We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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…from the Second Book of Kings, Chapter 20, Verses 12-19:
12 At that time Marduk-Baladan son of Baladan king of Babylon sent Hezekiah letters and a gift, because he had heard of Hezekiah’s illness.
13 Hezekiah received the envoys and showed them all that was in his storehouses – the silver, the gold, the spices and the fine oil – his armoury and everything found among his treasures. There was nothing in his palace or in all his kingdom that Hezekiah did not show them.
14 Then Isaiah the prophet went to King Hezekiah and asked, ‘What did those men say, and where did they come from?’
‘From a distant land,’ Hezekiah replied. ‘They came from Babylon.’
15 The prophet asked, ‘What did they see in your palace?’
‘They saw everything in my palace,’ Hezekiah said. ‘There is nothing among my treasures that I did not show them.’
16 Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, ‘Hear the word of the Lord:
17 the time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord.
18 And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.’
19 ‘The word of the Lord you have spoken is good,’ Hezekiah replied. For he thought, ‘Will there not be peace and security in my lifetime?’
While I would not go so far as to claim this post was divinely inspired, 2 Kings 20: 12-19 actually was the lesson in a church service broadcast on Radio 3 on Wednesday morning. I caught a little of it while in the car heading down to Bisley to perform an activity that once would have been proudly described as contributing to national security. (Do not try this line now.)
Anyway, for some reason over the next few days I found myself paying a little more attention to news stories like this one from today’s South China Morning Post,
“US blacklists about 60 more Chinese firms including top chip maker SMIC and drone manufacturer DJI”,
…or to this one from the BBC two days ago, “Huawei: Uighur surveillance fears lead PR exec to quit”,
Or to any of a thousand others. But what is the lesson for today? What should we do about the threat from the People’s Republic of China? “War is the health of the state”, wrote Randolph Bourne, and cold war is its daily vitamin pill. It was not so long ago that people like me were enthusiasts for China’s turn to capitalism. I still am, mostly. Now that their rulers have cast off all but the fig leaf of communism, a significant fraction of the human race has been lifted out of poverty in my lifetime. The Chinese people are not free, but they are much more free than they were in the days when the Eight Revolutionary Operas were almost literally the only music allowed. I am happy for them.
Yet when I see that famous video of Joe Biden, the man soon to take up residence in the White House, jovially saying, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man”, I cannot but remember the words of the prophet:
And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.’
‘The word of the Lord you have spoken is good,’ Hezekiah replied. For he thought, ‘Will there not be peace and security in my lifetime?’
Most attempts to claim the election was not stolen for Biden demand you ignore its blatant statistical oddities – so are wholly unconvincing. J. Christian Adams has been fighting voter fraud corruption since long before Eric Holder shut down his cast-iron case against the Black Panthers over ten years ago. Christian makes the statistical oddities a key part of his theory – that what happened is “sadly, generally legal”.
Two things happened in 2020. First, COVID led to a dismantling of state election integrity laws by everyone except the one body with the constitutional prerogative to change the rules of electing the president – the state legislatures.
Second, the Center for Technology and Civic Life happened. … left-leaning donors Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan gave $350 million to an allegedly “nonpartisan” nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which in turn re-granted the funds to thousands of governmental election officials around the country to “help” them conduct the 2020 election. … billionaires made cash payments to 501(c)(3) charities that in turn made cash payments to government election offices. … It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines. …
As far as it goes, this is sadly sensible. My sole but absolutely central criticism of the argument of Adams (whom I respect) is that it cannot go so far without going further. US politicians have been trying to build formula 1 turn-out machines for two centuries. The law of diminishing returns means that turning-out actual voters gets harder and harder as the percentage racks up. The obvious shortcut of just turning out votes is very much easier – and has also been practiced for two centuries. Adams provides a context for poll workers cheering as Republican observers are excluded – but that’s also the context for what happens after they are removed. Wealthy Dem donors can build this machine but there is a psychological improbability, which in today’s cancel culture becomes a psychological impossibility, that they could build a machine that would turn out inner city voters in such numbers while at the same time respecting their secret ballot choice, freedom from fear of its compromise, and so on.
