Explosive stuff over the last few days on the 2020 election. The Trump campaign is dropping a lot of side suits (which the media is making a big deal about) to pursue the overarching problems of the election: focused and intensive ballot harvesting in Democratic counties, including selective curing of ballots, no thorough cross-county vetting of mail-in ballots (I write about the anomalous rejection rates in Georgia on my blog), and the machines used in the election, Dominion Voting Systems Corp and its vulnerabilities, especially remote vote switching.
See Steve Cortes’ chalk talks on the War Room Pandemic show today. If you understand statistical inference, from Cortes’ presentations alone you can see this election is fraught with statistical improbabilities for Biden that must be investigated. Here’s Cortes’ Twitter feed:
The National Pulse has just dropped a scientific analysis of the reported Pennsylvania vote (https://thenationalpulse.com). What it suggests is a fraud scheme similar to the 2008 sub-prime mortgage meltdown—which Obama avoided investigating (instead handing the states 45 billion dollars of taxpayer money governors used to buy loyalty from powerful constituents). Biden votes in key states he needed to win are obviously too convenient to be trusted.
Biden’s win is not just quantitatively suspicious. Qualitatively they don’t make sense. Sleepy Joe Biden, who hardly campaigned, outperformed rockstar Barrack Obama? Enthusiasm for Trump was through the roof. His rallies were like Obama’s (and Bernie Sander’s rallies, who losses in 2016 and 2020 are suspicious in themselves). The argument that minority opposition to Trump drove turnout is absurd in the face of the massive gains Trump made in the minority vote.
If this were happening in a Third World country we would be talking about a stolen election. I know progressives are happy about Biden’s apparent win, but they cannot continue to talk about election integrity if they are telling us that there is nothing to see here.
Liberals didn’t envision this. Liberals believe in the individual. Equality before the law, equality of opportunity—these lie at the heart of liberal thinking, not abstract groupings based on race and other identities or quality of outcome.
The New York Times meant to write that progressives envisioned a multiracial coalition and voters of all races and ethnicities have other ideas. Progressives are the ones pushing group-based rights and notions of equity, not liberals. Kamala Harris even narrated a cartoon about it. See here:
The New York Times has long conflated liberalism and progressivism in an attempt to falsely divide conservatives and liberals who, while differing in many ways, don’t differ much on the fundamental premise of America, namely a republic where personal sovereignty and individual liberty reign.
At any rate, it didn’t work out so well for progressives, did it? The electorate rejected their agenda. In addition to being blown out on the affirmative action question in California, and Republicans likely retaining control of Senate, Democrats have so far lost seven seats in the House. Padding Biden’s tally with Californians voting out of reflexive hatred of the Orange Man in the White House does not a mandate make. Indeed, despite elites engineering Trump’s defeat, the vote remains close in several key states. There was no Blue Wave. And, improbably, the loser had the coat tails (see The Watchdog is a Sheepdog).
Maybe it was the divisive identitarian politics that animated Antifa and Black Lives Matter that put voters off the Democrats. It doesn’t seem that working people want what progressives are peddling. Perhaps that’s why Silicon Valley is aggressively censoring conservative and liberal content on social media. Desperate to obscure the backlash against identity politics and political correctness, they can’t stop reassuring the public that the Associated Press has called the race for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It feels like they are reassuring themselves.
Trump gained considerably in black and Hispanic support. US Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, boasted that the Republican Party had become a multiracial and multiethnic party. But, as Pedro Gonzales pointed out today on Steve Bannon’s War Room Pandemic show (see below), diversity politics suffers from a core problem: if the preachers of multiracialism/multiculturalism argue that the government must, instead of investing in development and infrastructure projects benefitting the working class generally, create race-based plans that favor some races and ethnicities over other races and ethnicities, what amounts to a racial spoils system, they must depend on the myth that there are no white people in this country who could use scholarships, that there are no downscale white communities that could use capital infusion, and so on. It’s a myth experience debunks.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders said, “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor.” I hear others making points along this line. You might not see such claims as immediately and profoundly wrong if you don’t study demographics the way I do. I’m a professional sociologist, I have to keep up with such things. The fact is that more than two-thirds of poor Americans are white. Put another way, there are more than twice as many poor white people as there are poor people of all other races combined.
