Book Burning

Ryan T. Anderson
photo from Wikipedia

Three years ago Ryan T. Anderson wrote a book. It was on a controversial topic, but sensitively presented and extremely well documented. It received praise from all sides. Well, not all. But all reasonable sides.

That book was recently removed from the Amazon online marketplace. For violating community standards. The author wasn’t informed or warned. The book had previously topped at least two of Amazon’s bestseller lists. It received high praise from experts in the field, and even from those with opposing views. It would be hard to find any more informative and sensitively written work on the subject. Amazon holds an 80% market share for booksellers.

The book is When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. You can still purchase a copy at this other online site.

image from here

Ryan Anderson is President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He spent time working at the Heritage Foundation and the Wotherspoon Institute before taking this most recent position. As a graduate student, in 2012, he co-wrote “What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense” for the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy along with mentor Robert George and fellow student Sherif Girgis. Besides many journal articles, he has also written Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, in 2015; and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination (co-written with Sherif Girgis and John Corvino), in 2017.  When Harry Met Sally was his most recent book, from 2018.

I’ve referred to his works numerous times here on this blog. Here are a few:

·         Bigness, April 16, 2015 

·         Path Forward for Us Dissidents, July 20, 2015 

·         Duty to Resist, September 7, 2015 

·         SOGI Laws Discriminate Against Religious People, February 22, 2019 

He is only this year turning 40. All this is to say, he is an extremely impressive young man, and a serious voice that deserves to be heard.

In a piece about his book being banned, Ryan Anderson mentioned the inaptly titled legislation currently before Congress:

It’s an abuse of our civil rights law when we add all these different protected classes and when we treat reasonable disagreements as if they’re discriminatory. We’ve done it on the gay marriage debate; we’re now doing it on the transgender debate. And the Equality Act would just make this worse.

And in a piece he wrote this week, Anderson says, 

[F]irst, a caveat: If you fear what Big Tech can do if you dissent from gender ideology, just wait to see what Big Government will do if the so-called Equality Act becomes law. Second, a lesson: If you fear Big Government, don’t turn a blind eye to Big Tech. Conservatives need to get over the misguided belief that private businesses can do whatever they want. That isn’t true. And it’s never been the American law on the issue. Nor is it what the natural law supports.

In 2019 books by researcher Joseph Nicolosi were removed from Amazon, as his son explains, “not because science dictates their removal, but because LGBT ideology has shouted down sound science.” Joseph Nicolosi, Sr., was a longtime, well-respected researcher. He wasn’t into the undefined and unregulated “conversion therapy” maligned in media depictions. He was a serious psychologist and researcher/ who developed methods that helped resolve issues for those seeking that resolution. I cited his works many times in my writings on the defense of marriage.

Note that Mein Kampf is still available. It does not violate Amazon’s community standards.

What are the false ideas so dangerous that they should not be allowed to be read—in books, in articles—or heard in recordings, speeches, or lectures? It’s SOGI issues (i.e., sexual orientation and gender issues), but also more:

·       There are two sexes of humans: male and female.

·       Permanently disfiguring a child to pretend they are something other than their biological sex is child abuse.

·       Sexual orientation is not immutable; treating with reintegrative therapy can help resolve issues for those who seek that help.

·       Covid-19 can be successfully treated with such inexpensive and widely available therapies as hydroxycholoroquine with zinc and azithromycin.

·       There is significant evidence of election fraud.

·       Race relations don’t get better when you insist on viewing everything in terms of race instead of character and ability.

You can probably think of a few to add to that list. But those are some things that will get you in trouble on social media and many other places—except maybe the HCQ treatment, which suddenly became acceptable news after being labeled dangerously false for most of a year.

There’s this sort of frenzy, among the dictators of what is allowed to be said, that posits there’s too much misinformation and disinformation being spread—and that is a danger to our democracy and must be stopped.

Tucker Carlson did an excellent monologue on February 23^rd, on the mixture of censorship, misinformation/disinformation, and truth. He noted that the MSM use the word “norms” a lot. Supposedly these so-called “norms” are violated when people say things they don’t like. And violating norms, they claim, destroys democracy. His montage was pretty amusing.

Tucker Carlson, screenshot from his February 23rd show

But then he notes, more seriously, that there are real consequences to people getting the wrong information. An example he uses is the mismatch between public views and the real statistics on police killing unarmed black men. People on the street were wildly overestimating the problem. Who is doing the misinforming? is a legitimate question. He says:

A lot of Americans are completely and utterly misinformed, and that has consequences. Public policy can change dramatically on the basis of things people think they know but don’t actually know. And we have seen that a lot. Entire police departments got defunded.

So it’s worth finding out where the public is getting all this false information, this disinformation, as we’ll call it. So we checked. We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which in the end we learned is not even a website. If it’s out there, we could not find it. Then we checked Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter feed, because we have heard she traffics in disinformation—CNN told us—but nothing there. Next we called our many friends in the tight-knit intel community. Could Vladimir Putin be putting this stuff out there? The Proud Boys? Alex Jones?

Who is lying to America in ways that are certain to make us hate each other and certain to destroy our core institutions? Well, none of the above, actually. It wasn’t Marjorie Taylor Greene; it was cable news. It was politicians talking on TV. They’re the ones spreading disinformation to America.

