January 6 Trauma and the Left

Today apparently is the January 6 remembrance day. The cast of the Broadway play Hamilton serenaded lawmakers participating in a remembrance event of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot with the song "Dear Theodosia" which playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda describes as being about people "finding a way to move forward." But not in this case. 

    Kamala Harris likened the events of Jan. 6, 2021, to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Thousands of Americans were killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11--killed by foreign enemies--while only 1 (or 2) Americans were killed by own government on Jan. 6. But Harris didn't seem bothered by her hyperbole. 

    Biden continued with disproven talking points blaming Trump for the incident, accusing Trump and his supporters of holding a "dagger at the throat of democracy." "He warned that though it didn’t succeed, the insurrection remains a serious threat to America’s system of government." Biden also added that "We are in a battle for the soul of America." Both the House and the Senate held moments of silence to remember the event.

    Biden and Harris are not the only ones divorced from the facts. Here is the spin put on the whole thing by the leftist rag, Politico:

On the surface, of course, everyone knows what the Capitol mayhem and its acrid aftermath are about. One side unreasonably believes that President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was stolen, and the other side reasonably fears that former president Donald Trump’s followers are so slavishly under his spell that they are willing to hijack the legal apparatus guaranteeing free and honest elections in order to facilitate his return to power in 2024.

Of course, the facts--i.e., the evidence of fraud and lax vote integrity--are all on the side of those who "unreasonably" believe the election was stolen while those with "reasonable fears" that Trump supporters want to overthrow the Republic are relying on nothing more than their wet dreams and visceral hate of  anyone to their political right.

    It would be one thing if the Democrats' and Deep State's portrayal was just hyperbole, but a Washington Post article on groups trying to use computer algorithms to predict a coup or insurrection explained how at least one of the groups has now incorporated false information into their models:

    CoupCast is a prime example. The United States was always included in its model as a kind of afterthought, ranked on the very low end of the spectrum for both coups and election violence. But with new data from Jan. 6, researchers reprogrammed the model to take into account factors it had traditionally underplayed, like the role of a leader encouraging a mob, while reducing traditionally important factors like long-term democratic history.

    Its risk assessment of electoral violence in the United States has gone up as a result. And although data scientists say America’s vulnerability still trails, say, a fragile democracy like Ukraine or a backsliding one like Turkey, it’s not nearly as low as it once was.

    “It’s pretty clear from the model we’re heading into a period where we’re more at risk for sustained political violence — the building blocks are there,” Besaw said. CoupCast was run by a Colorado-based nonprofit called One Earth Future for five years beginning in 2016 before being turned over to UCF.

Garbage-in, garbage-out. But this time, the garbage will be seriously considered as "truth" by the policy makers.

    The warped view of Jan. 6 is also being used to try and force "voter reform" legislation through Congress that would make future elections even easier for the Democrats to suborn illegal votes. 

    Perhaps most dangerously, though, is that some Democratic lawmakers and pundits have been pushing to disqualify Trump (or fellow Congressmen) from running for reelection under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. That provision states that officeholders who "have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same" are disqualified from future office. Thus, the reason that Leftists, in lockstep, always refer to the January 6 protest as an "insurrection."

    Most constitutional scholars who spoke to The Hill think the provision is not “self-executing.” In practical terms, that means applying Section 3 to Trump would require an additional step by lawmakers to make the 14th Amendment operative. 

    Some scholars believe that Congress, by a simple majority in both chambers, could act on its own to find Trump engaged in insurrection, which would implicate the constitutional provision. Under the 14th Amendment, restoring Trump’s eligibility would then require a supermajority vote. 

    Other experts, like Tribe of Harvard, say Congress would need to go further, either by establishing a neutral fact-finding body to determine whether Trump engaged in insurrection under Section 3, or assigning that fact-finding role to a federal court.

    One bill, introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) after Trump’s Senate impeachment trial last February, would permit the attorney general to make the case before a three-judge panel that an office holder had violated the provision and should be barred from future office. 

    In addition to legislative discussions, other efforts have focused on pressuring state elections officials with a view toward private litigation over the issue. 

    One pro-democracy group, Free Speech For People, has mounted a pressure campaign on top state elections officials to apply the 14th Amendment to Trump should he run again. Doing so would effectively bar Trump’s name from appearing on their state’s ballot in 2024.

    This summer, the group sent letters to chief election officials for all 50 states and Washington, D.C., making the case that they have a constitutional duty to bar Trump from appearing on future state ballots. The group argues the provision doesn’t require additional steps by Congress because the 14th Amendment is already operative by itself.

    “Just as states are permitted (if not required) to exclude from the presidential ballot a candidate who is not a natural born citizen, who is underage, or who has previously been elected twice as president, so too states should exclude from the ballot a candidate, such as Mr. Trump, who previously swore to support the Constitution, but then engaged in insurrection,” their letter to Georgia's top election official argues.

    And if the elections officials don’t comply?

    “We intend to litigate this question,” John Bonifaz, the group's president, told The Hill. “So if a secretary of state does not follow the mandate of Section 3, the 14th Amendment, we will bring this matter in court.”

The "Free Speech For People" group is tied to left wing persons and organizations.

    While most Democrats and RINOs blame Trump for the political divisiveness in the country, I was surprised to see Politico bucking the trend. It notes that prior "conflicts have been about big things — war, slavery, Depression — but this time we just don’t like each other." Except they weren't:

The transcendent issue of this time — no matter the specific raw material of any given news cycle — is the belief that one half of the country suspects the other half is contemptuous of them, and responds with contempt in turn. “Seinfeld” was not really, as was often said, “a show about nothing.” It demonstrated instead that with the right characters and frame of mind, you can make a show about anything that might happen in daily life. Donald Trump has shown that you can use the same approach to create a national crack-up. The violent rabble that crashed the Capitol a year ago showed that crack-ups are fertile ground for crackpots.

