Import jQuery

Some Thoughts on the Recent US Election by Aaron Hecht



Let me start with a confession.

I averted my eyes  from this recent election in the United States, for the same reason one might avert their eyes as the airplane one's family was onboard hurtled towards the ground with the engines on fire.

In the months running up to the election, starting about the time of the historic(ly horrendus) debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in which the latter was obviously suffering from severe cognative decline, I just couldn't watch any more. It was so awful watching the campaigns say horrible, nasty things to each other while the media gleefully egged them on and the general public appeared to be getting ready for a brawl.

I know some very serious people who thought there was a better than 50-50 chance that the election would be very close, and this would result in court battles and possibly civil unrest. I advised several friends and family members who live in large cities and even smaller cities to stock up on groceries and bottled water in case there were riots and they had to shelter in place and/or if their city was placed under martial law and lockdown.

But in the end, election day came and...none of the things I was worried about happened.

I think we should all be very grateful for that, and we should also take a look at the reasons why things went as smoothly as they did.

Obviously, a lot of people were praying about this election, and this is another reason to beleive that prayer works and is worthwhile.

The proximate reason the election went off without violence is that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States by a large margin. It wasn't even close, either in the Electoral College or the popular vote, and because of that, the losing side didn't have any legitimate reasons to contest the election, either in court or on the streets.

Even those who are angry, disappointed, fearful, etc. enough to try doing something like that know that they'd be fighting a hopeless battle, so there's no point even trying.

So what went right? 

Why DID so many American voters vote for Donald Trump, including the largest percentages ever for a Republican candidate among minority communities like Latino men, black men and white women?

Judah has given us his answers in the previous blog, and I'm sure everything he said is correct. I have been living outside the United States for over two decades now and he's still there, pluggin' away and keeping his eyes and ears open. 

Candidly, I was shocked while reading his blog, because I had no idea about how big of a deal some of the things he mentioned had gotten to be, especially "DEI madness." That was just beginning to be a thing when I left the US and by God's grace it has never really caught on over here in Israel. We have our fair share of Left wing (and Right wing) looney toonyness, but that's one mistake we've managed to avoid making.

But with all due respect to Judah's points, over the past couple of days since the election, I've been getting caught up as best I can and I have a couple of other points that I think are also relevent to this discussion.

My sense is that there's at least two things that the Democrats did, along with the media and Hollywood, that motivated so many Americans to vote for Trump and Republican candidates for Congress and state Governors in this election.

The two mistakes the American Left has made that led to this result can be summed up in two words. The first word is "contempt" and the second word is "deceit."

The smug, snarky, sense of self-evident moral and intellectual superiority that they just can't seem to stop themselves from expressing at every opportunity makes people not like them. The way they project contempt for "little people" who live in "flyover country" in the middle of the United States, between the East and West Coasts, and even more so over people who live in the Southern States, is really offensive and irritating.

But they also express contempt for the very people they always say they most care about, like Latino and African-American men who work in jobs that don't require a college degree, or "uneducated" white women who do the same. These people are assumed to be too weak-minded, stupid and generally unsophisticated to even know what's good for themselves, so the "elites" on the Left figure it's up to them to do their thinking for them.

The way the Left presents the issue of abortion is a good example of this mindset.

So-called "reproductive rights" is the only issue many on the Left believe ordinary working class women have any reason to be concerned with. If these women don't give their votes to Democrats, those Democrats sneer at them that they're too stupid to understand this principle, which they just assume is valid although they seldom bother to ask any actual working class women if they actually feel this way.

A fairy tale that many Democrats started telling themselves in this election is that most women would quietly vote for Harris while lying to their husbands that they intended to vote for Trump. Where they got this idea is unclear, but the numbers from the exit polls flatly repudiated it.

There are many other examples of this phenomenon whereby Democrats treat the American voting public, even including many of their own traditional base of voters, with contempt, earning the contempt those voters treat them with in return.

This is even more evident in the way we can see how celebrity endorsements of Vice President Harris didn't help her much. These celebrities take themselves very seriously, and it must be really baffling to them when no one else does.

On that note, if I have something to say to Bruce Springsteen, although I doubt he'll ever read this.

(ahem)

Bruce, I love your music and I listen to it all the time. But I couldn't care less who you think I should vote for, and I really don't understand why you think I should. You're a great artist and you've got loads of money, but otherwise there's nothing special about you. You're not smarter then me, or morally better then me, or anything else. You're a man just like me. You put your underwear on one leg at a time just like I do, and I'm glad you know who you want to vote for but I really don't care which candidate you chose. Candidly, it's none of my business, and it's also none of your business who I voted for.

