Posts Tagged → political
Old relationships die on new battlefield
If I have had one conversation about old friendships suffering from our prolonged political war, I have had a hundred.
Most people do not have comfort zones big enough to encompass people they politically disagree with, but those who do experience the deaths of those relationships, nonetheless.
Despite their big-hearted best efforts at disagreeing without being disagreeable, and making room for all opinions, it is mostly people on the right who watch their circle of family and friends getting smaller and smaller. The people whom they love or respect cannot return the favor when political disagreements stand between them. Even though each side holds views that the other strenuously objects to.
Fall-out from family holidays, a wedding invitation not extended to an old friend, and so on.
Once again, conservatives believed they were merely under disagreement, a fact of life that happens all the time, when in fact liberals were at war with them, family and friendship be damned. It seems that to liberals, relationships are a natural sacrifice in their “progress” forward and leftward.
Historians have written a lot about the long-term effects of old wars, like the American Civil War, or World War I. Hundreds of thousands of young men dead, maybe a million or more badly disfigured, missing limbs, half of a face, a hand. Not to mention the psychological trauma. Impacts on business and industry, farming, families, grieving parents and children forever unable to form strong emotional bonds as a result.
One can only wonder what will happen in the coming years when this quiet non-shooting civil war we are in here in America is over, and people are trying to move forward with their lives. What will be the effects, the results.
No amount of late night talk show humor will paper over the pain, and even some of those late night comedians are now saying “the fun times may be over.”
My take is this: If you take your political views so seriously that you cannot abide the company or fellowship of others who see things differently than you, then you are missing the key to being a peaceful person.
Gentle acceptance is the way to go. Something about tolerance, I think.
Vegas: Death by Liberal & Liberalism
Trendy vacation get-away Vegas is now known as America’s biggest murder scene, thanks to mass murderer Steve Paddock, who from his 32nd floor hotel room rained down thousands of bullets upon about 22,000 country music fans gathered closely together to listen to Jason Aldean and other top entertainers.
With so many people so closely packed into one spot, Paddock was shooting the proverbial fish in the barrel. Like union thug James Hodgkinson, who hunted down and shot Republican lawmakers playing softball this summer. And like the ISIS Bataclan murderers last year, except that they then walked through the wounded and the dying, methodically torturing, maiming, and executing those who still moved, just to put an exclamation point on their handiwork.
One American political party has developed a nasty habit of exploiting for political gain those events that are most painful to Americans. Natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, even heavy snowfalls are used to jack up and advance a “climate change” cause that just also happens to be mostly about wealth centralization and redistribution. That is Marxism 101 for those of you not reading between the lines here. These are cheap shots, cheap points, at the expense of those who suffer.
That political party has also exploited both individual and mass murders to advance the disarming of the American People through “gun control,” which is never crime control, just people control.
There are exceptions, however.
If an illegal invader (“illegal alien”) commits murder with a gun, then that is excused by that political party, because the purported victim status of the murderer both exonerates him from his crime, and also supersedes in importance any other political goal.
That is because illegal invaders are the key to this American political party’s quest for voter dominance and full political control of the nation. If those 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 people can be turned into one-party voters, and concentrated in major urban areas as well as previously conservative rural areas, then that political party will reap the rewards. Thus the support for illegal invader murderers.
Or, if that political party has long run a city like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or New York, to name a few, where violent crimes with guns, especially young black men murdering one another by the dozen each week or month, are very high, then that will not be reported by the mainstream media, or addressed by that political party. Nor will it be discussed by “experts,” or written about in newspaper op-ed columns. Because that would mean criticizing only that one political party, the responsible party.
That is unacceptable to that political party, so the cultural carnage continues, and that political party continues to call it firearm carnage, backed by the NRA, Republicans, etc etc etc.
What a huge diversion that is, a huge head fake. Well, it is fake, the opposite of the truth.
Back to Steve Paddock.
In his private life, Paddock was surrounded by far-Left, hard-Left street “activists” and violent thugs. ANTIFA, BLM folks. These people were his closest friends, and apparently also his lovers. True, it doesn’t square with his middle-America, middle-income nice white guy appearance. But as we know, appearances can be misleading.
James Hodgkinson and a multitude of other violent white Liberals in the news demonstrate that domestic terrorists can hide in plain sight.