This psychological impossibility is fully matched by statistical rebuttal of any claim that they did. Adams analysis provides a counter-argument to “the bizarre turn-out percentages alone prove fraud”. But by the self-same token, it provides a counter-argument only to “the bizarre turn-out percentages alone prove fraud”. The statistics of ratios and co-anomalies are just as telling as before. The machine did indeed go thus far and much further. It was criminal even in its own corrupted terms.
All this is probably not fair to what Adams actually meant when he said “sadly, generally legal”. Firstly, because he well knows that
fraud was a problem. …Mail ballots went to dead people. Mail ballots went to abandoned mines in Nevada. Mail ballots went to vacant lots in Pittsburgh. Mail ballots went in the garbage. Mail ballots were voted by people other than the voter.
Secondly because he probably just as well knows that a law on the books says that you cannot visit a Minneapolis minority suburb and burn down properties, but if the operation of the law means the perpetrators predictably evade penalty and the owners as predictably fail to gain remedy, then there is sadly a sense in which it is legal. Laws in various books say the secrecy of the ballot must be respected, and all and only legal ballots counted, but if ignoring secrecy sleeves carries no penalty even when seen, if poll counters (not just formula 1 turnout machines) act location-aware, and reported examples gain no remedy, then it could be said that, like some of Trump’s tweets, Adams “sadly, generally legal” should be taken seriously if not literally.
I’m not one to stay up late watching an election count – let alone stay up even later to watch a US one (and I discourage the habit in my nearest and dearest). I always tell myself (wrongly, as you shall see) that the result will look just the same in the morning whether I follow it overnight or not. So a month ago on Wednesday 4th, by the time we were up, had breakfast and started looking at how it was going across the pond, it was past 8 o’clock in my (Greenwich) time zone (much the same time of day as it was when the household first learnt we’d won the Brexit referendum four years earlier).
At that moment, Trump was the bookies’ clear favourite to win. Browsing the election map for five or ten minutes, I saw why they were giving him such strong odds. The cumulative vote total graphs for each candidate in the swing states were curving over towards flatness and the gaps below Trump’s lines, above Biden’s, were sufficient. I started to get on with the day’s business, still glancing at the electoral map at times.
Then I saw the one of the four anomalous data points analysed in this article*. That is, I looked away from my computer screen momentarily, drank some more tea, looked back – and wondered if my (rather good!) memory for figures had abruptly failed me. What it said simply didn’t fit what I remembered when I’d started sipping my still-very-hot cup of tea.
It was an astonishing thing to see.
That was in Wisconsin. While I was still trying to check my memory, Michigan did the same, as another of the paper’s four anomalies hit. By 9 o’clock UK time, the bookies were rethinking things – and so was I. I did some work, then went out for a walk and got back around half-past eleven, just in time to see the last anomaly take effect in Michigan.
The linked analysis of these four events is very easy to read – or so say I, but for five years my work was researching aspects of statistical anomalies, so here is my summary for anyone who feels differently.
Batches of counted votes can be very unbalanced towards either candidate or they can be large, but there is a strong inverse relationship between the two. The paper analyses a lot of data to show the improbability of both very unbalanced and very large. This is a good test because it tends to get past fraudsters, who are focussed on the raw margin of votes more than the ratio or the batch size.
A secondary tell – and this one is already well-known in fraud detection in third-world countries – is improbable ratios of the losing candidate to minor candidates, e.g. Trump getting little more than twice as many votes as the minor candidates in the second Michigan anomaly when the state’s average (calculated including that data point) was 31 to 1. The paper finds this combination of grossly-violated size-margin ratio and grossly-violated Trump-to-third-party ratio particularly suspicious (as do I). It also computes what happens if you pull these four data points in towards merely the 99th percentile of the size-margin relationship – leaving them still anomalous but not so wildly implausible. (Biden loses his alleged lead in all three states.) It also notes some related statistical oddities.