By the way, a couple of months ago I also tried to track down Q, or QAnon if you’d rather. Just so I could see actual posts, or drops, rather than what various people said Q had said. I literally couldn’t find a way to sign up to get Q drops. If it’s intended to spread, the spreader sure does make it hard. (I hope I didn’t accidentally get on some government list, just because I was trying to do due diligence.)

The odd thing, then, is that those who are so upset about the spread of wrong ideas are the ones spreading falsehoods.

This might be intentional.

Joshua Philipp of The Epoch Times was giving a talk in Texas earlier this month in which he said this: 

If you go back and read the Communist Manifesto, what does it say? “Communism abolishes eternal truths.” And what is eternal truth, right?

It says, “Communism abolishes all religion and all morality.” We think it’s an economic theory. You go back to the 1930s, it was never an economic theory; it was a metaphysical theory, meaning it is a belief. And it’s a belief of a cult of man. And that you can only create that cult of man by destroying God and everything that God created in man. It is a system to re-create society in the image of man and not in the image of God.

And so everything they do is to make you abandon your faith. Everything they do is to undermine your morals, to destroy your traditions, to destroy your family values, to destroy everything that your country and your culture and your character is based upon. And it is only through that, if they can achieve it, that they can achieve their goals.

And so, at Epoch Times, we of course have our slogan: Truth and Tradition—meant to speak the truth and uphold traditions. This is something we’re going to be doing into the distant, distant future. And we will never be silent.

Truth and tradition are very different from “our truth” and “our norms.” I certainly don’t want someone with a Marxist ideology—or really any other ideology—dictating what I’m allowed to say or read.

Hitler Youth burning books, 1938
Alamy stock photo found here

How do you know, at the beginning of a discussion, before both sides lay out their evidence and persuasive points, which side holds objective truth? Or even which side is most persuasive? You need to be able to express things that might not turn out to be true.

If there’s going to be some rule about what you can say, because it may not be true, then you have to ask, who is the arbiter of truth?

Our founders made this clear in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and then listed the God-given unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and then declared government’s purpose to defend these rights, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But, in Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope, he misconstrues that clarity this way:

Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.

As I mentioned some years ago,  you can’t get from that point A, the Declaration and Constitution, to that point B, rejection of absolute truth; there is no such path. As Dr. Larry Arnn puts the question, “How did Barack Obama come to believe something so foreign to America’s heritage as the idea that in the name of liberty we must reject absolute truths—which necessarily includes rejecting those truths I just quoted from the Declaration?”

Who, then, gets to be the arbiter of truth, if not God? There are a great many people I would absolutely not want to grant that power to.

Here's the irony: the self-appointed arbiters of truth reject absolute truth. But if there is no objective, perceivable truth, then why is “their truth” so right that any other “truth” must be censored—not only as simply untrue but harmful enough to be considered subversive?   

Book burning is never about protecting the unsuspecting public from false ideas; it is about protecting the power elites from dissent.

Surviving the Snowpocalypse in Texas

It was 72˚ today. A week ago the high was the inversion of that: 27˚. Texas is fickle that way.

Last week’s freak winter storm (it was named Uri, by the way) was something like a 150-year event. In other words, the last time we faced extended freezing temperatures down into the teens, most Texans were used to getting by without electricity. So there wasn’t a “last time” to learn from, to know how to prepare for this one.

Mr. Spherical Model took this photo early Monday, Feb. 15, early morning. We got a 

bit more snow, and it stayed in patches until Saturday. When he posted this, he said: 

Question: What's unusual about this picture?

Answer: * My house is in Houston.

    * It's 14˚F.

    *RealFeel is -10˚F (It's what my phone says, but doesn't feel like it to me).

    * I have power. At least for now. Over 375,000 in Houston area do not have power.

    * I do not have water. No water pressure at all. And it's not caused by frozen pipes 

       in my house. It's a regional problem.

    * By Sunday we'll have a high in the 70's.

One thing I've noticed about life in the Gulf Coast: there will be natural disasters. Usually they're hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes. In some areas, wildfires. This weeklong deep freeze was a new scenario to living Texans. But, as with the others, Texans are reminded who to rely on. We need to rely on God. And we need to rely on one another for help through the acute situation.

If government, or a utility company, is who you rely on—your god—you’re going to be let down.

I’m hesitant to criticize the frontline workers, who have to work to repair and restore power during the worst weather conditions—while the rest of us are hunkering down in our homes, where at least we have blankets and food. They are the heroes.

But the people in distant offices, making decisions that affect our lives—they’re fair game for criticism, and for getting our crowd-sourced suggestions on how to learn from this one so we’re better prepared for the next 150-year event—which, who knows, might show up next year.

Image from Chad Prather on Facebook

I’m not likely to ever be an expert on energy, enough to know what happened. But I’ve compiled some resources below. I’ll do a brief timeline summary. Then I’m going to share son Political Sphere’s assessment of what happened. I haven’t had him write a guest post in a long time. It’s a short one, so I’ll embed it in the middle, and then add a few comments.

