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Why I’m Voting for Donald Trump

Posted: November 3, 2020 by chrisharper in elections
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By Christopher Harper

The economy under Donald Trump has been a marvel. Despite the pandemic, my wallet is fuller than ever before. That’s why I’m among a significant majority of Americans who think I’m better off than I was four years ago.

My wife and I just refinanced our house at the lowest rate we’ve ever had in 40 years of home owning and lowered our monthly costs by $400 a month on a shorter term.

My retirement account has improved dramatically over the past four years, making it possible for us to live well.

After many years of reporting about the Middle East, I am far more hopeful than ever. The defeat of the Islamic State has made the region far safer. The disengagement from the Iran nuclear deal has hobbled that country and its plans for the region. The peace agreements between Arab states and Israel are the most encouraging signs since the Camp David accords 40 years ago.

Early on, the president tried to engage China, but he realized that the Beijing government represents the most severe threat to the United States and the world. As a result, he has used the bully pulpit and executive orders to awaken people to the issues.

After nearly 50 years as a journalist and a journalism educator, I realize that my craft has fallen on bad times. The media have become sellers of falsehoods rather than beacons of truth. I applaud the president for calling out those in the media who are more interested in dividing us than uniting us.

President Trump would surely have won in a landslide had the pandemic not intervened. As a senior citizen, I was worried about how COVID-19 might affect my wife and me. Fortunately, the disease has not seriously affected most of the people we know.

As COVID-19 has become the centerpiece of the Democrat and media attack against the president, I thought they might have some better solutions. I was stunned at the recent onslaught of campaign ads by the Democrats that focused on masks, Obamacare, and shutdowns. If that’s the best that Joe Biden and his team can come up with, I’m glad they didn’t run health policy over the last year.

Although I didn’t vote for President Obama and Vice President Biden, I hoped that a black president might usher in better race relations. In fact, the opposite happened. As Obama and Biden fanned the flames of racial unrest in places like Ferguson, Missouri, I realized that things were going to get worse before they got better. As a result, I blame Obama and Biden for the division in the country.

Finally, I am grateful that President Trump has been able to return the U.S. Supreme Court to a better balance than I’ve seen in my lifetime.

I have never felt better about the righteousness of my vote.

The Pennsylvania chaos

Posted: October 27, 2020 by chrisharper in elections
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By Christopher Harper

The presidential election in Pennsylvania, long considered one of the pivotal states in the process, is likely to be an unmitigated mess.

In a process created by Democrats, the election has the probability of being hampered by a new mail-in ballot procedure that may take three days to count after the election.

The hottest topic in my Democrat-controlled neighborhood is the number of people who haven’t gotten their mail-in ballots.

To demonstrate how cumbersome the process can be, Democrats, who are depending on this new initiative to get more of their supporters to vote or to obtain a greater ability to get fraudulent votes, have been flooding the airwaves with instructions on how to complete a mail-in ballot.

First, you need to get your ballot before today. Second, you have to mark the ballot carefully. Third, you place the ballot inside one envelope and then put that envelop inside a second envelope before signing and dating the outside.

Leave it to Democrats to devise such a disorganized system!

Even Democrat supporters warn that the complex process may result in as many as 100,000 votes may be ruled invalid.

Democrats appear to be the ones most likely to use the mail-in process, which may bode well for President Trump, who won the state by just over 44,000 votes in the last election.

But the process also could result in more fraudulent votes being counted. At least the courts ruled that people can only submit their own ballots—not those of others as the Democrats had wanted.

The process proved so cumbersome in the primary that several elections took days to determine what had happened.

In a letter to state legislative leaders, Philadelphia elections chief Lisa Deeley said that the new system might result in “electoral chaos” and a “significant post-election legal controversy, the likes of which we have not seen since Florida in 2000.”

Remember those hanging chads?

Earlier this month, the state’s election computers went off line for 40 hours.

County elections officials and voters have regularly complained about a variety of problems with the Pennsylvania Department of State’s voter services website and the state’s voter database, which officials use to process registrations and ballot applications.

At times this year, the system has slowed to a crawl or come to a complete halt, leaving election offices unable to register voters or process ballot requests.

Whatever the case, the Pennsylvania results might be decided in a courtroom rather than a ballot box.

President Trump had it right when he said that something bad is happening in Pennsylvania.

