Clarissa's Blog

I went to tuck in my child who suddenly sat up in bed and said, “with 72% of votes counted, Donald Trump is leading in North Carolina” before dropping back into bed and resuming sleep.

I have a very early day tomorrow but I’m afraid to go to bed because another middle-of-the-night surprise à la 2020 would be excessive.

So? Has anybody heard anything? What should we expect? Are we going to be able to sleep tonight or not?

We’ve been hearing that women are turning out to vote a lot more actively than men. We’ve been hearing that it’s abortion, it’s whatever else. But maybe it’s all much simpler and I got the answer to this question today when I received two ballots “by mistake.”

I just voted.

First of all, RFK is on the ballot. I could have voted for him. When I asked here on the blog how come the ballot included a candidate who’d withdrawn, people told me it was going to be changed. Well, it wasn’t. RFK is still there on voting day, splintering the Republican vote.

Another issue is that I had two ballots in my envelope. I’m a registered Democrat, female. When I brought the additional ballot to the attention of the election judge, she said, “Ha ha, this keeps happening today.” I have no idea if it “keeps happening” to registered Republican voters.

Yet another problem is that in the very short time I spent at the poll, a woman came in asking to vote. She was told she’d requested and received a mail-in ballot. She claimed to know absolutely nothing about it. This was an immigrant woman with poor English skills. Whether she voted already, or somebody did on her behalf, or something else took place, nobody can unravel.

I spent maybe 10 minutes total at the poll and it was enough to observe all this stuff. It’s disturbing, is all I can say.

Ooh, and it turns out I’m staying at a really nice hotel at the conference. It’s got a swimming pool! My plan to never set foot outside the hotel is starting to look feasible.

Unfortunately, it’s a short direct flight with no layover. I wouldn’t mind a very long layover. Just sitting at an airport for hours. But it’s not meant to be.

Today I realized I’m traveling to a conference in a week.

“I wonder what the topic of my presentation is,” I said to myself and went to look it up.

“Huh,” I thought when I found out the title. I’d sent in a blurb to that conference in April and gave it no more thought since then.

Writing conference talks is a bizarre way of wasting time. I cull mine out of books I’m writing, and that allows me to give them no thought at all. The whole point of going to the conference is to have 4 days to space out over my new book in an almost uninterrupted manner.

I’m telling you, folks. He’s gone. Demons have eaten him and he no longer sees anything else. It’s useless to hope that he will realize any time soon that he’s the source of the demonic apparitions that torture him.

Everybody thinks they are a very special cookie and are immune. But if you play with demons, demons will start playing with you. And you won’t be winning that game.

Leftism mutates a lot. First it declared itself the champion of the proletariat. When that didn’t work out, it became the defender of racial and gender-based groups. Those are minor details, however. The root of leftism’s existence remains unchanged.

Leftism is born from the incapacity to accept that inequality of both individuals and groups is an inescapable feature of the human condition. If you can accept that everybody starts in a different place even before birth and, consequently, the results everybody will get in every area of life will not be equal or possibly even comparable, you won’t be a sincere leftist. If you believe that this state of affairs is wrong and must be remedied through human actions, you’ll end up a leftist.

So far, so good. Accept inequality – not leftist. Don’t accept it – leftist.

But here’s where problems begin. The initial step on the way towards remedying the inequality of people and groups is, as Kamala Harris says, to give a leg up to those who are behind through no fault of their own. Here’s the famous image of what that’s supposed to look:

Again, it looks benign enough, right? Well, yeah. But then it becomes clear very fast that propping up the underachievers doesn’t solve anything. There are still those who are better endowed by nature, chance, life, family, or God, and they’ll still reach enormously farther than the artificially propped up. I’d never dance for the Royal Ballet Company even if you showered me with every grant, scholarship and handout imaginable.

So what’s the next step? It’s invariably to hold down those who are better endowed to let the less fortunate catch up. That dude with long legs in the picture should have them broken to help out the short-legged one because there’s simply no other way. We see the beginnings of that mentality in the picture where the tall person has his crate taken away. Leftism always, invariably, irreparably leads to the extermination of the more fortunate because there’s never enough social rejigging to erase their advantage without erasing them. Mass murder is not leftism gone astray. It’s leftism allowed to lead to its natural conclusion. Problem is, even once you forcibly remove all the unfairly advantaged, in the very next generation, there will once again be more and less advantaged. They’ll all start from a different baseline. The fence will be much taller for all of them. But even in relation to the much taller fence, somebody will be better positioned to peek over it. So you have to start rejigging, re-engineering, re-propping and re-disadvantaging all over again.

The only winner in this game is the fence. Humans always lose because it’s in their nature to be different. Leftism battles something that will always exist for as long as humans do.

Trump is definitely the same person. It would be disturbing if he experienced a major personality change at his age. But he’s running a completely different campaign. If people were capable of leaving partisanship aside, Trump’s campaign of 2024 would be an object lesson in taking stock of your mistakes and correcting course. Everybody is too emotional and I’m not even sure it makes sense to post because once you say “Trump”, all reason flies out of the window.

The question was asked, though, so I’ll answer.

The Trump campaign of 2020 made three catastrophic mistakes:

1. No legal challenges were presented before the election to prevent the shenanigans with ballot harvesting.
2. The fantasy of winning the black vote  was pursued to the detriment of courting the very winnable white male vote. As a result, this was the demographic Trump went down with in comparison with 2016. It was actually the only demographic where he decreased.
3. Hiring absolute morons and incompetents, which is a problem that has dogged Trump since 2016.

This time around, we see a complete turnaround on all 3 issues.

1. Legal challenges are presented swiftly and effectively before Election Day.
2. The courting of Elon Musk, the Joe Rogan podcast, and the garbage truck photo op are only the most recent of the very successful efforts to speak to the demographic that can put Trump over. There are many others, and that’s a major difference from 2020.
3. The people who carry out the day-to-day operations for the campaign are very organized, disciplined, effective people. Trump told, for example, about how fast the garbage truck photo op was organized, with the truck being covered with the campaign signage in a very short period of time and everything being ready lightning fast.

People have such an intense reaction to Trump – both good and bad – that it’s impossible to find anybody interested in discussing this. So thanks for the question, I appreciate.

We had a very American weekend: church, bowling, arcade, trampoline park, bookstore, mall.

And here’s what I have to say.

America is an oasis.

A magical place of wonderment and peace.

Everybody is orderly, kind and civilized. I haven’t seen as much as a shopping cart left out of place.

We need to not piss this away. It’s truly the best we can do. We’ve got such a great thing going. Let’s appreciate it as it deserves and not fritter it away.