 

Basic Timeline

·       There was an executive order on about day one of this presidency. It required adherence to “green energy” standards, which were not going to be useful during a polar vortex in Texas.

·       A week ahead of the polar vortex, ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas—it manages the electric grid covering most of Texas) requested permission to temporarily exceed emission standards in order to provide power to Texans during freezing weather.

·       The federal government refused; they suggested Texas buy energy from out of state, rather than exceed standards (although nearby states would also be suffering from freezing weather—even Mexico faced this problem). ERCOT wrote a letter dated February 14 to explain that they had exhausted all other avenues, and that the temporary permission to exceed emission standards was necessary; the Feds responded that day, 8:00 PM, that it would be OK, as long as they did as much as possible not to exceed, and it was temporary. 

·       This was the day of the arrival of the storm. Cold temperatures arrived before the additional capacity was brought online. It would have taken less energy, and been less stressful on the system overall, if the permission had been granted so additional capacity could be brought online during warmer temperatures.

·       ERCOT workers saw that need was rising quickly, and supply was falling short. Fearing catastrophic failures (fires that would destroy capacitors, as I understand it), they turned off some capacity—shedding they call it—and started rolling blackouts.

·       People began losing power on Sunday afternoon, February 14—Happy Valentine’s Day!

·       Rolling blackouts didn’t go as planned, at least in my area (Houston). They couldn’t easily switch, once an area was switched off. So areas that lost power Sunday stayed blacked out until Wednesday or even Thursday. My area was without power for only 31 hours between Monday night and Wednesday afternoon; we are a mile from a fire station, which may have helped.

·       Power was prioritized for hospitals and fire stations. It was not prioritized for gas suppliers to energy plants, which meant loss of fuel sources, making the situation worse.

·       Wind and solar, often unreliable, were unable to provide their expected allotment of power. Wind turbines froze. They were not hardened for the weather, because it was not considered cost-effective to do so in an area that hadn’t seen such low temperatures in a century.

·       Nuclear power (there is one plant in the Houston region and two others in the state) is typically reliable; however, a sensor froze, and the system interpreted that as a problem requiring shutdown. Once resolved, this source was brought back online.

·       Residents were requested to lower the heat to 68 or below (66 or below later on) to lower power needs. But once power was lost to homes, indoor temperatures dropped dramatically. We kept our home no lower than 59˚, using a gas fireplace. Other homes—particularly those that lost power on Sunday (we didn’t lose ours until late Monday night)—went as low as 42˚ for several days.

·       Pipes froze. If this happened with water in them, the water expanded and broke the pipes. Once they thawed, this caused indoor flooding. (We didn’t suffer as much cold; plus our pipes were not on outdoor walls. We were among the lucky.)

·       Water service failed in many areas, because of frozen pipes and water mains. In many areas, even with water pressure restored, most of the county was under a boil water order. Many areas got this order lifted on Sunday, February 21, but our area continues.

 

photo from Texas Scorecard

Thermal vs. Renewable Energy Sources

A couple of days into the disaster, we started hearing about blame and mismanagement. Up until then (with no internet or much other access to news), I was assuming it was just an overwhelming natural disaster—like Hurricane Harvey, or Ike, or the Tax Day Flood, or…. And, in the end, it is a natural disaster. But Tucker Carlson offered this rather obvious opinion: 

Running out of energy in Texas is like starving to death at the grocery store: You can only do it on purpose, and Texas did.

More GW (gigawatts) were lost to fossil fuels than to wind. Because a larger percentage is provided by fossil fuels. But enough of wind power was down that, by percentage of expectation, wind was definitely a failure.

Here is Political Sphere’s take on it:

The numbers are not adding up. I am hearing from several sources that it is the fossil fuels, not the renewable energy, that has created our problems in Texas this week. A good example of this opinion journalism was published by the Texas Tribune under the headline “No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages.” It opens noting that renewable energy sources were only expected to make up approximately 20% of the approximately 83.5 GW total capacity expected to be available this winter. This means renewable energy sources were expected to provide 16.5 GW of power (of that 16.5 GW only 6 GW was expected to come from wind).

16.5 Gigawatts is an interesting number. ERCOT, the agency responsible for ensuring the Texas grid, does suffer cascading power failures as other major grids across the US have done (think the Northeast power failure of 2003 that left 55 million people in the northeast United States and Canada without power for 2 full weeks during August of that year), reported that at its peak on Monday they were instructing service providers to shed 16,500 Megawatts (16.5 GW).

It is true, as pointed out in that Tribune article, that at its worst 45 GW of capacity was unattainable. Approximately 28 GW was from thermal sources (which would include both fossil fuels and nuclear) and 18 GW was from renewable energy sources according to the ERCOT officials cited in the article. The article and others use this to say that, see, a larger number of GW were lost overall from thermal sources than renewable, meaning that blaming it on renewables is wrong as the fossil fuel sources were a bigger problem. But this is a clear oversimplification, failing to take into account how much of a percentage of expected energy that is for each type. Going to our numbers above, we can see that we lost greater than 100% of the total expected capacity from renewable energy sources while only 42% of the expected capacity was lost from the thermal energy sources.

