The New Intellectual Blog

The New Intellectuals must assume the task of building a new culture on a new moral foundation - Ayn Rand

Election Fraud and The Consent Decree

A stunning danger to freedom and democracy in the US that too few Americans are aware of — and need to learn about.

I’ve always considered myself to be a relatively informed American citizen when it comes to issues of intellectual and political literacy. That’s why I was not only embarrassed, but stunned, to admit that I did not know the fact that is featured in the article below about the federal electoral process in the United States. If you do nothing else this entire year, please take the time to read it as soon as you can. Look up the (several decades of) history to confirm what it says. And then do some sober thinking about its frightening implications.

Media Misfire on the Big Lie
by Kerry Wakefield in The Spectator

Here’s a quick summary of the relevant history, in quotes from the article by Australian journalist Kerry Wakefield:

[Dickinson Debevoise] was a racial justice activist and New Jersey judge who in 1982 handed down what became known as the ‘Consent Decree’. Modified, expanded and protected by Debevoise, it barred the Republican National Committee from fighting suspected voter fraud in election day operations across the US for 36 years. Yes, you read that right.  For nearly 40 years the RNC and its agents were ‘prohibited by law from helping out with poll watcher efforts or nearly any litigation related to how voting is conducted,’ as Mollie Hemingway says in her book Rigged.  Multiple court challenges failed to dislodge the decree, and its influence permeated down through state bodies, effectively paralysing the GOP’s political work on election days. The RNC trained its staff to avoid election day operations, including recounts, for fear of lawsuits.

[All emphasis added]

Some additional background and context can be found in this article from 2018:

Since 1982, the Consent Decree had been renewed every year by the original judge, Carter appointee District Judge Dickinson R. Debevoise, who, even after he retired, returned every year for the sole purpose of renewing his 1982 order for another year. Debevoise died in August 2015.

End of 1982 Consent Decree: GOP finally can contest vote fraud after 36 years, Investment Watch, August 8, 2018.

Sean Spicer testified when the DNC tried and failed to get it extended yet again in 2017, after Debevoise’s death, based on bogus allegations that the Trump campaign had colluded with the RNC to engage in voter suppression. From the same article:

It had been abundantly clear for the six years that I worked at the RNC that the RNC and its employees were prohibited from engaging in Election Day activities, including poll watching, so I intentionally stayed away from all of that.

The [RNC] counsel’s office had been vigilant in informing both senior staff and subordinates on the importance of the consent decree and the activities that we were clearly should not be engaged at or be even perceived as engaging in. And so we had grown accustomed to not even coming too close to a line that would in any way, shape, or form lead one to believe that we were engaged in those activities.

As Wakefield concludes in the Spectator article:

The Debevoise decree effectively gave Democrats carte blanche to organise and institutionalise their election day activities, secure in the knowledge their opponent had been cowed. If you think the Left didn’t use this extraordinary and decades-long opportunity to stack the decks electorally then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. This helps explain why, on election day 2020 Democrat operatives ran rings around the GOP who, with no corporate culture or muscle memory, were mere novices trying to play their first polling day role for 36 years.

Such a biased playing field is unthinkable here [in Australia], and even many Americans are unaware of the powerful institutional advantage the consent decree created…

All Emphasis Added

The implications of this are devastating to any American who believed they were living in a free country that held fair elections. It means that every national election lost by the Republicans during my adult lifetime was compromised by a judicially enforced voting regime that gave Democrats a fundamentally and institutionally unfair advantage. It allowed them to monopolize election day and polling place presence and staffing, with all the opportunities for unchallenged activity (and mischief) that provided. It effectively put the fox in charge of the electoral henhouse for nearly four decades.

I was shocked (and I wasn’t the only one) as I observed the aftermath of the 2020 election. I watched the coverage and footage of GOP poll watchers being blocked from viewing, or even ejected from, where the votes were being counted. And I wondered, how could this be happening? How could it have become the case that workers who were clearly in the pocket of the left so completely dominated electoral staffing in these polling places that they could do as they pleased, and brazenly violate election law, with impunity?

Well, now we know. That was the regime they had become used to. That they’d become experts at dominating. That they’d had three and a half decades to establish the institutional infrastructure and staffing to enforce, thanks to America’s broken judicial system and the decades-long fecklessness of the Republican party.

