Denial of Reality and of Womanhood

A week ago Andrew Klavan spent much of his weekly video talking about bodies, their importance in experiencing life and relationships. And there’s some good stuff there, for deep thinking, as he tends to do. In there he shows and talks about a short clip of a woman on TikTok. He admits that, of course, you can find crazy people out there. But the craziness of what she says is worth discussing.

Andrew Klavan, screenshot from here

As an intro, he mentions a piece in the Wall Street Journal by diagnostic radiologist Grazie Pozo Christie, talking, as Klavan says,

about how the science behind Roe v. Wade, which is about to come up, to be challenged before the Supreme Court—the science behind Roe v. Wade is out of date. With the tools that we now have, we can see that a baby at 15 weeks is a human being. It’s alive. It’s kicking, scratching himself. And it is in this mother’s body, being nurtured, being kept alive.

In the wake of that mounting scientific evidence, here’s what this crazy TikTok woman says:

screenshot from here

At no point ever has it mattered whether it’s just a clump of cells or a fully fledged person already accepted to Harvard University. It has never ever mattered when life begins. The point is that a person cannot use another person’s body without their permission. By forcing women to share their bodies with fetuses to keep them alive, you’re actually suggesting that fetuses should have more rights than any other person in the world, and that people with uteruses should have less rights. If you want a fetus to have the same rights as other people, I hate to break it to you, but you’d be pro-choice.

So, all those decades when the pro-abortion crowd claimed it was just a clump of cells, or that viability mattered—those were lies all along. But looking at this woman’s now bold claim, there’s a lot in there that seems obtusely unaware of how babies are made. I shouldn’t have to point out this biological fact, but, except in cases of rape, there’s a voluntary act that results in pregnancy. It isn’t, as Andrew Klavan points out, someone coming along and forcing a human being up inside of you. It’s a procreative act. We know what it is that results in pregnancy.

So the flaw in her argument is “a person cannot use another person’s body without their permission.” Engaging in the procreative act is granting permission. It’s more than that; it’s an invitation.

Metaphorically speaking, you can’t invite someone over to your house for dinner and then shoot them for trespassing on your property.

Even more metaphorically accurate, you can’t invite them—and hire the Uber driver to bring them to your house—and then kill them for trespassing on your property.

Except in the very rare instances when a pregnant mother’s life is on the line—which more than likely means the baby’s life is at risk as well—the baby’s presence in the womb is not a threat to the mother’s life. And in those rare cases, the medical community and doctors agree that you save both when possible; when that is not possible, you prioritize saving the mother.

So the castle doctrine doesn’t really apply here.

image found here

You don’t get to invite people to your house, bring them inside with the promise of feeding them dinner, and then kill them for trespassing because of the inconvenience of having to feed them when you failed to note the invitation on your calendar.

You don’t invite them inside and then kill them—and announce to the world that you had the right to do that—so they wouldn’t interfere with your career or travel plans. You don’t invite someone to your house for dinner and then get to indulge in resentment for their showing up. You don’t invite them unless you plan to provide. (This is why abstinence before marriage and complete fidelity within marriage has been such a good idea for so many millennia.)

If you invite the guest, and then, once they’ve arrived, you suddenly find your plumbing has gone out, or your stove doesn’t turn on, and it’s going to be a hardship—you still just do your best to get through dinner. You don’t at any point kill the invited guest for showing up at what isn’t a good time for you.

It’s not like you can tell the invited guest already in your living room that this isn’t a good evening for dinner after all, so they should leave and come again some other evening. Because “going,” in the case of pregnancy, involves snuffing out the life of the guest—so there cannot be a next time for that person.

The crazy TikTok woman speaks as though some cabal of cruel conservative humans is forcing her to host another person in her body. But that “cabal” is God, who made us in a way so that we can miraculously participate in procreating—in bringing new life into the world. If the woman doesn’t believe in God (and that’s a safe assumption), then it’s the nature that arranged for procreation to happen in similar manner in pretty much all mammalian species.

The pro-abortion opinion is premised on a denial of reality. The denial that women are different from men is the denial of nature. And the significant difference between men and women is the ability to get pregnant and bear a child. Denying that fact erases women as important for being women. Everything about the “right” to kill an unborn child says that bearing the child is unimportant—the unique difference about women is unimportant. But going to school, having a career, indulging in sex without consequence, or whatever other life pursuit—those are important. Everything supersedes womanhood. It says there is more fulfillment in having a career like a man. It says indulging in sex without worrying about getting pregnant—like a man in a decaying society—is what a woman should want. She “shouldn’t be punished with a baby” for being a woman; we should pretend she is more like a man and manipulate reality, even dispose of a baby, to make it seem so.

There is nothing about abortion that is empowering to women. Everything about it denies the unique value of being a woman.

The crazy TokTok woman might be evil. Or she might just be self-centered and duped. She did not come up with the argument she is giving here. She is parroting an argument fed to her by people more entrenched in evil.

In Michael Knowles book Speechless, he says, “No social relation influences the ‘human essence’ more than sex, which sits at the center of every creation account.” He lists a few such accounts to illustrate. And then adds,

Sex also plays a role in the construction and destruction of society’s fundamental institution: the family. Culture-minded Marxists have long understood that any successful “march through the institutions” must overcome the family.

The denial of family, favoring the individual, plays into the hands of those who devalue the individual and value only the collective. That’s why you don’t find pro-life Marxists, only pro-abortion Marxists.

There’s a selfishness that’s obvious. But refusing to become a family doesn’t lead to “being able to do whatever you want”; it actually leads to doing whatever the tyrannical ruler allows.

It’s a trap. It’s the same trap the adversary has used since the beginning: “I’ll take care of you; you just have to surrender your free will so I can make you do what I command.”

We’re getting down to the bottom of something here.

At the Spherical Model, we often point out that civilization requires two foundational things: a religious people who honor God, life, family, truth, and property ownership (that’s a summary of the Ten Commandments); and the family must be supported as the basic unit of civilization.