This is not to say that there were not some significant problems with the fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources; there clearly were. There will be an investigation find all the causes for the 4 million plus without power this week, and I am sure the investigation will discover there were many failures that led to such a massive inability to deal with this extreme event, but it appears that you cannot expect renewables to produce any energy during major crises and should prepare to have a hardened and ready replacement for every Gigawatt they are calculated to produce when energy production really counts.

 

Energy source	Expected	Unattainable	% Failure
Renewable (wind, solar)	16.5 GW (6 GW from wind)	18 GW	100%+
Thermal (oil, natural gas, nuclear)	67 GW	28 GW	42%
Total	83.5 GW	45 GW	54%

 

Political Sphere shared an analogy with me, about what the federal government was asking of Texas. Say you’re on the brink of a hurricane and need to hunker down very soon. But you need to resupply your bottled water, in case you don’t have water for several days. But the store says, “Before you can buy water here, you need to have tried buying water in a neighboring city at price gouging rates. Do that first.” So you do all you’re able. You find that the asking price is 83 times higher than your normal rates—if the neighboring cities had it to sell at that rate. But you find that water isn’t to be had in the neighboring cities either, because they’re facing the same likely natural disaster. [All states but Florida were hit with this polar vortex, and so was Mexico.] So then the store says, “OK, but only just enough to sustain life for a couple of days. Because we really don’t want you producing too much plastic waste, you know.” Yeah, plastic waste is the least of your worries during a hurricane. 

What needed to happen was, Texas should have gone ahead and added supply—assuming the permission would come. Because a small temporary increase in carbon dioxide was the least of our concerns when people were about to die of hypothermia inside their icy, flooded homes.

 

Conclusion

There’s one thing this disaster showed us: we’re pretty dependent on electricity. That makes us very vulnerable. It’s one thing to have a one-week outage; it’s another thing altogether to lose power for a much more extended period of time.

We need to protect our electric grid. This is, once again, an issue I’m doing some citizen lobbying on in the state legislature. Just this past week we finally got a couple of bills addressing it. If you’re in Texas and care to call your representatives about it, these are: HB 1731  and HB 1180. Neither is adequate. They mostly just look at the situation and hope to come up with a plan. But that’s a start.

The most urgent concern is not another polar vortex, which may not happen in our lifetime. It isn’t even increased need for energy during high temperatures, which happen every summer and are planned for. The most urgent concern is an electromagnetic pulse, which can be natural or manmade (terrorist or enemy military attack) caused, and which can result in loss of power for months. Loss of life would be tremendous. All our prepping and camping supplies would run out quickly. And the prevention could be accomplished at relatively small cost, passed along to consumers without additional taxes.

After a week like we’ve just had, I’d say protecting against loss of power is a pretty high priority. And Texas ought to be doing what we know we need—regardless of some federal bureaucrat crying foul. They do not have our best interests in mind; they’ve proved that.

 

Resources

·       “The Texas Power Outage Started with Bad Policy” Jason Isaac for The Cannon, Feb. 17, 2021. (This was possibly the clearest explanation I found.)

·       “Could Lawmakers Have Prevented Texas’ Blackouts?” by Robert Montoya for Texas Scorecard, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “We are ordering an investigation into ERCOT and immediate transparency by ERCOT.” Statement by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Feb. 16, 2021. 

·       Notice of Public Hearing of the Energy Resources Committee on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2021, shared on Facebook  

·       “The Narrative is Overshadowing Truth in the Texas Energy Crisis” Erick Erickson, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “Did Frozen Wind Turbines Impact the Texas Freeze? Here's the Data” by Bryan Preston for PJ Media, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages” by Erin Douglas and Ross Ramsey for The Texas Tribune, Feb. 16 (updated Feb. 17), 2021. (This is the article Political Sphere referred to.) 

·       “Q&A on Texas Blackouts” Rep. Dan Crenshaw on Facebook Feb. 18, 2021 

·       “Texas was ‘seconds and minutes’ away from catastrophic monthslong blackouts, officials say” by Erin Douglas for The Texas Tribune, Feb. 18, 2021. 

·       “A Giant Flaw in Texas Blackouts: It Cut Power to Gas Supplies” Rachel Adams-Heard, Javier Blas, and Mark Chediak for Bloomberg, Feb. 20, 2021. 

·       “Texas Spins into the Wind: An electricity grid that relies on renewables also needs nuclear or coal power” Wall Street Journal editorial board, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “Tucker Carlson: The Texas Green Energy Disaster Is Coming to You Next” by Kipp Jones for The Western Journal, Feb. 16, 2021. 

·       “Joe Biden’s Dept. of Energy Blocked Texas from Increasing Power Ahead of Enduring Storm” by Adan Salazar for [your]News, Feb. 19, 2021.  (Facebook marked this as false according to independent fact checkers, but it does seem to coincide with information on the ERCOT website for February.) 

·       “Electricity Prices during the 2021 Winter Storm” Public Utility Commission of Texas winter storm price explainer 

·       “As Texas deep freeze subsides, some households now face electricity bills as high as $10,000” by Leticia Miranda for NBC News, Feb. 19, 2021. 

·       “Texas households face massive electricity bills, some as high as $17K, after winter storm” by Brook Seipel for The Hill, Feb. 19, 2021. 