I expect to have a lot more to say about this in the coming weeks, as I work my way through the research to learn more about it and its full consequences on the last few decades of voting history. But if there’s one thing that it makes crystal clear, it’s that any claim that our electoral system is somehow the victim of voter suppression by Republicans is a blatant lie. Given this history, the suggestion that the left hasn’t been engaged in election fraud for decades in the US is entirely without credibility, and an insult to our intelligence.

Classic Correia

If you don’t read anything else today, treat yourself to the latest blog post from Science Fiction and Fantasy author Larry Correia. Larry’s the author of several popular works, including the Monster Hunter series, of which I’m a fan.

He’s also notorious for periodically posting no-holds barred, brutally honest (and brutally worded) political rants. This epic takedown of the clown-show dumpster fire that the Biden administration has become is no exception. It’s a feast for anyone hungry for candid talk about where we are in the United States today, so tuck in.

(Warning to anyone who may be squeamish about deleted expletives: you may want to brace yourself.)

“Remember before the election when people like me were getting “fact checked” and kicked off of social media for talking about The Big Guy’s many scandals, and his crack head son doing some mind bogglingly corrupt and evil shit? Yet now it is admitted that all that stuff did actually happen. Oh media, I sure hope covering for these shitheads was worth burning the last of your credibility, to the point that Joe Rogan is now eating your fucking lunch.”

https://monsterhunternation.com/2022/01/20/the-one-year-anniversary-of-utter-failure/

Keep Your Blood Money

The SCOTUS ruling against vaccine mandates for large, private companies was marred by its unfortunate decision to allow it for health care workers at facilities that receive Medicaid and Medicare funding.

Supreme Court blocks Biden vaccine mandate for private firms, allows mandate for healthcare workers

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/supreme-court-blocks-bidens-vaccine-mandate-us-workers-allows-mandate

There is, however, a potential and indirect upside to that despicably corrupt part of the ruling. The blowback may create a strong moral and financial incentive for the spread of health care facilities that openly refuse any form of federal funding. Certainly they would have a ready and willing pool of employees, given the refusal of so many doctors and nurses to comply with the mandates. And I can’t think of anything better for the long-term health of the health-care industry than that.

Heart of a Child

Eric Clapton has released a heartbreaking new music video about the devastating harm done, especially to children, by the lockdowns.

This is what a counter-culture revolution against the “new normal” of ascendant fascism looks like. Creators with honesty and integrity sprouting like new growth in today’s cultural wasteland, to make art to inspire resistance to the brainleashing of mankind.

The philistines of the conservative establishment must learn that art is a major lever of cultural change, and start supporting good people who make it. The world needs actors and filmmakers and musicians and novelists, to inspire a spiritual renaissance against the soulless oppression that we face today.

The Establishment Cabal’s Crimes Against America

The article cited below is the most important opinion piece of the year. I strongly urge you to read it in its entirety.

“It’s time to admit it. Less than a year in, Joe Biden’s is a failed presidency. Biden knows it, the press knows it, and voters know it. And our foreign adversaries like China and Russia know it.

It’s also time to look at the “cabal” of business, labor and political leaders who foisted the Biden administration on us.

The ‘Cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency – Glenn H. Reynolds, New York Post Opinion Page, December 9, 2021

The reason this article is so important is that it states, forcefully, coherently and in a single place, in the open and on the opinion page of America’s oldest newspaper, the most crucial thing that has needed to be said for the last year.

Normally when you get a bad president, voters are to blame… But in saddling America with the Biden administration, the voters got more than a nudge. As Time magazine reporteda “cabal” — Time’s word — of “left-wing activists and business titans” worked to get rid of Trump. It pushed mail-in voting. It moved to block election fraud suits… It employed social media censorship to mute pro-Trump arguments and amplify anti-Trump arguments

The consequences in terms of lost faith in democracy have been severe, but the worst effect is that the winning ticket was never seriously vetted by the media or the campaign process. As a result, we have a president whose mental capacity is openly doubted by much of the nation… In a normal campaign, Biden’s weaknesses would have been obvious…”

[All emphasis added]

Time’s establishment “Cabal” ran a relentless campaign of election interference that included the brutal censorship of facts unflattering to Biden, a firehose of flagrantly dishonest attacks on Trump, and an illegal manipulation of the election process in a number of states. Were the narrow swing-state margins in the close election that resulted decided by this heavy-handed thumb placed on the scale by an “elite” in the political and cultural establishment? It strains credulity to suggest otherwise. If there were ever an example of an election being “rigged by the system,” America in 2020 was it. And none of the more “speculative” allegations of voter fraud are required to grasp that.

