Month: August 2018

The uproar over President Trump’s putative “capitulation” to Putin in Helsinki and the “hack” of the 2016 election by the Russians has a message for anyone willing to hear it, and it is this: sixteen years after the debacle of the 2000 Florida recount, America’s elections were still open to attack.  That a great democracy’s election systems would still be vulnerable to foul play four election cycles after a meltdown is proof that a fraud-free, error-free, tamper-proof election system is something America’s political class just doesn’t want us to have.

It’s scandalous that our election systems are still vulnerable.  It should be well nigh impossible to interfere with America’s elections.  It’s disappointing that America’s tech gurus haven’t come up with systems that secure our elections from tampering and fraud.  You’d think they’d be competing with each other to be the first to come up with the most elegant solution.  Sad!

By pushing for laws that require proof of citizenship to register to vote, Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach has long been the whipping boy of the political left.  One of the candidates who ran on August 7 to replace Kobach is Dennis Taylor.  Mr. Taylor had an interesting guest column on July 23 in the Kansas City Star headlined “Three easy steps to securing our election results in Kansas.”

Taylor’s three easy steps don’t deserve much comment.  His first step is, “Audit, post-election, the eligibility of voters.”  Shouldn’t eligibility be vetted beforehand, when one registers or when one votes?  The second step is, “Back up all votes cast in Kansas with verified paper ballots.”  Why, so we can have recounts?  And his last step: “Constantly verify system security, comprehensively and proactively, to ensure protection of online voter registration data.”  Right, but how do we “verify”?

The Kansas secretary of state oversees elections and voter registration in the state, so it’s good that Taylor’s article gets more substantive in the second half, where he makes some salient observations.  One of them is that citizenship has never been validated in the state of Kansas, not even under Kobach’s requirement for proof.  Regarding the proof of citizenship law, Taylor writes:

The requirement to provide documentation fell only on those who were registering for the first time in Kansas, as a result of turning 18 or moving from another state.  The law did not require those already registered to disclose whether they were citizens or non-citizens.

To effectively address the belief and concern that non-citizens were registering and voting, wouldn’t it have made more sense to require that all Kansans currently registered, as well as new registrants, provide such proof of citizenship?  That way, any non-citizens already registered and voting – if any – would have been discovered, since they presumably would not have been able to supply valid documentation.  Applying the law only to prospective voters [i.e., new registrants] could never address the belief that non-citizens have registered and voted.

So Kansas’s proof of citizenship law was never adequate.  But it’s doubtful that Kansans who are already registered would appreciate having to register yet again just so registrars can see their documents.  One simple solution would be for voters to show their Social Security cards at the polls.  (Maybe that’s too simple.)

Just how should the states verify citizenship?  The way to determine whether a registrant is a citizen is to go online and access federal databases to see if he is on file.  Employers access federal files when they use E-Verify.

But besides verifying citizenship, the states have another problem.  You see, there’s no federal law that prohibits foreigners voting in state and local elections, and some local governments want to allow aliens to vote in their elections.

The snag arises when the states mix elections – that is, have federal and state-local officials on the same ballot.  Because there is a federal law that one must be a citizen to vote in federal elections, one solution to this problem might be for the states to conduct separate elections for federal officials.

Having separate elections for the federal offices has attractions, because the quadrennial presidential election is the election that brings out the voters and creates those long lines at the polls.  If there were only one to three items on the ballot (that is, U.S. representative, U.S. senator, and U.S. president), that would expedite voting.  What takes the most time in mixed elections is the state and local items.  To support that, take a look at this 2016 Kansa City ballot and see what all we had to vote on – everything from president to state amendments.  By having separate elections, there’ll be greater “throughput” in the federal election, and voting will go faster.

In August of 2016 at America Thinker, I outlined an idea for how America might have hack-proof election systems.  I then exchanged a few emails with the expert whom I cited, MIT’s Ron Rivest.  He wasn’t buying my idea.  What I had urged was using the internet to vote, which means remote voting – i.e., voting from anywhere.  One thing that concerned Rivest is that with remote voting, it becomes easy to sell one’s vote.  Selling one’s vote may be more of a problem than I had appreciated, even though selling one’s sacred vote is a federal crime.  However, it’s still legal to sell your soul (as long as you pay the sales tax).  Remote voting also enables another crime: coerced voting.  If a voter is not at an official voting station and is using a smartphone or computer to vote, an abusive spouse or an imperious boss could force a voter to vote the “right” way.  But with absentee and mail-in ballots, isn’t coercive voting possible right now?

