Motus Mentis

The fog of war is abroad in the land, and in every direction sturdy, familiar realities dissolve into grotesque phantasms and chimeras. Trumpets and bullhorns blare in the smoke and chaos. The ground trembles and shifts under our feet.

One thing seems clear, I think: this Republic, as we have known it in our lifetimes and understood it to have existed for 243 years, is over. I hear the voices of stout “conservatives” talking about political strategy, and about how we will vote ourselves back into power — as if the nation we loved still lived, and was just going through a difficult spell. But the reality is a familiar one from science fiction: the friend or loved one we hope to nurse back to health is dead, gone, replaced by some ghastly alien who wears his body as a costume. I’m reminded of “Edgar” from Men In Black, whose hollowed-out corpse was put on by a roach-like monster who wore it around town even as it began to rot and stink.

 
We are going to have a lot of work to do, and we’d better start figuring out just what that means. But first I think we have to understand that, as hard as it is to accept, the USA of 2021 is no longer Edgar.

OK, so the polls are open in Georgia today. At stake in the two runoff elections is control of the United States Senate.

Is everyone feeling as optimistic as I am?

From a just-released forensic report on the widely used Dominion voting system, as tested in Antrim County, Michigan (a red county where vote-tabulation errors were already known to have happened):

We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results. The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.

This was not a legitimate election, and there is a shocked and angry cohort of Americans, scores of millions strong, who will never accept the result. They will believe, instead, that the institutions that sustained this Republic for centuries have failed and abandoned them, that they are no longer governed by consent, and that they are now on their own — despised and rejected by the powerful factions who brought this about. I have no idea where this will lead, but the era of American history in which all of us grew up is over and done. A new epoch — far darker, and fraught with peril — begins.

Read the report here.

A commenter on our previous post asks how any intelligent person could actually be suspicious about the result of the recent election. He also mentions, in support of his confidence that the results are legitimate, that Joe Biden won the popular vote by millions of votes.

Here’s my reply:

First of all, the point about the popular vote is irrelevant: it’s the Electoral College that determines the presidency, not the great mass of voters in huge Blue population centers.

Second, the people telling us “nothing to see here” — the political operatives of the Democrat Party, and its foot-soldiers in the press — are the same ones who perpetrated the four-year operation to remove Donald Trump from office, by any means necessary. They subverted our most powerful institutions of justice, national security, and intelligence to do so. They created a truly audacious hoax, using a fraudulent opposition document paid for by the Clinton campaign, as the basis for surveillance of Mr. Trump’s campaign, legal harassment of his allies, and a relentless smear campaign in all media. When it came to light that the whole thing was a pack of lies, they insisted as one that its critics had all been taken in by a crazy conspiracy theory. To this day, we are still waiting for justice to be done. (Spoiler alert: it won’t.) At every turn, these powerful and implacable enemies of the President have done everything they can, again and again and again, to defeat, slander, and remove him from office. Anyone who questions this sustained assault is censored, cancelled, doxxed, shouted down, and excluded from polite society.

Given all that we have seen of these people, how can any intelligent person not assume that they would do everything they can to steal this election? Do we think they are too scrupulous, too dedicated to honesty and fair play? Given that they know they will get the faithful and absolute support of the press to erect a stone wall against any scrutiny, why wouldn’t they do the very best they could to prevent Donald Trump from winning a second term? We know that they have pressed constantly, in advance of the election, for everything that might undermine the security of the system. They have introduced mail-in ballots on an unprecedented scale, when voting by mail is known to be so ripe for error and abuse that it is scrupulously avoided in most other countries. They have further reduced the security of voting-by-mail by sending unrequested ballots to many millions of voters, many of whom have turned out to be dead, or no longer at their previous addresses, or use two different names, both of which were sent ballots. They have permitted “vote-harvesting”, which interrupts the vitally important chain of custody. They have resolutely resisted the most basic tool of election security — voter ID — which is such an obviously necessary measure that it is the law pretty much everywhere else on Earth. They have altered mail-ballot rules (in some cases, in clear violation of the Constitution) to weaken the security of the mail-in vote, by discarding requirement for timely receipt, for making sure that signatures match, and for ensuring that ballots are correctly filled out.