These were acts of systemic political and social corruption. But there is another dimension to them that needs to be addressed as well: that they constituted reckless negligence with the future of the nation. It’s become abundantly clear over the last year that the Machiavellian “Cabal” that “fixed” the 2020 election did so while evading clear facts not only about Biden’s lack of fitness, but the falsehood of much of the media slander about Trump. And while that would have been bad enough by itself, the most damning part of their moral treason was that in doing so, they discarded the rational context-keeping required for wise governance — and for clearly emotion-driven motives. ((This applied not only to the American left, but to many on the right, and to some of the country’s often nascent pro-freedom intellectual movements as well. Too many of these thinkers lost their minds to Trump Derangement Syndrome, as exemplified by the philosophical disintegration at the Ayn Rand Institute.)) There is no other reasonable way to explain the visceral and fact-impervious vitriol with which these partisans brandished pitchforks for Donald Trump — who, while meriting certain criticisms, was demonized out of all proportion to his actual shortcomings.

The result, as we have seen over the past year, has been an eye-popping series of predictable policy disasters. The crisis at the border; the Afghanistan fiasco; the collapse of US credibility abroad and the emboldening of our adversaries; a crippled national supply chain; escalating national violence; the raging return of 70s style stagflation; a legislative agenda to increase spending by trillions despite a compromised economy, and to establish federal election tyranny and censorship; a covid policy debacle topped by a vaccine mandate so fascist that it would make Mussolini turn green with envy; and too many other failures to list or to count.

These are not just mistakes. They are the fruit of the establishment Cabal’s reckless and cynical disregard for the consequences of its actions when it put its thumb on the scale to interfere in the 2020 election. It installed into office what it knew (or should have known) was an administration that was both grossly incompetent and malicious. It is responsible for the lives crippled and destroyed as a result, and it must be held to account for it. And everyone who sanctioned and carried water for this disgrace should never be trusted by the American people again.

An Entrepreneur’s Rebellion?

Some have observed, regarding the coming vaccine mandate job losses, the danger in effectively expelling many of the nation’s most independent thinkers from its current workforce. That danger is real. I’ve seen little attention paid yet, however, to the flip side of it.

That flip side is the effect of casting many of America’s most intelligent, independent-minded, and potentially entrepreneurial minds “into the wilderness,” so to speak, and forcing them to reinvent themselves. Not all of the current realignment in the national employment landscape is happening because of a backlash against tyranny. But some of it, clearly, is.

There’s been a lot of talk about how dissenters can counter rising totalitarianism by rejecting existing, corrupted institutions, and establishing “parallel structures” to replace them. It seems to me that fascist overreach like the vaccine mandates may only end up serving as a crucible to help encourage that.

Workers Quit Jobs in Droves to Become Their Own Bosses

Seeking flexibility or escape from corporate bureaucracy, employees discover their inner entrepreneur

Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2021



The Corruption of Ayn Rand’s Legacy

I want to preface my comments by saying that I haven’t listened to this podcast, and I’m not planning to. I’m sharing and evaluating it based strictly on the writeup, which carries intellectual bankruptcy and useful idiocy to a whole new level.

Take a look at the outline, and ask yourself how this can be reconciled with Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Ask yourself how — in a world where today’s totalitarian left is literally implementing fascism all around us — that an institute allegedly based on her ideas can aim its fire at the few parties left in our (primarily state) governments that are trying to stop it.

To anyone who may be confused about ARI’s slander against Republican governors and legislatures trying to defend their citizens from these federal government driven attacks on freedom of speech and bodily autonomy, check your premises.

Ask yourself whether it would be reasonable to support so-called “private” companies censoring news or instituting workplace practices to demand unchosen medical treatments — in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Then ask yourself the same question about allegedly “private” companies, with names, say, like “Associated Steel,” who eagerly “chose” to impose such mandates from “The State Science Institute.”