All the news that fits we print

Posted: October 20, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

After nearly 50 years as a journalist and journalism educator, I can no longer stomach the mainstream media, which have become apologists and censors.

After the New York Post published an account that linked the younger Biden’s influence-peddling to his father, almost every major “news”organization ignored the startling revelations.

In the old days, when the media actually pursued news, every outlet would have been chasing the story to confirm what the Post had reported.

After ignoring the revelations on Hunter’s computer, the media posited some of the ridiculous claims that the Russians were engaged in a disinformation campaign.

It didn’t matter that the nation’s intelligence chief dismissed those claims. Instead, “news” organizations contacted their paid consultants to confirm, without any direct knowledge, that Russia had done Donald Trump’s bidding.

However, suppose you look at the facts. In that case, the link between Hunter’s questionable activities and his father’s position, the case against Joe Biden is far stronger than anything the Democrats have thrown against Trump.

In this era of the media, however, that doesn’t count because news organizations have been propagandists for Biden.

In one of the most pathetic examples, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius portrays Hunter as a victim rather than a perp. “This is smoke without a fire. Hunter Biden erred. His father has said so quietly but clearly. He should get on with the business of trying to put the country back together after Trump’s ruinous presidency,” Ignatius wrote.

When these “news” organizations tried to cover up the story, Facebook and Twitter went to work to censor it.

The Post’s Twitter account was shut down. Facebook stopped the sharing of the story. 

Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit, was surprised when USA Today rejected his weekly column.

Fortunately, he published it on his website in which he takes the “news” organizations and the tech giants to task. See https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/

“Had Facebook and Twitter approached this story neutrally, as they would have a decade ago, it would probably already be old news to a degree… Hunter’s pay-for-play efforts were already well known, if not in such detail — but instead, the story is still hot. More importantly, their heavy-handed action has brought home just how much power they wield and how crudely they’re willing to wield it. They shouldn’t be surprised at the consequences,” Reynolds wrote. “And while this heavy-handed censorship effort failed, there’s no reason to assume that other such efforts won’t work in the future. Not many stories are as hard to squash as a major newspaper’s front-page expose during a presidential election.”

I took one step to express my dissatisfaction. I canceled my subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post. I am no longer convinced that these organizations are interested in telling the truth. 

Their standards of “all the news that’s fit to print” for the Times and “democracy dies in darkness” for the Post seem hollow these days.

Selling fear

Posted: October 13, 2020 by chrisharper in Uncomfortable Truths
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By Christopher Harper

When I walk our dogs each day, I don’t wear a mask outside because no studies show any reason to do so.

If I encounter anyone along the way, many pull up their masks as though I pose a danger.

A few weeks ago, we were cutting a dead tree from our garden, and our neighbor came storming out of his house because we weren’t wearing masks.

I see these incidents as examples of the success of the Democrats’ approach to selling fear during the pandemic, resulting in many peoples’ minds turning into emotional mush.

This anxiety and fear have permeated many people’s thinking when we should be looking to the future. The lockdowns throughout the United States may be taking a more significant long-term toll than the disease itself.

New research has added to the growing body of evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic is taking a heavy mental health toll on people who are not directly impacted by the disease.

A new study of 12,000 workers and executives in 11 countries found that more than 80 percent of those surveyed complained about the pandemic’s negative effect on their mental health. Those surveyed said they suffered from sleep deprivation, poor physical health, reduced happiness at home, or isolation from friends.

A CDC survey found that thoughts of suicide had increased among several groups in the United States: those between ages 18-24 (25.5%), essential workers (21.7%), and minority racial/ethnic groups (18.6% Hispanic, 15.1% non-Hispanic Black).

The homicide rates in many cities have risen dramatically. In August, a Wall Street Journal analysis of crime statistics among the nation’s 50 largest cities found that reported homicides were up 24% so far this year, to 3,612. Last week, Philadelphia recorded 363 murder victims, which was more than all of last year with nearly three months left. This year the murder rate has exceeded the number from every year since 2008. If the trend continues, there will be 113 more murders in the city, bringing the total to 476, the highest since 1990 and the third highest on record.

I may be naive, but it seems that there is a relatively simple solution to many of these issues: tone down the rhetoric and get people interacting once again in a safe environment.

The emphasis on making people afraid of one another and locking them down is likely to have far more negative effects over the next few years than the pandemic.

The Democrats should think about what one of their most beloved presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, said, “[L]et me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself–nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

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