So here we have a man dabbling in far-Left politics who grabs a pile O’ guns and ammo, and implements a fantastically complicated plan for mass murder of likely conservative Americans (the same victims that CBS News executive Haley Geftman-Gold said she was unsympathetic for yesterday, because they were likely conservative gun owners and Trump voters) (until Liberals openly repudiate her remarks, I believe Haley Geftman-Gold is representative of and speaks accurately for most liberals).
Never mind that right before the shooting, one or two women were escorted from the concert front row for telling people there that they “were all going to die tonight.” Other than planning, it seems Paddock also had a lot of logistical help in the hotel. Sneaking in and setting up all those guns and ammo, in two hotel rooms, is not a job for one guy.
Who helped him plan? Who helped him set up? Who were these disruptive, threatening women who witnesses asked police to take away from the concert?
My big take-away from this crushingly sad event is that Liberals have struck a brilliant one-two punch on America.
First, through their mainstream media arm, their entertainment media arm, and their academia arm they created a publicly hostile, violent atmosphere surrounding their political opponents, and the (“white privilege” etc) justification for that atmosphere. This is the same atmosphere where people like Paddock, Hodgkinson, and Floyd Corkins, who shot people at the Family Research Council’s DC office, as well as the regular rent-a-mob ANTIFA, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter thugs, can all freely operate.
These thugs attack, hurt, intimidate, or kill the political opponents of Liberals.
Then, when the blood is in the streets, Liberals also get to blame their political opponents AND demand gun control!
And gun control really means gun confiscation, which many Democrats are now openly admitting, which means the disarmament of The People.
Armed, We The People are an insurmountable barrier to the un-American big government control that the subject political party constantly advances. Disarmed, we are destined to become the serfs the liberals dream of having under their loving thumb.
It is truly brilliant to create the problem, and then loudly demand the solution that best fits your political agenda through hundreds of elite mouthpieces, while simultaneously destroying your opposition.
With that approach, how can Liberals lose?
NFL – “No F@#*n Loss”
As part of the entertainment industry’s decades-old war on American culture, ESPN and now the NFL have joined the politically correct pile-on.
Hollywood has led the way, surely, with its movies’ power of suggestion.
That Hollywood increasingly excretes unvarnished political activism in the guise of children’s movies as well as rated R adult movies is a thing of pride to that city; no one there even denies it. Hollywood is really just a communication propaganda arm of one political party.
But you cannot discount the increasing effects of ESPN reporters who now openly write that President Trump and his supporters are “white supremacists,” among many other examples of overt daily political activism by ESPN staff.
When I write “effects,” I mean the boomerang effect, which is where the intended results of one’s actions negatively rebound and injure the person who started it. These are ironic consequences, the best, most well-earned.
Perhaps the pinnacle of this boomeranging political activism is the anti-America statements by NFL players. Taking a knee and not standing during the national anthem wasn’t enough. Now some NFL players are making political videos that are shown at the game opening, or at half-time.
Well, removing the ESPN application from my iPhone was easy. There, ESPN, I am done with you. You are out of my life. See ya!
Over the past few years, ignoring the latest crop of poorly acted, poorly scripted, CGI-heavy Hollywood movies was a little more difficult, because Saturday night out at the movies with ice cream afterwards is a regular family thing. Even a lame movie would nonetheless entertain us and provide food for discussion later on. Like, was the movie’s symbolism consistent with its message? Did the message flow, or did acting anomalies and hiccups sidetrack the message? Was the message worthy, or was it muddled, or even negative?
These kinds of conversations with our kids were always stimulating, because as parents we enjoy watching our children grow. Nonetheless, unless a movie is exceptional in every way, we now decline to spend our money on a product from Hollywood, because that city is constantly at war with our values.
Now we have the National Football League, the NFL, getting all poseur-like. The NFL, too, is starting to see a substantial decline in business income. Why?
Illiterate men of the NFL, who have earned tens of millions of dollars in a few brief years’ time simply for running up and down a field, are out complaining about their station in life. You cannot make this stuff up. We indeed have phenomenally successful young men from disadvantaged backgrounds, whose wealth is largely accumulated from admirers of a different skin color, now claiming discrimination. And therefore, they take a knee during the American anthem.