If you want to destroy civilization, you attack the foundation. Abortion dishonors God and His creations; it dishonors life; it dishonors truth; and most particularly it dishonors family.

And what do you get when you destroy civilization? Savagery. We rightly think it’s savage for a culture to sacrifice children to their idols. It’s pagan and horrifying. But that is what we’re looking at in our modern pro-abortion culture. People like this woman spouting off on a social media platform are trying to frame baby killing as the logical and right thing—calling evil good. She is so smug as she says, “I hate to break it to you,” as though we were too stupid to see the rightness of her position before, but now that she’s explained things to us, we should simply acquiesce—when she was too stupid to know how pregnancy happens.

Texas Heartbeat law illustration found here

The savage crowd are weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth about the recent Texas abortion law, outlawing abortion after a heartbeat can be detected. During September and October, since the Heartbeat Bill took effect, abortions in the state dropped by 50%. That’s an estimated 2,149 babies not aborted. It’s hard to say whether women went elsewhere, or whether they rethought abortion and reconsidered giving birth. If that represents the 50% not aborted, that still leaves another 2,149 babies who were killed during that two months.

The separation between savagery and civilization is indicated by those who regret not getting another 2,149 babies killed (savagery) and those who regret that, even with the law, there were still 2,149 babies killed (on the way to civilization).

What kind of a person invites an innocent human being into their life and then kills them? A savage. What kind of a person convinces a woman that her ability to bring life into the world is a punishment put upon people with a uterus by an unfair society? An uglier savage. And probably a Marxist. Definitely an anti-free-will tyrant.

Don’t Forget That We Need Fathers

There’s a question to ask with the statement, “I need ….” Why do you need it? What do you need it in order to do? You might find out, by exploring the question, that you may only want something, but not really require it. Or you may find that you do require something, and you’ll come to understand why that thing is essential.

The other day Andrew Klavan (how many times have I quoted him at the top of a post lately? It’s from 7 minutes onward in this clip) suggested that one trouble with woke, or leftist, culture is that it is forgetting obvious things that have always been known. He says,

Every great civilization dies by forgetting the obvious thing…. And they want to make sure that your children forget it too. The culture war is the war.

I believe that among these forgotten things is the fact that we need fathers.

Why do we need fathers? What do we need them in order to do?

We need them to fill the role in the basic unit of civilization—the family—that fathers must do.

Dennis Prager recently put out one of his 5-minute videos asking and answering the question, “Are Fathers Necessary?” Yes, is the answer. Yes, fathers are essential.

screenshot from Dennis Prager's PragerU video "Are Fathers Necessary?"

After listing several publications showing the answer has been forgotten, Prager quotes Barack Obama, from a 2008 speech, saying fathers are “critical” to families, that “they are teachers and coaches; they are mentors and role models; they are examples of success; and they are the men who constantly push us toward it.”

That speech wasn’t disqualifying to Obama as a candidate, so that must mean, as recently as 2008, this basic truth was in the public consciousness. So it’s only recently that it has been forgotten.

But it’s still true.

Prager goes through some of what we know through social science data[i], showing that both boys and girls need fathers. First, for boys:

A boy has no built-in understanding about how to be a man—meaning a good and responsible man. Male nature is wild—most obviously regarding sex and violence. If a boy does not have a father who models how a man controls himself, he will most likely not know how to control himself—let alone want to. That's why most males in prison for violent crimes grew up without a father.

After days of riots in the UK in 2011, quite like the 2020 riots in America, Cristina Odone wrote a column for The London Telegraph whose title says it all: “London riots: Absent fathers have a lot to answer for.” In the column, she wrote, “The majority of rioters are gang members…. Like the overwhelming majority of youth offenders behind bars, these gang members have one thing in common: no father at home.”

The way social science data works is, it’s about the odds. It doesn’t mean that mothers never successfully raise boys on their own. It means the odds are against them. It means that, if you take a large number of people where boys are raised without fathers and compare them to large numbers of boys with both parents, the fatherless boys have a much higher likelihood of bad outcomes than boys raised with both mother and father.

According to family researcher Glenn T. Stanton, in Secure Daughters, Confident Sons,

Anthropologists tell us that the primary problem in every human community throughout time and place is always the same: the unattached, undisciplined male. His male nature—with its raw physical strength and energies, appetite for food, drink, and sex and even violence—needs to be domesticated and even socialized.

Next, for girls, Prager says this about fathers and daughters:

Mr. Spherical Model and granddaughter.
Masks are still required on the tram ride at
Space Center Houston, but we had fun
taking yet another generation there.

As regards daughters, the father is the man girls learn to relate to. Without a father to relate to and bond with, there are at least two destructive consequences. First, she will not know how to choose a man wisely. She will not know how a man should treat her, and she may well end up with a man who mistreats her. Second, to fulfill her desire to bond with a man—as primal a yearning in most women as bonding with a woman is in most men—she will go from man to man. Girls without fathers in their lives are far more likely to be sexually promiscuous, and to begin sexual activity at an earlier age, which in turn are reasons many young women are depressed. Few women find sleeping with man after man fulfilling. Most find it ultimately depressing.

It isn’t a matter of simply having two parents—of whatever sex—to help with the parenting; it is that fathers and mothers contribute particular things to the family. Some of this is borne out in data surrounding children raised by two same-sex parents. There’s this summary of the data from 2013, in a piece by Michael Bauman: 

Compared to children who were raised in intact homes with both the biological father and mother present to raise them, the children of homosexual parents grow up to:

•                   Be Much more likely to receive welfare.

•                   Have lower educational attainment.

•                   Report more ongoing “negative impact” from their family of origin.

•                   Be more likely to suffer from depression.

•                   Have been arrested more often.

•                   (If they are female) Have had more sexual partners—both male and female.

If they were the children of lesbian mothers, they are:

•                   More likely to be currently cohabiting.

•                   Almost 4 times more likely to be currently on public assistance.