Third, there are great and gathering currents of evidence that something was very seriously amiss here, and amiss in just the places that mattered most. Taken individually, perhaps, they don’t amount to much, but taken together those currents all flow in the same direction. There is statistical evidence – from Benford’s Law anomalies to rejected mail-ballot percentages. There are obvious geographical curiosities — where, for example, the vote in adjacent red Midwestern counties separated by a state border voted in wildly different ways, despite having very similar patterns in the past. There are sworn affidavits from poll-workers explicitly testifying, under oath, to egregious malfeasance of various kinds. There is the curious fact that in places where the down-ticket Republicans did very well indeed — far outperforming 2016 — but somehow Donald Trump’s lead slipped away in the wee hours of Election Night, and in the days after. There is the refusal to admit observers (or letting them into gigantic spaces, but keeping them so far away they couldn’t see anything). There is the suspension of the vote-count in key cities in the middle of the night, so as to send the observers home, then resuming the counting in secret. There are the great tranches of Biden ballots that suddenly arrived en masse once the deficits had been reckoned — thousands and thousands of pristine ballots, perfectly marked in the little ovals with black ink, with no down-ticket candidates marked at all, just Biden. There is the discarding of large numbers of mail-in ballot envelopes, making it all but impossible to separate timely and legitimate ballots from fraudulent ones. There is the extremely shady history of the Dominion voting system, which was used in many of the swing states where Biden miraculously rose from the dead to overtake Trump by narrow margins.

Is any of this conclusive? Well, we will never know unless we do everything we can to verify the results, and unless we do everything we can — despite the howls from the media — to make sure that we count only those votes that were cast in accordance with local voting laws, and with the Constitution. No matter what happens from here, the stench of fraud is already thick enough that there are going to be many, many millions of American citizens who will have lost all faith in our system of elections. At the very least, we should try to keep that number of citizens as low as possible, and that means letting this investigation, and this contest in the courts and legislatures, play out to the end.

The damage is already done, though. After the arbitrary authoritarianism of our mayors and governors all year in dealing with both the Wuhan virus and the anarchy and violence in the streets, followed by this reeking election, our national morale is now, to a very great extent, broken beyond repair. As far as confidence in the rule of law is concerned, and trust in the Republic to honor its founding principles, 2020 will have been, probably for at least fifty to a hundred million Americans, the year they began to check out.

I haven’t written for a few days, because I have nothing new to say; like all of you I am waiting to see how this election challenge plays out. We are up against titanic forces, not least of which is just the colossal, viscous mass of institutional inertia, media resistance, and partisan antipathy that stands in the way of a fair and searching inquiry into what happened. But the stench of corruption is so foul, and the evidence of strategic planning and tactical malfeasance so multifaceted, that none of us should lose heart. This isn’t over yet.

I was listening to a couple of guys from Russia today, talking about how the Russian people see this charade. The vote-counting corruption is obvious enough, but that’s no big deal; most Russians generally assume that all elections are corrupt. What Russians watching today find laughable is that the U.S., which has been swaggering around the world for decades lecturing other countries about election integrity, should have ended up presenting to a global audience this tawdry spectacle: an election so obviously tainted and insecure that even the most brazen 20th-century caudillo would have been too embarrassed to try to pass it off as legitimate.

Whatever happens next — no matter who takes the White House once the dust settles, and I have no idea who that will be once as much of the truth comes out as we can manage to uncover — half the nation is now going to think the other half stole the election. (So: interesting times ahead for the Republic.) Both sides should take an interest in reducing that uncertainty as much as possible, if only to try to preserve the peace, but only one side seems to be doing so. The other just wants us all to move along — because, you know, nothing to see here.