My guess is that the idea of the US waking up to what I’d woken up to – Trump the heavy odds-on favourite – terrified his enemies. Their pre-election narrative was that Trump would at first ‘appear’ to win, after which ‘days and weeks of counting’ (Zuckerberg) would show he had lost. But while Zuckerberg promised to ‘educate’ America to believe in that, I think someone in the early hours of the 4th panicked that if the US electorate woke up to a bookies-call-it-for-Trump breakfast on Wednesday morning, that would never be erasable from the US mind, no matter how many votes they then ‘found’. So they made sure that didn’t happen. (You never know: it might yet be that what they did to prevent that becomes equally hard to remove from America’s consciousness. You don’t have to be a statistician to think a sudden step function in a smooth graph looks odd.)
So the good news is that my memory for numbers is working fine. The bad news is that I may lose a night’s sleep next election. The very first of the four anomalous points went into the Georgia vote totals soon after 6:30 AM my time – half-an-hour after the normal rising time of Donald Trump and Margaret Thatcher, I am told. (I guess the reason I’m not PM or president is that I’m usually asleep then.) When I first glanced at the results, I thought Georgia was surprisingly close given e.g. the Florida result, but if I’d missed the other three oddities as completely as Georgia’s, I’d have been far less cautious in reviewing the outcome.
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*FYI: the linked paper was easy to access this morning in the UK, but sometime before 9 o’clock eastern US time, it became hard to reach via the link above. (Massive interest overwhelming server, DoS attack, both, …? – Your guess is as good as mine.) You can try here. Another summary of it is here. (I’ll arrange a robust link if the problem does not clear.)
“…we may not shelter in place when the Constitution is under attack. Things never go well when we do.”
Justice Gorsuch in ROMAN CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF BROOKLYN, NEW YORK v. ANDREW M. CUOMO, GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK. The Supreme Court has injuncted pending trial Cuomo’s executive order restricting religious observance in New York, noting that although the original order had been changed since the proceedings started (a device to make the litigation moot), that actually made it more important, as a defence against arbitrary state power.
Now, just as this Court was preparing to act on their applications, the Governor loosened his restrictions, all while continuing to assert the power to tighten them again anytime as conditions warrant. So if we dismissed this case, nothing would prevent the Governor from reinstating the challenged restrictions tomorrow. And by the time a new challenge might work its way to us, he could just change them again. The Governor has fought this case at every step of the way. To turn away religious leaders bringing meritorious claims just because the Governor decided to hit the “off ” switch in the shadow of our review would be, in my view, just another sacrifice of fundamental rights in the name of judicial modesty.
The judgment of Gorsuch is full of robust language, such as:
It is time—past time—to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques.
Bear in mind that here, the Keep Britain Free judicial review was thrown out at the English High Court partly on the basis that by the time the court heard it, the restrictions had changed (whilst the power to impose them remained). This is now under (leisurely) appeal in the English Court of Appeal. How nice it would be to have an appellate court in the country that could produce such robust defences of liberty and the rule of law, e.g.
Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical.
And a splendid dig:
Even if judges may impose emergency restrictions on rights that some of them have found hiding in the Constitution’s penumbras, it does not follow that the same fate should befall the textually explicit right to religious exercise.
And this:
Nothing in Jacobson purported to address, let alone approve, such serious and long-lasting intrusions into settled constitutional rights. In fact, Jacobson explained that the challenged law survived only because it did not “contravene the Constitution of the United States” or “infringe any right granted or secured by that instrument.” Id., at 25.
Tellingly no Justice now disputes any of these points. Nor does any Justice seek to explain why anything other than our usual constitutional standards should apply during the current pandemic.
Whilst the United States Supreme Court is so constituted, there is hope for the Republic, even though this was a 5-4 victory. Meanwhile in the UK, any hope of help from the courts is a deranged fantasy. But the courts may serve a purpose in demonstrating that point.
In the old days, Mayor Daley commanded his goons to “vote early, vote often” and Lyndon B. Johnson ordered his fixers to write down the vote tally required.. Etc.
I think incentives work better than commands, in general. I also think that these days, when there’s a non-zero risk that even the thickest goon just might have a smartphone and a grudge, it is prudent, as well as effective, for some forms of voter fraud (not all) to avoid the overt top-down command-driven model. Teach a general political philosophy that values achieving the noble goal far above pedantically observing the rules of the process. Garnish with four years of proclaiming loudly that electing Trump president is fundamentally illegitimate (to a degree that obviously no irregularity on your side could match). Drizzle with half-a-year of normalising the burning down and looting of property to make burning or looting its owners’ votes seem trivial, while also having governors proclaim (and judges defend) rules that make doing so easy and safe.
