Posts Tagged → 2025
Anatomy of a primary election
On May 20th, Pennsylvania held its primary election. Mostly local seats and judgeships were on the ballot, which are definitely important, but the real prizes were the PA Commonwealth Court and the PA Superior Court. As has come to be usual here and in many other states, the conservative/ independent-minded grass roots fielded their candidates and the state Republican Party fielded its candidates.
And as usual, the PA Republican Party was directly involved in the selection of the primary election candidates, their endorsements, their negative attacks, funding, etc. When a political party gets in between The People and their choice of candidate, the party always loses in the long run. When The People believe the party does not share their views or values, and is only pursuing the selection of certain candidates who will be malleable and loyal to the party, then The People lose faith in the party.
Here in PA there is real animosity between grass roots conservatives and the PA GOP establishment.
This election we had grass roots candidate Maria Battista vs. PAGOP candidate political establishment-endorsed Ann Marie Wheatcraft for Superior Court judge. Battista had run before as the GOP endorsed candidate, and had lost to the grass roots candidate. This time around, for whatever reason, she was on the outs with the PAGOP and on the in with the grass roots groups, like Lycoming Patriots. Wheatcraft had the PAGOP endorsement and money.
For the Commonwealth Court we had well known Second Amendment attorney Josh Prince vs. unknown state bureaucrat attorney Matt Wolford. Bureaucrat Wolford was mysteriously endorsed by the PAGOP, even though he has worked most of his career at the PA Dept. of Environmental Protection, an agency that no matter which incarnation it embodies, and regardless of which political party is running it, nonetheless is associated with heavy-handed regulations and lawless bureaucrats who routinely beat up on private landowners and businesses. Not exactly a likely place to give birth to a solid Republican candidate for any office, much less a judgeship.
The long and short of these two races is that Battista the outsider defeated Wheatcraft the moneyed insider, and Wolford the party endorsed yet unknown bureaucrat and mystery “Republican” defeated grass roots favorite Prince. Moreover, Prince was endorsed by numerous organizations, like Gun Owners of America, Firearms Owners Against Crime, etc.
These are strange results.
Normally voters align with outsiders or insiders, but not with one candidate here and not that one over there. And yet that is what happened in this election. Normally, big endorsements gain big traction for candidates, but we saw no evidence of that in the Prince vs Wolford race. Despite his many big endorsements, Prince was utterly crushed even in very conservative rural counties, like Lycoming and Elk, where he was known, liked, and should have won handily. And yet, in these same counties, Battista blew off Wheatcraft’s doors.
Aside from a crooked vote tallying scheme, I have no explanation for this odd outcome that defies all odds and conventional thinking. Except for one possible variable that tends to get overlooked these days, and that is ballot position. That is, where does the candidate’s name fall on the ballot – top, middle, or last.
Studies have shown that ballot position does matter, or it can matter, but much less so when voters feel compelled to look up candidates on the internet. With its easy information access, the internet has been the great leveler of campaigns everywhere. Big campaign money cannot always defend a candidate’s bad record, which will be all over the internet, visible to the voters who but follow a few clicks on a search engine.
Battista had top and Prince had bottom on their respective ballots. Meaning that the 3/4-4/4 super voters who make up the primary election electorate, were unsure of who to vote for and simply and superficially chose the first name they saw for each position. That could explain the opposite results we got for both candidates, Battista and Prince.
As we see here, the voters have to want to know something about the people they are voting for in order to defeat the ballot position factor, as well as overcome often superficial campaign advertising. And so we learned a hard lesson here: The vaunted and lauded super voters did not necessarily do super research into the candidates. They apparently did not bother to look up the candidates before walking into the voting booth. They simply saw a name at the top and made their choice.
And that is the gory anatomy of Pennsylvania’s 2025 primary election, God help us all.
Does ballot position really determine who a lot of primary election super voters choose? From this election, it would seem so.
Elk County is a very conservative rural place where DEP bureaucrats are hated like poison ivy. The 2025 results there make no sense, unless ballot position is the primary factor.
Doesn’t it seem mean spirited to not even mention candidate Josh Prince? Doesn’t it further alienate his supporters? What is that all about?
I have never seen election results like this. If conservative rural Lycoming County super voters feel so strongly about conservative candidate Battista, they for sure would have felt just as strongly about conservative candidate Prince. And yet…the results seem to prove that ballot position is the most important determinant
Dauphin County
Dauphin County
South Africa 2025 > racism than South Africa 1985
The South Africa of 2025 is a far more racist, more violent, more evil place than the South Africa of 1985. The Apartheid of South Africa 2025 is much greater, much worse, than the South Africa Apartheid of 1985. The South Africa that we see today is a failed state, a leper among nations, and I do not suggest that I know how it can get better. My role is to simply call it what it is: Racist evil.