Meanwhile, I’m still seething over the Democrats’ sudden calls for “unity”. How dare they. After what they’ve done these past four years, and the way things are going, the only reply they are going to get from scores of millions of Americans is the one Andrew Breitbart gave.

Here’s another perspective on things: Curtis Yarvin, AKA “Mencius Moldbug”, has published an essay today about the 2020 election. In it he describes himself as being “so pro-Trump, I wrap all the way around to pro-Biden.”

Yarvin makes an important point about the difference between traditional American conservatism and all forms of Leftism: subsidiarian, small-government conservatism is all about checking and distributing power – which gives it an intrinsic, permanent, and colossal disadvantage. This is inherent in the system devised by the Founders, which sought in all its forms to prevent the consolidation of power in any political official or faction, and to reserve it to state and local government. The ultimate aim — the “final cause” — of the system they devised was to maximize individual liberty, which is of course the exact opposite of imperium. But the American system has an exploitable vulnerability, which was recognized at the time of the Founding by everyone involved: without unanimity, among a virtuous civil society, as to the appropriate final cause, a faction that knew what to do and how to do it could gradually infiltrate and corrupt everything. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”, goes the old saying. John Adams put it this way:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

No Constitution, real or imagined, can provide a suitable form for unsuitable people. The Constitution is, after all, only a piece of paper, and has no more power than any other piece of paper, save by the will and fealty of the people it purportedly governs.

Here’s Yarvin:

Progressives see power as an end; conservatives see power as a means to an end. As soon as conservatives get even a sliver of power, they start trying to use this power to create good outcomes. This is irrational.

The rational way to use power is the progressive way: to make more power. Your power grows exponentially. Eventually you have all the power, and can get all the outcomes you want.

There is not one progressive idea which does not yield a power dividend. I cannot think of a conservative idea that does. If one did, the progressives would steal it. Then the conservatives would persuade themselves to oppose it, and all would be well.

This is not a coincidence. The great flaw of the American right is that, besides not being able to get any real power, they do not want any real power, and have no idea what they would do with any real power.

From later in the essay, here are a few words about the result (if result it should turn out to be, once the appeals are over):

Accelerationists who voted for China Joe will be disappointed. Nothing will speed up. All the gas in the regime’s tank is coming from Trump. As soon as Trump is out, the panzer death sportscar custom-built to guzzle his pure octane will sputter to a crawl.

Once as the Trump administration is over, no one has anything to fear or hate. No threat could ever be as exciting as the racist rapist in the White House. No Malibu hausfrau will ever again feel like she is in the French Resistance. After Prohibition, breweries could still sell nonalcoholic beer. This is journalism after Trump.

Why was I pro-Biden? Because I longed to see my enemies cast out into the cold, uncaring wind of poverty and despair. Why were you pro-Trump? Because you loved seeing your enemies grow huge and fat and hard? I like to win. I hate to get owned. How about you, my based friend?

By March or April, America’s ruling class will feel like Hunter Biden on a Tuesday morning. Hunter reflects. He knows he left his pipe somewhere. He’s not sure where. What he knows is that this world, which as recently as mimosa brunch on Sunday was still burning with the rainbow fire of a hundred suns exploding in H-bomb supernova pornstar orgasms while galaxies collide, is an ugly, boring place. A sterile promontory. A foul and pestilent congregation of vapors… also, something sticky is stuck to his ass. He’ll get to it in a minute… oh, man…

For four years, the regime is stuck with a spokesmodel who combines the charisma of Leonid Brezhnev with the probity of Willie Brown. China Joe is getting no younger. His circuits already wrestle visibly with every solar flare. He did bring a backup unit, who has the charisma of Linda Blair and was once the protegée of Willie Brown. Is God supposed to hand us something better?

Take the time to read the whole thing, here.