The elites know this, and that’s why the white privilege argument is drilled into our heads, why we are told that no matter how down on his luck a white man may be, all whites are privileged. They say this of course to downplay the suffering of the majority of working class workers in order to pit them against non-white minorities who are in reality their comrades. It’s an old divide and rule tactic.
The latest target of progressives is the white woman. Julie Kohler of Democracy Alliance, a white woman, appeared on MSNBC to say that “white women have taken an active role in the maintenance of white supremacy.” “[W]hite women,” she says, “weaponize their identities against, especially, black men.” There’s a lot of other nonsense in what Kohler say, which you can see for yourself, if you care to.
Amidst a lengthy MSNBC segment attacking white women, the Democracy Alliance’s @juliekkohler1 says: "white women have taken an active role in the maintenance of white supremacy … white women weaponize their identities against, especially, black men" pic.twitter.com/VSRjbRd8gf
The truth is that progressives weaponize race to wage class war on behalf of corporate power. They weaponize racism to marginalize working people in order to blunt criticism of woke ideology and corporate power. Elites mean to confuse class consciousness and stifle class struggle by sowing racial and ethnic division and waging racial and cultural warfare. Their vision weaves together a coalition of minorities they claim are oppressed and wield their grievances, even when minorities don’t claim them, even when they resist them, as a battering ram against the proletariat. They push for open borders, while decrying assimilation as racist, then, to enlarge their coalition, claim the newcomers are victims of a pervasive white supremacy. There could be no other reason for borders but racism. Since whites are the majority, whites are necessarily the subjects of attack. The tactic marginalizes workers by undermining their moral authority, portraying them as backwards ignorant rubes, as racists and xenophobes. The deplorables.
Biden means to throughly institutionalize the progressive racism, as Bloomberg points out, “putting racial disparities high on the agenda as he assembles his administration” (see Biden Fills Economic Posts With Experts on Systemic Racism). “revious administrations haven’t made race scholarship such a clear priority,” Bloomberg tells its readers. “Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are emphasizing diversity as they prepare to assume power next year. Women comprise more than 50% of the new administration’s landing teams, according to the transition team, and more than 40% of advisers are from groups that are historically underrepresented in the federal government, like racial minorities, people with disabilities and those who identify as LGBTQ.”
Bloomberg quotes Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, co-founder of the Sadie Collective, a nonprofit working to get more Black women in economics. “Having these individuals who are representative of their community in the actual room where they can voice their perspective and have their perspective actually translate to policy—it matters more than you think.” Bloomberg paraphrases her hopefulness: “Next, she said, she will watch to see whether progressive-leaning advisers can drive policy change.” What makes “these individuals” “representative of their community”? Their racial identities. In other words, moral entrepreneurs pressing to speak for others on the basis of superficial phenotypic traits.
But ever larger proportions of Asian, black, and Hispanic workers are seeing through the ruse. They see how they’re being used by progressives for the sake of a racial politics that has disadvantaged and endangered them. They see the high crime rates and social disorganization in their communities. They see their businesses failing, looted and burned. They see their personal development assumed to result from tokenism and not from creativity, initiative, and sacrifice. To be sure, not everybody knows they’re being used; but when the scales fall from enough eyes, movements emerge.
“To psychologically healthy individuals,” McWhorter elaborates, “the fact that Trump wouldn’t want to be their friend may seem an abstraction, as they will never meet him, have fulfilling lives that have nothing to do with him, and are quite sure that they are as good as him anyway. To these people, Trump’s policies, or even just some of them, or even just the cut of his jib, may seem more important than what Trump would say about them in private—or public.”