Given the things Biden does say, I hesitate to assure you we will not find a recording of him saying “Vote months early, vote often”, but after doing the above, there was far less need for anyone to say that in so many words.
A guy with some experience investigating fraud thinks the same but (like me) he also thinks incentivised fraud has a downside.
Real errors go both ways. … errors going all one way means it is systematic across the entire organization. Different errors all going one way means that it isn’t one state, one software company, one voting method… this is everyone in the organization getting the message to move the stats one way. And they did it sloppy and across the board because although the message was sent and received, it wasn’t *organized* from the top. It was handled from the local level. It was impossible to be slick and smart, the front line knew what the top level wanted as a result and no one knew how much it would take so it became super obvious…
As statistics and examples of vote fraud accumulate – and are swiftly repeated and denied in haste from site to site on both sides by both the statistically literate and the anything but, by both the cautious and the furious – I advise investing a little thought in the underlying state(s) and model(s) that these details are intended to clarify.
I’ve given one example above – consider how much of this was incentivised, not centrally controlled. Governor Newsom could hardly tell the pair arrested for making more than 8000 fictitious voter registrations between July and October 2020 that the California Democrats only needed each activist to register a few tens or hundreds at most; incentivising enough while also restraining enough, while saying nothing overt outside one’s inner circle, is a difficult trick to pull off.
A second example is the fact that mail-in voting notoriously makes voter fraud much easier – and also, as a side-effect, makes it even easier than it already is to submit a single legitimate vote. For several reasons there was real increased turnout as well as fictional, and all of it showed up in the totals – which should be remembered when, for example, a statement about Biden underperforming Hillary or not in some context shows up far down some comment thread with any original ‘relative’ / ‘absolute’ qualifier long forgotten in the twenty repetitions the point took to get there.
A third is that when a Rasmussen poll reports 30% of Democrats saying it is likely the election was stolen from Trump, what you think that means will be affected by what you think about the (in)accuracy of polls in general – and whether you think that, like voting anomalies, polls overwhelmingly err in a pro-Democrat direction.
Even though most of its conclusions were known well before the US election took place, something tells me that the Graun would not have published anything even slightly resembling this most interesting piece by Musa al-Gharbi before November 3rd: “White men swung to Biden. Trump made gains with black and Latino voters. Why?”
While on that subject, allow me to shoehorn in two quick thoughts I have had about the current situation in America that I have not had time to expand into full posts.
Thought No.1: Hunter Biden’s laptop has not gone away.
Thought No.2: Joe Biden’s mental decline is not going to reverse itself.
On Saturday, the establishment media did something incredibly irresponsible. In the midst of the most contentious election in modern history, instead of acting as neutral observers of the political process, they decided to embrace the undemocratic role of kingmaker by prematurely calling the election for Joe Biden. Yes, in normal times it has been a time-honored tradition that the media act as the unofficial scorekeeper in presidential elections, but this role has no official standing, despite the desperate attempt by the media to usurp that role for itself.
These are not normal times and the media’s action amounts to an attempt to short circuit the official and legal process of selecting the president. The outcome of this election is still very much in doubt. The electoral margins are razor thin, votes are still being counted, recounts will be held in a number of states, and there are legal challenges that have yet to work their way through the courts. Regardless of the false claims of the media, the election process is not yet over.
The media is compounding its own malfeasance by making the false claim that there is no evidence of election fraud and by suppressing any reports of the many problems with the vote counting. Although it may be true that there is yet to be any proof of election fraud, this is not the same as there being no evidence of fraud. Evidence and proof are not the same things. And the proper bodies to judge any evidence are courts of law. In our constitutional system, neither the news media nor the laughably misnamed “independent fact checkers” of the social media have any place deciding the merits of the evidence of fraud taking place in this election.
