Data Scientists Are the New Superheroes

Presidential election map, as of Nov. 9, 2020
The Epoch Times

We're still here, counting, and waiting to know the outcome of the election, despite what the media and Joe Biden have announced. People keep saying it's like Groundhog's Day; we wake up and live it over again.

We've been here before. It’s hard to consider that 2000 was now 20 years ago. College students today didn’t even experience what was happening then. So, here’s a little history lesson.

History Lesson

During that 2000 election, President George W. Bush was declared the winner of the presidential race the night of the election. Al Gore conceded. Then Gore retracted his concession and asked for a recount in Florida. Not all of Florida. Not in counties he thought he should have won but didn’t, leading him to be suspicious of voter fraud. Only in specific securely Gore-winning counties. The recount included precincts reporting zero votes for Bush, a statistical unlikelihood—even, you could say, an impossibility.

The more they “recounted,” the more votes they “found” for Gore. It was a suspicious process. It depended on subjective discernment of voter intent when a computer punch card hadn’t been punched correctly, leaving chads, the little rectangles that were supposed to be punched out, hanging, or pregnant (indented but not removed).

Long story short, the Florida Supreme Court got involved, overruling the laws of the state legislature in an attempt to achieve a particular outcome (a Gore win). The US Supreme Court stepped in—at the time still a Supreme Court during the Bill Clinton presidency—and stopped the Florida Supreme Court from breaking their own state laws. The outcome was to return victory to George W. Bush.

At the time, one of the interesting stories I came across on the internet was from a mathematician who proved, with math and logic, that what we were seeing was fraud. I wish I still had my hands on that article. But what I’m seeing this week is the enlargement of that story.

This year the fraud isn’t confined to a couple of hard-core Democrat counties willing to pad their numbers upon request; it is essentially Democrats in every swing state (and who knows beyond that) doing whatever it takes to add numbers to their side.

Image from Freedom Through Truth Pac Facebook page
where FB "helpfully" tells me it's partially false;
the fact check tells me Dems aren't colluding with CIA,
but everything on the list apparently checks out.

And there’s proof. It won’t be the same kind of proof as, “I watched that person illegally fill out a ballot, right in front of me, and add it to the stack to be counted, and here's the video.” But it will be the kind of proof that has sufficed in fraud cases, and other types of cases involving numbers, for quite a long time. We have the proof because data scientists and forensic accountants are stepping up.

A few days ago a friend posted a link to a Reuters “fact check,” debunking a whole list of supposed voter fraud cases that had been determined to be baseless. I wrote about voter fraud last Thursday, and I’ve been keeping up on such accusations; not a single one of the Reuters list was one I had heard of or was looking into. Debunking them did nothing to debunk the multitude I talked about Thursday, nor the ever-growing additional cases I’m talking about today.

In other words, if you’re depending on mainstream media sources to tell you the truth about the actual fraud going on, you will find yourself shocked and disturbed when the evidence going into the courts yields its inexorable outcome.

 

It’s About Math

Fraud stories, from here on, will look like math. Like this one: In Milwaukee, 7 wards (voting jurisdictions, like precincts) had more votes than registered voters. And people are noticing thousands of dead people on voter rolls, or among actual voters. People are going over the available public data right now, discovering this type of anomaly, for which often the only explanation is voter fraud.

 

Benford’s Law

You’re about to hear more about Benford’s law. It’s a forensic accounting tool to identify anomalies, which has been used successfully in voter fraud cases for some time. In brief, layman’s terms (and that’s all I can handle in this field), there are certain numbers that are expected to occur in random counts. 1s and 2s show up naturally a lot more often than 3s, 4s, 5s, etc. There’s a natural curve. It looks like this, the curve for a write-in candidate in Milwaukee:

Benford's law graph, expected
image from here

When a set of data doesn’t follow the expected pattern, it is an identifier of interference—or fraud.

When this test is used on jurisdictions where Biden was struggling before a sudden middle-of-the-night vote dump, his pattern looks like this, in Milwaukee, Allegheny, and Chicago: 

Benford's law graphs showing anomalies of Biden in Milwaukee, Allegheny, and Chicago
composite of images from here

It is not simply suspicious; it is an indicator that fraud occurred. Benford’s law is frequently used in court, because it is a reliable test.

