More Votes than Voters in PA...

Why Snowden Deserves a Pardon and Mueller/ Comey Deserve JAIL.

Obey!

The Science says, "Lose the Masks if You Are Asymptomatic"

Jeffrey A. Tucker, "Asymptomatic Spread Revisited"

The phrase “fog of war” is attributed to Carl von Clausewitz. It has come to refer to the confusion and uncertainty felt by everyone in the midst of conflict. It is often unclear who is making decisions and why, and what the relationships are between the strategies and the goals. Even the rationale can become elusive as frustration and disorientation displace clarity and rationality. 

In 2020, we’ve experienced the fog of disease mitigation.

The initial round of lockdowns was not about suppressing the virus but slowing it for one reason: to preserve hospital capacity. Whether and to what extent the “curve” was actually flattened will probably be debated for years but back then there was no question of extinguishing the virus. The volume of the curves, tall and quick or short and long, was the same either way. People were going to get the bug until the bug burns out (herd immunity).

Gradually, and sometimes almost imperceptibly, the rationale for the lockdowns changed. Curve flattening became an end in itself, apart from hospital capacity. Perhaps this was because the hospital crowding issue was extremely localized in two New York boroughs while hospitals around the country emptied out for patients who didn’t show up: 350 hospitals furloughed workers. 

That failure was embarrassing enough, given the overwhelming costs. Schools closed, commercial rights were vanquished, shelter-in-place orders from wartime were imposed, travel nearly stopped, all large events were cancelled, and so on. Clearly there needed to be a good, solid, science-based reason for why the politicians and their advisers had, on their own, decided to take away much of what we once regarded as human rights. 

Talk about this began in March but faded. Sometime in summer, the idea of asymptomatic spread started to trend, bit by bit. It finally went to an explosion of interest in the first week of June. It trailed off again until very recently.

Asymptomatic spread was the answer given to the great question: I’m not sick so why should I have to be locked down? Why are we quarantining the healthy? And what possibly could it mean, in any case, to be sick without symptoms? Why are half the PCR-positive tests assigned to people who otherwise seem to be perfectly fine? 

All these valid questions came to be answered by this one phrase: asymptomatic spread. You might not feel sick. You might not ever have symptoms from SARS-CoV-2. Still, you could be an even worse super spreader without knowing it, infecting people all around you who will carry it to people who will die from the disease. This was also the moment when, subtly and imperceptibly, we were being asked to think of our fellow citizens not as human beings with dignity and rights but pathogen-carrying disease vectors. We had to be masked, all of us, because we are secretly filthy and unclean: we cannot be allowed to breath near others, so even with a mask we must stay 6 feet away. 

(As I type these words, I feel sure that if anyone reads them in ten years, the reader will assume I’m writing fiction or engaged in wild hyperbole. To the future reader: this is all true.) 

On June 7, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told a press conference that from the known research, asymptomatic spread was “very rare.” “From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual.” She added for emphasis: “It’s very rare.”

A study conducted in China involving 10 million people showed asymptomatic spread is a myth. Major news! So why is no media outlet covering it? Makes you wonder who is making decisions and why. @jeffreyatucker⁩ #nomasksneeded https://t.co/P2pbrZbVTn

— James Miller (@jdgator87) November 23, 2020

There was an understandable explosion of fury on all sides. People against lockdowns were screaming all over Twitter that if this is true, the rationale for the lockdowns mostly disappears. We can go back to our normal lives. We can open up everything again! 

I wrote at the time:

What this suggests, of course, is that there is nothing mysteriously magical or insidious about this new virus. It behaves like the viruses that scientists have been studying for one hundred years. What we do with a normal virus is be careful around others when we have symptoms. We don’t cough and sneeze on people and generally stay home if we are sick. That’s how it’s always been. You don’t need lockdown to achieve that; you just proceed with life as normal, treating the sick and otherwise not disrupting life. 

If that is the case with this one, everything we’ve done over the months – the mask wearing, the grasshopper dance not to be next to people, the canceling of everything, the wild paranoia and premodern confusions – has been a calamitous and destructive waste of time, energy, and money. 

On the other side, there was the predictably pro-lockdown mainstream media which decried her heresy. The cry was so loud that the WHO immediately started walking back the claim, mostly with hints and suggestions that didn’t say untrue things but did not repudiate the initial claim either: “There is much to be answered on this. There is much that is unknown. It’s clear that both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals are part of the transmission cycle. The question is what is the relative contribution of each group to the overall number of cases.”

Following that, the question seemed to fade. We went back to assuming that potentially everyone had a disease, enabling fellow citizens to become virtuous enforcers of mask wearing, staying home, and separating, screaming and yelling at others for failing to comply. The science on the question was unsettled, we were told, so let us go back to wrecking life as we once knew it. 

The fog of disease mitigation, indeed. But as with most of the “science” throughout this ordeal, it eventually came to be revealed that good sense and rationality would prevail over implausible claims and predictions that led to experiments in social control without any precedent. 

