Assorted

     I have only a few scattered observations for today. The weekend was strenuous, and I need the day to recover.

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     1. “They won’t hear us.”

     Every major figure on the Left, from Barack Hussein Obama on down, has promulgated the notion that the Democrats have lost federal power because of messaging problems. At an earlier period in the Obama Interregnum, The Won put the responsibility on his side: i.e., he said Democrats had done an inadequate job of explaining their policy positions. Today, he and his fellow travelers are trying to lay the onus on us: specifically, that we’ve refused to give the Democrats a fair hearing, and therefore that their policies haven’t had a fair chance to prove themselves.

     I suppose it’s consistent with their shared mindset. After all, if the problem was their inadequate communication, it would follow that they’d worked to improve it since then. But if we grant that assumption but their “message” is still being scorned, there are only two possibilities: we’ve refused to listen, or we have listened and have deemed their ideas bad for the country. And how could our moral and intellectual superiors be so completely mistaken?

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     2. The attacks on Gab.ai.

     The new alternative to increasingly left-wing and intolerant Twitter, Gab.ai, is exploding in popularity. The administrators are straining to keep up with the volume of applications for membership. Gab’s servers are groaning a bit, too. And the existing members -- I’m one -- are simply loving it as Twitter continues it’s auto-da-fe.

     So of course, the Left has rallied its forces and mounted a furious attack on Gab and its organizers. Here’s a smidgen of news from Gab principal Andrew Torba:

     It’s become quite obvious that the Left doesn’t just want “its own” space, cleansed of differing opinions; it ardently wants to deny the Right any medium in which we can cluster, find one another, and communicate freely.

     I’ve said it before: the three pillars of freedom are education, communications, and weaponry. We have weaponry, but the educational system is firmly against us...and if the Left has its way, we’ll be denied the power to communicate as well.

     Fight back while you can. And join Gab!

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3. Election results, county by county.

     The following map of results provides a great deal of food for thought:

     Now, just as it’s obvious that the majorities for Trump were well distributed over the nation, it’s equally obvious that the majorities for Clinton occurred primarily in America’s perimeter cities. I’ve remarked on this before. The import of the story is that the coasts are steadily separating themselves politically from the rest of America. This is consistent with the dominance of the coastal megalopoli over education, journalism, and entertainment.

     In the previous segment, I mentioned that the Left is doing everything it can to slander and degrade Gab.ai, which up to this point has been a welcoming place for persons of all political convictions. The Left has campaigned for absolute dominance of social media. That’s an implicit recognition of the Internet’s critical role in allowing persons of like convictions to find one another. Though the Reagan Administration predated large scale digital communications, the blossoming of conservative opinion that followed owes a great deal to the Internet and World Wide Web. It allowed us on the Right to confirm our intuition that we’re not alone – and certainly not crazy, stupid, or evil.

     Gab is an excellent development, but one social medium firmly dedicated to freedom of expression is not enough. We need more. Perhaps a free-speech alternative to Facebook will be next. Though I’m retired from software as a paying trade, I’d enthusiastically participate in the development of additional avenues of communication, on the condition that they pledge never, ever to censor their clients.

     The original opening of the Internet to general use was a time of high excitement, propelled by the many possibilities the Net offers for everything from commerce to gossip to academic research. Perhaps we’ll see a resurgence of that excitement in the near future.