In short, they tell their audiences and fans to go to Hell.
I don’t deny these guys have a right to stage their silly protests. But I have no duty to watch them, or to listen to their nonsense. And I have the right to stop watching their football games altogether, which is what I have now done.
This past January I called the NFL headquarters in Manhattan. Sharing my opinion of the league’s unwillingness to bring the football games back to being just about the games was the goal of the call. But, try as I might, finding a live human being was impossible. The phone menu just kept rotating through, taking me back to the beginning each time.
So I just started punching random numbers in to the phone.
Next thing I know, I was into the voice mail of a young NFL staffer, whose name I do not recall. But you know I took that opportunity to leave a detailed message on his voice mail.
My message to him was simple: Since I was eleven years old, I have looked forward to new NFL seasons. I always enjoyed watching NFL games. But that enjoyment has diminished lately because of all the fake moaning, fake victimhood, fake whining by these anti-America grandstanders on the football teams. And so I kindly asked the league to give players a simple choice: Dear employees, play, or leave, but no more political crap on someone else’s dime.
Unsurprisingly, I did not get a call back from anyone at the NFL. The organization seems to take people like me for granted. At their own peril.
Well, I did not watch one single NFL game last year, and I will not watch one single NFL game this year, either. And I will keep spending my time on other activities until the NFL gets its players to commit to just playing the game, and to stop insulting good people who have not had a racist thought in their lives. Or perhaps the time I free up that I used to spend watching NFL games on TV will become better spent, irrespective of the political landscape.
Yes, I know, it is common now for people to assert that disagreeing with them on policy issues automatically means you or I are “racist.” The contrary facts do not matter to them. As a result, nothing has done more damage to the battle to end discrimination and racism than this constant crying wolf by crybullies and rich crybabies. I am a very good person, I am not a racist, and I am tired of being told I am a bad person because I do not share some silly ideology.
Guys, just play ball. OK?
I have now arrived at a place where the NFL has taken on a new meaning: No F@&#’n Loss to me. I don’t miss it.
Historic American Art vs. NAZI ISIS People
In the 1930s, the German NAZI party identified “degenerate” art that was supposedly representative of “degenerate” culture, officially unfit for Germans.
Paintings, sculptures, drawings, pottery, books, poetry, you name it, if it had any artistic value, the NAZIs scrutinized it carefully. And if that art did not match the NAZI’s new standards, then it was forbiddden, burned, destroyed, or looted and hidden away, to be ransomed and sold off to future buyers outside of the ‘culturally supreme’ Deutchland.
Entire museum collections and privately owned collections throughout NAZI-occupied Europe were looted, damaged, and or destroyed, because the art did not comport with the new standard these Ultra Germans had created. Priceless artifacts were lost forever, at best melted down for their precious metal value.
If you want to see the long-term impacts of this intolerant approach to art, use www.duckduckgo.com to search the phrase “nazi looted art,” and marvel at the sad results. Real Western culture took a huge hit from the neanderthal NAZIs, and the ill effects are still felt today.
Fast forward six decades to ISIS, the puritanical Muslim movement that uses extreme violence and sadistic cruelty to achieve political domination. A lot like the NAZIs, come to think of it.
ISIS has a thing against most art and even historic artifacts, if they do not fit neatly into the Sharia law that ISIS followers believe in.
Ancient Buddhist cliff carvings, imposing and inspiring…detonated into rubble, by ISIS.
Ancient Assyrian cities, buildings, from the beginning of recorded human history….bulldozed and detonated into shards of broken rock, by ISIS.
Important archaeological digs providing useful history, bulldozed by ISIS.
Entire churches looted of anything of immediate value, then burned down, by ISIS.
Entire museum collections either destroyed, or looted and re-sold on the international black market, by ISIS.
Fast forward just a few years to ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, etc., and now we have priceless American artifacts that belong to the public being outright destroyed by mobs from these groups.
Irreplaceable and beautiful bronze statues of long-dead generals and soldiers are being removed and destroyed either by street thugs enabled by big city mayors, or by the big city mayors themselves.
This is a war on history and art no different than the NAZIs or ISIS.
At the very best, this is simply the mistake of applying new understandings to old history.