In case you’re wondering, the curve for Trump, consistently across the country, is close to expected, with only occasional minor deviations within an acceptable percentage.

Let me say this really clearly: this is not someone’s opinion that we have something that hints at fraud for Biden; it is evidence that we are looking at fraud. This evidence will hold up in court.

 

Mail-In Anomalies

Several anomalies show up comparing late mail-in votes to other votes. We’ve expected more mail-in votes to go to Biden than Trump, because Democrats were pushing people to both be afraid of voting in person because of COVID-19, and to do mail-in wherever possible, disregarding safeguards necessary to prevent voter fraud. However, mass mail-in voting actually may make it easier to catch mail-in ballot fraud.

Mail-in rejection rates tend to be high—the highest of all forms of voting. The pattern this year, in particular places, is an extraordinarily low rejection rate for mail-in ballots—which happen to coincide with areas that prevented Republicans from viewing the ballot review process.

Election observers in Philadelphia are kept behind barriers,
too far away to observe ballot checking, Nov. 6, 2020
image from Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

Another anomaly compares apples to apples. If you look at ballots that came in through the mail system, which processes the voting envelopes randomly, you can see a consistent pattern: even distribution of D and R votes, with movement toward R later in the process. The assumption here is that there are more Rs in rural areas, with mail needing to travel further, so they arrive closer to the deadline. This pattern occurs consistently around the country. (See graphs here.)

But in areas that received post-deadline mail-in ballots, those ballots skew dramatically toward Biden. They do not match what can happen with ballots randomly going through a mail system. They do not match the distribution of the same type of ballot in the same jurisdiction that arrived just before the deadline. They appear to be non-random dumps of D votes.

 

Undervote

Let’s add another anomaly.

In past years, when Democrats wanted to contest a close election, one detail they looked at was the undervote; that is, votes that only vote for the top of the ticket and leave the rest of the ticket blank. A certain percentage of those will occur. Some people care only about the top-of-the-ticket race and don’t bother with the rest. But that is rare. Most people vote down at least through several races, if not the entire ballot. When you see undervotes, that indicates someone who quickly votes what matters to them, because of time pressure.

Imagine someone at a polling place, with a list of voters who haven’t voted, then quickly voting for those names, one after another, before someone discovers what they’re doing. Even 10-20 per polling place could switch a close election’s outcome. So it’s something Democrats know to be suspicious of.

Except this election. This year they’re telling you massive numbers of undervotes—all for Biden—are totally normal. There are areas with inordinate amounts of undervotes. Beyond suspicious. Into the territory of “fraud is the only explanation.”

For example: 

In Michigan, Trump received 2,637,173 votes while the GOP senate candidate received 2,630,042 votes. The difference here is only 7,131 which is not far off from what we see historically. In the same state, Joe Biden received 2,787,544 votes while the Democratic senate candidate received 2,718,451. The difference is 69,093 votes which is much higher than the historical norm.

In Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, he received a total of 2,867,680 votes, while the democratic senate candidate received 3,033,000 votes. Somehow Joe Biden gained over 60,000 ballots with no down-ballot vote.

 

Illegal Voters

Let’s add that there are many votes cast by people not legal to vote in the state. In Nevada, this could be tens of thousands. It’s not uncommon for citizens to have homes in both California and Nevada. Suppose a person left their California home to escape the harsh pandemic shutdown, or possibly to escape wildfires. For whatever reason, they’re in Nevada, instead of in California, where they’re registered to vote. A Nevada mail-in ballot arrives for them in the mail, even though they aren’t registered to vote in Nevada. What the heck! California isn’t going to change because of their vote, but Nevada’s a toss-up. They fill out the ballot and send it in. They don’t think they’ll get caught, and if thy do, they can plead ignorance of the law; after all, the ballot came to them, so it was a fair assumption that the government knew what it was doing.

True, it is a fair assumption the “government,” or its operatives, knew what they were doing. That’s the point. And that’s one reason Nevada can’t seem to provide an accurate vote count yet.