Your pal,

Aaron

Moving on, the next issue of deceit, this is a huge problem not only among the American Left, but the global Left and it's also not absent among the global Right.

Almost two years ago I wrote a blog entitled The Crisis in Israeli Democracy (and Christian Zionism) which delved into this issue if anyone wants to go back and check it out.

It's a problem in American politics as well. Whether it was Vice President Harris taking credit for things that Trump had done in his first administration or the media amplifying things he said, knowingly taking them out of context in order to try and make him look bad, the deceit piled up fast and furious in this campaign. Trump also told some whoppers, but even there the response to these lies he told were out of all proportion to the offense, sometimes to a ludicrous degree.

If you're reading this, you can probably give a fairly long list of your own with all the lies and falsehoods that you saw and heard in this election cycle. The "post-truth world" that we're living in is toxic to everything and everybody, including those who try to make it work for them.

For example, when political parties and ideologies lie to the voters, it's yet another form of contempt. Many voters see right through the lies and they get resentful of those who tell them. It's purely anecdotal, but I know two people, one who lives in Texas and one who lives in Tennessee, who had not voted in decades but decided to vote in this election because they were so disgusted and angry at the way the Democrats were insulting their intelligence.

I wish I could tell my friends that this is unlikely to ever happen again. I wish I could tell them that the Democrats, the liberal media and Hollywood seem to have learned some lessons from this election and are doing some introspection and soul searching to try and do better next time.

But the exact opposite seems to be happening. Instead of looking at their own conduct to try and figure out what went wrong, they're blaming voters for being too stupid, uneducated, short sighted, evil, misogynistic, racist, etc. to make the obviously correct decision. 

That's the most toxic form of deceit, lying to oneself.

The damage one does to others by lying to them can sometimes be fixed, but the damage one does by lying to oneself is much more difficult to fix.

So what is to be done?

Well, for starters, I think it's appropriate to give thanks to God that, as I said before, the worst fears we might have had about the election turning into a fiasco including court cases, civil unrest, riots and possibly worse didn't happen.

Once we've done that, the next step is to renew our own personal commitment to being truthful and honest in all circumstances, even when it will cause us some inconvenience and/or pain. The most important thing is to never lie to ourselves. You can sometimes fix the problems you create by lying to other people, and you might even be able to fix the problems you suffer from when you believe lies someone else tells you.

But if you believe the lies you tell yourself, it's really hard to fix the problems that causes.

In conclusion, I believe the results of this election have given the United States, and Western Civilization in general, a bit of a reprieve. But there's still plenty of really big problems. Most of them won't be solved by politicians or governments. The solutions must come from the grass roots, and that means you and me.

Why Americans Voted for President Trump in 2024

Donald Trump moments after an attempted assassination clipped his ear

Last night, the US voted President Donald Trump back into office, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote.

Many reasonable left-leaning folks are confused why Americans would vote for President Trump.

Here's my gentle, non-snarky introspective why we did so. Maybe it's useful to folks who genuinely want to understand. Here are 10 reasons why folks like me voted for President Trump:

  1. Abortion
  2. Inflation
  3. Immigration
  4. Free speech
  5. Competency
  6. Small government
  7. DEI madness
  8. Free Palestine cult
  9. Authenticity
  10. LGBT excesses

I explain each below.

1. Abortion. 

This is the greatest moral issue of our time. Our conviction is that killing unborn children is a form of murder. Trump appointed justices that overturned federal protection for abortion; he is the pro-life candidate who has, by his appointment, saved thousands of innocent lives.

For many, especially religious conservatives, abortion is the single issue that caused us to vote for him. In the 19th century, many of the slavery abolitionists were religious people who believed all humans were created in God's image and worthy of value. Many of the abortion abolitionists today are the same: religious people who see unborn children as humans created in God's image and worthy of value.

2. Inflation. 

The U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics uses Consumer Price Index to measure inflation. Here is that index over the last 20 years. I created this chart based on data from usinflationcalculator.com



During the last 4 years, inflation reached record high levels. Families pay a lot more for groceries, gas, electricity, basic necessities. People are poorer because of foolish fiscal decisions from the Biden administration, particularly printing extraordinary amounts of money during the COVID pandemic. It devalued the dollar and caused inflation to skyrocket. Several polls indicated inflation and the economy to be the key issue for US voters this year.

The Biden-Harris administration demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the cause of inflation, instead blaming the problem on "price gouging", even in industries like the grocery business where margins are razor thin.