•                   Less likely to be currently employed full-time.

•                   More than 3 times more likely to be unemployed.

•                   Nearly 4 times more likely to identify as something other than entirely heterosexual.

•                   Three times as likely to have had an affair while married or cohabiting.

•                   An astonishing 10 times more likely to have been “touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver.”

•                   Nearly 4 times as likely to have been “physically forced” to have sex against their will.

•                   More likely to have “attachment” problems related to the ability to depend on others.

•                   Use marijuana more frequently.

•                   Smoke more frequently.

•                   Have more often pled guilty to a non-minor offense.

Whenever a family is missing a mother or a father, the children are missing something essential to their upbringing. If we recognize that this father-shaped piece is missing, we might be able to compensate—with another father figure, maybe a grandfather, uncle, coach, teacher, or minister.

There’s a dad who saw what was lacking, and took it upon himself to fill in a bit. He teaches people, through short videos, how to do basic skills that typically a father would teach. “Dad, How Do I?” shows how to tie a tie, how to iron a dress shirt, how to shave, how to jumpstart a car, how to fix a toilet, and even something as important as how to have integrity. A video might not make up for the absence of the father, but at least it’s a resource to help out the moms, who can’t teach it all.

screenshot from "Dad, How Do I" video on how to iron a dress shirt

But if we fail to notice what has been obvious to civilizations for millennia—that children need a mother and a father—and suddenly think we know better, we leave that gap. And it’s the children who suffer.

We’ve looked here at what happens with a missing father. But, in honor of Father’s Day coming up soon (a week from Sunday), let’s also list what fathers-doing-the-dad-thing-right provide. I offered this list in 2019. And when I wrote it, I had adapted it from this article. 

·       Children who come into families with loving fathers know they were wanted, planned on, and welcomed. If affects their identity in positive ways today’s society should know better than to take for granted.

·       Fathers fill a need. Without a father in that role, there’s a father-shaped hole in the child’s life that good mother can’t fill.[ii] It’s not just about love; it’s about the security and protection that a good father represents, allowing a child to feel secure enough to explore the world and grow to potential.

·       Fathers work to generate the wealth necessary to provide for a wife and children—far beyond the typical earnings of non-fathers, and also far beyond what non-resident fathers provide even when required by law. These good fathers create a sense of worth in the child that some other resource—such as welfare or even charity—could provide.

·       These good fathers modify their behavior; they become more civilized personally. They control their anger, their language, their aggression around the woman and children they love—thus modeling civilization for that next generation.

·       Good fathers have a particular effect on their daughters. Daughters need the respect and love of a father to know to value themselves with the men in their lives. This helps daughters grow socially, with self-respect, better able to accomplish their personal goals and better able to resist men who would not be good partners in marriage.

·       Good fathers have a particular effect on their sons. Boys in particular need the example of male role models in order to grow into civilized, socialized men.

·       Good fathers channel the use of power toward defense and protection, rather than toward aggression. They protect the family both physically and morally. This eliminates male predatory behavior toward women and children. And it eliminates aggressive force among larger societies—nations—for any reason but defense.

 I heard earlier this week, on Glenn Beck radio, a parent complain that their child was given the writing prompt on an AP exam, “Explain the benefits to society if marriage didn’t exist.” The answer is easy—a blank page. But that doesn’t get you any kind of passing grade on such an exam. That question could only be asked by those who have forgotten obvious things—and are insisting no one else should remember those things either. Because the culture war is the war. 

The forgetful—those pressuring for some experiment that doesn’t include mother-father families—ought to try a better experiment. As I said in 2019 and still stand by:

 

If all men were living civilized lives within families, many of the world’s ills would disappear: war, famine, poverty, tyranny, bullying, abuse. We would still have illness, accident, and natural disasters. But we’d also have the strong help to face those things.

 

---

[i] I suggest this compilation of social science data: “Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences” by family scholars, for the Institute of American Values, 2011. 

[ii] The piece I adapted my list from included this anecdote: “And that longing can hardly be extinguished: a never-married San Francisco professional with a young child was stunned by it: ‘My son began asking for his father before he was two. I’ll never forget it. He said, “Why no daddy?” with the reference to Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage, pp. 54-56.

What Matters Most

I spent a chunk of time this week listening to testimony in the Texas legislature. It’s all streamed live online, and archived later. We’re in the final week for bills to be heard in committee hearings and still have any chance at all of getting through the remaining bill stages.

Wednesday I was listening to testimony on a couple of abortion bills. One was a heartbeat bill, similar to those already passed in other states. It would make abortion illegal after a heartbeat is detected—around 8 weeks gestation. It doesn’t, however, acknowledge that the baby growing in the womb was human life before that heartbeat-detecting moment. I also learned recently that it is fairly easy for an abortion technician—getting paid to be part of the abortion-performing act—to either find a heartbeat or fail to find a heartbeat at will. So, while the supporters of this bill are well-meaning, I don’t think it goes far enough.

Another bill in the hearing conferred personhood on the unborn, which I think is the appropriate way to go. There were plenty of opponents, of course. One of them struck me, this week coming up on Mother’s Day, as dystopian.

The woman told her story. Several years ago, she was running for her seat (I think in the Texas Senate, but it might be in the House), and hadn’t announced yet that she was pregnant. But she was ghastly sick with “morning sickness,” which wasn’t confined to morning; it was all day every day. She had a condition called “hyperemesis gravidarum,” which is severe nausea and could be life-threatening because of loss of fluids. As she tells it, people used to die from that condition. I’ve actually known a couple of people who went through this. Both were hospitalized for significant portions of their pregnancies. Fluids may need to be given intravenously. Antiemetics may help, but not enough.

I don’t know what this woman had to do to survive throwing up twelve times a day. But she not only survived; she was able to successfully run for office.