Then there is non-citizen voting—people who should not be voting in US elections in any jurisdiction. Just the Facts provides the math estimates for seven the states still up in the air. Here’s how much Biden has benefitted from illegally cast non-citizen votes: 

·         Arizona: 51,081 ± 17,689

·         Georgia: 54,950 ± 19,025

·         Michigan: 22,585 ± 7,842

·         Nevada: 22,021 ± 7,717

·         North Carolina: 46,218 ± 16,001

·         Pennsylvania: 32,706 ± 11,332

·         Wisconsin: 5,010 ± 1,774

Taking only the low-end estimates would put Trump up to 259 electoral votes. The high end would give him 285—that’s from this form of fraud only, leaving out the dumped fraudulent mail-in ballots and other types of fraud.

Do non-citizens actually vote in such numbers? Most states don’t do much to prevent it. Here’s what previous surveys of non-citizens have told us:

·         15% admitted they were registered to vote in 2008, and 8% stated “I definitely voted” in the 2008 US presidential election.

·         14% admitted they were registered to vote in 2012, and 9% stated “I definitely voted” in the 2012 US presidential election.

·         13% of Hispanic non-citizens admitted they were registered to vote in 2013.

·         In 2008, 82% of non-citizens who said they voted also stated that they voted for Democrat Barack Obama, and 18% said they voted for Republican John McCain.

 

Counting Software “Glitch”

There’s more. There’s a program hack, used with a particular system, detected in Antrim, Michigan, where a hand recount proved that 6,000 votes for Trump were switched toward Biden. That error was corrected, because the county noticed and did a hand recount. But that was one of 37 counties in that state that used the system. And 30 states around the country used that counting software. Pay attention to the company names Dominion’s Democracy Suite and ImageCast, Scorecard, and a government supercomputer called Hammer. We should be hearing more about these.

Places where the "glitchy" software has been used
image found here

That is different from a ballot dump of mail-ins, where you simply remove them from the Biden total. This is double the damage. When Biden took Trump votes this way, he went up 6,000 while Trump went down 6,000—a shift of 12,000. If you assume 6,000 votes were changed in this manner in each of those 37 counties, that would be a switch of 444,000 votes in a state where the count currently shows Biden up by 146,123.

Another story I read shortly before posting shows that there were ballot systems connected to the internet, rather than just to an LAN. This is illegal. It introduces the possibility of hacking.

 

The Future

Remember that, in 2000, even though just a couple of counties in one state were at issue, the recount and final decision took until December 13^th. We didn’t know who would be our president until then. Not knowing for a long time is not unprecedented.

This year the Electoral College is scheduled to cast their votes on December 14^th. There are several scenarios that could play out.

One: The courts take up the cases quickly, and appeals are handled quickly as well, due to the urgent and important nature of what’s at stake. The courts consider the evidence and rule on the cases. Depending on the various cases in the various states, several states could flip to Trump’s column. Pennsylvania and one or two others would do it. At that point, the decision of who is president would be complete, and that means other cases, while important for prosecuting fraud, would be moot concerning determining the presidency.

It’s also possible—but it looks unlikely to me—that the courts consider the evidence and do not find a remedy, such as removing certain numbers of fraudulent votes from Biden’s count. Another remedy could be a re-vote, but I see that as mostly unlikely. In Georgia, it is not out of the question, because they have a scheduled runoff for Senate races already set for early January; they require re-registering to vote in the runoff, by the way.

Two: The courts do not make a determination concerning the fraud and appropriate remedy in time for the December 13^th deadline. There’s a lot of sudden discussion of the process we don’t usually look at. One part relates to state legislatures; they are the ones to determine the slate of electors. If a state cannot determine the will of the people by the vote, then it falls upon the state legislature to meet and make that determination. State legislatures actually certify their state’s votes, and they have a choice in these states with obvious fraud, according to The American Thinker:

certify an election that was clearly fraudulent, certify a different slate of electors who will vote against the popular, but fraudulent vote, or just fail to certify.

Nearly all of the swing states that are up in the air, despite having Democrat governors and election officials, have Republican majority state legislatures. Still, the most likely scenario, for lack of courage, is that they fail to certify, and so they send the final decision elsewhere.

Three: The courts and state legislatures do not provide an answer in time. Then the decision falls to the US House of Representatives, as outlined in the Twelfth Amendment. However, that does not mean an automatic win for Democrats, who hold the majority. It’s not apportioned in the normal way the US House does its business. Each state will have one vote: Texas gets 1, California gets 1, Wyoming gets 1, Rhode Island gets 1. And every state’s one vote is determined by the majority of that state’s US House delegation. In other words, there may be a larger number of Democrats in the total House, but there are more states that have more Republican representatives than Democrat representatives.