3. Immigration. 

Illegal immigration in the US. I created this chart based on unauthorized immigration data from usafacts.org


During the last 4 years, illegal immigration greatly increased and the Biden-Harris administration did little to stop it. This has negative downstream effects: a higher welfare tax burden for citizens and legal green card holders, fewer jobs for citizens, more crime, changing demographics, foreign culture. Trump is rightly seen as tough on illegal immigration, whereas Harris was appointed border czar and oversaw this immigration disaster.

4. Free speech. 

In an unprecedented assault on free speech in 2020, left wing authoritarians banned a sitting President from social media. For the first 3 years of his administration, the left tried to delegitimize his Presidency via the Russiagate witch hunt. Several blue states tried unsuccessfully to get Trump removed from the ballot prior to the election. 

This applies downstream to average citizens. Even now, sites like Reddit routinely ban conservative commenters, shut down conservative subreddits, and suppress dissent by mislabeling any opposition as sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigot, etc. 

The pandemic also saw a great deal of censorship. Anyone who opposed the government's emergency powers were muted, banned, shunned. It became a grave sin to question the mandatory closing of businesses, the origins of the virus, the efficacy of masks, or even the COVID vaccines pioneered by the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. People were banned from social media accounts and labeled conspiracy theorists. One of my family members was threatened with dishonorable discharge from the military for refusing to take a vaccine. Many lost their jobs over their convictions. Hell, I'm strongly pro-vaccine and some of my posts on social media were censored and deleted for discussing -- merely discussing! -- alternative treatments for people who were already diagnosed with COVID.

Harris and Walz ticket demonstrated a lack of understanding of what free speech is or why it's important. Walz erroneously stated at the VP debate that "free speech doesn't include misinformation.", and repeatedly said in interviews free speech doesn't include hate speech or misinformation. In fact, free speech does include hate speech and misinformation: otherwise the government could e.g. deem any critique of the President as misinformation or hate speech. I hope folks can see the issue with that.

5. Competency. 

Some past Democratic candidates like Obama have been intelligent, competent, even persuasive, but Harris was visibly not so. Often she responded to simple and direct questions with word salad non-answers, e.g. the Brett Baier interview. She refused to do longform, unscripted interviews with opposing (Rogan) or neutral (Lex Friedman) interviewers. Her voting record was ranked as farthest left of all Senators during her time in office. She was appointed as "border czar", but oversaw the worst illegal immigration in decades.  She didn't win the Democratic nomination but was shoved into the role after Biden's poor debate performance. She had never won an election outside of her blue home state of California. 

Trump, by contrast, ran a successful 4-year term with no new wars, a booming economy, international strength. Both Trump and Vance engaged in many adversarial interviews -- indeed, 95+% of newspapers and legacy media donate overwhelmingly to Democrats -- and answered convincingly. They engaged in long-form, unscripted interviews to explain of their positions.

6. Small government. 

Conservatives believe that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. A vote for Trump is a vote for smaller government. The US debt is at $35 trillion (!) in debt, and the interest is snowballing. The new administration promises to create a Department of Government Efficiency which will slash the size of the federal government, reduce federal spending, trim the bloated welfare state, stop injecting billions of newly printed dollars into the economy, deregulate, and reduce inflation. Harris/Walz looked more of the same: unfettered government growth, spiraling debt. The great entrepreneur of our age, Elon Musk, as part of the new Trump government vows to deregulate and cut red tape, unleashing a new era of innovation and business growth.

7. DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) madness. 

Biden administration appointees include US Health secretary Rachel Levine, a man identifying as a woman, and US Secretary of Nuclear Energy Sam Brinton, an LGBTQ activist who is currently in custody for charges of grand larceny.

Most Americans are merit-focused: the best person for the job, regardless of skin color, race, gender, religion. But the Biden administration's appointees were often not based on merit, but on skin color or minority status: Sam Brinton, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Rachel Levine, and perhaps even Harris herself are examples of people who likely would not have reached their current levels but for their minority status.

The Harris/Walz ticket asked we "vote for people who look like America" -- but this appeals to outward, immutable characteristics like race, gender, or skin color. 

During the last 4 years, the Democratic party had cozied up to race rioters (e.g. George Floyd protests) who destroyed businesses and shut down cities because the protestors were diverse. The legacy media excused this, with a CNN reporter famously claiming they were "fiery but mostly peaceful riots" while a city burned behind them.


Harris famously spoke out during that time in favor of defunding the police, at a time when law and order were badly needed. (She later recanted that belief when it became politically expedient.)

