by Conrad Black
This column is becoming a weekly checklist on the descent of American public policy and attitudes further into the depths of frivolity, chaos, and national self-dislike. I was honored to make a small contribution last week to the edition of this website celebrating its fifth anniversary. In the editors’ statement on that anniversary, they renewed their hostility to the ineptitude and moral decrepitude of the bipartisan ruling class, their “opposition to the unaccountable administrative state,” their dislike of an American oligarchy, particularly the “Big Tech monopoly to suppress disagreement,” and their contempt for “pernicious utopian ideologies.” It is a privilege to be associated with such opinions.
In this past week, we’ve seen the absurd spectacle of a group of Texas state legislators commandeering a private plane as they fled from Texas to escape the ability of the governor of Texas to require them to return to Austin and discharge the duty they were elected to carry out, in this case, vote on a voting reform bill.
The selfies they took on the planes as they swilled beer—maskless despite masking regulations the Democrats are particularly fervent about upholding, given that they are the party of COVID terror—and the subsequent positive COVID tests of several of the fleeing legislators are almost too ludicrous to believe. Vice President Kamala Harris’ comparison of their ridiculous flight to Washington with the gathering of the founding fathers of America to declare its independence in 1776 confirmed that the race between the escalating foolishness of elected Democrats and the apparent sincerity with which the Democratic harlot-media endorses anything the Democrats do or say continues at neck-and-neck pace.
The proposed Texas voting rules that occasioned the flight of the Democratic legislators require voter identification, prohibit ballot-harvesting and the casting of votes by one person on behalf of other people, provide a reasonable (i.e., not open-ended) window of hours and days for voting, and assure that the counting process will be witnessed by representatives of all contending parties. The attempt by the Democrats to portray this as “voter suppression” is an outrage, especially Joe Biden’s nonsensical volcanic eruption last week that such efforts have produced the “greatest crisis since the Civil War,” even after he had conceded, following months of violent objection, that voter identification is actually not a bad idea. This is all very distressing.
It is obvious that there were serious problems with the 2020 presidential election and no matter how endlessly and emphatically all of the elements of the anti-Trump coalition and the almost totalitarian unanimity of the national political media repeat that there is no room for belief that the election produced a fraudulent result, a very large number of Americans, for excellent reasons, believe that it was a tainted election. There were 18 challenges to the constitutional integrity of the election in the six swing states to which all problems of voting or vote counting were confined. In addition, there was the Texas attorney general’s case alleging that the swing states did not meet the constitutional requirement of ensuring fair presidential elections. The judiciary at every level refused to judge any of these cases on their merits and the abdication of the judiciary from its coequal status with the executive and legislative branches in the exercise of its highest responsibility—to assure fair elections to national office—and disquiets and rankles with every thinking American. For the incumbent president to state that measures to assure just elections are a menace to the country on the scale of a war in which 750,000 Americans died to preserve the Union and abolish slavery is a shocking immolation of his own credibility.
In part, we are witnessing the gradual erosion of the two great myths which underpin the present wobbling administration: despite having 95 percent support from the national political media and outspending Trump two-to-one, it did not win a clean or unquestionable election; and despite fervent attempts to pretend otherwise, the trespass at the Capitol on January 6 was not organized, incited, or condoned by Trump or his organization and it was neither seriously armed, remotely coordinated, or intended by anyone to be an insurrection.
The failure to come up with any serious indictments despite holding trespassers in prison for six months on what must have been strenuous shakedown efforts to suborn false inculpatory testimony, indicates that the politicization of the FBI continues. The Democratic effort to present the 2020 election as a deliverance of democracy from potential revolutionary despotism is a complete failure. The presentation by the FBI of a Lego set of over a thousand pieces, in its box, that when assembled makes a model of the United States Capitol, which was found at the home of January 6 trespasser Robert Morss, is indicative of how seriously the FBI has deteriorated, at least partially because of the political rot that infected it in the Obama era under Comey and McCabe.
Other highlights in this week of continuing political disappointment include efforts by apologists of the justice system to equate the likely failure of the argument against voting systems to a complete debunking of the unanswerable concerns about drop boxes filled with unverifiable votes in lopsided numbers arriving in the middle of the night; and the news that the National Football League will play what is generally regarded as the African-American anthem “Lift Every Voice” prior to the national anthem at their games this year, and have “social justice messaging” interspersed among other diversions at the games and on the players’ outfits.
If one looks hard enough, the social justice of an NFL game is probably not found in the affront to the U.S. flag and anthem of obscenely overpaid athletes milking their natural gifts through 20-hour week/seven-month work years. Instead of rolling over like poodles, the NFL owners should have contracted the league, expelled the most demonstrative malcontents, and chucked the invertebrate commissioner, Roger Goodell. If they had done that and asked the fans for support they would have received it, and the anti-American players would have straggled back eventually. At least, unlike the National Basketball Association, they haven’t yet been suborned by the Communist Party of China.
Next to Biden’s assimilation of measures to assure fair elections to the Civil War, the most depressing utterance by a U.S. government official last week was Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s request of United Nations officials to be the “scourge of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia in the United States.” This is a mission for which the moral elevation of the Iranians, Chinese, Russians, and North Koreans, perfectly prepares them. The rabbits are chasing the hunters, the children are operating the candy store, and the lunatics are running the asylum.
Finally, the misery index—a combination of the rate of unemployment with the rate of inflation, which reached 21.9 under President Jimmy Carter and fell down into the sixes under President Reagan—is back after scarcely having been thought of these 40 years. It was 6.9 when Trump left office, and as of June it was 11.5. The trend is clear, the administration has shown no plausible method of stopping or reversing it, and the Biden societal miracle has produced a crime wave and a flood of illegal unskilled immigrants as well. There’s also the general harassment of vaccination non-enthusiasts, but I can’t face it this week.
It will all get worse.
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Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour. He is a contributor to the Center for American Greatness.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