The count as it currently stands is 24R-22D. According to what the vote count so far shows, in early January, when the new Congress is seated, the count will be 26R-20D.

So, that’s your Constitution lesson for the day.

What do I think is going to happen? I think the amount and placement of the fraud is both obvious and provable. I believe the most peaceful remedy will be the revelation, over the next several weeks, of the proof of the fraud. I do not expect the media to share the proof, but it will get out there. It has to. There is already so much that I can’t imagine accepting this election as a Biden win. But at this point I am trusting the courts to rule according to the law.

If word gets out about the fraud, Scott Adams calls this the best-case scenario. He says it’s better than if Trump had been declared the winner in a close race on election night—which would have spurred rioting, and even more weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth than we’ve seen so far. He says people will realize, over time, “Hey, it was our party that was corrupt.” And, even though the vast majority of Democrats aren’t willing to engage in voter fraud, they will see clearly that some in their party did. And they’ll be willing to accept the outcome.

He’s an optimist. I like to be as well. But we’ll see. By the way, Adams predicted a 60% likelihood that Trump would be in the White House in January; 40% Biden. Even now, he still holds to those probabilities.

Miracles can happen. Thirty-one years ago today, the Berlin Wall fell. 

Whatever happens, I leave it in God’s hands.

 

Sources

I’m not an investigative reporter. I’m a blogger gathering info and trying to share it with somewhat organized clarity. I suggest you don’t take my word for it. Here’s some of what I looked at for today’s blog post:

·         Leigh Dundas video  

o   Dundas links to this article: “There is Undeniable Mathematical Evidence the Election is Being Stolen” 

·         Lou Dobbs interview with attorney Sydney Powell video 

·         “BREAKING: ‘Too Close To Call’: Georgia Headed For A Recount After Biden Takes Lead” video 

·         “Right Now: Trump lawyers holding press conference in Philadelphia” with Rudy Giuliani, video 

·         “‘Like Flipping a Coin and Getting Heads 100Times’: Stats Boffs Scrutinize Biden ‘Victory’ Numbers” by Raheem Kassam and Natalie Winters for The National Pulse 

·         Twitter thread from an anonymous data scientist, containing excellent graphs and explanations, at this url 

·         “Quantifying Illegal Votes Cast by Non-Citizens in the Battleground States of the 2020 Presidential Election,” by James D. Agresti for Just Facts 

·         “New Election Math: It’s Not 270, It’s 26-24*UPDATED*” by Jay Valentine for American Thinker 

·         “Getting Republicans into the House is as crucial as getting Trump re-elected” by Andrea Widburg for American Thinker 

·         “Another Cliffhanger” by Clarice Feldman for American Thinker 

·         “Election Outcome Unclear Amid Pending Recounts and Legal Challenges” Epoch Times, Nov. 8, 2020  

·         “Former Nevada AG Claims Trump Would ‘Convincingly’ Have Won State Without Mail-In Voting” by Jon Brown for The Daily Wire

·         “Trump Team Confronts Philly Officials For ‘Violating’ Judge’s Election Order” by Amanda Prestigiacomo for The Daily Wire 

·         “Democrats and Media Collude to Steal Presidential Election” by Michael Walsh for The Epoch Times, Nov. 8, 2020 

·         “How Republican-controlled state legislatures can rectify election fraud committed by courts and governors” by Daniel Horowitz for The Blaze 

·         “Trump Campaign Taking Numerous New Legal Actions In Election Battle” by Ryan Saavedra for The Daily Wire 

·         “Election Systems in Michigan County Appeared to Be Connected to Internet: Sworn Affidavit” by Ivan Pentchoukov for The Epoch Times, Nov. 9, 2020 

·         “DOJ Looking Into Criminal Referral Alleging 3KCases of Voter Fraud in Nevada” by Tyler O’Neil for PJ Media 

·         “Texas Charges Social Worker With 134 Felony Counts Involving Election Fraud” by Ryan Saavedra for The Daily Wire 

·         Scott Adams podcast “Why President Trump Still Has the Advantage. Crazy, Right? Maybe not.” Episode 1181 Part I and Part II 

Remembering Freedom and Finding Truth

I started off today with a plan to do a comparison of people under tyranny and under freedom, before going down a slightly different rabbit hole. But let’s start with a few quick visuals.