Oh sure, the neanderthals claim that these statues are memorials to bad ideas, and sad times, and to some extent there may be some vague shred of truth in that. But to keep these cultural artifacts, these works of high art, is no endorsement of what they may have once captured long, long ago.
Rather, these statues are mute testimonials to our nation’s history, its struggles, and its triumphs. The fact that the Confederacy did not win, due to the intervention and huge sacrifice by hundreds of thousands of Caucasian men from the north, is the real story of these old monuments.
Today we have one American political party that is increasingly at open war with every basic value and idea that undergirds America, as it was founded. These public square symbols are caught up in that party’s war.
That political party has more and more officials doing cheap political stunts, like seizing old bronze statues in the public square, and declaring them “Cherem” (unfit, like ISIS does to the churches it burns), and culturally unfit, like the NAZIs did.
Frankly, there is zero difference between these mayors, and Virginia governor Terry McCauliffe, and the other totalitarian movements that preceded them, like the NAZIs, ISIS, and the Soviets (who tore down beautiful old Russian statues and replaced them with boring, utilitarian statues of Lenin and Stalin meant to project an intimidating political message).
Whether these mayors and governors act unilaterally and use publicly owned machines to take them down, or if they allow their allied street thugs from ANTIFA and BLM to tear them down, while the city police are ordered to make no arrests, it makes no difference.
In the end, these mayors and their violent street soldiers are no different than the worst people in history. But if they win, you can bet they will erect statues of themselves, glorifying their total transformation of America to…God knows what.
Now they are talking about destroying the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. No lie.
I say we make a stand like a stone wall to protect this historic American art, and stop this insanity, stop this assault on America, by these modern day NAZIs and ISIS thugs.
PA’s Keystone Fund: Symmetrical Program in an Asymmetrical Political World
If there is one rule or overarching principle that taxpayers want applied to how their hard-earned money is spent by government bureaucrats, it is symmetry.
If taxpayers put money in, they expect to get money, or value, back out.
Gasoline taxes? Show me the newly paved highway! Etc. Real simple symmetry.
This is the most elementary social contract between citizens and their self-selected governments, and today ain’t Ninth Century Europe, where armed tax collectors come knocking and begin turning the humble home inside out in search of hidden wealth to take, er…collect.
Today, when the government takes your money by threat of coercive force, you grudgingly turn it over, expecting to at least see some benefit from it.
At budget time is when the legislature and the executive negotiate over how the collected resources of a state or nation are going to be spent. Right now it is budget time in Pennsylvania, and there are no guarantees. Neither the governor nor the legislature has my trust.
Both are up for re-election.
In the middle of it all we have the Keystone Fund, Pennsylvania’s conservation engine. The Keystone Fund is used to run most of Pennsylvania’s “Ranger Rick” – style conservation programs. State parks, state forests, land acquisition, new kiosks, etc. Good stuff. Worthy stuff. The kind of stuff that makes the taxpayer say “Hey, I finally got my money’s worth back!”
The Keystone Fund is funded by taxpayers, but also in large part by the net returns from timber and natural gas sales from public lands. There is an appealing, nearly holy symmetry to any government program that uses money from its own programs to pay for its own programs.
It is the way government should be run!
Now, the Keystone Fund is at risk because it is a symmetrical program living in an asymmetrical political world populated by career politicians who disburse public funds to win public favor, and votes.
Instead of returning the proceeds from timber and gas sales back into the very natural resources that produced them, we now see the likelihood that elected officials will use this income stream to buy off their favorite constituencies. So they can get votes, and get re-elected.
How sad to see one of the very few examples of good public policy, the Keystone Fund, fall victim to something so crass, vulgar and common as an elected official.
To quote Mark Twain: “I think I can say, and say with pride that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.” (Speech 7/4/1873)
See-Saw Reactions Indicate Something is Up
When a political party or a movement politicizes every single thing its opponents do, in the hopes of turning every action taken into a negative, you’ve already got a problem.
It is a problem because nothing positive is being sold. It’s just hate and anger and fake outrage piled on top of more and more hate.
Trying to demonize people has many downsides. It is emotionally unsustainable. And it is politically unsustainable. Just ask Adolf Hitler and his Nazi socialists, who perfected the heaping of hate upon their opponents.