Sigh.

    But I believe they are correct that our divisions today are mostly because we don't like each other. This is just a natural result of the Left jumping off the cliff and trying to pull everyone else with them. The political Right has stayed pretty much in the same place for the last couple of decades as to their values and views while the Left has consistently moved ever farther left. But this is more than a difference in opinion or philosophy. I believe Anonymous Conservative is correct in identifying as something biological and innate.  As he explains:

The science behind r/K Selection theory was hashed out decades ago. It emerged as biologists pondered why some species reproduced slowly using monogamy and high-investment parenting, while other species reproduced explosively, using promiscuity and single parenting. At the time this science was developed, the researchers were wholly unaware of its relevance to our modern ideological battles in the world of politics. The terms r and K came from variables in equations which described how populations would change over time. r represented the maximal reproductive rate of an individual, while K represented the carrying capacity of an environment.

As to the liberal r-select persons, Anonymous Conservative observes:

Here in the r-strategy, we see the origins of the Liberal’s tendencies towards conflict avoidance, from oppositions to free-market capitalism, to pacifism, to demands that all citizens disarm so as to avoid any chance of conflict and competition. Even the newer tendencies to support the ”everyone gets a trophy” movement are outgrowths of this competition-averse urge, and desire for free resource availability. Similarly, Liberals are supportive of promiscuity, supportive of efforts to expose children to ever earlier sexual education, and, as the debate over Murphy Brown showed, Liberals are supportive of low-investment, single parenting. Finally, as John Jost has shown, Liberals show diminished loyalty to in-group, similar to how r-selected organisms do not fully understand the reason for even perceiving an in-group in nature.

Conversely, the K-select conservative:

    [E]mbrace competitions between individuals and accept disparities in competitive outcomes as an innate part of the world, that is not to be challenged. Since individuals who do not fight for some portion of the limited resources will starve, this environment will favor an innately competitive, conflict-prone psychology. Study shows, such a psychology will also tend to embrace monogamy, embrace chastity until monogamous adulthood, and favor high-investment, two-parent parenting, with an emphasis upon rearing as successful an offspring as possible. This sexual selectiveness, mate monopolization, and high-investment rearing is all a form of competing to produce fitter offspring than peers. This evolves, because if one’s offspring are fitter than the offspring of peers, they will be likely to acquire resources themselves, and reproduce successfully.

    Although total numbers of offspring will be diminished with this high-investment rearing strategy, the offspring’s success in competition is what is most important in a K-selective environment. Here, wasting time producing numerous offspring that are not as fit as possible will doom one to Darwinian failure. As time goes on, and K-selection continues, forming into competitive groups will often emerge as a strategy to acquire resources. This will add add loyalty to in-group to the suite of K-type psychological characteristics. This is why when we look at K-selected species in nature, we see packs of wolves, herds of elephants, prides of lions, and pods of dolphins, and each individual is loyal to their group and its competitive success. Since the only way to survive will be to acquire one’s resources by out-competing peers, this invariably produces tremendously fast rates of evolutionary advancement. For this reason, K-selected organisms are usually more evolutionarily advanced than their r-selected counterparts, and will exhibit more complex adaptations, from increased intelligence and sentience, to increased physical capabilities, to loyalty and prosociality, in species where group competition occurs.

    Clearly, this mirrors the Conservative’s embrace of competitions, such as war, capitalism, and even the bearing of arms in self-defense against criminals. It also mirrors the Conservatives tendency to favor family values, such as abstinence until monogamy and two-parent parenting. It even explains why Conservatives feel driven to see their nation succeed as greatly as possible, regardless of the effects this has upon other nations or just members of their out-group.

He continues:

    To my eye, it is inherently clear that this r/K divergence is the origin of our political divide. Indeed, while policy proposals from Conservatives are predicated upon the premise that resources are inherently limited, and individuals should have to work and demonstrate merit to acquire them, Liberals advocate on behalf of policy proposals which seem to be predicated upon an assumption that there are always more than sufficient resources to let everyone live lives of equal leisure. To a Liberal, any scarcity must clearly arise due to some individual’s personal greed and evil altering a natural state of perpetual plenty.

    Here, we see how these two deeply imbued psychologies generate grossly different perceptual frameworks within those who are imbued with them. Just as a Liberal will never grasp why a Conservative will look down upon frequent promiscuity and single parenting, the Conservative will never grasp why the Liberal will be so firmly opposed to free market Capitalism, or the right to self defense when threatened. Each sees an inherently different world, and is programmed to desire an inherently different environment.

    In nature, since it is the individuals who best exemplify this r-selected psychological standard who will reproduce under conditions of resource abundance, their offspring will carry these traits. As time goes on, the population will gradually develop ever more extreme presentations of these traits. ...

Or, to put it more succinctly, "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times." The r-select politics is on the ascendance and will necessarily create hard times. 

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For additional information, see also the following videos:

VIDEO: "DECLINE & The Inevitable FATE of EMPIRE"--Felix Rex (15 min.)

Anonymous Conservative predicts a cycle between r and K populations and nations which is very similar to theories of the cycles of civilization by others such as Oswald Spengler and Sir John Bagot Glubb, the latter of which is discussed in the Felix Rex video above.

VIDEO: "Why would you defend something that is evil?: John Lovell"--Fox News (4 min.)

Discussing why and how "wokism" will weaken the military.