I came across this photo of Girl Scouts in Iran in 1969.

Girl Scouts in Iran, 1969, before the Islamic Revolution
image found here

Somewhere near that time, maybe a decade earlier, Mr. Spherical Model’s grandparents lived in Iran for several years. Grandpa was an educator, near the end of his career (he had been president of a college), and was contributing to education in Iran. At the time, it was a modern and thriving part of the world. People looked and dressed much like people elsewhere. An organization such as Scouting could thrive and be seen as a positive contribution to society in such an atmosphere.

Then there’s this photo, from much more recently, where women not only look oppressed; they feel it. They want to throw it off, and return to the freedom they had before the oppression.

Women in Iran, October 2019
image found here

There are similar comparisons for Venezuela, before and after socialist reforms imposed by Chavez, and then Maduro. Venezuela had been the wealthiest, most prosperous and forward looking nation in South America. Only about a short decade later, toilet paper shortages are the least of their problems. People are literally starving, while the nation’s wealth has disappeared, offshore, into accounts belonging to the rulers' family members.

Destitution in previously thriving Venezuela
photo by Claudia Guadarrama/Polaris/Newscom, found here

In a 2018 piece on socialism, David Harsanyi says this:

After all, socialism is the leading man-made cause of death and misery in human existence. Whether implemented by a mob or a single strongman, collectivism is a poverty generator, an attack on human dignity, and a destroyer of individual rights.

In both the Iran and Venezuela cases, the implementation of tyranny happened quickly enough that the memory of previous freedom and prosperity remained. But, in time, would the societal memory disappear? Then what?

A comparison of North and South Korea can give us a pretty good look at the differences between relative freedom and tyranny. The ethnicities and cultures started out the same. The dividing line is artificial. The North has almost no access to the outside world, or any news beyond what the government tells its people. And this has been going on for 70 years, pretty nearly a lifespan. In other words, anyone who remembers previous freedoms has probably died off by now. Societal memory is virtually gone.

North Korea, left; South Korea, right
comparison photos found here

In our social media world, we often see funny memes comparing things to olden days—when we didn’t have internet, and phones were connected to the wall, and you went to the library or opened the set of encyclopedias to look up information. Enough of us remember those “olden days” that it’s still societal memory.

Lately there have been memes talking about the good old days of 2019, back when we used to go to restaurants or get together with friends.

I was thinking through these comparisons when a friend posted something about a Scott Adams podcast from Saturday, October 24. My friend pointed us to around minute 16. So I listened. I’ll summarize the data afterward, but it’s fun getting the data a bit at a time, with a tad of misdirection and suspense, as Adams reveals it. So here’s a transcript of that section. He’s talking about national daily polling numbers, by Rasmussen, for black likely voter job approval for the president:

So these are likely voters who are also black, how much they approve of the president. Back on—this is just not long ago; this is October 19^th, not that long ago, right? Just last week? Black likely voters have a 25% approval rating for the President, which would be crazy, like off-the-charts crazy. Because he only got like 11% of the vote, so you’d expect his approval would be closer that 10% range, right? 10-11%. But 25%! Last week? That close to the election?

Oh, I’m not done yet. That was last week. So, that was the 19^th. On the 20^th it dipped a little bit. OK, that’s back to normal; it dipped to 24%. Still really high, but at least you can see it trending down where you’d expect it to trend, right? You kind of expect it to sink back down.

Except, oh, what happened on the 21^st? Huh. It reversed directions and went to 31%. What? Thirty-one percent of black likely voters have given the President—who is considered by his enemies the worst person in the world—they’re giving him 31% approval? On the 21^st? That was only a few days ago.

But, you know that’s not going to hold, right? That’s the kind of number where, you hear it, and you say, “OK, that’s not gonna hold.” And it didn’t. It didn’t hold.

So, the very next day it was pretty different. It was up to 37 frickin’ percent. Black likely voters, 37% approved of the President, on the 22^nd. What’s today? Today’s the 24^th. That was only 2 days ago. 37% of the black likely voters approve of the President? What’s happening here?