She claims that, knowing she had options—and she means the option to kill her baby, whom she now claims to love and be grateful for—was what got her through. Just knowing that, if it got too rough, she could kill the baby. Now, the bill in question has an exception when the life of the mother is at stake; if the attempt to save both lives is not possible, the doctor prioritizes saving the life of the mother. The subtext of what she’s saying then is, if it’s harder than she bargained for, she wanted to have the “right” to kill the other human being experiencing that pregnancy.

She told of another woman who had a similar condition and already had a toddler running around. She made the choice to abort, because she wasn’t physically able to care for her existing child otherwise. I wonder if, in later years, she will lovingly say, “I killed your baby brother, because you were too hard to care for.”

I know I sound unsympathetic. But I’ve been through some pretty challenging pregnancies—none of which I could have survived while running for office.

I’ve lost a child born premature. I’ve spent months bedridden (three months with my oldest, six with each of the other two). I’ve done it with a toddler running around, and I couldn’t get up to manage him. My husband was gone all day to work. I managed part of days, with a little one bringing me diapers so I could change them from the couch where I lay. I was a huge burden on friends and church congregations—who amazingly seemed to love me more because I needed their help.

That's me, mothering from the couch, for most of 1987

When you can't get up to feed your 2-year-old,
he will somehow find a way.

It wasn’t convenient. It wasn’t easy. The last one, I came to a point I thought I couldn’t endure, when I’d gone several months unable to sleep more than 3-4 hours before waking for the next miserable 24-36 hours before I needed to try to sleep again. You get close to hallucination when that sleep deprived. At the point I thought I couldn’t go on, about nine weeks early, I was asking when we might need to induce so I would survive. But I had a spiritual blessing at that time that eased my burden from that day onward, and I endured. She was born on her due date, a beautiful, healthy 9 lb. 14 oz., 22 ½-inch baby. And I learned that God is there for me, to carry me through when I’m not strong enough on my own.

For me, abortion was never an option, because I always knew I was dealing with a beautiful, innocent, human life.

Last week Andrew Klavan spent much of his podcast talking about dystopian stories. He went through parts of 1984, Brave New World, The Giver, The Stepford Wives, and a story called “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas.” And he drew some conclusions. First, this short observation about The Stepford Wives:

What’s really interesting is the children in Stepford become happy when the women are dedicated to them. One of the points of it is—it’s not a totally feminist book. It’s sort of saying, “Yes, homemaking is a sacrificial act.” Being a homemaker is, in some sense, a sacrificial act. You’re pouring yourself into other people. That is what—that’s to me what makes it so beautiful.  

In this story, of course, if women don’t want to do it, they turn them into robots. So, about dystopian societies in general, he says,

The dystopian novel, the dystopian story, in order to be a story, depends on you having those values. It depends on your having the moral understanding that, in order to achieve this perfect world, something terrible has been done.

He illustrates with The Giver, the scene where The Giver, the older man mentoring the boy, Jonas, who is the main character, shows the boy his father euthanizing an infant. Here’s the dialogue from the clip:

Jonas: That’s death.

The Giver: He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Jonas: Doesn’t know what he’s doing? He killed him.

The Giver: But he doesn’t know what it means….

Jonas: How can he not see the baby isn’t moving? Doesn’t that tell him something is wrong?

The Giver: The young and the old are killed. Your friend Fiona—she will soon be trained to release as well.

Jonas: That’s a lie. She’d never do that. If Fiona understood—

The Giver: We are the only ones who understand it.

Jonas: Then it’s our fault—you and me, and all the receivers back and back and back and back and back. There has to be a way to show them, to give them the memory so they can understand. Because, if you can’t feel, what’s the point?

Scene from The Giver
screenshot from Andrew Klavan's podcast

Klavan’s response to this is,

It’s only a dystopia to the people who understand what they are doing. The people who “know not what they do,” like the people who kill Christ, think they’re doing the right thing. They think they’re living in utopia. It’s only a dystopia because of our moral impulses. Right?

It’s just like abortion. Abortion works. Abortion frees women of the responsibilities of the—and the consequences of having sex. Abortion does make their life easier. Abortion does make it so that they don’t, you know, get raped or make a stupid decision and wind up with a baby for life. It works. The only reason it doesn’t work is if you have the moral sense to know that it’s killing. If they can talk us out of our morality, dystopia becomes utopia. You can slaughter your way to perfection.

Someone has been doing the lying, telling people not to value that human life. Not to value motherhood, or parenting, or nurturing, or self-sacrificing at all.

We ought to be telling young people—young women in particular—the truth, that there is nothing she can do that will be more meaningful than giving life and nurturing that child. (If she knew how important it was, she wouldn’t be risking it for sex with a man who isn’t committed to her in marriage. But we’ll save that for another day.)

Jordan Peterson had a conversation with Patrick Bet-David on his Valuetainment podcast. Bet-David showed a clip from a conversation they had together in July of 2019, and then asked him about it. This is Jordan Peterson from that clip:

Little children pay you back immensely, if you have a good relationship with them, you know, if you’re on their side and encourage them, because they’re an unconditional source of joy and love. [long standing ovation]

You know, the other thing I noticed that you should all know is that, as you get older, your family—the family you’ve produced—becomes more and more important.

We teach young women in particular that the fundamental goal of their life is going to be their career. And, you know, first of all, most people don’t have careers; they have jobs. And those are very different things. But you’re not a very happy camper, so to speak, if you’re 45 and you have no one, and it doesn’t go upwards after that.

Patrick Bet-David, left, and Jordan Peterson
screenshot from here

Later in the podcast Peterson refers back to this clip, and shares some more about what makes him happy. He talks about the joy he’s had from touring and talking with people. And then this:

You know, what makes me most happy right now is when my family gets together. So that’s my immediate family: my wife, my kids, and their spouses. And there’s no— There’s nothing buried underneath the rugs. And everyone’s joking and laughing and playing. And that’s— And it’s peaceful. It’s truly peaceful. And that does happen.

He talks about spending time with his son’s family—who live just up the street, and with whom they have a deep and rich relationship, and they have a peace-filled home. And there’s a grandson there.