·       “Texas utilities can't stick customers with huge bills after storm: Abbott” by Linda So, Jonathan Allen for Reuters, Feb. 21, 2021. 

 

Social Media Conversations among Texans Who Know Energy

·       “Here’s another ERCOT kick in the pants...” John Boggan live on Facebook Feb. 17, 2021  (On the video he says ERCOT was cutting power to the providers that natural gas producers who were providing fuel to the power plants—because they weren’t considered essential infrastructure.)

·       “So here is Biden’s dark winter… directed at us!” Christine Gagne, February 21, 2021 (near midnight, on Facebook) 

·       Bryan Preston Feb. 19, 2021 on Facebook  “One more nerdy chart and then I swear I'm done. ‘The wind turbines don't freeze in (pick your favorite very cold place) and shouldn't freeze in Texas!’ Right? Like Alaska, right?” (includes chart on Alaska’s energy sources)

·       Rolando Garcia, Feb. 17, 2021, on Facebook, passes along a Scott Friedman tweet from NBC5, suggesting ERCOT inspections were done virtually this year because of the pandemic. 

·       Mark Ramsey passes along a summary from Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, pointing out “every natural gas plant online at the start of this crisis stayed online.”  

 

Rush Limbaugh: A Man. A Legend. A Way of Life.

Yesterday morning was gloomy and gray. We were on our second day without power. Texas isn’t set up for long, deep winter weather. The snow that came down Sunday night is still on the ground here and there; we have never seen that in our part of Texas. The rare snow typically melts off within a couple of hours.

We were better off than many; our power didn’t go out until late Monday night (shortly after I posted my Monday blog). But it stayed out all of Tuesday, for 22 hours. Then we got a few hours, until around 2:30 AM Wednesday, and it was out again.

We have a gas fireplace, which we seldom use in Houston, but it was giving us a bit of heat. For a while it was 12 degrees outside (real feel of -4, according to phone app) and 59 degrees inside. That’s pretty cold, but some houses were in the 40s inside. Having that extra day of power also seemed to help us preserve our pipes. So we had water—when there was enough water pressure.

Anyway, although Tuesday was cold but sunny, Wednesday was dreary gray and rainy. And I was tired of being cold everywhere but standing right next to the fireplace.

Power finally came on for us around 1:30 PM Wednesday, so we had been without for a total of around 31 hours. And we had no flooding from busted pipes. We felt protected during this ordeal, truly.

But I was in that cold, miserable, I’ve-had-enough state when I heard the news that Rush Limbaugh had passed away. I guess we knew it was coming, but it seemed like, of course it would happen on such a miserable day.

Rush Limbaugh
image found here

There have been some very nice tributes. I’ll link to some below. But I want to just add my memories.

I started listening to Rush in 1989. It must have been very shortly after he began a national broadcast. I think he was still in Sacramento. I’ve always been a radio listener, but not usually music (which fills my life elsewhere). I like hearing words and learning things. But talk radio, before Rush, was things like health programming, or info about places to visit in the town you’re living in, or maybe a discussion of a book here or there.

When Rush started talking about politics—and saying what I also thought but never heard anyone say on a public broadcast show—that was new.

I listened daily. For years. Typically with kids not around, except in summer, or in the car going to or from some appointment. But they remember it as though Rush Limbaugh was on in the background of our lives 24/7.

I got what he was doing. I found it funny. He could take divisive topics and say the truth using humor. There were parody songs. There was demonstrating the absurd with the absurd.

He had some trademark sayings, like “Talent on loan from God.” He would say it, emphasizing the G and the d in God. He didn’t mean that in a braggadocious way, although that’s how his opposition interpreted it. It was a way of saying thanks to God for whatever gifts God was granting him.

He would often say, “With half my brain tied behind my back,” which goaded the opposition, who thought their views should be accepted without question, because they assumed they were smarter than the rest of us—lack of common sense notwithstanding.

And there was “accurate 99.98% of the time.” It was a made-up statistic, but at least as accurate as many stats out there. It got the opposition to listen, just to see if they could find an error—or something they could call an error.

Female callers often got, “one of my favorite names,” whatever her name might be. It was sweet.

Those of us who were tired of the opposition’s negative labels of us, and anything we valued, appreciated someone bold enough to call them “feminazis.” He dared to say things—all without profanity—that we just hadn’t been allowed to hear any voice say. One was “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.” I believe feminism degrades women and pressures them to be bad men, while pressuring men not to be men. But his statement adds that layer of humor that his followers appreciate and his opponents find appalling.

He handled that “golden EIB [Excellence in Broadcasting] microphone” so very well. He became, essentially, his own distributor, syndicated on hundreds of AM radio stations. You could say he actually saved AM radio from disappearing. And you could also say he started talk radio, and any other forum for public conservative conversation. Sean Hannity and Mark Levin would not have had a voice without Rush as their forerunner. Glenn Beck got a start filling in for Rush. Anyone else, even on YouTube or other more obscure forums comes out of Rush Limbaugh’s pioneering radio show.