So, one thing you can say for sure, again, the 25% was crazy, so you didn’t really expect that to hold. But when it reaches 37%, you know that number’s not going to stay there, right? ‘Cause that’s just crazy. It’s not going to stay at 37%. And, indeed, sure enough, the very next day, the 23^rd, it changed again by quite a bit—to 46%. Forty-six percent!

I feel like I have to keep reading this again, because you won’t believe you heard it right. Let me say it again, to make sure you heard it right. The national daily black likely voter job approval for the President, according to Rasmussen, went from 25%, which was sky high, on the 19^th, just a few days ago, to 24%, 31%, 37%, then 46%.

What the h— is happening? What the h— is happening?

Here it is in quick-to-digest chart form:

National daily black likely voter job approval for the President—Rasmussen polling
date	%
Oct 19	25%
Oct 20	24%
Oct 21	31%
Oct 22	37%
Oct 23	46%

Estimates are that, if Republicans can get 15% of the black vote, they win. So, while job approval doesn’t equal votes, it tends toward that direction—bigly, as the President would say.

Scott Adams went on to speculate about why this is happening. Maybe because of the influence of prominent blacks: 50 Cent for one—who quipped that Biden’s tax increases would make him only 20 Cent. Ice Cube for another, who asked questions of both sides and got better answers from President Trump's side. Also Kanye West—hard to tell whether his write-in campaign is to give blacks a transition alternative away from Democrat Biden, or if he legitimately wants to run, even though he has expressed great approval of President Trump in the past. And former Obama adviser Van Jones said aloud that Trump isn’t getting enough credit for what he is accomplishing for blacks.

All of that could contribute. But Adams has his own theory. He says there’s a crack in the media silo, “the news silo that keeps the left in their bubble—I feel like it cracked.” Actual news is seeping out. He goes on to talk about this theory:

My world view is that our opinions are assigned to us by our chosen media. And if the media you’re absorbing is telling you Trump is a monster, you go away believing it—and you believe you’ve made up your own mind. But you didn’t. And I would say that my world view has all of the scientific backing, that people can be convinced to believe anything, just about anything, if their news source is consistent.

And, so, my world view is completely intact. The people who watch the wrong news get the wrong feeling about the world. The people who watch the correct news, or at least they’re smart enough to recognize fake news when they see it, have not been brainwashed. And that’s it.

And that’s what we see. We see some brainwashed people, some not brainwashed people. It’s all perfectly consistent. And scientifically backed, I would say.

That part where he says “people can be convinced to believe just about anything, if their news source is consistent” brings me back to North Korea, and probably other tyrannies—where memory is gone and current beliefs are controlled by the government. I don’t think North Korean’s know the rest of the world is far and away better off than they are; they see no evidence. 

This past week we saw the blatant partisan media attempt to black out news about the Biden family crime corruption. NPR—which we taxpayers pay for—decided to avoid all mentions of the story, to dismiss it as unproven, even as one source after another comes out. And all the “legacy” media sources blacked it out or repeated the “Russian meddling with our election” line, preventing their followers from even hearing about the story—while all the intelligence say there has been no Russian connection at all.

I continue to wonder about the news related to COVID-19, the virus from China. Why has it been so difficult to get accurate, or even consistent reports? I collect data myself—I’m dependent on government sources, but at least I can see trends for myself. News lately claims we’re in an upsurge in cases right now. But the rates I’m seeing (I ignore cases, except in my own zip code) are essentially flat or lowering slightly, as they have been for months. Death rates are a lagging indicator, so I’ll have to wait to chart that. But here’s the current epi curve chart for cases, on the Harris County Public Health site, looking pretty much the way it has looked for the last couple of months:

Harris County Epi Curve of Cases Over Time, October 26, 2020
image from here

This doesn’t look like a surge in cases. It doesn’t look like we should expect a sharp rise in deaths within a couple of weeks. With the county level still at red, no matter how low the cases and death numbers, it looks like someone is ignoring the data—ignoring the science—to keep us in fear and confusion, and under control.

Who would want to control other people? Tyrants. People who don’t understand that there’s a whole northern hemisphere on the model, where you find freedom, prosperity, and civilization—those people look only at who’s in charge; and they want to either be in charge themselves, or have someone in charge who has promised them special treatment.

I believe the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization will work every time they are tried. I see evidence that bears that out. It's in our history. And it's what we see when we examine the truth in real time.