Their little boy is laughing. He’s playing with laughing. We had some people over for Easter dinner, my son and his wife and a couple of friends of theirs. And they had a little baby named Florence, and she was also the same age, and she was playing with laughing. So she would go “Ha ha ha!” And then this little—my grandson Elliot, would go “Ha ha ha!” And then all the adults would laugh, because these two infants were actually having a conversation with each other—a proto-conversation with laughter. That lasted for about 10 minutes, and everyone was laughing about it. And, well, there isn’t anything better than that.

C. S. Lewis quote image found on Pinterest

Why don’t we tell young people? There isn’t anything better than that. There’s a lot to life, to using our interests and talents and abilities, and making a living. But that making a living, it has a purpose beyond itself. As C. S. Lewis put it,

Homemaking is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, mines, cars, government, etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes?... The homemaker’s job is one for which all others exist.

This is not to say you can’t be happy if you can’t have children. But to think that children are a burden, instead of the very thing that nurtures you into adulthood and gives you reason for living beyond yourself—you simply don’t understand what life is for. All creatures take joy in “filling the measure of their creation” and take joy in their offspring. But only humans have the capacity to understand what that means. When we forget that, we are less human.

It’s not easy. And while I’ve seen some friends who appear to me to be perfect at it, no one actually is. But with God’s help, what you do as a mother can be enough.

One of my favorite speakers, who speaks so many words of encouragement, is Jeffrey R. Holland. He was President of Brigham Young University when I was working on campus many years ago, and I used to pass him and wave hello on my way to my office as he was walking to his. Anyway, he said this:

If I’ve passed on any message to my children, I hope it is that they know I love them and think they were worth any sacrifice I could manage. And, even though I was imperfect at it, I trust that God filled in the differences. He does that in our lives, because He is the ultimate loving parent.

Happy Mother’s Day to all those who know what that means.

Lies Become the Narrative

Andrew Klavan, the other day, was talking about what happens when you face continual lies. He started with an example of a young woman he encountered many years ago who kept lying. After long hours of continual lies, he faced a sort of warped sense of reality:

Andrew Klavan, Episode 1028
screenshot from here

I found that I was living inside her lies. So, it’s not exactly that I was starting to believe her; it’s that I was starting to react as if what she said was true, because I was debating with her what disease she had when she had no disease.

And the reason for that is, I’m not insane. It takes an insane person to think that every single thing he’s being told is a lie. Right? To think that you’re living in the matrix, or a simulation, you know, is the kind of thing a crazy person believes. And yet, right now we are effectively living in a simulation—created by this massive telecommunications media empire that the left has assembled; the woke businesses that have taken on being part of the oligarchy the government wants to form; and the government officials were being backed up by the media.

So we’re kind of living in this matrix. And you have to be insane to think that that’s true—and yet it is true.

I spend a certain amount of energy trying to understand people who believe things I know to be lies. I don’t think I’m better at discerning outright lies in normal life situations than the next person. Maybe I’m less skilled. As a truth teller, I tend to go into a situation with the assumption someone is telling me the truth face-to-face. When that isn’t true, it kind of twists my gut, and I have to puzzle it out, maybe re-prove what I know to be true.

I’ve been fascinated for a couple of years by people who “read body language,” for lack of a better way of saying that. There’s this website, and this group on YouTube for example. They aren’t exactly lie detectors, but they can tell better than most of us what someone’s body is telling about what that person is thinking or feeling. These places teach their skills; next time I’m ready to put in about enough time to learn a new language, I may have to dive in, instead of just observe and marvel at what they do.

But Andrew Klavan’s explanation struck me. People aren’t exactly crazy for believing the crazy things they believe; they’re acting like a sane person acts when they have been repeatedly lied to by someone in authority.

One example he showed was a clip of a congresswoman in California, commenting about her nine-year-old daughter, whose thought about climate change was, “The earth is on fire, and we’re all going to die soon.” Why does the nine-year-old believe the earth is on fire when, other than the occasional brush fire or forest fire (which, granted, do significant damage in California every year or two), the earth is not on fire? Why does she assume the entire population of the earth, all of us, are going to die soon? For a nine-year-old, I’m assuming “soon” means maybe before she gets to enjoy adulthood. Let’s say twelve years—since that has been a repeated time frame of impending doom since the 1960s. This girl wasn’t even alive to hear Al Gore predict it various times—all over 12 years ago. But she may have heard AOC or Greta Thunberg—another young girl who only believes it because she has been told to believe it. Most likely she had her mother and teachers lie to her.

Is that nine-year-old girl crazy? No. Klavan says,

In order for her nine-year-old to say, “All the adults around me are lying and making stuff up,” that would be nuts. That would actually be a mentally disturbed child. But this is a sane child, so she believes all the lies she’s being told.

But here’s what happens, Klavan says, every time we have to address a lie:

Fighting back against these lies makes the lie the narrative…. If you have to defend the fact that police shootings aren’t a problem, police shootings become the narrative.

Klavan showed a Fox News clip of a professor, Eric Kaufman, who had done a university-funded survey in which they had asked people, “Which is the more likely cause of death for young black men in America? Is it car accident? Or is it to be shot by police?” The actual verifiable statistics show that death by car accident is 10-fold more likely. But he mentioned these groups of people who believe death by police bullet is more likely:

·         80% of African-American Biden voters.

·         70% of whites who believe Republicans are racist.

Klavan follow up with:

The lies become the narrative. And the narrative distorts the way you look at things. And then the way you look at things distorts your politics.

I took occasion to read the Democrat platform once, a few years ago. I expected—and of course found—multiple things where I simply didn’t agree, because, as we know, government interference tends to bring about unintended consequences that are likely to be the exact opposite of the stated objective. But what surprised me was how many policies were based on verifiable lies: about climate change being the biggest existential problem, about racism being a systemic problem with no evidence of improvement, about abortion being about a woman’s bodily autonomy and not about the additional living human being they cheer about snuffing out, about tribal victimization—such as skin color, sex, LGBTQ status—being the determining factor in who should control others.