Like all inveterate racists, today’s South African “leaders” have to want to get better, they have to want to repent, and they have to actually make substantive policy changes, before they are actually better people with a more representative democratic government. Right now, President Ramaphosa and his many associates are only in the early stage of being confronted about their evil racism, and they are trying to put up a fight. Not that Ramaphosa et al are in denial about their racism, no, they are simply telling us all to talk about something else. At least their racist White predecessors acknowledged their own racism. These current people are just bad liars.
Very well do I recall watching the Super 8 camera footage and nascent video footage of uniformed South African police (of all skin colors) beating black South Africans with rubber truncheons in 1985. My dad and I were watching the evening news on television, and the violent images were highly disturbing. Peaceful, non-violent protestors were being beaten badly, sent to the hospital, so that a racist and race-based government in Praetoria could maintain control. It was awful, about as a bad as any government could be. It motivated me to participate in the construction of our own student “shanty town” in front of Old Main at Penn State, and to hold many demonstrations there.
Those violent images did not stop until several years later, when the Whites-only South African regime stepped down and turned political power over to everyone else who lived in South Africa – black, brown, Asian Indian, Muslim, Hindu, white, Christian, etc. You name it, the entire ethnic and religious melting pot that the original South Africa had attracted to live there from across Africa and Europe and Asia since its founding in the early 1700s.
But then new South African images began to enter the nightly TV news: Black South Africans burning each other alive with gasoline and car tires. Butchering one another with machetes. Dragging one another behind vehicles until only a bundle of bloody rags with some bones and tattered meat remained at the end of the rope. Entire shanty towns burned, with poor mothers and children running pell-mell to escape. Such is the cost of political turmoil, one supposes. Perhaps when democracy and self-rule emerges from this turmoil, everyone involved will step back and call it quits.
Nope.
South Africa may have given up the original Apartheid of roughly 1947-1987, but it has only exchanged it for an Apartheid of Black-on-Brown and Black-on-White oppression. Racial oppression is evil, regardless of who is doing it, and the current South African leaders are a bunch of evil racist bastards, who use butchery, rape, and torture to hold on to political power. Don’t try to explain this away. Evil is evil, racism is racism, oppression is oppression, regardless of who is doing it.
And I think one of the lessons we have learned about the current Apartheid South Africa is that they will tell everyone that their oppression and racism is not oppression and racism. That the images of whites being beaten to death on their farms (which I have seen and will not re-post here), and white women being gang raped (which the perpetrators enjoy filming because they are not held accountable, and they are in fact encouraged by President Ramaphosa) before being be-headed, are not violence.
Today President Trump hosted President Ramaphosa at the White House. Ramaphosa wanted to talk about trade and getting more free money from hard working White American taxpayers, but Trump forced him to sit through about five minutes of horrible video showing Black-on-White political activity and hate speech from South Africa, including white-owned farms being gleefully ransacked by racist assholes. Trump also had some White refugees from South Africa talk about being ethnically cleansed from the land their families had called home for over 300 years. Three hundred years anywhere makes you a native.
And yes, let’s talk about human migration a bit, because that seems to be at the heart of all this Apartheid-reverse-Apartheid stuff going on. Fact is, humans migrate across this planet. They all do.
Asians especially have migrated a lot to then-empty lands, occupied them, called them home. Blacks have migrated to Europe in huge masses, seeking economic opportunity unavailable in their home sh*thole countries run into the ground by racist people like Ramaphosa. Whites have migrated out of Europe, Arabs and Asians have violently migrated into Europe over the past thousand years (Ghengis Khan, the Ottoman Turks, the Muslim Arabs).
There has been a non-stop human migration around the planet, but when white Europeans do it, it is oddly decried as Colonialism. Even when the white Europeans founded incrediblly developed, wealthy nations like South Africa, which in turn attracted even more human migration, because of the unprecedented opportunity in the region, and which formed the basis for the modern day Apartheid South Africa that is now run by people like Ramaphosa, corruptly lapping up the last dregs of civilized development and wealth that remain, and creating none to replace what is taken.
Yes, white refugees from South Africa are a reality that breaks the racist narrative that only White people can be racist. Fact is, everyone can be racist – Blacks, Browns, Whites, Yellows, Reds, and all shades in between. Everyone of all skin colors can hog power, and use it unjustly. We are seeing these simple truths with Hamas and Hizb’alla, with the race-mocking Ramaphosa, and with the poorly mis-named International Court of Injustice and Official Discrimination that has sought to finish what master racist Adolph Hitler tried against the Jews.