Of the many actual pieces of evidence of election fraud surrounding the vote counting, the most damaging are the cases of GOP poll watchers, in violation of election laws, being kicked out of the vote counting rooms in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. It was in these very Democrat-controlled cities that partisan political machines in charge of the vote counting, now behind closed doors, somehow managed to find enough additional votes to flip the vote counts in their respective states from being in favor of Donald Trump to being in favor of Joe Biden. The media has become wilfully blind to this clear violation of the law.
Any ballots counted during the period when GOP observers were locked out of the counting rooms are now tainted and legally suspect. If the courts eventually do throw out these votes, as they should, the fault would not be on Donald Trump for bringing a legal challenge, but on the Democrats for attempting to use their partisan political machines to control the vote counting.
One final point. If Joe Biden wanted to ensure that any victory would be seen as legitimate by Trump’s supporters, he should have immediately joined the Trump campaign in demanding that GOP poll watchers be allowed to observe the vote counting, as they are entitled to by law. The fact that he remained silent, as did the entire Democrat establishment (including their media allies) makes him complicit in any illegal activities that occurred behind those closed doors and will forever taint any claim that he has on being legitimately elected as president.
– Nick Forte, re-posted from The Pelican Report
Must say this is a catchy tune by Austin Forman.
They’re like the Tsarist government, happy that they’ve seen off the 1905 Revolution
– Tim Newman
“I can’t spare this man – he fights!” (President Abraham Lincoln, when told he should get rid of General Grant because Grant had a drink problem)
Trump fights. (If the woke of today were eager to make each feature of Trump’s character an urgently-needed virtue, they could hardly act differently. 🙂 ) Trump hates being a ‘loser’ – really hates it, not just the way some do.
Most people in politics are, whether they know it or not, much more comfortable with failing conventionally than risking the social stigma of behaving unconventionally. They did not mind losing so much as being embarrassed, as standing out from the crowd.” (Dominic Cummings, ‘How the Brexit Referendum Was Won’)
For an example of that approach, consider Prime Minister of Prussia Otto Braun on 20th July 1932.
“We are yielding only to force!”
is how Otto proudly declared his belief that the emergency decree replacing him with direct rule from Berlin was unconstitutional. Many historians of the next German transfer of power (the one that occurred in January 1933) sadly explain that “We are yielding only to force!” sounded like “Sure, we’ll yield to force” to a certain eager listener – and to the German public. I’d agree with almost everything this article says, except that the writer sounds like he is preparing to yield only to mass voter fraud – and thinks Trump should too.
They told us weeks ago they would do this – and I’m not talking about Biden’s gaffe-boast two weeks ago of having
“the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organisation in the history of US politics”
but about Zuckerberg’s declaration two months ago that
“We need to prepare the public for days and weeks counting mail-in ballots … what we and the other media need to start doing is preparing the american people that there is nothing illegitimate about this election taking additional days or weeks to make sure all the votes are counted.”
It’s a standard propaganda technique to predict the crime you plan to perform. Afterwards, the prophecy is an alibi – hey, nothing happened but what was predicted.
Jack Dorsey, Mark’s partner in preparing the US people to see nothing illegitimate in current events, was on the case two-and-a-half years earlier.
“there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win. … The way forward is on the path California blazed about 15 years ago. … reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. … Make no mistake: A reckoning with not just Trump, but conservatism, is coming. … This is a civil war that can be won without firing a shot.” (my bolding)
– to which a US commenter explained that the victory Jack predicted
depends upon no shots being fired.
(If you want to know what I predicted, click the link above.)
Two-and-a-half months, and one Supreme Court (and, I hope, some Trump rallies), stand between now and a direct confrontation with mass voter fraud (but only half as long till the state electors cast their votes). Having some time is good. Firstly, the court may do good. Secondly, we will know in less time than that about some things we now sensibly suspect. A recent commenter who knows Chicago told us that, in Chicago, whatever doesn’t look corrupt may or may not be corrupt but whatever looks like corruption most certainly is. I am confident the same rule holds in Detroit (and Pennsylvania seems already open and shut). In other cases, US citizens should verify what the truth is, as far as they can, to know what the right way to act is. When the truth is known, the question may be: Will you yield only to mass voter fraud?