Mr. Rivest is an expert on cyber-security.  I don’t know how much experience he has in applications programming, such as for payroll, accounts receivable, budget, time management, etc.  But one thing I learned as an applications programmer is that there’s usually a “workaround” to most snags.  I believe there are workarounds for the problems associated with internet voting, but I’m not going into that here because I’ve concluded that professional politicians don’t want such serious change in our election systems.

In a recent article, I presented an idea that is a workaround for the election systems currently in use.  My goal was to come up with a minimalist “fix” that would allow the states to continue conducting presidential elections but would also make possible the identification of alien voters and other fraudsters and thereby give Americans an accurate count of the legitimate vote.

The article urged that all presidential “ballots” in all the states be sent to the feds to go into a single file, which could then be used to identify alien voters, multiple voters, etc.  Even if a state has perfect voter registries, that doesn’t prevent election crime; elections can be stolen in backrooms during recounts.  The states are doing such a lousy job of vetting registrants that the only solution is to vet the voters in federal elections by accessing their records on federal databases, like the database at the Social Security Administration, as is done with E-Verify.

The Russian hacking narrative is a “shiny object” Democrats use to distract us from looking at the real foreign interference in our elections.  This other “hacking” is done not remotely from Minsk or Romania, but right here at home under the noses of our election officials.  And unlike Russian hacking, this other hacking actually does affect vote counts.  But the Dems are okay with this other hacking by foreigners because it helps them “win” elections.

Democrats’ idea of democracy is so warped that they really need to rename themselves.  How about the “Aliens First Party”?

Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.

A little remembered event that occurred 538 years ago today – the ritual decapitation of 800 Christians who refused Islam – sheds much light on modern questions concerning the ongoing conflict between Islam and the West.

Context: Though primarily remembered for sacking Constantinople in 1453, because Ottoman sultan Mehmed II was only twenty-one years old then, he still had many good decades of jihading before him.  He continued expanding into the Balkans, and, in his bid to feed his horses on the altar of Saint Peter’s basilica – Muslim prophecies held that “we will conquer Constantinople before we conquer Rome” – he invaded Italy and captured Otranto in 1480.  More than half of its twenty-two thousand inhabitants were massacred, five thousand led away in chains.

To demonstrate his magnanimity, Mehmed offered freedom and security to 800 chained Christian captives.  All they had to do was embrace Islam.  Instead, they unanimously chose to act on the words of one of their numbers: “My brothers, we have fought to save our city; now it is time to battle for our souls!”

Outraged that his invitation was spurned, on August 14, on a hilltop (subsequently named “Martyr’s Hill”), Mehmed ordered the ritual decapitation of these 800 unfortunates.  Their archbishop was slowly sawed in half to jeers and triumphant cries of “Allah akbar!”  (The skulls and bones of some of these defiant Christians were preserved and can still be seen in the Cathedral of Otranto.)

Now consider what this event says about current realities.

First, whenever Islamic individuals or organizations engage in violence against non-Muslims – and cite Islam as the reason for their behavior – we are instantly told the exact opposite: that they are mere criminals and psychopaths, that their actions have “nothing to do with the reality of Islam,” to quote John McCain.

Yet it was not just run-of-the-mill “Muslims” who committed atrocities atop Martyr’s Hill, but the official leader of Sunni Islam – the sultan himself, who always had a pack of Muslim ulema – clerics, scholars, and muftis – to guide and confirm his decisions vis-à-vis infidels (including massacring those who reject Islam).

Nor was Otranto an aberration.  As documented in my new book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, Islam’s official leaders and spokesmen – from sultans and caliphs to ulema and sheikhs – have always spoken and acted just like the Islamic State (or rather vice versa).

Also interesting to reflect on is how even then, over half a millennium ago, Western nations preferred to engage in denial and wishful thinking over coming to grips with reality or aiding their beleaguered coreligionists.  Soon after the Otranto massacre, Pope Sixtus IV chided an indifferent West accordingly:

Let them not think that they are protected against invasion, those who are at a distance from the theatre of war!  They, too, will bow the neck beneath the yoke, and be mowed down by the sword, unless they come forward to meet the invader.  The Turks have sworn the extinction of Christianity.  A truce to sophistries!  It is the moment not to talk, but to act and fight!

Such laments were not uncommon; nearly a century later, in 1565, as a massive Islamic armament was sailing over to besiege the tiny island of Malta, Pope Pius IV complained that the king of Spain “has withdrawn into the woods and France, England and Scotland [are] ruled by women and boys.”