Ask yourself why SCOTUS has ruled that when allegedly “private” companies conduct government censorship for it, they have become state actors and are still violating the first amendment. Ask yourself whether the principle behind this ruling has any broader implications for the state of so-called “capitalism” today. And ask yourself why Donald Trump, who ARI slandered relentlessly over the past several years, understands this well enough to have included it in his suit against “big tech,” but the alleged heirs to Ayn Rand’s legacy, don’t.

Finally, ask yourself what this means for a political system clearly transitioning from a mixed economy into fascism. Ask yourself whether institutions increasingly embracing “public/private partnerships” run by lackeys with government ties actually constitute a free economy of private companies in any meaningful sense of those words. And ask yourself whether the principles of an actually free society apply to them, in the same way, in that context — and if not, what principles do.

In other words, start thinking outside the box of what has become an unthinking “objectivist” orthodoxy — one that insults the depth of Ayn Rand’s ideas by applying them as shallow bromides appropriate to a freer past, instead of asking the philosophically challenging questions that today’s world actually requires.

What I think that this disgracefully superficial article demonstrates is that The Ayn Rand Institute has lost its way. Its principals have lost the capacity for serious and independent thought required to understand and apply the philosophy in historical context. They have betrayed everything that their namesake ever wrote and stood for, and have forfeited the moral right to use Ayn Rand’s name.

Radicals for Capitalism

Every so often I feel the need to state this for the record. I am not a conservative. To quote Ayn Rand, I’m a radical for capitalism.

And by that I don’t mean the crony fascism that has been increasingly taking over today’s world. That is and has always been a manifestation not of the independence and individualism of capitalism, but of the authoritarianism and groupthink of collectivism in all its forms.

The conservation of traditional values from the past will not be enough to save the world. Like the founders before us, only a new generation of radically independent thinkers will be able to do that.

Welcome to the New Intellectual

The New Intellectuals must assume the task of building a new culture on a new moral foundation

Ayn Rand

Welcome to the New Intellectual Blog, an upcoming journal of ideas focused on philosophy, culture, and cultural change. It is inspired by Ayn Rand’s 1961 essay For the New Intellectual. In it, she called on a generation of New Intellectuals to rise and “assume the task of building a new culture and a new moral foundation,” to address the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our civilization’s past.

The decades-long corruption of yesterday’s ideas has played out with grim predictability. Today, in 2021, they have brought the world to a state of unprecedented crisis, and to the brink of cultural and civilizational suicide. Racism and fascism are openly preached in the name of anti-racism and anti-fascism. Authoritarian groupthink and a demand for conformity to neo-Marxist dogmas have replaced what remained of a capitalist culture of free speech and intellectual openness. Speakers for a “truth” officially sanctioned by an alliance of government and crony corporate interests are increasingly replacing independent thought and expression, or threatening and intimidating them into silence. The thoughtful and respectful disagreement of the past is giving way to a “cancel culture” in which a refusal to conform is met with vicious attacks for individuals and businesses alike. Violence is openly encouraged, as long as it supports “politically correct” movements. And so on.

Contrary to the surprise of too many today, these developments were not only predictable, but predicted. They are what happens when a culture abandons the realm of ideas to some of the most vile scum mankind has ever produced. We allowed them to take over our universities, educate our artists, writers, and thinkers, and shape the values of much of today’s civilization. Now, after the better part of a century, when that takeover is nearing completion and people everywhere are beginning to feel the leash of rising fascism on their own necks, they are finally starting to wonder how this all could have happened.

Ayn Rand gave us the answer, and pointed us toward the way to save ourselves, over half a century ago. Bad ideas can only be defeated by good ones. Only a few of us needed to answer her call, and we forfeited on that responsibility. The fault is ours for not listening.

We let this happen. When we assumed we could trust those in political power and “authority” to educate our children, and to tell us what to believe. When we put the pressure to be “socially acceptable” above our self-respect, and the responsibility to think for ourselves. When we forgot that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

It’s been three generations since Ayn Rand’s call to arms. There is no more time left. If the world is to be saved from a descent into a new, global dictatorship, every able-minded individual needs to take on the responsibility to become one of the New Intellectuals needed to save the world – now.

This is a battle of ideas, and it can only be won by warriors of the mind who are willing to enter it. I’m in. Are you?