He was hated by the opposition. They couldn’t silence him, and that was unacceptable. Yesterday, they showed their disrespect in ways that I won’t bother to acknowledge here, other than to note that he was not the one saying and doing vile things, like they claimed to rage against.

Back in 2016, during the presidential primary season, I was very much behind Ted Cruz, because I am a constitutional conservative. Donald Trump didn’t seem to care that much about the Constitution—or even understand it. He talked a “populist” message that didn’t resonate with me. And he sounded authoritarian. I was wrong about him, it turned out. But there were also the brutal personal attacks on his Republican opponents. Rush seemed to be OK with that. He didn’t just describe what was going on in the campaign; he seemed to approve of it.

So I stopped listening. And then the time of day didn’t work out, and I found myself turning to other sources more regularly.

But this past year, and especially since the election, I started tuning in now and again. I started to see I’d missed a good four years of listening.

Rush appeared bombastic on radio. Overly self-assured. But I got it; it was his schtick. All reports of him in person were that he was gentle, kind, curious, and mainly pleasant to be around. I could see that in the interactions with callers and the occasional guest he talked with.

What I found, a couple of years into the Trump presidency, was that he was also bombastic in public, and overly self-assured. But reports of him in person were otherwise—decent and kind and curious. And I watched him in moments of ceremony—the most touching of which was probably awarding the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh at the State of the Union last year, shortly after we learned of Rush’s cancer diagnosis.

Rush Limbaugh receives the Medal of Freedom 
at the State of the Union speech, 2020.
The post where I found this also said, "It was
in an 'impromptu' two-hour interview with Rush
that Donald Trump first laid out the case
for Making American Great Again."
From Trent Lynn Clark, found here.

I think Rush understood Trump because they were similar. I wish I had understood that five years ago.

Rush Limbaugh was a lover of the Constitution, and of the historical founding of this country. And he had a way of telling the story of the goodness that reached people. People got converted to the ideals of freedom and prosperity through his broadcasts. Young people grew up as “Rush babies” and stayed conservative—meaning conserving the Constitution. They learned common sense, and how to think through an idea without getting too much emotion in the way. And doing it with good humor instead of rancor.

I wish we had his voice in these next few years. I hope his legacy—those of us he taught—will be able to combine to do some portion of what he gave us these past several decades.

Here are some nice tributes:

·       “Mark Levin gets choked up remembering Rush Limbaugh's legacy” Mark Levin with Martha Raddatz on Fox News, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       “Rush’s Monument: Let Us All Speak, and Fearlessly.” by Andrew Klavan for City Journal, Feb. 17, 2021. 

·       Glenn Beck: “How Rush Limbaugh Was Responsible for My Radio Career” 

·       Glenn Beck Facebook post, photos of subbing at the EIB microphone around 1999 

·       Hillsdale College Facebook post, “From the desk of Larry Arnn” 

·       Senator Ted Cruz post on Facebook 

·       “Ben Shapiro Reflects on the Life and Legacy of Rush Limbaugh” posted by Matt Walsh on Facebook. 

·       “Read The Most Touching Tributes To Broadcast Legend Rush Limbaugh” by Tristan Justice for The Federalist, Feb. 17, 2021.

     

Projection

If you have not heard the psychological term projection, you may want to look it up. Essentially, it is seeing in others what is actually in yourself—in your thoughts, actions, intentions. You see it in others when it is not there, but you fail to see it in yourself.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Example 1: The Impeachment Acquittal

President Trump, after second impeachment acquittal
photo: Oliver Contreras/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty images, found here

This past Saturday former President Trump was acquitted in the impeachment trial. The prosecution spent two days last week drumming up emotional reaction to the violence that took place at the capitol on January 6th.

In an actual court of law, the defense would stipulate that the violence took place; showing evidence of it serves only to be “prejudicial rather than probative,[i]” so that would be inadmissible. Also inadmissible would be hearsay evidence, such as “I heard someone say that they heard Trump say….” The prosecution would have been required to depose the actual person who heard the actual statement.

In other words, while it is clear that violence took place, the prosecution showed zero evidence that the President incited it.

What they tried to do was claim it was his consistent horrible rhetoric that led to the violence. They speak of that as a given. But they don’t provide evidence of any rhetoric by President Trump actually calling for violence.

During the 2 ½ hours of defense presentation, the President’s lawyers also showed a video montage—of Democrats, many among those in that room—using the word “fight” as political rhetoric. (Here: It starts at the 20-minute mark and goes on for 11 ½ minutes.) Beyond that, many of them used actual calls for violence, and encouraged the violence that happened over the summer. Much of it was closer to incitement than anything President Trump said during his rally speech—or in any other speech.

That video montage of Democrats calling for fighting was instructive. The defense team didn’t claim those Democrats should all be prosecuted or impeached; they agreed that this was just political rhetoric. And political rhetoric actually has a heightened First Amendment protection, not lessened.

There was, in fact, plenty of evidence that the President didn’t incite the attack. He had sought only legal means regarding the voter fraud, and he reminded listeners that we are the party of law and order. I will add that he certainly had no motivation to disrupt the proceedings that were about to show the evidence of voter fraud that hadn’t been seen by a large portion of the public; that disruption was exactly opposite of what he called people to the rally to support.

