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October 29, 2022

We have learned that the checks and balances aren’t in check.  What will happen if you don’t [win the Georgia governorship]? … It’s really frightening. … I’m wishing that the people of Georgia come out and make that a reality for you and the state of Georgia.

—Oprah Winfrey to Stacey Abrams, Oct. 20, 2022

Oprah does not, of course, specify precisely what she means by saying that “the checks and balances aren’t in check.”  One might speculate that part of what she means is that the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) rendered a decision that Democrats don’t like, but that doesn’t mean that “the checks and balances aren’t in check.”  Many people believe “the checks and balances weren’t in check” when the 1973 SCOTUS created a new Constitutional right out of whole cloth and that the current SCOTUS simply restored the checks and balances in accordance with their job as the highest court in the land (precisely the opposite of what Oprah claimed). However, it is hard to know for sure because Oprah’s utterance does not have a determinate meaning. If it did, she would have to defend it.  It is much easier to insinuate than to formulate.

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One might also speculate that she might have meant that the new Georgia voting laws are not to her liking, the law that many Democrats called “Jim Crow 2.0” because they claim it suppresses the black vote (Jim Crow being the laws passed by the Democrats after the Civil War that made blacks second-class citizens).  Joe Biden, apparently wishing to exaggerate even more, called it “Jim Eagle 2.0”.  However, that canard was exposed when turnout, including minority turnout, in the recent Georgia elections was massively higher.  However, once again, one cannot be certain what Oprah meant because what she said had no definite meaning.

In the same discussion, Stacey Abrams is a bit more specific,

If we don’t elect me, we will have no health care for half a million Georgians. Our children will continue to go to underfunded schools where transgender children have been banned from playing with their friends.  We will have divisive laws that say that you have to lie to your children about their history. The members of the LGBTQ community will not have protection. [Kemp] will attack our freedoms, especially if you’re a woman.  So if you want opportunity, freedom, and the ability to control your future, you need me as governor, because Brian Kemp’s proven he doesn’t care…

The first thing one notices about Abrams’ statement is that if what she says is true, then she need not worry because she is virtually guaranteed to win.  Since Kemp has been in office for four years, and since, according to her, “he doesn’t care,” the voters, much preferring her largesse, will clearly send him packing.  However, the fact that she is currently much further behind Kemp in the polls than she was four years ago when she lost to him, suggests that the voters do not agree that Kemp “doesn’t care,” whatever that empty generality is supposed to mean.

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The second thing one notices about Abrams’ statement about the horrors that are to befall Georgia if Kemp is re-elected is that she provides no evidence whatsoever that any of her claims are true.  Where is the evidence that only Stacey Abrams (“If you don’t elect me …”) can provide health care to half a million Georgians, or that if Kemp is elected, transgender children will not be allowed to play with their friends, or one will be forced to lie to children about their history, or the LGBTQ community will have no protection, or a woman’s freedoms will be attacked, or Georgians will lose the ability to control their own futures?  Abrams gives no more evidence for any of these vague claims than she gave for her comically false claim four years ago that the Georgia governor’s election was stolen from her.  Abrams, borrowing a concept from Wittgenstein, is not playing the “language game” of fact-stating but rather a particularly emotive version of the “language-game” of story-telling.  In more ordinary terms, she is concocting a narrative aimed to benefit herself.  

For example: No one has proposed anything so transparently silly as the claim that transgender children in Georgia schools will be banned from “playing with their friends.”  There is a Georgia law requiring children competing in sports to align with their sex and gender.  That is, little Tommy, who weighs 180 pounds in eighth grade and wears a dress but has a penis will not be permitted to take a place on the swimming team from little Mary who weighs 78 pounds and does not have a penis.  This, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with Abrams’ deliberate distortion that transgender kids will be prevented from “playing” with their friends.

The final thing one notices about Abrams’ statement is that the very first sentence is focused on herself (“If we don’t elect me …”).   Notice that Oprah also seems to think the election is about Stacey Abrams (“I’m wishing that the people of Georgia come out and make that a reality for you …”).  However, the election is about the people of Georgia, not giving Oprah’s friend Stacey Abrams a Christmas present.

One of the things that one constantly notices when arguing with Democrats (and most leftists) if one can still find one who, given their assumed moral superiority, will condescend to talk to a conservative that has not be cancelled yet, is that they no longer seem to understand that grown-ups have these things called “disagreements” and that the best way to resolve these disagreements is to have these things called vigorous discussions in an attempt to formulate the precise nature of the problem and find these old-fashioned things called “solutions.” 

Instead of “free and fair discussions” of the sort we used to have in the United States, what one now constantly gets from Democrats is that if you don’t give them everything they want and give it to them now, it is the Apocalypse:  “People are going to die!”  The silly claim, backed up by nothing whatsoever, that Trump could start a nuclear war, is one example (when in fact the realistic threat of nuclear war has risen under Biden whom we had all been solemnly assured by the geniuses, is the most experienced foreign policy person in Washington).  Another is the fact that climate-alarmists, such as Al Gore, are constantly telling us that unless we give them enormous power and a big paycheck, the world will be coming to an end soon. 

Quite surprisingly, however, they need to keep revising their doomsday predictions because if they were right most of us should have been dead long ago.