He then chastises the woke among us: “This outlook arguably represents a more sophisticated sensibility than the pitchfork attitude of many on racism. Think of those who since the 1980s have rejected the Great Books canon because the authors were white and almost always racist. Ahead of the curve? Maybe. Or one could see this condemnation of people for being unable to see beyond their time as simplistic and even anti-intellectual. Many, in fact, do.”
McWhorter recently appeared on the Glenn Loury show featuring Shelby Steele. Steele was on promoting his documentary, “What Killed Michael Brown?” McWhorter puts the question to Shelby. Watch the conversation below:
Nationwide, around 750,000 mail-in ballots were rejected in the 2016 and 2018 elections, most of those in 2018, where one out of every seven ballots were rejected. Overall, that’s about 1.2 percent of the total ballots returned, tens of thousands of them rejected because signatures didn’t match. That suggests fraud.
In 2020, more than 500,000 ballots were rejected in the primaries nation-wide. In Wisconsin, for example, 23,000 ballots were rejected during the primaries, a number greater than Trump’s margin of victory in the state in 2016. That’s 1.8 percent of mail-in ballots (964,433).
How did Wisconsin do in the November 2020 election? As of Tuesday last week, the Wisconsin Elections Commission determined that only 1,506 mail-in ballots—out of 1.45 million ballots returned—had problems. That’s an astonishing low 0.1 percent. The difference between Trump and Biden in Wisconsin? Around 20,000 votes.
If the 1.2 percent rejection rate had held across the country for the 2020 election, an election in which many more millions more people voted by mail than previously, 780,000 mail-in ballots would be rejected.
In Georgia, nearly 5 million citizens voted. Applying the 1.2 percent metric, one would expect 60,000 or so rejected mail-in ballots in the state. The difference between Trump and Biden in Georgia? 15,000. We know mail-in balloting favored Joe Biden.
Looking at the percent of county-level ballots rejected in Georgia in the November 2020 election, the vast number of counties were between 0.0 and 0.1 percent (there are a few 0.2% counties, one 0.5%, and one 0.9%.), replicating Wisconsin’s highly improbable improvement in rejection rates. This is a stunning level of voter competence. How did this happen with so little experience voting by mail?
We were told there is an audit of votes in Georgia, so maybe we will get an answer. Not so fast. They don’t appear to actually be auditing the ballots in Georgia. They’re recounting. What does it accomplish to recount votes without a deep-dive verification process? Sounds like a massive waste of taxpayer money.
So the question remains: How does mail-in balloting move from hundreds of thousands of votes rejected upon examination to fractions of a percent discrepancies in an election in which a vastly larger proportion of voters voted by mail than any time in the nation’s history? In the middle of a pandemic?
Democrats are big on election integrity. At least they say they are. So what are Democrats doing about making sure this election was maximally valid? Democrats and the media told us for months that we would not know who won the presidency on the evening of November 3. It will take time to count all the votes and resolve all the disputes, they said. It would be the first time mail-in voting would constitute such a large proportion of the votes counted. Be patient, they begged us. Be understanding, they implored. Experts expected well more than one percent of mail-in ballots to be rejected.
The early morning November 4 vote flips in key states that produced Biden’s victory were mail-in ballot dumps. Just like they told us. How do they know? With polling specularly wrong, they seemed to know how the election would go down.
The media is telling us that there was no fraud. The headlines never note “Trump’s claims” about the election, but frame the campaign’s statements as “Trump’s false claims.” What they aren’t asking is more telling. Why must we settle for these election results without asking why the hundreds of thousands of rejected mail-in ballots the experts expected never materialized? Isn’t the media supposed to be a watchdog and ask the tough questions?
Instead, if you do ask tough questions, you’re branded a “sore loser” or a “conspiracy theorist.” The gaslighting continues.
For the sake of election integrity, the election 2020 process needs thorough studying. I lived through a stolen election. I always get accused of wearing a tinfoil hat for saying this, but Florida was effectively stolen in 2000. I vowed then to never let my fellow Americans forget that. Not that the world would have been that different if Gore had been president. But it might have been. We’ll never know.
