RUTHFULLY YOURS

How many times have we heard it? Clinton won the popular vote. The latest figure is by 2.6 million. You can find these updated figures on Dave Leip’s Atlas of US presidential elections. At the latest count — apparently it isn’t quite all done — Clinton obtained 65.54 million (48%) votes to Donald Trump’s 62.86 million (46%). It seems like an impressive margin of the popular vote went to Clinton. Certainly people like Michael Moore find it impressive. And it is not hard to hear it being repeated ad nauseam by Democrat commentators on US TV.

The accompanying conclusion on the part of Democrats is that Trump’s mandate is problematic. Accordingly, so it goes, Clinton has a right to feel hard done by and to keep on whining about Russian hackers and fake news stories queering the pitch. And, through surrogates, fund Jill Stein’s disingenuous recount efforts in States narrowly won by Trump, ostensibly to verify voting integrity. Meanwhile, she is not contesting New Hampshire won much more narrowly by Clinton; by less than 3000 votes.

I took the popular vote at face value. The trick is to win 270 or more Electoral College votes, not the popular vote, and losing the popular vote and winning an election is not unknown. But, hold on, I thought, this winning margin of the popular vote for a losing candidate is extraordinary.

It is extraordinary. The extraordinary part of it is that if you take out California, which Clinton won by 4.27 million votes, Trump wins the popular national vote by about 1.6 million. In Los Angeles alone Clinton won the popular vote by 1.7 million. If you take out New York, as well as California, Trump wins the popular vote by a margin over three million.

I’m not sure what this all means. But it seems significant enough for commentators to at least remark on the remarkable fact that without California, never mind New York, Trump wins the popular vote very handily. In fact, I have not heard this mentioned during all of the times I have heard the popular-vote narrative being played out – even, so far, on Fox News.

Now I know Californians are Americans and deserve to be counted. But it is a strange business when a little over 4% of the land mass contains sufficient numbers of Democrat supporters to outweigh the significant weight of Republican support living in the other 95% plus of the country. It is a powerful endorsement of the Electoral College system.

Perhaps the Founding Fathers envisaged the need to protect American values from the future growth of populous coastal progressive enclaves. Though, it is hard to imagine that they could ever envisage the culturally destructive mindset of modern progressives. I live now and can’t begin to grasp it.

Let me see. Here is a taste. It starts with an assumption that we can have things we can’t collectively afford if only we tax the rich. That the most successful, free and prosperous nation in the history of mankind is irredeemably wicked. That white supremacism is rampant. That white people disagreeing with that nonsensical delusion are racist. That people who want to control borders are racist. That people who want to deport felons among illegal migrants are racist. That people who support cops defending themselves against black thugs are racist. That people fearful of Islamic supremacism are Islamophobic. That people who value unborn life are misogynistic. That people who oppose gay marriage are homophobic.

It is a form of madness which in its final stages shows itself in political correctness, trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions. In California it isn’t recognised as untoward because the imbeciles have largely taken over. Thank God for the unwitting foresight of the Founding Fathers and for the majority of sane people living between California and New York.