In fact,

·       Women do not make $.70 for every $1.00 a man makes—once you take into account multiple variables, not least of which is women’s choices.

·       A minimum wage is not expected to be a living wage; it is entry level, to give experience—a contractual agreement made illegal by a minimum wage law, thus eliminating work for those who can’t yet bring in that high minimum of value to the employer.

·       Blacks do not need to live in fear of murder by police. Even the handful of annual cases where blacks suffer death by police show causes other than racism—even when the officer is at fault. Note that the Derek Chauvin case did not even bring evidence of racism to the courtroom—because the prosecution had no such evidence—even though that was the supposed basis for months of rioting in Minneapolis and around the country.

·       Blacks do not suffer systemic racism from everyone else in society; they suffer much less than during Democrat-caused Jim Crow laws; they suffer far, far less than under Democrat slave owners. Only racists care about race anymore; the rest of us care about character.

·       Black Lives Matter is an international Marxist organization, bent on the overthrow of self-governing people and any pillars of civilization those people have built—in particular the intact mother-father family, the destruction of which has caused more damage to black communities than any other.

·       America was not founded on slavery; it was founded on “all men are created equal,” and then began the task of living up to that ideal after millennia of slavery, including a few hundred years of whites enslaving blacks.

·       Climates change. No amount of draconian de-industrialization will change that in any measurable way. But a single volcanic eruption could wipe out a half century’s worth of lowered carbon emissions. (Note: If you read scriptures, dire world-ending events are much more likely to result from rebellion against God than from driving a gasoline fueled vehicle. But if you really have faith in lowered CO2, then, be my guest and show your faith by going back to horse-drawn transportation.)

·       Abortion isn’t healthcare, and it isn’t about a woman’s choices concerning her own body; it is killing living, human offspring.

·       Men and women are biologically different.

·       Married mother and father give children a better chance to grow up safe, protected, educated, and nurtured than any other institution or program could possibly do.

·       Criminals do not obey gun laws. And self-defense is a God-given right. Guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens prevent crimes.

The list could go on. You get the idea. Let’s add a couple we’ve learned this past year:

·       Virus spread isn’t prevented by wearing a cloth mask, wearing a mask outside, wearing a mask while also social distancing, wearing a mask when you have immunity from having the virus or getting vaccinated. And viruses don’t magically stop spreading once you’re eating or “protesting.”

·       Treatments have been available for over a year now to reduce and relieve symptoms: hydroxychloroquine along with zinc and zithromycin; ivermectin; increased amounts of Vitamin D and probably Vitamin C and other immune system boosters—all of which you weren’t allowed to say on social media, and many doctors were prevented from sharing.

·       Science does not say schools should close, or businesses should be forced to shutter, or churches should be disallowed—even outside in parking lots. And we now have reliable evidence that some scientists are just as capable of lying as other humans. We also have evidence that scientists have no business forming public policy.

·       Our God-given rights should never be infringed. Any time they are, that is tyranny—even during an “emergency.” If all it took was an emergency to take away our God-given rights, governments would simply declare perpetual emergencies.     

Who is doing all this lying? People we were raised to believe we could believe: elected officials, their appointees, academia. “NBC lies to them. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Coca-Cola, Delta, Disney.”

And why are they lying? Klavan speculates that it’s to cover up for their failed policies. He’s likely right about that:

You know what it’s like, it’s like a cigarette maker telling us the crisis we have in this country is not enough cough drops. You know, “Oh, you’re coughing up blood? Dammit, you know, it’s the cough drop companies. We have got to do something about the cough drop companies. Have a cigarette, and I’ll get right on it.” That’s what this is like. An entire power structure, we’re surrounded by an entire power structure whose policy failures, and whose incredible debt, and whose moral failures have made it necessary for them to distract us from their increasing power and wealth by turning us against one another. We are living inside their lies.

One question that ought to come up is, how do I know they’re lying and I’m not just wrong? Evidence is one thing. And once evidence of lying comes up a time or two from a particular source, you start looking skeptically at everything that source says. Sometimes it’s worth digging up the actual facts—when you can find reliable sources. (Fact checkers can be liars too, and most are.) Sometimes the liars ought to just be disregarded.

Except that you have to fight them, because they’re trying to brainwash our children, and they’re trying to take away our ability to get and share actual facts, and they’re trying to do damage to our ability to make a living and buy and sell and associate—the things people do in a thriving civilization. So we have to fight the lies, and not just ignore them.

image found here

But, if combatting the lies puts us in the position of making their lies the narrative, the real question is, how do you combat the lies—and the narrative they engender?

Klavan suggests living in truth. Embody the truth. He doesn’t mean just shouting truth louder. He doesn’t even mean run for school board or attend school board meetings—although you should do that too. It comes down to treating others truthfully—being who you really are. Be kind. Be wise. Be generous. Be caring. So that the lies they tell about you don’t ring true to anyone who knows you personally.

I’ll add, if you feel the need to point to your black friends to show you’re not racist, you’re doing it wrong. Your denials won’t prove who you are; rather, it validates the accusation. But the way you actually treat people, all the time, just might prove who you are.

And also speak the truth. After all, the people you’re speaking truth to aren’t demented; they’re deceived. And for many of them, at some point they will question that matrix they’re in; then they’ll step out of the lies and into truth—where we welcome them.

It's Not Over

Don’t go insane. You can get mad, but don’t go mad.—Andrew Klavan 

I was going to debrief our pretty good poll working experience, and then get on with the insanity. But this was too long. Let me just say, one of our new workers was pleasantly surprised; no one got angry all day. If you run things smoothly, you can avoid irritable voters—while preventing fraud.

There’s a long list of voting irregularities and outright fraud in Harris County. Observing from afar, my lawyer son says, “Your County Clerk belongs in jail.” But we’ll save that list for another day. Lawsuits are underway. But today, the national election is more at issue.