Florida’s Secretary of State, Republican Katherine Harris, called the election for Bush. But Gore won the state and thus the election. And not by a little. We know Gore won the state because we had enough time to dig through the ballots and see what happened. Republicans tried to hide the process. They even bullied the vote counters. The media worked the public for them. In the end, Bush prevailed. What followed were wars of choice and economic calamity.
In the aftermath of Bush-Gore, the media successfully convinced four-fifths of the American population to believe the 2000 election to have been an example of how the systems works. They blamed the spoiler Ralph Nader for everything. Third parties are a threat to the two-party system. In reality, it was an instance of the establishment installing their candidate in the White House and legitimizing the hegemony of corporate rule.
The Project for a New American Century, the neoconservative progeny of Cold War liberalism, needed a sure platform from which to manifest its agenda in action—global military power projection. Neoliberals were horrified at Gore’s suggestion that the budget surplus be sequestered and a firewall established between Social Security and political elites. They wanted a Grand Bargain to privative Social Security. Rioters wearing black uniforms possessed a populist-nationalist spirit then, and Gore’s seemingly authentic environmentalism, a powerful element in anti-globalization, made him suspect. Greenwashing is fine, but practical environmentalism is a no-go. Gore might be a risk. Better safe than sorry.
As we have seen with Biden, and saw with Obama, the corporate media was behind Bush. They openly ridiculed Gore. They spun the debates. They transformed Bush’s dismal performances and frequent gaffes into folksy Americanism. Gore was weird. A robot. A wooden boy. A deliberate alpha male. He sighed a lot. To be sure, it would take Obama to dissolve anti-corporatism and anti-globalization with identitarianism and to normalize regime-change wars. The Grand Bargain would have to wait, of course. At least they consumed the surplus and stopped the firewall. But installing Bush in office was an important step in mainstreaming neoconservatism and neoliberalism.
Now the establishment likely has once again their man in office (actually their woman). Neoconservatism, neoliberalism, transnational corporatism, Chinese imperialism—it’s all back on the menu. The globalists are back in the saddle. Everything is good again. Trump was only a temporary disruption. Back to normality.
We’ve seen this story before. The studies of 2020 will occur. But the majority won’t learn about the findings unless they favor the official narrative—or are twisted in favor of it.
There are memes going around telling us that we cannot vote for candidates who hurt the ones we love and care about. We understand who the meme refers to. Its target is Donald Trump and those who may vote for him. But it would be more accurate to ask this question of all those voting for Joe Biden.
Didn’t Biden author the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in the Senate, the draconian crime bill that disproportionately impacted poor and minority members of our society? That wasn’t the half of it.
I bet you don’t remember the Biden-Thurmond crime bill of 1982. It eliminated parole at the federal level, expanded civil asset forfeiture, limited access to bail (a provision the ACLU denounced for standing legal innocence on its head), increased penalties for drugs, and called for a drug czar. Terrifyingly, the bill passed by the Senate and House overwhelmingly but was vetoed by then-president Ronald Reagan. Why? The drug czar bit was too much for Reagan. Really? Yes, really.
Strom Thurmond and Joseph Biden, responsible for the Biden-Thurmond crime bill of 1982
Who’s this Strom Thurmond person? Look into it. Biden eulogized the man in 2003. That’s a eulogy probably worth looking into. Before you go to the polls. Or maybe you already voted? Hey, Biden isn’t big and orange, right?
Biden didn’t let Reagan’s veto deter him. Biden shaped the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. The bill eliminated parole, expanded civil asset forfeiture, and restricted access to bail. Biden led in foisting upon the public the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. It lengthened sentences for many offenses. That’s the law that created the infamous 100:1 crack versus cocaine sentencing disparity. I am pretty sure you’ve heard of that monstrosity.
Biden finally, got his drug czar with his Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. It is this law that, more than any other, drove up federal imprisonment by lengthening sentences at the federal level.
In 1989, Biden criticized President George Bush’s for being “not tough enough, bold enough or imaginative enough” in his war on drugs. “The president says he wants to wage a war on drugs,” Biden said, “but if that’s true, what we need is another D-Day, not another Vietnam.” That was his inspiration to write the crime bill Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994.