The hypocrisy inherent within DEI initiatives were also seen during the COVID pandemic, when experts urged everyone to quarantine at home...except the race rioters, who were told to keep gathering in large groups and keep protesting because they were protesting against the disease called racism.

DEI excesses also include silly and hypocritical land acknowledgements, pronouns in bio, and other performative gestures that normal Americans roll their eyes at.

By contrast, the Trump-Vance ticket proposed rolling back the DEI madness, removing political indoctrination from the education system, and returning higher education to a place with free and open exchange of ideas:

8. Free Palestine cult. 

Pro-Hamas protests at Columbia University

The Democratic Party embraced flag-burning, terrorist-supporting pro-Hamas groups who celebrated the rapes, tortures, kidnappings and execution of October 7th. 

Leftist contributor to NBC and Teen Vogue praised the October 7th slaughter of Jews.

It welcomed the far-left terrorist sympathizing students and the months long sit-ins at university campuses that threatened Jewish minorities and made campuses a place an unsafe place for the free exchange of ideas. Jewish students and faculty were harassed. 

Some 30 Harvard groups, including student and faculty groups, signed the above letter in solidarity with Hamas in the week following the October 7th massacres.

One Stanford professor told Jewish students in his class to stand in a corner, told them this is what Israel does to Palestinians, and chided them, "Colonizers killed more than 6 million. Israel is a colonizer." 

This pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party includes powerful members of Congress including Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, and several other members of the squad. Many of their values go beyond support for civilian Palestinians and creep into antisemitism or full-blown support for terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. 

The free Palestine cult impacted Harris' own campaign: one of the early favorites for VP was Pennsylvania governor Joshua Shapiro. The antisemitic wing of the Democratic party pressured Harris to not pick Shapiro because he is Jewish. One wonders if Harris could have won Pennsylvania if Shapiro was her running mate.

9. Authenticity. 

Harris would change her accent depending on who she was speaking to. Her own positions changed whenever politically expedient (e.g. defund the police). Walz claimed to be a football coach, but tweeted about a political ally "running a mean pick 6". He claimed to be an avid hunter but during a hunting photo op, had trouble loading and arming his weapon. 

The Harris and Walz campaign claimed Trump was Hitler. It compared his rally at Madison Square Garden to the early Nazi rallies. But Trump had 4 years in office and decidedly wasn't Hitler. On the contrary, President Trump became a great friend of Jews and the people of Israel, even moving the US embassy to Israel's capital, Jerusalem. 

To this day, there is even a town in northern Israel named after President Trump.

The northern Israeli town of Ramat Trump רמת טראמף, Trump Heights, named for the friendship between President Trump and the Jewish people.

And in this election, more Jews voted for Trump than any other Republican candidate in history.

Trump's daughter Ivanka married a Jewish man, Jared Kushner, and they are raising their children as Jews. Here's their family celebrating Hanukkah:

If Trump is Hitler, Hitler must be spinning in his grave knowing he's become one of the greatest friends of the people he tried to exterminate.

The Harris-Walz ticket also critiqued vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance as "weird".

But in the VP debate, Vance showed himself to be one of the most genuine, down-to-earth people to run for office in recent memory. 

10. LGBT excesses. 

The Democratic Party and the left advocated for excesses in the LGBT movement, including the chopping off of healthy sexual organs in prepubescent children. It waged lawfare against parents who opposed it, and in some cases, separate confused children from their parents in the name of trans rights.

The Biden-Harris administration appointed men-cosplaying-as-women to significant roles in the government and military and demanded we call them women when any ordinary person can see they're men. It supported biological men competing in women's sports and access to private female spaces like locker rooms and restrooms.

Biden administration appointee Sam Brinton

Harris supported taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants and prison inmates. Many public schools now fly flags advocating for sexual deviancy when most American parents just want their kids to have a decent education without sexual indoctrination. 

Leftist public school teachers advocated for pornographic books in schools provided they are LGBT-focused. The Biden Administration issued statements in support of this, demonizing opposition to this as book burning. 

The Biden Administration's statement regarding pornographic books in schools, framing it as about book burnings.

The LGBT excesses also include attempted expansions of LGBT to so-called "two spirit" individuals, people with a pseudo-spiritual belief they were born in the wrong body, "minor attracted persons", people who claim to be animals, and other gender or sexual deviancies that normal Americans recognize as harmful to a healthy society. 

While I don't speak for all conservatives or all Americans, I'm a lifelong conservative and have an ear to the ground in that space. I believe these are some of the significant reasons that most Americans voted for Donald Trump as our next President.