The prosecution was embarrassed by the the presentation of the defense. Rather than going straight to a Senate vote, they spent time Saturday trying to call witnesses—after the trial. That is never done. You don’t get to closing arguments and suddenly say, “Oh, by the way, we want to call additional witnesses after all.” It’s too late for that.

In response, the defense said they were willing if they were also allowed to call witnesses—because they had been deprived of that during both the House and Senate parts of the process. Maybe they’d start with Nancy Pelosi, to learn what she knew ahead of time of possible danger to the capitol, and to have her explain why she refused additional protection to be brought in. Because there was, in fact, growing evidence that the attack was planned and had no connection to President Trump, and that Pelosi and others knew that in advance but wanted an opportunity to blame Trump.

The prosecution quickly backed off and settled for one statement to be read in; it was a second or third-hand account of something someone said they heard the President say—which, again, would not have been admissible in an actual court of law.

The vote went as expected—except that one of the Republicans who had voted that they didn’t have jurisdiction, looked at the prosecution, which was totally lacking in evidence but full of emotion, and voted to convict President Trump on incitement to insurrection. Still, unlike in a court with an actual jury, where consensus is required, this Senate jury fell ten short of a required two-thirds majority.

Defense attorney, Michael Van der Veen, in his closing statement, pointed out that it wasn’t justice that was driving the impeachment, and he offered four grounds for acquittal:

We heard one of the congressmen on the screen: “If you don’t impeach him, he might be elected again.” That’s the fear. That’s what’s driving this impeachment.

When you deliberate over your decision, there are four distinct grounds under which you must acquit my client.

(1)    First, there’s jurisdiction. There is no jurisdiction. And if you believe that, you still get to say it.

(2)  Two, rule 23: It had to be divisible. Each allegation had to be singularly set out in front of you, so it could be voted on and see if two-thirds of you think that they proved that case or not. They didn’t do that. You’ve got to ask yourself why. They know the Senate rules. They got them, and so did I. Why’d they do it? Because they hadn’t investigated, first of all. But also, what they found out, as they were preparing all of this, is they couldn’t do it. So, if they threw as much in as they could, and made as many bold, bald allegations as they could, then maybe two-thirds of you would fall for it. That’s why the rules don’t allow it to go that way.

(3)  Due process. I’ve exhausted that subject. It’s a really good reason for all of you—all of you in this chamber—to stop the politics, to read the Constitution and apply it to this proceeding, and acknowledge that the lack of due process—way over the top. Shocking. And you must not stand for it.

(4)  And, of course, the First Amendment, the actual facts of this case. There were no words of incitement.

Swalwell showed media the tweets presented as evidence.
He misunderstood the word Calvary. The blue check mark
was added; also, at this point, they had the wrong year,
meaning they were recreations, not screenshots.
This screenshot from here.

By the way, on that third one, due process, did you hear that the prosecution had doctored evidence?
Defense attorney David Schoen offered multiple examples. One was a tweet sent out by a woman saying they were bringing the Calvary, which House Manager Swalwell misread as “cavalry,” or armed warriors on horses, when it really meant followers of Christ, who died on a hill named Calvary. Besides the misreading, the tweet as presented as evidence had a check mark showing the sender as verified as a public figure, meaning she had a large influence—a mark she does not have on her account, meaning it wasn’t a screenshot of the original tweet and could not be offered as evidence. In a real court of law, a single doctored piece of evidence is sufficient to have the case dismissed. 

Enough about that process. It was political theater with a known outcome beforehand—like seeing yet another movie portrayal of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express when you’ve read the book and seen previous movies. You know how it’s going to turn out.

But let’s add one more irony.

The attorney, Mr. Van der Veen, had his home graffitied, and his family and law practice threatened and attacked. People who are outraged about the capitol are pretty sanguine about threats and attacks on individuals. These miscreants called the attorney a traitor—in spray paint on his driveway—for providing a defense against the fact-free impeachment. And it doesn’t seem to occur to them that, if you have to intimidate a defense lawyer, you might be a much bigger threat to America than President Trump ever was.

Projection. They see Trump as bad, because they are bad, likely doing the very things they accuse him of.

This may not be exactly related to projection, but Candace Owens sums up their thinking, implying, yes, indeed, it is mental illness.

image found here

 

Example 2: Harris County Election Law Crime

There’s a case of voter fraud here in Harris County that we’re looking at right now. Actually there are many, but this one seems like it ought to be a slam dunk.

On October 14, 2020, a Republican poll watcher was denied access to observe the Signature Verification Committee’s work, related to ballots by mail. The presiding judge for that process was Rob Icsezen. He didn’t just deny her access. He wrote on her poll watcher certificate that poll watchers are not allowed to observe the work of that committee—and then he signed his statement.

The poll watcher appealed to Mr. Michael Winn, the Director of Elections for the Harris County Clerk; he refused to correct the situation. Members of the Early Voting Ballot Board witness the above and have signed affidavits saying so. The poll watcher then appealed to Mr. Keith Ingram of the Election Division of the Secretary of State’s office, who verified that poll watchers can observe the Signature Verification Committee’s work. In other words, Mr. Icsezen’s denial of access to poll watchers was illegal.