President Donald Trump, Thursday press briefing
screenshot from here

 

Sharpie-Gate

One voter fraud situation I have personal knowledge of is Sharpie-gate. We first heard of it from Mr. Spherical Model’s brother in Arizona. There were polling places in multiple states that handed out Sharpie permanent markers to use to mark paper ballots. Sharpies can bleed through, and that causes problems for the optical readers. And the ballots get rejected.

A friend said online that, from now on, if it doesn’t come from Reuters, she doesn’t want to hear it. No more news from friends’ Facebook posts or blogs. While I question her choice of authoritative news, I offer my anecdotal report anyway. When I mentioned this on a Facebook thread, I got called out for spreading rumors from a friend’s Facebook post. But that’s not what I was doing; I was sharing direct knowledge from an extended family member, and I hadn't yet heard of it anywhere else. So to me it wasn’t rumor. More news came out later—so the attack guy probably should have held his peace for a while.

My BIL took his marked absentee ballot to the polling place and turned it in as his vote, and his counted; they have a place you can go to online to check whether your vote is accounted for. His wife filled out her ballot at the polling place, using the Sharpie marker provided by poll workers. When she checked online, hers had been rejected. In addition, they have multiple relatives around the state who had the same issue. Those in Democrat areas had no problem; those in Republican areas had their votes rejected. It’s a small sample, but enough to make them personally suspicious.

My SIL was able to cure her ballot (verify it and get it counted) by Thursday morning, but at least three other relatives have not been able to get theirs counted yet as I write this.

Arizona Republican officials give press briefing Thursday
screenshot from here

Arizona has a hotline for people to call and report when they have this problem. It looks like, at least for those complaining, they will eventually be able to cure their ballots. It just may take a while. And the expectation is that, eventually, Trump wins Arizona’s 11 electoral votes.

·         Check your BALLOT STATUS HERE: https://my.arizona.vote/AbsenteeTracker.aspx

·         IF it says “cancelled,” file a COMPLAINT HERE: https://www.azag.gov/criminal/eiu

Catherine Engelbrecht, on the True the Vote podcast, said she first heard about the Sharpie problem from hotline reports out of California, North Carolina, and Michigan. It was when the calls started coming from Arizona, and then Nevada, that she realized it wasn’t an anomaly; it was widespread. She said, 

Now, there’s new details coming in on this. And as I said at the top of this broadcast, this is raw, right, so we don’t have some of the details that we will have throughout the day that will help glue some of this together. But what we have been told is that there was a company, particularly in Michigan, that was responsible for passing out Sharpies. That’s one data point. Another data point, out of North Carolina was that some of the Republican election workers—and you may have seen this in our Twitter feed late last night—the authorities had the sheriffs called in on them, sheriff’s, law enforcement called on them for trying to not use Sharpies, and using ballpoint pens instead, because it wasn’t spoiling the ballots.

We’ll see how that turns out. But, yes, poll workers saw the Sharpies were spoiling ballots, so they went and got ballpoint pens, and someone called the cops on them—for making sure their voters’ votes were not spoiled! I’d like to know who called the cops and what crime did they claim had been perpetrated.

 

Mail-in Ballots

On Andrew Klavan’s show, he wryly headlined his post with this: 

If only someone had predicted that mail-in voting would be a chaotic mess!

Of course we knew this would be the outcome. The only scenario that would not have worked out this way would have been a decisive, unquestioned, fairly counted Biden win. We knew that wasn’t going to happen. The multitudes at Trump rallies, compared to pathetically few at the purposely scarce Biden appearances, told us that.

I know this was a misspeak,
but we heard him say it and not correct it.
image found here

What we’re seeing play out is the Democrats’ plan A. They pushed every form of ballot chaos they could, well ahead of time.

One of the main points of contention is the counting of mail-in ballots. This is a new thing, special for this election. And they’re ripe for fraud; they’re missing most of the safeguards of in-person voting.

Yes, there are a few states who do it relatively successfully. They have a process in place, with years to have worked out issues. In particular, they clear out their voter rolls completely every two-year election cycle. People have to re-register or they do not get a ballot, and their registration includes their signature. They have a system of identifying that the enclosed ballot belongs to the registered voter who received it. (Still, I hear reports of people I know who have gone to the polls in person only to find that someone else had already voted in their name.)

There’s nevertheless a span of time when the ballot is “in the mail” and could be tampered with, or “lost.” So it will never be as secure as in-person. There’s also no way to have observers verify that the voter wasn’t intimidated or coerced or influenced as they filled out their ballot. That’s why absentee ballots are typically a last resort way of voting, reserved for those who cannot make it to the polling place in person—not on election day nor during early voting. It’s a courtesy for elderly voters and for active military, so it’s usually a small, manageable number that are not likely to sway an election.

But the places that do mass mail-in successfully do not send out ballots to people who have long since moved, or died, or never existed, or never registered in the first place. In our county, where the county clerk printed ballot applications to send out to every voter (because he couldn’t get away with sending actual ballots to uncleared voter rolls) spent millions on the printing, and then was prevented by law from sending them out to people who had not requested them. Still, he sent probably a million. Some households got several ballots more than the number of people living there.

President Trump warned about this months ahead of time. And the experience of many places in primary and runoff votes showed they could not—maybe ever—determine the outcome of the election in a timely and just manner. The sudden use of mail-in ballots—especially without the legislature putting safeguards in place—is dangerous and probably illegal.

The news media use President Trump’s warning against him, saying he’s stirring up lack of trust in the process.

Not so. There is a fairly simple solution to lack of trust: transparency. You have observers from both parties view every interaction with every ballot, and work together to determine the eligibility of each vote.

But that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing Democrats thwart the observation. Purposely. Intentionally. Breaking the law by denying access. (See video here from the TCF Center in Detroit, Michigan.) 

The Democrats are acting like people trying to steal the election—with the added bonus of causing loss of trust in the system.

