse, Horkheimer, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Laclau and Foucault.  The names and theory, rather than empirical data,  are used as authorities and the more names the more the authority.    

Laclau and Mouffe were clear that  modification was required to “the notion of class struggle, to be able to deal with the new political subjects – women, national, racial and sexual minorities, anti-nuclear and anti-institutional movements etc – of a clearly anti-capitalist character, but whose identity is not constructed around specific ‘class interests’”…” Political struggle in this era must involve other groups.”  ( D Murray The Madness of Crowds 2018, p 58-59).  The mental dysphoria in Babel is increased and compounded by the drones of intersectionality.

The death blow to this philosophy has been effected by Stephen Hicks and especially by the feminist writer, the erudite  Camille Paglia,  in her article ‘Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf’, in  Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1991),  pp. 139-212.  As Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies,  had labelled Hegel an intellectual charlatan, Paglia does the same for Foucault.

To sidestep the heavy intellectual lifting and labour a litmus test on social Justice warriors is proposed.   This weeds out the power-hungry and the narcissistic from those who seek human decency and dignity and kosmopolitiea.   Seeking justice which is about means is a bona fide pursuit and a social good, and not an exclusive secular-religious mission to one iconographic issue. 

One serious area of discrimination and bigotry where people are grossly disempowered, 'othered' and where discrimination affects every aspect of life: family, housing,  employment (career terminal, particularly if one is a lawyer or other professional), access to medical treatment to legal services and credibility is mental health discrimination.  Occupational/workplace bullying and harassment, and even bereavement grief leading to depression, is captured- if ‘male pale and stale’ (capturing a rights trifecta)  it is even worse.    The litmus paper is applied: The response is a very uncomfortable silence. 

Whither then social justice?    The neo-Marxist view can be turned on its objectives.  If the power structure is overthrown who fills the power vacuum;  if a discipline is decolonised, who and what re colonises it; if the Idealist (in the Platonic sense) chimaera construct patriarchy is disestablished is it replaced by a matriarchy?  One oppressor is changed for another it is not?

The fact of the matter is that reductionist philosophies descending into ever-decreasing circles, and slipping from reality and common sense,  do not grasp the nuances and complexities of human life.  Last week a National  Review article stated: Solzhenitsyn once remarked that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. . . . And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”  Solzhenitsyn’s message, [is] that there is virtue in the worst of us and vice in the best, is a reminder that people are morally complex.  So, too, is history."   An aspect of the 18thC needs to be let go and that is Rousseau.  Justice is a problem of us: the system comprises humans.

Having lived in a small “heartland” town one sees clearly- and experiences- the raft of hates, jealousies and resentments at those who are different.  The drive to conformity of opinion, conduct and taste; the petty “village vexations” as Burke called them can have real social and economic consequences.  Ostracism: Being asked to leave town or driven out of town in the light of being different is a local ‘cancel culture’ at work.

This is human beings and human nature  at work.   Recourse to  the “systemic” and “structures” is not needed.  Instead of social justice ‘warriordom’,  tolerance and acceptance of our neighbours is a better starting point.

 

Graham Hill
Nelson,  19 June 2020

Another Book to Read for these Present Times

In addition to George Orwell's 1984 one could add to the culture war's reading list the following book by Bernard Bailyn The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchison  Allen Lane,  1975.

The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchison is about  Thomas  Hutchison,  a native-born American who became Chief Justice and then later the last  Governor of pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts.   He ended up in exile in England never to return to his homeland.

Bailyn wrote it after the student riots at Berkeley in the late 1960s, which has informed its content.  My dissertation supervisor at Canterbury, Dr D C Harlan, painted a picture of Bailyn huddled down in his office at Berkeley as the student mobs wandered outside and wondering how he had become the "enemy."

The chapter on 'Law and order and its break down' (think Seattle) and the one titled the Furies are salutary reading. 

It captures everything you need to know for the present madness: lies/spin, fake news; twisting of words, false narratives,  the demise of law and order,  mobs attacking public figures, people afraid to speak out; shaming and attacking people who had a different opinion from the mob; Justices of eh peace afraid to act, and if the authorities took action they were blamed for being oppressive and if they did not take action they were blamed.  The latter is not unlike the MSM Trump scenario.

There is even iconoclasm. Hutchison had to acquiesce in the removal of portraits of   Charles II and James II from the City Hall.

The mob wanted to bring down the existing "structure" and looked for crises to exploit. Additionally, there was the admixture of the mob (who Hutchison said were mostly misinformed and deceived) and its radicals plus business interests. (The US stock market during  the BLM protests has had a series of upward spikes as corporations virtual signal).

Hutchison was a prolific writer on law and politics and much of it unpublished in his lifetime and he sought to obtain a resolution.  Hutchison expresses a  parallel thought to that of  David Hume  (in the latter's History of England on the Puritan revolution of 1642 to 1645)  on passionately held moral opinion, that once held and galvanised by the mob, the state is weakened, law and order is compromised (Czarist Russia was relatively indulgent to its anarchist and revolutionaries)  and the state falls.

Bailyn specifically chose the losing side in the American Revolution to write about.  History is first written by the winners then it is by those who see ‘Whig progress’ and ultimately, history,  Bailyn theorised,  is tragedy.

Hutchison’s experiences of the political crises of 1763 to 1770 are a good comparator to current events in the USA and elsewhere in addition to the 17thC Puritan Revolution in Britain and the exempla exemplorum, the  French Revolution.

Graham Hill
Nelson
22 June 2020.