I advise US readers to think about it now. The next two-and-a-half months will pass swiftly. As you think, remember – the task of the woke media is now to demoralise you (to de-moralise you – to take your morale from you). And don’t assume that they cannot also fool you just because you saw through them long ago.
[UPDATE: he still is. “This may be the most important speech I’ve ever made.”. For once, I will not allege even mild overstatement in a sentence of the Donald’s – though some speeches yet to come may be more important still.]
As they say on TV Tropes, “Nice job breaking it, Hero!”
In 2018 Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett Kavanaugh of committing sexual assault approximately 36 years previously, when he was a teenager. There were no witnesses to the alleged assault. We have only her word for it that the two of them ever met. The people she said she had talked to about it at the time said they had no such memory. She could not say in whose house or even in which year the alleged assault had happened.
The mainstream media devoted thousands of hours to her story.
In 2020 Tony Bobulinski accused Joe Biden of having lied when he (Joe Biden) said that he was not involved in the business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden, and had never even discussed them. Tony Bobulinski is unquestionably Hunter Biden’s former business partner. There are thousands of emails exchanged between them on Hunter Biden’s laptop. (That it was Hunter Biden’s laptop has never been denied by the Biden campaign.) The accusation relates to events only a few years ago. Tony Bobulinski has specified to the hour the exact occasions when he says that he spoke with Joe Biden about Hunter Biden’s business deals in China and the Ukraine.
The great names of the mainstream media refused to even look.
The Managing Editor for News of America’s National Public Radio spoke for American journalism when he said,
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
The tabloid New York Post which broke the story was censored by Twitter and Facebook.
First thousands, then millions of people from America and around the world went to look at the NYP story and found their way blocked. Those who tried to share it got the message, “Your Tweet couldn’t be sent because the link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”
Now, as some of you may have heard, the Americans have held an election. The outcome is contested. There are claims of voter fraud. Project Veritas has videos. This comment by Shlomo Maistre contains seven links to tweets discussing strange events at counting sites across the US. He says other tweets he bookmarked have disappeared. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole… “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process. Learn more.” “In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the Steal.’” One blogger even found himself abruptly banned from Facebook for sharing links about dubious fact checkers in a private message.
The mainstream media in the US and their chums in the UK and elsewhere (the whole lot of them are practically one entity by now) would really, really like to convince Americans that there has been no vote fraud.
Yeah, right. I am sure that the press will investigate this story with all the fearless diligence it showed in investigating Hunter’s emails.
Allister Heath has these thoughts about the US election results (as of the time of writing the result has not been fully declared, and as we know, this situation may not change for days because of legal challenges in state counts such as Michigan).
So what are the lessons for Boris Johnson? The first is to realise that the politics of the West are now all about class and education. The Tories can only win again if they maintain or increase their grip of working-class voters. That means, among other things, a Covid policy that doesn’t condemn them to permanent impoverishment. The second lockdown is a mistake. Johnson must put his new core voters first, not the professional classes and their Zoom meetings. That also means doubling down on the anti-crime agenda, on Brexit, on human rights reform, on abolishing the BBC licence fee. The Tory working class base doesn’t want to pay more for green energy, and they hate the Government’s awful, anti-car roads policies.
Second, Johnson needs a pro-growth, pro-entrepreneurial agenda: Trump was better at this, even if his reforms would be undone by Biden. The Tories seem too keen on taxes and regulations. Yet an entrepreneurial, pro-private sector jobs, self-help message would chime with aspirational ethnic-minority voters. The Tories must appeal to their economic and social values, rather than genuflecting to nonsensical woke ideologies that ethnic minorities don’t approve of.
Third, Johnson must halt the Left-wards drift of the upper-middle classes, something that Trump miserably failed to do. How? By ceasing to subsidise the creation of a woke generation, by preventing culture warriors from taking over schools, museums and corporations, and, crucially, by reforming universities. Education is vital, and we need more of it, but it doesn’t need to take place in universities. At least a quarter of students would be better off gaining high-quality technical or practical training, rather than wasting time studying useless social-science degrees at second-rate institutions.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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