In this case, the carrier of rationality is a gigantic study conducted in Wuhan, China, of 10 million people. The article appears in Nature, published November 20, 2020. 

The conclusion is not that asymptomatic spread is rare or that the science is uncertain. The study revealed something that hardly ever happens in these kinds of studies. There was not one documented case. Forget rare. Forget even Fauci’s previous suggestion that asymptomatic transmission exists but not does drive the spread. Replace all that with: never. At least not in this study for 10,000,000.

Stringent COVID-19 control measures were imposed in Wuhan between January 23 and April 8, 2020. Estimates of the prevalence of infection following the release of restrictions could inform post-lockdown pandemic management. Here, we describe a city-wide SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening programme between May 14 and June 1, 2020 in Wuhan. All city residents aged six years or older were eligible and 9,899,828 (92.9%) participated. No new symptomatic cases and 300 asymptomatic cases (detection rate 0.303/10,000, 95% CI 0.270–0.339/10,000) were identified. There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases. 107 of 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 patients tested positive again (re-positive rate 0.31%, 95% CI 0.423–0.574%). The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan was therefore very low five to eight weeks after the end of lockdown.

One might suppose that this would be huge news. It would allow us to open up everything immediately. With the whole basis for post-curve-flattening lockdowns crumbled, we could go back to living a normal life. The fear could evaporate. We could take comfort in our normal intuition that healthy people can get out and about with no risk to others. We could take off our masks. We could go to movies and sports events. 

From what I can tell, there was only one news story that was posted about this. It was on Russia Today. I’ve not been able to find another one. People not following the right accounts on Twitter wouldn’t even know about it at all. 

We keep hearing about how we should follow the science. The claim is tired by now. We know what’s really happening. The lockdown lobby ignores whatever contradicts their narrative, preferring unverified anecdotes over an actual scientific study of 10 million residents in what was the world’s first major hotspot for the disease we are trying to manage. You would expect this study to be massive international news. So far as I can tell, it is being ignored. 

With solid evidence that asymptomatic spread is nonsense, we have to ask: who is making decisions and why? Again, this brings me back to the metaphor of fog. We are all experiencing confusion and uncertainty over the precise relationship between the strategies and the goals of panoply of regulations and stringencies all around us. Even the rationale has become elusive – even refuted – as frustration and disorientation have displaced what we vaguely recall as clarity and rationality of daily life. 

New Normals?

Be there or b^2.

Last night, President Trump sent out a tweet at 1:42 AM, where he promoted a “big protest” in DC against the election fraud that appears to have taken place in November. President Trump included a link to a Washington Examiner story about Peter Navarro’s 36-page report alleging election fraud that was “more than sufficient” to swing the victory. Navarro is the Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. “A great report by Peter. Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” President Trump wrote.

Free Julian Assange!

A Cautionary Tale...

Chris Buskirk, "The Beggaring of the Middle Class"

The question for every policymaker should be how to restart a new period of national vitality. Narrowly focused gains in information technology won’t do it—neither will fiscal stimulus.

American politics are deeply polarized. In the last 20 years, a significant percentage of people on the losing side has disputed the legitimacy of three presidential elections. The increasing intensity of the conflict seems ready to rend the country into openly warring factions. Still, no one has a satisfactory answer as to why this destructive tendency is accelerating.

In fact, over-reliance on ideology obscures the real, material sources of the conflict that are right in front of us and keeps solutions permanently out of reach.

Ideological mystification has characterized and redirected the discussion around the stock market driven increase in the wealth of American billionaires since March. In just over eight months, this group of 650 Americans gained over $1 trillion in wealth. The response has been predictable. The left-liberal cut on this news has been to decry the greed of billionaires and the depredations of late-stage capitalism. The right-liberal cut, influenced heavily by libertarian fundamentalism about markets, has been something like, “Three cheers for a rising stock market, my 401(k) is doing great!”

Both miss the point. The problem isn’t that rich people are getting richer. It’s that almost everyone else is, at best, running to stand still.

Consider a few data points: real median wages have been flat for the past 50 years; Generation X has owned a much lower share of national wealth at every stage of their lives than the Baby Boomers who preceded them. And Millennials are substantially trailing Gen X. In other words, each generation is poorer than the one that preceded it.

The Left is too eager to vilify billionaires and offer facile answers like making billionaires illegal or implementing a wealth tax. The Right won’t grapple with the historical reality that extreme wealth concentration combined with a lack of social mobility is politically unsustainable. Neither side of the ideological divide is willing to address the fact that the rapid rise in the wealth of a handful of very wealthy people is, in part, a reflection of the accumulation of monopoly power among a small group of very large corporations and a tidal wave of newly created money driving up the prices of financial assets. Both of those things represent difficult structural problems that defy answers from the standard left-right political dialectic.