Sukkot Miracle: Hamas Leader Sinwar is Dead

Photo from this morning: Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader and October 7th mastermind, dead in the rubble, killed by the Israeli military. 

On October 7th 2023, which happened to be the last day of Sukkot, Hamas carried out the October 7th atrocity, resulting in the largest single day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. The mastermind of the attack was Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

And now, today, on the first day of Sukkot 2024, Israel has killed Yahya Sinwar.

Sinwar carried out his butchery on Sukkot and is now dead on Sukkot a year later. We're witnessing a divine moment. God's fingerprints all over this.

The timing was not planned by humans; the IDF had no intel that Sinwar was in the building. After reconnaissance spotted multiple figures moving stealthily among buildings, the IDF sent a drone into the building. It recorded a masked man injured and resting on a couch, his face hidden by a bandana. 

The IDF shelled the building and opened fire. Hours later when the IDF entered the building, the masked figure's identity was revealed to be the October 7th mastermind.

Sinwar's body was found with cash and a false ID, indicating he may have been attempting to flee Gaza.

The contents of Sinwar's pockets, courtesy of Israel's Channel 12. Note the occupation listed on the false ID.

Sinwar joins a host of powerful men who tried and failed to erase Israel, often bringing calamity and destruction on themselves:

  • Pharaoh Ramses II of Egypt
  • King Tiglathpilnesser III of Assyria
  • King Shalmaneser V of Assyria
  • King Sargon II of Assyria
  • King Sennacherib of Assyria
  • King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon
  • Haman the Agagite of Persia
  • King Antiochus Epiphanes of the Seleucids
  • Emperor Titus of Rome
  • Emperor Hadrian of Rome
  • Fuhrer Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany
  • Hamas chairman Ismail Haniyeh of the Palestinians
  • Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon
  • and now Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar of the Palestinians

History teaches this simple lesson: if you try to harm the Jewish people, God will harm you.

An Israeli believer friend wrote some important, appropriate notes on Sinwar's death.

Sinwar is dead. The graphic pictures of his intact corpse leave no doubt, as the face is unmistakably his. And DNA tests have now positively identify the corpse as his.

His story and the story of the worst massacre of Jews since WW2 is filled with tragic twists and turns, and no shortage of bitter ironies.

The first bitter irony is that Israel saved his life with state-of-the-art surgery when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor that would have killed him if left untreated, while he was a prisoner in an Israeli jail.

The second irony was that he, together with 1,000 of the most murderous of Hamas' terrorists, were released from Israeli prisons in 2011, in exchange for a single Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured and taken back to Gaza as a hostage in 2006. For six years his family and a growing number of their allies urged the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to "pay any price" to ransom him. While every Israeli citizen feared for Shalit's welfare and wanted to see him safely returned home, many saw the risk and folly in releasing 1,000 of the most experienced and hardened terrorist to rejoin the front lines of Hamas' jihad against Israel. This wasn't the first time that Israel released thousands of murderers to restore a single person--sometimes a dead citizen--to their family. And each and every time, without exception, it led directly to the deaths of tens or hundreds of other Israelis in the years that followed. Sinwar's release in 2011 for a single individual led, directly, to the torturous deaths of thousands of others on October 7, and since then.

A third tragic irony is that for months before the attacks of Oct. 7, dozens of female field intelligence soldiers arrayed along the frontier between Israel and Gaza faithfully observed Hamas' preparations for the attacks and correctly interpreted the gravity of what was being planned. But when they reported their findings to their male commanders, they were dismissed as the ramblings of a bunch of anxious teen girls with oversized imaginations. Therefore, the Middle Eastern chauvinism that famously affects many of Israel's neighbors seems to have infected not a few men in the ranks of Israel's own armed forces, with deadly consequences. 

The story, of course, continues, as the end is not within sight.

Another Israeli friend writes about the significance of Sinwar's death on Sukkot:


One more note from me, on a personal level. On Yom Kippur last week, I talked to my kids about repentance. I read for them Ezekiel 18, where God says he doesn't delight in even the death of a wicked person, but would rather that they repent and live. How does that relate to Sinwar's death?

While God doesn't delight in anyone's death, we can celebrate that justice is served. A man who orchestrated the murders, tortures, rapes, kidnappings, and executions of hundreds of innocent people deserves the death penalty. He has now received it poetically on the Hebrew anniversary of his demonic depravity.

God says Sukkot is a day for us to rejoice. We can rejoice that justice is served and that perhaps we're a step closer to the release of the hostages and the end of the war.


Appending "You might like" to each post.