Hitler and the Nazis reaped a whirlwind of backlash.
And the credibility gap grows, because the daily bobbing and weaving in search of an opening leads the accuser to become the blesser and vice versa. It looks nutty because it is nutty.
So we have Obama jetting around the planet to sell his carbon control message. The huge SUV convoys taking Obama from place to place aren’t low on carbon emissions, either.
His TV interviewer asks him why he is against eating meat because he has cooked “thousands of steaks” for Obama. Obama admits he sure likes steak.
In other words, don’t do as I do, do as I say.
Obama’s credibility may remain high with a small group of highly partisan hard leftists, but the rest of us shake our heads at his naked hypocrisy.
This Comey firing business is even worse, if it can be imagined.
For months and months, one American political party was demanding that Comey be fired. They blamed him for the loss of their candidate.
Then he gets fired by the president yesterday, and within an hour the same exact people who hated Comey and demanded his firing are now hating the president for firing him and are saying it is a political act.
This irrational hate isn’t just hypocritical. It is self-damaging, because normal people see it as nearly schizophrenic.
Someone quipped last week that Democrats are now so confused, if Trump came out for gun control, the Democrats would be “outraged” and immediately be against gun control.
Somewhere this acting and fake outrage works on people who are not independent thinkers. I understand that. Enough people anywhere simply follow the lead of someone, anyone, to make a real movement. Might only be five or ten percent of a society, but it is usually enough to raise hell. And that is what is happening here.
Folks, if you are reading this, I hope it is to expand your own thinking and not just to try to find fault. One of the huge challenges the left faces is the constant hatred expressed for people who simply disagree on policy. For decades the Left has been calling opponents haters, bigots, racists, xenophobes, sexists, etc., with no substance to back it up. Just toxic hate.
What our nation loses when these illogical, erratic see-saw reactions and wild hateful accusations lose their sting isn’t just a diminished political party on the left, but the real issues suffer. That is because the political mix and debate is reduced and the normal people somewhere in the middle back away, disgusted by the antics.
Don’t be a hater. Be a thinker. For a long time liberals were open minded, thoughtful, reflective, and analytical. That great tradition is gone. And that is sad, because all Americans are impoverished as a result.
Obama the Domestic Spy Part 3
You know what all this “Russia hacked the election for Trump” noise was all about?
It was a distraction to draw attention away from the fact that Obama had an aggressive and totally illegal domestic spying program against his political opponents.
Including and especially Donald Trump, who threatened everything Obama had done to America over eight years.
The illegally gathered and illegally “leaked” Flynn transcript, the leaked transcripts of Trump talking with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. These are wiretapping results from people controlling the levers of government power. They are the remnants of Obama’s administration, dug down deep in the DC bureaucratic morass, dishing out their best efforts to undermine and damage Trump by whatever means they can.
Before the leaks they were simply wiretapping Trump, when he was a candidate and after he was elected, in his home, his business, his car.
Oh sure, the Obama folks have tried to cover their tracks by saying this was all a legitimate “investigation” of Trump.
But there never was an investigation of Trump. Unlike with Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Russia, there is zero evidence of any wrongdoing by Trump.
Trump didn’t do anything wrong or illegal. His only “crime” is that he opposed the Obama machine, which illegally weaponized the federal government against its political opponents, using the IRS , the NSA, EPA, Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, etc.
Obama took this risk because the information was highly valuable for the campaign, and he bet that Clinton would win. Obama expected this whole thing would be swept under the rug and no one would ever really know after Clinton was elected.
But now that Trump is president, and the facts are coming out, Obama’s malicious persona is becoming public knowledge. He is not a nice man. He is not an honest man. Obama makes president Richard Nixon look like a puppy, a kitten, a baby monkey, whatever image of a cute, cuddly, non-threatening adorable little pet you can imagine.
That is the contrast. That is the truth. And the truth is becoming more widely known. Russia didn’t hack anything, and they didn’t make Clinton run a terrible campaign nor did Russia force people to vote a certain way. Russia is a false flag by a group of people who we now see deserve to be treated like the deposed tyrants of Europe, at the hands of a mob.
What ever will we now do with this illegal squatter in our midst, this criminal alien with his anti-democracy machinations against the American People?