Only here in America, it appears, do we have an opportunity to create a non-racial society, a racially blind society, where the quality of your character is the sole basis for judgment and measure. I am proud of President Trump for starting a conversation about racism that is looooooong overdue. The fact that the South Africa of 2025 is much worse than the South Africa of 1985 – more racist, more Apartheid-y, more cruel and violent, shows how much work needs to be done. Ramaphosa is a useful foil.
I am looking forward to the honest discussion about it, and in the meantime to helping the refugees from today’s racist South African Apartheid.
Shameless Fake News New York Times created the alternative media that replaced it
The Blaze posts facts that are inconvenient to liars like the New York Times
January 6th 2021, USA’s modern civil rights march
On January 6th, 2021, I stood near the Washington Monument and listened to President Donald J. Trump speak about election integrity. He was right on the facts and also a bit long winded, but who in his position wouldn’t be. America had just witnessed a stolen election, and a presidency illegally ripped from Trump’s hands by a band of lawless bureaucrats and anti-America activists.
To say that America was shocked at the blatant theft of the 2020 election was an understatement. Most people expected the US Supreme Court to step in and hear arguments about the overwhelming details of rampant election fraud across the country. But no help was coming from the spineless weasels on the Supreme Court. And with very few exceptions, no help was forthcoming from anyone in elected office, either, as state attorney generals sat on their hands and looked the other way, and state legislatures refused to take impeachment and removal actions against rogue bureaucrats and lawless state supreme courts that helped implement the Steal of 2020, the theft an entire nation.
I will never forget marching down Constitution Avenue in the early afternoon of January 6th, arm-in-arm with people who were strangers on the one hand, and yet recognizable to me on the other hand. On my left arm was a black guy, probably mid thirties, visibly upset and shouting about our rights being trampled. On my right arm was a Hispanic guy, who was animated but who also seemed especially positive. We were bound together as Brothers in America. Regardless of our different skin colors, we shared then and still share now a common interest in the rule of law and honest elections.
I think we all expected our participation that day in that 100% peaceful march for our most important civil right, the right to vote, to bear fruit. We justifiably expected the representatives of The People to suspend the artificially forced electoral vote counting, and that all the obviously fraudulent actions in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, would get a public airing.
Alas, the lawlessly violent police response to our peaceful civil rights march in front of the US Capitol matched the lawless behavior of the elected official class: Both groups ignored We, The People, and both police and members of congress went on unimaginable rampages against us. The DOJ’s shameful hunt for political dissidents continues to this very day.
As I wrote here on the day after January 6th, I was illegally gassed three times and repeatedly shot with rubber bullets by a police officer who was keyed in on me, and yet my face, which he seemed so intent to hit with his many rubber bullets, was just a few feet out of range of his gun. His projectiles kept hitting my chest, my shoulders, but never my face. I don’t recall there being much room behind me to step back from the officer’s assault, and like others around me, I stood shocked by what I was witnessing and experiencing. The police were supposed to be our protectors, not assault troops acting as an arm of the lawless political class.
January 6th, 2021, was the civil rights march of our time, and I am proud that I was there as an active participant. Unlike the police there that day, I did not hurt anyone, I did not break anything, and I did not act lawlessly. My heart and my mind are clear. The police, however, must be investigated and legally held accountable for their civil rights violations against us peaceful protestors.
Nothing is more important than voting, having the right to vote, and have your vote be honestly counted and not be diluted by fake ballots and hacked voting machines that deliberately change votes in favor of the lawless political class. Without one person-one vote, there is no republic, there is no democracy, there is no representative government of, by and for The People, and no America.
In 1964, elected Republicans overcame Democrat Party opposition and got America to pass the Civil Rights Act aimed at letting Black Americans live free and equal lives with everyone else. A year later, in 1965, elected Republicans again overcame Democrat Party opposition and got the Voting Rights Act passed, which allowed Blacks to vote freely and not be subject to the myriad barriers the Democrat Party was placing in their way.
On Januray 6th, 2021, a new civil rights movement was begun, one for clean voting in America. For elections free of violence, free of interfering police, free of hacked voting machines, free of endless fake ballots, free of endless vote counting so that one political party eventually gets enough fake votes to declare a fake triumph, and free of papered-over windows of vote counting rooms where Republican watchers have been ejected, which happened in many venues, including here in Pennsylvania in 2020 and 2021.
In 2025, America needs a new Voting Rights Act, that protects all American citizens: a) One paper ballot per legal voter, b) personal official ID by all voters that matches their voting roll information, c) in-person voting for all but military personnel and those with extenuating circumstances, d) no voting machines, and e) just one Election Day, with all results counted and announced immediately after counting that evening.
America will not continue as a free nation without this one essential civil right being achieved.