All of the signed affidavits related to the case were presented to the Office of the Attorney General that week. AG Ken Paxton’s office then sent its own investigators to Harris County to re-interview each witness, re-creating the affidavits. It is now February, and the Republican AG’s office has yet to take action on this case that was placed in their laps.

Many of us are contacting the AG’s office to encourage them to act. [If you’re in Texas and take an interest, here’s an action plan.] It may seem like a small thing, but if we don’t act on the known crime, it continues. At the very least, this presiding judge should be prevented from working an election again.

What got my attention, as I was learning about this case, was a memo this partisan PJ sent out the week before he committed that crime. In part, he urged voters to vote Democrat all the way down the ticket and explained why:

Even if the worst human of our generation, whose putrid vile will stain the top of our ticket, even if he loses this election, 60+ million Americans will have voted for him. [actually closer to 74-79 million]. And they’ll still be here when he is gone.

Let that sink in a moment. He is saying that Donald J. Trump is the worst human of our generation. Worse than Xi Jinping. Worse than Kim Jong-un. Worse than Jeffrey Epstein, who sex-trafficked children. Worse than Osama bin Laden. Worse than the guy who mass murdered people at a music concert in Las Vegas. Worse than the Boston Marathon bombers. Worse than drug cartels or violent gangs.

Because of his tweets. Which are supposedly worse than referring to people as “putrid vile” who “will stain the top of” a ballot just by having their name there.

image of Robert Icsezen post
from Oct. 6, 2020, from here 

I don’t want to defend rude tweets. But I keep waiting for someone to share at least one that is truly vile, or racist, or some other epithet they keep throwing around about President Trump. His account was taken down by Twitter, but someone archived it, here.  If you have time, please comb through them and find something worse than what this man just said about Donald Trump. Then we have a fact to converse on.

Here’s a bit more of what Icsezen says—about us voters:

The only principle that guides the GOPklan, is power. They have shown this repeatedly, trampling laws and norms without hesitation. It’s OK in GOPland to be an awful person unbound by any sense of community or consistency, so long as you get those judges in, deregulate big business and keep those black and brown people away from the polls and in cages.

That’s projection.

The Dems have used every lever they can find to increase and hold their power. Look at the censorship we’re dealing with. Look at the attempts to change voting laws going forward to facilitate fraud. Look at the insistence on taking away the people’s means of self-defense. Look at their plans to “pack the Senate” by adding DC as a state, and maybe also Puerto Rico and Guam, and to “pack the court” by adding whatever number to the Supreme Court they want in order to secure the outcome they want. They want to make sure their power is never again challenged, even if they must use Communist Chinese methods of monitoring, and threatening that those who disagree may not buy, sell, or make a living.

But somehow Trump’s smaller government, non-authoritarian actions over four years were pure power hunger?

And “trampling laws”? You mean like that refusal to allow observation by poll watchers to assure a free and fair election? What laws is he referring to?—since neither the first nor second impeachment of the President involved an actual accusation of a crime, because they couldn’t find one.

We could deal with each point. But, do Republicans keep black and brown people from the polls? No. We want free and fair elections for all. And, this election, that meant more black and brown people voting Republican than ever, mainly because their economic and social situations improved under Trump in ways that Democrat promises had never actually provided. Because, if it’s about power—as it arguably is for Democrats, at least their leadership—you want to keep people dependent. On the plantation, you might say. While we’re mentioning that, the actual Klan was and always has been affiliated with the Democrat Party.

And those cages? The photos you’ve seen are most likely from 2014, under Obama, when they were constructed. Or they might be people in the Middle East, not even the right part of the world. But lying is apparently the Democrat comfort zone.

The policy of separating children temporarily from parents has a specific purpose: to protect children from trafficking. It needed to be determined that the children belonged to the adults claiming them. If that could be determined, then they could consider a detention arrangement with parents reunited with children. The Democrats didn’t question Obama on it. But with Trump, they’re willing to throw children to traffickers for the chance to create a visual that makes Trump look bad.

In other words, everything this guy says about President Trump is a lie. And he is pasting the lies onto every Trump voter.

Icsezen, the guy who broke the law to facilitate a fraudulent signature verification process, says, “All Republicans are guilty.” Ironically, with much tone-deafness and lack of self-awareness, he adds,

They must be taught a lesson: that truth matters, facts matter, consistency matters, principles matter, decency matters.

I know when we’ve worked elections along with well-meaning Democrats, and they see that we run a free and fair election, which is what they want too, we have no difficulties with them. It is that connection to law that gives us civilization together.

When someone flouts the law and gets away with it, that civil connection breaks down. It’s like in a crime-ridden neighborhood. Once law enforcement starts taking care of the relatively small window breaking and petty theft, they get a lot less of the assault, burglary, rape, and murder. Criminals come to expect that the law will be enforced.

We need that restoration of law enforcement.

 

But those doing that crazy projection? How do you fix that sort of crazy? I don’t know. How do we function together in a society with people who cannot see those who believe differently as human, and cannot see the lack of human decency in themselves? Maybe we need a whole lot of clinical psychologists who specialize in dealing with projection.

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[i] I got the legal language from a Robert Gruler podcast.