Is there no one who will rid us of this meddlesome priest?
Where are all the rogue judges when they are really needed to administer true justice?
Judicial independence, or over-reach?
Judges do not technically have an ability to do more than rule “Yes” or “No” on an issue that is both before their court and also justiciable.
However, for decades activist judges use “broad powers” to advance a political agenda and have continuously put average Americans on defense. This means overstepping boundaries around the judicial branch, reaching deeply into the legislative and executive branches. These activist judges ignore the elementary separation of powers at the heart of the American republic, and they establish themselves as rulers by fiat over all the little people.
Because all people (literally everywhere) want to respect judges, and the justice system, as the heart and soul of democracy and quintessential justice, a culture of deference has built up around even the most active judges who legislate from the bench. That culture is at work now as several extreme judges have ruled that President Trump’s executive order on immigration must stop. The truth is that the recent immigration order is both in keeping with existing law and with the Constitutional purview of the executive branch. Judges really have nothing to say about it. Technically speaking.
But, so powerful is the draw of an independent judiciary that Americans have for a long time given up their rights, liberties, even our immediate safety to even the most obvious judicial political over-reach. Plenty of judges create “rights” where none existed before, or take rights that are expressly stated in the US and most state constitutions. The problem with this is it is unsustainable.
Judges are not elected, and when they act as if they are, and as if they are part of the political system from which they are supposed to remain aloof, they undermine the entire system of law that delicately balances upon their shoulders.
What is now happening as more and more judges engage in out-and-out political action, is the American citizenry believes less and less in what those judges do. The citizenry is losing confidence that those judges are capable of upholding the basic tenets of America, first and foremost.
A truly independent and cautious judiciary is one that passes up most legal complaints, focusing instead on the truly important ones that cut to the heart of American representative government. America is far beyond that now, and here is what we ought to be doing about it:
First, the executive branch must ignore the rulings of imperial activist judges. Simply ignore them, because judges have no actual enforcement power. Ignoring activist holdings will strand activist judges and draw attention to their powerlessness, re-focusing attention on the real heavy weight of truly well-considered holdings. Activist judges have only themselves to blame for this.
Second, activist judges must be removed from the bench, either through elections, impeachments, or administratively. For far too long judges acting far beyond their natural limits have gotten away with murdering democracy, and it is time for Americans to reclaim their freedoms. It is time to focus our efforts on reining in judicial over-reach, so that we might have an independent judiciary worthy of our admiration, respect, and deference.
NPR’s alternative facts undermine media credibility
Seasoned NPR employee Mara Liasson asked a question at a White House press briefing the other day, and it has taken me days to accept the brazenness of her bald-faced lie.
Asking Trump Admin spokesman Sean Spicer about allegations of voter fraud, Liasson asserted that Trump had claimed the number of fraudulent votes in the November 2016 election were between three and five million.
Unfortunately, Spicer is new and did not challenge Liasson’s lie. Trump never claimed that number. He did say he believed between one and two million of the votes for Hillary Clinton were fraudulent. How Liasson arrived at five million votes is something only she knows.
But we know why she did it: Mara Liasson is personally opposed to the Trump Administration.
Unfortunately, Mara Liasson is like the other NPR employees, she is a partisan political activist. Her personal politics shapes her professional behavior. Nothing that Mara Liasson does is news reporting, as in reporting of actual facts. Her brazen creation of alternative facts in this one instance resembles her many prior years of alternative facts creation and fake news aimed at her other political enemies.
In one public moment, Mara Liasson has re-opened the worm can of fake news and alternative facts, used to attack and undermine the mainstream media’s political enemies.
And NPR fans wonder why their credibility is so low, and why there are so many loud calls to defund NPR and strip it of the publicly owned intellectual property it manages, like its trademarks and logos.
UPDATE: Fifteen minutes after writing this, I read a New York Times article published today, written by Richard Fausset, another political activist who wears the credentials of a “news reporter.”
What catches my eye right away is the following statement by Activist Fausset:
“The scrambling of what’s real and what’s illusion began well before Mr. Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway offered the concept of “alternative facts” on Sunday when commenting on false statements by Mr. Trump and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, and before Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims on Monday that millions of illegal voters cost him a popular vote majority.”