DANGEROUS DISTRUST OF ELECTORAL PROCESS

Yes, I did call for President Trump to resign two weeks ago. However, it may surprise readers to know that if I could go back to 2016, I would vote for him again; 2020 too. Despite his behavior since losing reelection, I see his presidency as a net positive. Impeaching him now is farcical given that he’s leaving office anyway but the Dems want to prevent him from ever running again because they’re afraid of him.

Biden brags about getting Ukraine prosecutor fired

This latest impeachment for inciting violence may have grounds, unlike the 2020 effort which charged Trump with asking Ukrainians to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling. Pelosi ignored then-vice-president Biden on videotape threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine to stop a Ukrainian investigation into Hunter Biden. Mainstream media allies cooperated on both fronts.

Ever since Trump got the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, mainstream media has amplified every Democrat effort to impugn him. First they magnified the Clinton campaign’s fabricated Steele Dossier and dubious Trump/Russian collusion story. They ignored Obama’s use of intelligence agencies to spy on Trump’s campaign before the 2016 election and then afterward on his transition team. They cheerleaded the dubious Mueller Investigations into General Flynn and President Trump, neither of which found anything to prosecute and only succeeded in bankrupting Flynn, destroying his reputation, and crippling Trump’s presidency.

Conservatives did a slow burn watching all this and 90% negative media coverage of Trump’s presidency despite its long string of successes: Trump isolated Iran and its terrorism. He killed Iran General Soleimani, ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and al-Qaeda leader Qasim al-Rimi, among others. He forged the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab leaders. He spurred economic growth that Obama claimed would be impossible. He reduced illegal immigration and built over 400 miles of new border wall. He hammered out favorable trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, the EU, and China. He appointed hundreds of pro-life judges and three originalist Supreme Court justices.

He eliminated the Obamacare individual mandate, reformed the VA, withdrew from the Paris Accord and the Iran nuclear agreement, got NATO Countries to pay their fair share, cut restrictions on oil drilling and coal exports, fast-tracked and funded a COVID vaccine, brought unemployment to record lows, raised median household income to record level, brought home troops from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, reformed the criminal justice system, and created the Space Force. Trump may be the most controversial president ever, but he’s also one of the most accomplished, especially considering he did all that in four years.

After losing on November 3rd, however, Trump claimed election fraud. Mainstream media said there was no evidence. Millions of Trump voters however, watched as Trump was winning that evening when swing states abruptly stopped counting votes, sent observers home, and resumed counting. By morning they were reporting that Trump was losing. Pennsylvania extended its deadline for counting votes without constitutional authority, after which the votes swung to Biden.

Is that evidence of election fraud or coincidence? Millions of Trump voters believe it was cheating. Mainstream media denied it all and called the election for Trump. Hundreds of observers made sworn depositions of voter fraud. That is evidence. Only two eyewitnesses, for example, are needed for a murder conviction and sometimes only one, but mainstream media continued claiming there was no evidence. There’s also video of ballot stuffing in Georgia. Law suits alleging fraud were dismissed on procedural grounds like lack of standing. There is plenty of evidence for election fraud largely perpetrated by Democrats, though probably not enough to overturn the result.

Our Founders gave us freedom of speech for many reasons, but one was for irate citizens to blow off steam by expressing their anger verbally and in writing. Here in 2021, people don’t use 18th century broadsheets; they use Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Those outlets are owned and run by leftists who have been censoring news and posts with which they disagree, especially about election fraud. Because they’re private companies, they probably aren’t violating the 1st Amendment, but they’ve assumed enormous political power and they’re using it against conservatives, so far under the legal protection of Section 230.

We now have a huge percentage of our electorate that no longer trusts the electoral process. One could debate whether that mistrust is justified or not, but there’s little dispute that it exists. That is a huge threat to our republic that should give all of us the shivers.

Trump has been accused of narcissism even by supporters. What they at first saw as a character flaw was turning into an unraveling after his election loss, and it accelerated week-to-week. By January 6th it had completely blinded him to the political reality that Biden’s election would not be overturned. His unwillingness to accept that is embarrassing for all who voted for him. I will not vote for him in any 2024 primary and I hope he doesn't get the Republican nomination again. Right now I'm looking at Nikki Haley.

Life and Death and Then What?

Christopher Hitchens died last Friday. He was 62. Though it’s too early to say with surety, it seems he died as he lived - convinced that as the title of his last book declared: “God is Not Great,” and further convinced there was no such thing as God. Many of us wondered whether he would have a change of mind and/or heart after being diagnosed with terminal cancer of the esophagus but, so far, there are no reports that he did.

Unlikely as it would seem, Hitchens interested me as he did other conservatives. Unlikely because he was an apologist for communism, an admirer of Leon Trotsky who, with Lenin and Stalin, led the Russian Revolution, and he was a bitter critic of Mother Teresa. He was a darling of the left because he was an intelligent, articulate, atheist socialist.

He was a champion for the principles of leftist orthodoxy until he came out in support of President Clinton’s impeachment in the late 1990s. The left was in shock. Then he wrote a book about the Clintons called “No One Left to Lie to: the Values of the Worst Family.” That was heresy for a “progressive.” Next came the September 11th attack on the United States which, among other things, made him decide to become a US citizen. Following that, he exposed the left’s myopia in its refusal to condemn radical Islam in spite of its treatment of women, homosexuals, its denial of free speech, freedom of religion, and its willingness to use violence wherever and whenever to impose sharia on everyone. The final straw occurred when in 2003, he supported the US invasion of Iraq.

Hitchens pursued truth as he perceived it. He had heart and he had integrity. That’s more than I can say about most of the people I encounter on life’s journey. We perceived the world differently but I trusted the man in some intuitive way. He seemed to put the search for truth above himself, and I’ve discovered that I can relate only to people who do that. I’ve come to believe that Truth has a capital T but Hitchens denied that to his death.In his last essay for Vanity Fair Hitchens wrote:

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that "Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger."

He was referring to the debilitating effects of chemotherapy on his body.

That last quote is, ironically, attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche - author of the famous phrase “God is Dead” that has become the mantra of 20th century secular nihilism and championed by Hitchens during his lifetime. Nietzsche, however, predicted that the post-Christian 20th century would cause a decline in civility, indeed of western civilization itself, because Christianity has been responsible for the rise of those cherished western values including individual freedom and equality. As frequent Hitchens’s debate opponent Dinesh D’Sousa put it: “Unfortunately for the critics of Christianity, even values they care about will, according to Nietzsche, eventually collapse.” Nietzsche, Hitchens and millions of others like them believed the universe, our world, and those of us in it just happened by chance, and our existence doesn’t mean anything. That’s the essence of nihilism, which has which has become the ruling ethic - if you can call it that - of our age. Ironically, Christopher Hitchens had a brother, Peter Hitchens, also a writer, who is both a Christian and a political conservative. Evidently they were never close, even in childhood, but they were civil to each other most of the time. Often they debated God publicly and politely. After his brother’s death, Peter Hitchens wrote:

While I was making my gradual, hesitant way back to the altar-rail, my brother Christopher's passion against God grew more virulent and confident. As he has become more certain about the non-existence of God, I have become more convinced we cannot know such a thing in the way we know anything else, and so must choose whether to believe or not. I think it better by far to believe.

So it seems Peter Hitchens’ belief in Christianity is informed more by Pascal’s Wager than by intrinsic faith. During one of his debates with brother Christopher he said: “I think both the atheist and the Christian fear there is a God, but the Christian also hopes there is one.”
Christopher Hitchens believed fervently that his body would turn to dust and that would be it - lights out. I wonder what he’s thinking now.