But people who never see that higher possibility are brainwashed to think that no better possibility exists. It looks like intentional blindness to those of us who see, who are trying to show them, mostly without success.

I don’t know what our country is going to look like after this election. I hope we have beautiful freedom and all that comes with it for a good and righteous people.

But if we don’t, I won’t think it’s bad luck; I will see that it is bad choices by tyrannical, corrupt overlords, who managed to get their power—not by telling the truth, but by obfuscation and outright lies.

I'm hoping that Scott Adams is right about a crack in the fake news silo—through which truth will flow. And people who love truth will move toward it, and find that truth is easier to find when their eyes are open.

Red Pills, Walking Away, and Truth Seeking

There are plenty of popular culture references that go over my head. Some of that is related to my age (a full generation beyond millennials). And some of it is related to my odd collection of interests, which frequently don’t align with popular culture. Sometimes something bubbles up to my consciousness nevertheless.

The red pill meme is one of these. I never saw The Matrix, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here’s the result:

red pill and blue pill
image from Wikipedia

The red pill and its opposite, the blue pill, are a popular cultural meme, a metaphor representing the choice between:

·         Knowledge, freedom, and the brutal truths of reality (red pill)

·         Security, happiness and the blissful ignorance of illusion (blue pill)

The terms, popularized in science fiction culture, are derived from the 1999 film The Matrix. In the film, the main character Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill by rebel leader Morpheus. The red pill would free him from the enslaving control of the machine-generated dream world and allow him to escape into the real world, but living the "truth of reality" is harsher and more difficult. On the other hand, the blue pill would lead him back to stay in the comfortable simulated reality of the Matrix.

This concept has come up in relation to yet another popular culture idea: the #WalkAway movement, which turning coming up repeatedly in my Facebook feed this past week, although it’s been going on since May. Here’s a brief summary from Erich Reimer last week at Townhall:

At now over 100,000 members in its Facebook group and widespread international media coverage, the #WalkAway movement of former Democrats telling their stories about why they left their party has resonated deeply with a core feeling currently in the American people.

Started by NYC hairstylist Brandon Straka in late May the movement has caught flame because it speaks to how the Democratic Party of today, where far-left sentiments ranging from universal socialist programs to demonizing our first responders and border control, to questioning the very goodness of America itself, are edging closer to gaining a seat at the table.

The original Brandon Straka video is about six minutes, and pretty powerful:
  

When I first looked up #WalkAway, in a Google search, there was something about it being a fake movement instigated by Russian bots. But that was dispelled by numerous short and long videos of actual people telling their own stories—something Russian bots, I’m assuming, could not produce. And several of them say so right in their videos: “Just so you know, I’m not a Russian bot.” Straka’s video is powerful, but also professional looking. These myriad others aren’t professional, slick videos. They’re homemade, sometimes rambling, but very real.

Scott Adams, of Dilbert cartoon fame, but also a thoughtful commentator on the culture, talked about the movement. At first he thought it must be the result of policy. It turns out the economy is doing better, or something else seems better than expected. If it were that, he said, he would assume it would pass fairly quickly. But once he watched Straka’s video, he realized it was something far more interesting. Straka didn’t walk away because of policy; he walked away because he realized he’d been lied to and manipulated.

Here’s Adams’ description:

I’ve also said that President Trump—I said this two years ago—would “punch a hole in the universe, or put a tear in the universe so that you could look through the hole and see reality for the first time.” Because we all walk around in this little bubble movie of our own making. And I said that he’s going to let you see reality—at least a little bit of it, not all of it, ‘cause we’re not able—but he would put a hole in your current bubble so you could just peek out and see what’s on the other side, and you’d say, “Holy cap! I’m in a bubble!” So really, the most you’re going to get out of this is the knowledge certain that you’ve been living in a bubble of truth that you created in your own head, as opposed to truth that exists in the universe.

And apparently that’s what happened to Brandon Straka, because here’s how he describes his thinking behind the walkaway. It wasn’t about policy. Here’s what it was about. He realized that the Democrats were using fear to manipulate people.

Scott Adams
screen shot from video

Adams points out that, while Trump uses fear to manipulate as well, it’s different. Trump points to people outside the country—real people, like ISIS and terrorists—with guns and weapons and hatred toward us. And on the border, while immigrants as a whole are a low-crime demographic, illegal aliens commit more crime than their percentage of the population. And MS-13 is real people who really kill people. Democrats, on the other hand, try to instill fear in their fellow citizens, and in particular this president—whom no one was afraid of before he ran.