The President is resolute. I’m glad to see it. And he explains it well. This isn’t about him or any other particular candidate winning; it’s about us, the American voters, having our votes counted accurately.

Democrats keep saying “Count every vote.” Republicans are saying “Count every legal vote.” It echoes the immigration fight: “The Republicans hate immigrants,” versus the truth: “Republicans welcome legal immigrants.”

Let me put it this way, every illegal vote that is counted disenfranchises a legal vote. Notice which party is intent on disenfranchising voters.

Fox News screenshot, found here

 

The Suspicious Six

So, the Sharpie states seem to be among the suspicious six: Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. [Other states, including New York, used Sharpies, maybe without issues. I’m wondering about differences in the paper used, or in the optical scanners.] All six have Democrats in charge of voting. All six had President Trump leading or quickly gaining—until around 3:00 AM (Eastern?) Wednesday morning. Then they stopped counting. For several hours.

I can’t emphasize enough how odd this is. You don’t stop the counting in the middle of the process. Ever. For any reason. I think it was Georgia that claimed their pause had to do with a pipe that burst—far away from the counting location and having no effect on it. Hmm. I’m unaware of any rational explanation from any location. Then, when they opened up again, suddenly there were huge Biden gains. As though they had just happened to come upon some surprise boxloads of votes, all of which went to Biden.

I found this on Facebook, an unofficial news source, but I think it’s well stated, by Jan N. Freeland: 

How come the people processing the ballots suddenly couldn't process anymore ballots at the same exact time in the same states in different time zones? Did they all have their break times synched with each other across the USA? Did they all have to go home at the same exact time? Why, for hours, weren't any of these missing ballots being tallied up?

One thing you learn when investigating is that coincidences need to be carefully examined, in the event of multiple coincidences happening at the same time, which points to a non-coincidence.

What we are seeing now is a carefully orchestrated backup plan; it is far too planned out to be a coincidence.

There were areas where, in entire townships, only single digits of votes went to Trump—in areas where he won last time. I defy you to find a voter who went for Trump last time but not this time. Let alone an entire township. It doesn’t happen. It’s such a statistical anomaly that you can say it cannot happen—except by voter fraud. Incidentally, during the 2000 Florida recount there were entire precincts without a single Bush vote—except for some spoiled ballots that got thrown out. So, yes, we’ve seen this before.

Also consider this, from Joy Pullman at The Federalist:    

It would be mystifying if Republicans won more seats in the House, retained the Senate, and picked up state legislative seats, all while the same voters voted against Trump. Trump has solidified his support among Republican voters and enjoys a massive approval rating from them he didn’t have in 2016, and expanded his coalition to more working-class and minority voters this year. This is not a blue wave year. This is a year that the blue wave of 2018 appears to be receding.

Yet we are supposed to believe the same media-Democrat complex that fed us wildly erroneous polls all year, and runs false information operations on us about coronavirus, the Russia hoax, and everything else they can use to steal power, that this blue wave’s evaporation did not at all affect the top of the ticket?

Something is amiss.

tweet from Mollie Hemingway

 

The Lawsuits

Our new State Republican Executive Committeewoman, Deborah Kelting Fife, was one of the original members of Catherine Engelbrecht’s True the Vote team. They’re the ones that taught me poll watching and ballot security law, back in 2010. Deborah says that Catherine

has offered assistance in reconciling votes across the Nation. Without going into detail, it would be a very simple process to electronically determine the number of times people voted, deceased votes, or felons, or illegals, or people that have moved out of the State, etc.

Trump wants to count every LEGAL ballot.

I know True the Vote is not the only group. If you have evidence of voter fraud issues or irregularities, here are some places to report:

·         True the Vote Election Integrity Hotline or 855-702-0702

·         Jay Sekulow, ACLJ Election Hotline 

·         Trump/Pence, Defend Your Ballot 

·         Brandon Straka, #StopTheSteal 

Rudy Giuliani said this about the President’s lawsuits: 

When these mail-in ballots that you know are highly suspicious anyway, this form of balloting has always been considered the most prone to fraud—that’s according to the New York Times when it didn’t apply to candidate President Trump—well, we were supposed to be allowed by law to observe the counting of the ballots. Now, observe means, to any intelligent person, being able to look at it. The way that it’s interpreted by the Democrat crooked machine of Philadelphia is that the observers can be 20 or 30 feet away, never able to see the ballot itself. Never able to see if it was properly postmarked, properly addressed, properly signed on the outside—all the things that often lead to disqualification of ballots, or make it easy to dump 50,000 totally fraudulent ballots, because they’re not observed. This went on for 20 hours. While all of you thought there was some kind of legitimate count going on here in Philadelphia, it was totally illegitimate.

Does it make a difference? It wouldn’t if people were honest. So, yes, it makes a difference. For example, in Wisconsin, the location of at least one of the President’s lawsuits, after a pause in counting suddenly 120,000 ballots show up. We have no way of knowing from where, or whether they’re legitimate at all. Because observers weren’t allowed to observe. That’s where they’re putting boards on windows so spectators can’t even look in.

According to Catherine Engelbrecht, even Democrat observers around the country are calling in to complain that no one is allowed to observe. Backroom shenanigans are being carried out. Vote counts aren’t just showing gradual rises, they’re showing vertical rises in favor of Biden. That doesn’t happen.

image found here

 

My Plan

Don’t give up on our beloved 233-year experiment in self-rule; our constitutional republic is a gift from God, worth preserving, whatever the cost.

Pray hard. Pray for God’s intervention in this darkness that is too heavy for us to bear alone.

Pray that every single incident of voter fraud is uncovered and made known—with consequences to follow. Pray for President Trump, and Vice President Pence, and their families. Pray for those working to uncover the voter fraud and bring it to light.

Pray that those who vote another way will see the corruption on their side and realize it doesn’t represent their beliefs; welcome them when they break away.

When you get up off your knees, take action. Spread the word. Volunteer. Bear one another’s burdens. And be of good cheer. Whatever comes, God’s plans will include you and your choice to serve Him.