You don’t love the poor and minority members of our society who were sent to prison for long periods of time? What about their children?
Didn’t Biden vote for the Iraq War? You don’t love the people who are killed and maimed in regime-change wars? Didn’t Biden support NAFTA? Hasn’t Biden been at the forefront of organizing the migration of manufacturing from the United States to China? You don’t care about the loss of livelihoods for vulnerable working families?
If you don’t think Biden’s actions hurt the ones you love or care about, then you aren’t paying attention to your surroundings. Or maybe you don’t love and care about the right people. In any case, your attempt to guilt trip your peers is nothing more than a demonstration of doublethink.
When you search COVID-19 cases and deaths in Google, look below the case and death totals so you can see the new case and fatality totals added since the last update. Calculate the case fatality rate (CFR) using those figures. Multiply the CFR by a factor of ten to estimate the infection fatality rate (IFR). Doing this yields rates of 0.5% and 0.05%. That is overall. As we know, death rates for most age groups is much lower than this.
We are interested in the present death rate because we want to calculate risk in real time. Taking the rate from the entire number of cases over several months produces a distortion, even while the overall rate declines with time. The rates of CFR were very high early on for several reasons. One of the reasons was because fewer cases were being diagnosed. Today there is a lot more testing. As a result there are a lot more cases. It looks scary when we see the number of cases going up. But when we realize that the rising number of cases indicates that the virus is much less lethal than we have been told, the rising number of cases has a silver lining.
The relative risk vis–à–vis age is also very important to reckon. The median age of death from COVID-19 is mid-80s. Two-thirds of persons at this age will die next year from something other than COVID-19. In the beginning, COVID-19 was highly lethal to the very old and infirm. It was never extraordinarily lethal to other age groups and healthy individuals. Even for the very old and infirm, most survive the disease, and that number improves everyday. Indeed, early on, more than one-quarter of those hospitalized with COVID-19 died. That figure is now around three percent.
You know your health. Adjust aggregate and relative risks in light of your personal circumstances. I have preexisting health conditions, so I am more cautious than I otherwise would be. But from a public health standpoint, lockdowns make no sense. There is no reason to subject to a population that is not generally at risk from this virus to the draconian rules that have been imposed and are being imposed. Don’t forget, these rules have had severe downstream effects, as I have discussed in past blogs. The authorities understand this. They aren’t stupid. The public needs to start asking questions of the politicians. What has this really been about?
Have you seen the meme putting MAGA hats on historic photographs of white men harassing black men sitting at segregated lunch counters? I provide an example below. With such memes, progressives smear tens of millions of white Americans who are not racist. Moreover, they disappear black Trump supporters, who number in the millions.
Social media meme circulating.
First, members of my family and a great many of my white friends are Trump supporters who move in fully racially-integrated occupational and social circles. They work and eat around black people. Their sons and daughters marry black people. They foster care for and adopt black children. They would never harass a black man eating at a lunch counter. They would share a cup of coffee with him. Or a beer. If they ever saw a black man being harassed, they would intervene. (See video below for an enlightened discussion on civil rights.)
Second, analyzing exit polling data from the 2016 presidential election, 13 percent of black Americans voted for Donald Trump. Racially disaggregating voter turnout from that election finds that the number of blacks who voted for Trump north of two million. And Trump looks to gain more black votes in 2020. Why? Historically low black unemployment, fastest wage gains among blacks in history, criminal justice reform, and immigration restrictions. Trump’s frank talk about the failure of progressives to properly govern black-majority neighborhoods probably has a lot to do with it, as well.
A lot of white progressives dismiss the black vote for Trump by chalking it up to false consciousness. Blacks can’t judge such matters for themselves really. Distrust of the people is deeply rooted in the technocratic attitude of progressive elites. The progressive has been known to call black conservatives “Uncle Toms.” Progressives reflect their candidate’s attitude in this regard. Remember when Biden said, “I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”? Yeah. He said that. He meant it, too. Progressives don’t even trust black people with navigating the voter verification process.