Adams mentions the news coverage, journalists who “moved from an observer watchdog role to actual participants, trying to move the needle.” He says, “I would argue that close to 100% of the fear that people have about this president is based on non-objective coverage.” What if the president wasn’t portrayed as a crazy buffoon, ready to blow up the world, and take over in Hitlerian fashion? How would things look different with objective coverage, just of a person doing and saying things, maybe keeping campaign promises or not? What if they left out all fear-mongering?

As he summarizes, “So the Democrats, for their political benefit, have caused the entire left to be in physical and mental distress, for two years.”

That’s what this movement is reacting to.

Where it will lead depends on a few things: Whether these people walking away are going to move forward continuing to seek truth. And whether they’ll now accept those people who were previously demonized as their enemies. And, of course, whether they feel welcome and comfortable around the demonized others—us.

My guess is that they’ll find welcome. As with other things, hatred and other negatives among us has been greatly exaggerated. (See this piece by Ben Shapiro. And this piece by William Voegeli.)

Everyone being welcome what I’ve seen at local and state Republican Party meetings. I’ve taken photos from time to time of the perhaps surprising number of blacks among us—nearly the percentage in the population as a whole, even though something like 92% of the black demographic have voted reliably Democrat, so it's as if, if you're a black and conservative, you really need to get active in the party to feel supported. We get accused of hating them, but when they’re with us, they’re just part of us. And we’re not at all surprised by Hispanics among us, because they’ve always been a big part of our party, despite what you may have heard.

Here are some truths those walking away might find:

·         Democrats have never been in favor of doing away with racial bias; they want to use it to convince people they are victims and then pander to them for votes. Republicans fought against slavery, fought against Jim Crowe laws, and fought for equal rights.

·         Democrats have never been in favor of lifting everyone up; they use class envy to tear down and bring down the top so all suffer together. Republicans, by philosophy, let go of class envy and admire success, because that just means success is possible.

·         Democrats claim to be generous—but with taxpayer money. Republicans tend to be careful about taxing and spending (at least in theory), and in reality are a lot more generous in their charitable giving.

·         Democrats aren’t about tolerance; they are absolutely intolerant of anyone who doesn’t move lockstep with their beliefs; they are particularly intolerant of members of their “victim” groups who do not agree ideologically with the party line. Republicans are used to having to defend their beliefs, and, while you can find exceptions, most are willing to listen to differing opinions and discuss beliefs with true interest in what others think.

·         Liberalism has nothing to do with freedom or open-mindedness. Conservatism is actually classic liberalism—freedom from tyranny. That’s what we’re conserving. While we’re doing it, we can have interests in all kinds of food, culture, fashion, architecture, music, and entertainment. Conservatism isn’t stuffy and stifling; it’s about conserving our God-given rights to life, liberty, and property.

·         Progressivism has nothing to do with progress and much to do with regression. Real progress is what you get when you adhere to the principles that lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

·         Socialism has nothing to do with being social, or being civilized, and much to do with submitting to tyranny and its associated savagery. To have a thriving civilization, you do, indeed, need a religious, and a strong support of marriage and family. But for those who are willing to live in ways that are decent and kind, but who haven’t discovered the connection between that kind of choice and belief in God, you’re still welcome among us. Civilized people are good at getting along in the playground.

If you want freedom, you need to walk away from tyranny and go upward toward freedom.

If you want prosperity, you need to walk away from poverty—or, put another way, walk away from a controlled economy and toward a free market, which has lifted more people out of poverty than any other concept in world history. You need the people who earn to be the decision-makers in how they spend their earnings. And, for those unable to earn and in real need, you need voluntary philanthropy to help them as needed.

If you want civilization, you need to walk away from savagery. As we say at the Spherical Model:

Civilized people live peaceably among their neighbors, helping rather than taking advantage of one another, abiding by laws enacted to protect property and safety—with honesty and honor. Civilized people live in peace with other civilized people; countries and cultures coexist in appreciation, without fear.

So, if the #WalkAway movement describes your journey, your awakening to truth, come join us in our real world movement toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization.