Multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg spent $100 million in Florida to swing the state to Joe Biden in the recently-concluded 2020 presidential election. He failed.
Please consider Bloomberg’s miss relative to reporting in The New Yorker from late 2018. A sophisticated magazine largely catering to those politically and culturally on the left, its readers were treated to straight-faced analysis suggesting that during the 2016 presidential election, Facebook was captured by “Russian agents who wanted to sow political chaos and help Trump win.” Supposedly the “Internet Research Agency, a firm in St. Petersburg working for the Kremlin,” had “an astonishing impact” on the final result.
So while American citizens of the billionaire kind routinely try and fail to manipulate the voting patterns of the U.S. electorate, the legendarily incompetent Russians managed to spend $100,000 on Facebook, some of it after the election, only to author a Trump victory over Hillary Clinton. Bloomberg and Sheldon Adelson call your political operatives! You’ve been ripped off. The Russians (yes, the Russians) are so savvy that they can control American elections for a microscopic fraction of what you’ve been spending, with ad buys on Facebook that are nano relative to the social network’s annual advertising revenues.
The funny thing is that Democrats broadly believed the narrative about the Russians and the election. Fast forward to 2020, revelations that Hunter Biden traded on his father’s name on the way to riches (the political news equivalent of Sports Illustrated telling readers that professional football players are big) were dismissed as “Russian disinformation.” As the great Holman Jenkins reminded his readers last week, Democrats still believe the Russians were behind Trump’s 2016 victory over Clinton; so much so that Clinton was explicit to Joe Biden that he wasn’t to concede to Trump in the event of an electoral loss.
Speaking of Jenkins, his subsequent column indicated that “88% of subjects don’t know they are infected or have no great incentive to find out if they are suffering from Covid.” Jenkins’s essential commentary came to mind while reading the latest from New York Times columnist David Brooks. In “The Rotting of the Republican Mind,” Brooks observed in downcast fashion that “77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud.” To support his contention that Republicans are the picture definition of mouthbreathers, Brooks added that “Many of these same people think climate change is not real,” plus a similar number “believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.”
Brooks believes the U.S. is in the midst of an “epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality.” That's funny. Detached from reality? Has Brooks stopped to consider the Democratic home in which he has an increasingly cozy wing within?
Aside from the Party’s Russian obsession, can we talk about its hateful embrace of the most absurd of absurd Covid-alarmism? Republicans can't join them in the fetal position because more than a few take very seriously the tens of millions of jobs lost stateside, the millions of bankruptcies stateside, and the hundreds of millions rushing toward poverty globally as a consequence of the political class’s reverence for the experts. Brooks claims to promote reason, but it was Brooks himself who described as a national “humiliation” the spread of a virus that most don’t know they have, and that is almost monolithically associated in the death sense with individuals who can already claim some other malady of the morbid variety.
Can we talk about Brett Kavanaugh? Does anyone remember how the supposedly reasonable Democrats poured over his high school yearbooks in hopes of exposing an alleged sexual harasser? What about gang rape accusations lobbed at Kavanaugh, and that Dems so deeply believed? How about a certain Hawaiian senator’s question to Amy Coney Barrett about whether she had a history of sexually harassing others?
Do you the reader enjoy the WiFi that enables you to read and work from anywhere, the smartphones that make it possible for you to summon cars, meals and the world’s plenty with a touch of a button, and do you yearn for the day when cars will drive themselves in concert with exponentially fewer car accidents and deaths? Billionaires were behind the first two innovations, and the creators of driverless cars will similarly be billionaires, but Democrats daily rant about the horrors of “inequality.”
When it comes to “global warming” or “climate change,” it’s not that Republicans don’t believe that the climate doesn’t change as much they don’t buy the allegedly rational analysis from Dems that “a failure to act” will result in the world’s biggest coastal cities morphing into undersea monuments to inaction. Basically Republicans believe in science, but believe in markets that comprise all known information even more. The biggest market in the world is people, and over 50% of the world’s people live in coastal areas precisely because that’s where wealth and opportunity are most abundant. Implicit in Brook’s view that scientific alarmism should be accepted as gospel is that the combined knowledge of half of the world’s population and more than half of its wealth is rather stupid, and blithely ignoring the ruin that awaits them. Sorry, not happening.
Which brings us back to the recent presidential election. Businesses in major cities were boarded up ahead of the vote, though not out of fear that Biden would win. It was insurance against the opposite. While an apparent majority of Republicans peacefully believe fraud perhaps led to a Biden victory, Democrats can always be counted on to loot and wreck the property of others when their candidates don't win. Yet Brooks worries about the “rotting” of the Republican mind....The self-hugging Brooks is teaching his readers how to self-tackle.