Democratic party presidential candidate Joe Biden tells Charlamange on The Breakfast Club that black people who do not vote for him are not really black.
This condescending attitude reflects the progressive worldview generally. Let’s put the left’s constant infantilization of blacks and other groups to one side. Identitarian politics for progressives isn’t so much about race or sex or sexual orientation as it is about partisan loyalties. Progressives want to see the first female president, but not if she is conservative; the identity of conservative women is suspect. They celebrate a Ruth Bader Ginsburg, hailing her as a model for girls and young women, but an Amy Coney Barrett is a traitor.
One’s racial identity is suspect if one vote for Trump. Except if he is white. Then he’s acting on the reflexive white supremacy that the good white man recognizes in himself. To be fully black, woman, or gay, one has to subscribe to progressive doctrine and support the Democratic Party. Skin color comes with a politics. If you don’t see that, then you’re deluded or stupid.
The technocratic elite see the popular consensus expressed in democratic elections as routine endorsement of its policies. When the results run contrary to this purpose, the popular will is delegitimized. The people chose poorly, we are told. These are not referenda, after all. They are ritual acts of affirmation.
In 2016, we saw this in the Brexit vote and in the election of Donald Trump. The establishment successfully manufactured the perception that a vote for either indicated a reflex of reactionary stupidity. The Deplorables surprised them.
To meet the reflexive stupidity of the Deplorables, the Resistance was founded. Four years on, the Resistance has a chance to fix popular error. The polls indicate that destiny is on their side.
The United States is facing a situation in which those who claim to oppose corporate power, regime-change wars, and the vast prison-industrial complex are voting for a man who has for decades been at the forefront of pushing these very tendencies.
Globalist Joe Biden
The man the Resistance has or will vote for on Election Day is a career politician who represents for the elite a return to the neoliberal and neoconservative status quo, a globalist who has spent his entire life making sure the establishment knows that he is and will always be its man.
The Resistance is voting to topple a leader—a populist outsider with broad support among working class Americans—who has resisted globalization, ended foreign wars, and led on major criminal justice reform.
That the man the Resistance labors to carry to power has at his back the academic institutions, the corporate establishment, the administrative state, the propaganda apparatus, and the culture industry appears not to convey anything significant to the Resistance.
We are inundated with news stories of the rising SARS-2 cases in the United States and instructed by progressives and pundits to attribute the increase to the failure of the Trump administration to deal in an effective way with the pandemic. His Democratic opponent, former Vice-President and long-time Senator from Delaware Joe Biden, tells us that Trump’s lack of action puts Americans in harm’s way.
However, looking at Canada and major European countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), one sees a drastic rise in SARS-2 cases in all of them (see charts below). It feels a bit silly to remind readers that Donald Trump is not the leader of any of these countries, but he’s not. Ask yourself: why is the media not reporting what’s happening in these other countries, all of which employed extensive lockdowns and enjoy comprehensive universal healthcare? Because the establishment agenda is to install globalist Joe Biden as the president of the United States. It’s the same reason they aren’t reporting on the evidence damning Biden as a corrupt politician.
The truth is that SARS-2 is a biological event. It manifests the same tendencies independent of the policies of the countries in which it appears—independent of the policies ostensibly meant to deal with contagion. It rises and falls on its own. It targets the same preexisting conditions. The average age of those die from or with SARS-2 is mid-80s. Lockdowns in free and open societies don’t work. Obviously. The more citizens of these countries have masked up, the more cases of infection there are. That’s not because masks spread the virus. No, it’s because there is no causal relation between the things these governments are doing and the natural history of SARS-2.
But this doesn’t mean that government policy doesn’t carry effects. We know that the downstream effects of shuttering society—the tens of thousands of deaths that will occur from undetected cancers, untreated conditions, drug addiction, suicides, and other acts of self and other harm—are the result of policy decisions. Pandemic preparation in the West never had societies locking down. The character of Western freedom ill-prepares people for social isolation. Tyranny imposed on a free people manifests in bizarre ways. Hysteria over systemic racism is a prime example.