Finally, and not unlike today, whereas the mass of Western people were ignorant of Islam’s doings, a minority were always keenly aware, including from a historical perspective.  Consider Sebastian Brant (b. 1457)’s “Ship of Fools,” a satirical poem on the gradual nature of Islam’s advances against a “sleeping” Christendom:

Our faith was strong in the Orient

It ruled in all of Asia in Moorish lands and Africa

But now [and since the seventh century] for us these lands are gone…

We perish sleeping one and all

The wolf has come into the stall

And steals the Holy Church’s sheep

The while the shepherd lies asleep

Four sisters of our Church you find

They’re of the patriarchic kind

Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch

But they’ve been forfeited and sacked

And soon the head [Rome] will be attacked.

As the poem’s continuity suggests, learned Europeans saw the Ottoman scourge as the latest in a continuum of Islamic terror, for whereas the Arabs were “the first troops of locusts” that appeared “about the year 630,” to quote a contemporary English clergyman, “the Turks, a brood of vipers, [are] worse than their parent … the Saracens, their mother.”

The same observations of continuity can be made about the Islamic State and every other jihadi organization.

Editor’s note: A portion of this article is excerpted from the author’s new book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.  All quotes are sourced there.

Never mind that the conservative movement is dead, writes Michael Walsh, because conservatism isn’t a movement anyway; its job is to “conserve.”  So a movement with political goals is beside the point.  Instead, conservatism is:

… a simple acknowledgement of timeless verities and a willingness to defend them against malevolent faddishness masquerading as “progress,” whose object is the destruction of our culture and its replacement with…well, nothing.

But that has been the problem all along.  If you have already retreated to defending the citadels of timeless verities, the other side has the strategic advantage of keeping you under siege.

For instance, the Marxist secular religious movement has always had the simple advantage of declaring that its members were on the side of the angels because they were fighting oppression.  That’s a much better strategy than defending timeless verities.

And Ed Kilgore points out that the Sarah Jeong affair shows that the Marxists are already in the citadel.  If Sarah Jeong and her racism are normal, then if you are getting “married to the opposite sex, starting a family early, having more than two kids, worshipping in church every Sunday, revering the nation’s founders” in today’s public square, that makes you kinda weird, as in Vice President Pence.

So I say the best defense is a good offense.  It is not good enough to defend the citadel, or revere marriage, family, and children.  We need to seed every American mind with the notion that the left’s century-long attack on the bourgeois culture is evil; that the marginalization of work, family, and the rule of law is unjust; and that it is right and proper for every American to resist the left with every fiber of his being.

I say the whole Marxian worldview is a Great Reaction, a cruel attempt to return humans to a world that never was.  For I mildly say the welfare state is neo-feudalism, identity politics is neo-tribalism, and taxing people up to 36% of GDP is neo-piracy.

It is not just that socialism fails whenever it is tried because the economy is no longer a feudal agriculture that is simple enough for dull warrior-nobles to keep going.  It is not just that the left’s culture of revolution is nothing less than a religious war to the death that blows society apart.

No, the left’s monumental blunder is to suppose that politics is a saving truth rather than a necessary evil, and that political power is a force for good rather than a battering ram that all too easily demolishes the fragile structures of social cooperation.

Here is the ground I stand on.  I simply say that if you lefties demand that the middle class, the bourgeoisie, has to make allowances for the poor helpless working class, and now women and minorities, because they don’t have the power, then we say the same.

We deplorables demand that you godly, educated, and evolved ruling class make allowances for us, who don’t have the education, the connections, the inside track, and the advanced culture to devise personal journeys of discovery along the arc of history for ourselves.  Because we don’t have the power.  All we want is to live honorable lives obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

To put things into the language of rights, we deplorables demand the right to live our ordinary, responsible lives and not be stigmatized by the enlightened ones as bigots and bitter clingers.

We might go a step farther and appropriate the language of the philosopher Lina Lamont, that we demand the right to live our humdrum little lives, and to feel as though our hard work ain’t been in vain for nothin’.

Oh, I understand what is really going on; it is the conceit of the ruling class that they are better than we are and therefore get to tell us what to do.  No doubt, you remember that the philosopher Lamont had their number on that one, too.  She said:

Peo-ple?  I ain’t peo-ple!  I am a…’a shimmering glowing star in the cinema firm-a-mint!’  It says so – right there [in the New York Times].

If you are a shimmering glowing star in the MSM firm-a-mint, you find it easy to sneer at a rude, crude mortal like President Trump.  Your Olympian gods are like that; they tend to treat ordinary humans as garbage.

So I would say the left’s program of attacking the middle class and our responsibility culture is a vile injustice and that we will never rest until the left cries “uncle” and abandons its monstrous and inhuman program.

See what I am saying?  It is not enough to defend our timeless verities.  We need to defeat the Democrats in the midterms, and the next presidential election, and on and on until the pussy hats cry “uncle.”

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.  Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.