We also know that SARS-2 originated in China. Whether naturally emergent, the result of a gain-of-function experiment accidentally released, or a bioweapon designed by the Chinese military, the Chinese communist state is ultimately responsible. Moreover, if we can believe the reporting from the CCP and WHO, China showed the world the efficacy of totalitarianism in controlling the spread of a virus domestically (see below chart), even while, at the same time, allowing the virus to escape China to infect the world. The corporate media is silent on that matter, as well (even while elites hold up China as a model of pandemic preparedness). To be sure, the devastating consequences of lockdowns are a self-inflicted wound that Western governments perpetrated on its own people. But without SARS-2 this would not have happened.
Finally, we know this, too. A Hillary Clinton presidency would have looked no different in terms of controlling the virus. The statistics would have been the same. Not unless a Clinton regime had transformed the United States into a totalitarian society by February 2020. I would like to believe the people would not have stood for such a thing. If I were a believer, I’d pray to God they’re not ready to stand for that in a Biden regime. Or a Kamala Harris regime.
One of the arguments progressives make in pushing their politics is environmental concern. They are excited when they hear presidential candidate Joe Biden and his sidekick Kamala Harris talk about ending fossil fuels. But progressives typically don’t think in terms of interconnections and they are generally ignorant of international political economy and the problem of uneven global development. (We see a similar myopia in the desire to shut down society over SARS-2, a demand that neglects all the downstream effects of shutdowns, such as the thousands of people who will die from cancer and other diseases, as well as from drug abuse and suicide.)
The United States does indeed produce a lot of energy from fossil fuels. We have achieved a substantial degree of energy independence on account of it. However, because of our high level of economic and technological development, our production and use of fossil fuels, thanks to, among other things, carbon capture and storage methods, is efficient and clean compared to that of China, India, Russia, and other economies. If we reduce production of fossil fuels in the United States, we not only give away our energy independence, but we will also come to rely on fossil fuels produced by other countries in the dirtiest way, thus drastically accelerating global climate change.
The truth is that the world economy depends fundamentally on fossil fuels. We cannot produce the energy we need to run the world using geo, hydro, solar, and wind. I am all for these other sources of energy, but we have to be honest about the situation. And while it is conceivable that we could replace fossil fuel with nuclear power, even if we could agree that nuclear comes with little risk (I seriously doubt folks can agree on that—I am not sure I could agree on that), we could not produce the number of reactors we need to reduce emissions to a level sufficient to stop the trend in global warming.
What progressives appear unable to grasp is that progress on the environment comes with technological advancement. We cannot have technological advancement without economic growth. We cannot have economic growth without sufficient sources of energy. We cannot have sufficient sources of energy without fossil fuels. This is the character of the treadmill of production for the foreseeable future. We have to grasp the structure of throughput and the dynamic interrelation of systems parts in developing sound environmental policy. Moreover, without economic development, we also cannot raise the standard of living for those whom progressives purport to speak.
Extinction Rebellion protests in London last year.
After a year of reflection, I now believe that the most immediate path through the climate crisis is the development of technological solutions to conservation and pollution. The United States can lead the way—but only if we have a country. Progressives have us giving up too much in the name of “social justice.” To be sure, much of the promotion of “clean coal” is greenwashing, as I have written and spoken about. I have worked very hard to debunk the claims of the antienvironmental countermovement. But I have come to realized that one of the greatest barriers to rational discussion on economy and environment is the apocalyptic rhetoric coming from climate change zealots, such as Extinction Rebellion. Unlike the panic over systemic racism, global climate change is real. But like systemic racism hysteria, climate apocalypticism is a disruptive and regressive force in modern society. All of these panics—and throw the SARS-2 panic in there—reflect a neurotic worldview that functions as a type of quasi-religious fundamentalism, a secular millennialism, if you will. We have to listen to more rational voices than these.
freedom and reason 