The Rise of Wall Street and the Decline of Main Street

Despite all of the tumult that has defined 2020, the stock market has marched steadily higher since the pandemic crash in February and Gross Domestic Product, already positive, is expected to resume its predictable climb next year as the threat from COVID-19 recedes. All of the big lines that chart the economic progress of our lives keep going up and to the right, just as they have been doing for decades. Yet, for most people, life hasn’t been getting better. In fact, for a lot of people, it’s been getting worse.

Since 1970, the Federal Reserve reports that the real GDP has risen by more than 370 percent from a bit under $5 trillion to about $18.6 trillion in the third quarter of 2020. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has done even better, rising about 575 percent over the same period. And the very richest Americans—the billionaires of Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warrens’ fever dreams—have gotten much, much richer.

The fact that wages flatlined during a half-century in which reported GDP grew consistently and the stock market reached the stratosphere should have been an indication that something was wrong. This disconnect is a time bomb. If two of the main measures of economic success can register long-term growth at the same time real wages are stagnant, and living standards are flat or even declining for the middle and working class, then we need better, or at least additional, metrics to measure national prosperity—metrics that take their interests into account.

Flatlining real income from the working class all the way into the professional managerial class combines to produce social and economic anxiety that manifests in political conflict and decay. This decay acts as fertilizer for instability that grows more powerful and more dangerous the longer the structural forces cultivating it continue unarrested. Even professionals like lawyers have seen median wages decline, which should be no surprise since there are roughly five times as many lawyers per capita in the country today versus 1970. But it remains that as more people sought security in a professional degree, those degrees became economically less valuable.

Neither Left nor Right has been able to develop solutions even attempting to change the structural forces responsible for this problem because they both operate on the false assumption that America has been experiencing real economic growth of the same type and at the same rate as that experienced before 1970, when our growth was related to technological innovation. Both mistakenly believe that the only question now is how to share the gains.

But there are compelling reasons to believe that the real problem is that we haven’t had the sort of growth we thought we had. Tyler Cowen wrote about this in The Great Stagnation nearly a decade ago. And Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon developed similar themes in his 2017 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth. But somehow, the truth and the importance of this thesis is still underappreciated.

The Stagnation of the American Economy 

Economic growth springs from two basic sources: population growth and productivity growth. Population growth just means throwing more bodies at a problem; it doesn’t raise living standards.

But productivity growth means doing more with less. A farmer driving a tractor can do more than a farmer working with a plow pulled by a horse. At the most basic level, population growth is limited by access to basic resources like food, water, and shelter. Productivity growth, driven by technological innovation, makes more of those things—and other things that make life better—available. This illustrates the basic truth that the purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity.

Over the long-term, living standards track productivity growth. So when productivity growth slowed in the early 1970s, wages and eventually living standards necessarily followed with a lag. It’s one of the reasons that debt levels have risen across the board. People didn’t realize what was happening and continued spending as though there was real growth occurring or that the pause was short term. But it wasn’t, and debt at every level from the consumer to the federal government filled the gap between actual and expected productivity growth.

This is how the innovation slowdown led to the process of financialization and our movement into what I have begun calling the “Cantillon Economy.” This comes from “the Cantillon Effect,” which posits that money creation redistributes wealth upwards. According to this theory, when new money is created, those who receive it first see their incomes rise while those who get the money last see their incomes eroded by inflation. In our economy, that means banks do very well. So does anyone who owns financial assets.

You can see this not just in the long-term rise in stock prices but in how much better stocks have performed than GDP. More return has gone to capital than to labor. And it creates a particularly vicious cycle in which money creation begets asset price bubbles. When those bubbles inevitably pop, the response, invariably, is to flood the system with more liquidity, which just enriches those at the top while everyone gets left further behind.

What began to impact the working class 50 years ago has crept up the income scale first to the middle class, then to the professional managerial class, and eventually to the merely rich who are being outpaced by the super-rich.

This is particularly insidious in a country like the United States, where people understand themselves in terms of growth, dynamism, and the ability of each generation to do better than their parents. When the growth stops or even slows down, we can’t meet our financial, political, or cultural obligations.

The result of this is what we see happening around us: professional and economic frustrations are sublimated into political rivalries—fights over a pie that isn’t growing fast enough to keep with the promises or expectations built into the system. Wages aren’t growing, making it harder or impossible for people to buy houses and start families, so energy is redirected into getting non-economic rewards like clout chasing on social media.

But that misdirection, which mystifies the underlying economic causes of conflict, is also a vector of social and political decay that is unsustainable and leads to factionalism, patrimonialism, and unsustainable rivalries. These are real threats to the American order and way of life.

The existing framework for dealing with this is stale. At best, it’s ineffective; at worst, it’s counterproductive. The question for every policymaker should be how to restart a new period of national vitality. A period of broadly shared prosperity requires faster growth based on innovation and the social mobility that comes with it. Narrowly focused gains in information technology won’t do it—neither will fiscal or monetary stimulus, which just paper over the real problem.

The solutions are neither obvious nor easy. They will necessarily require doing things differently than we’ve been doing them and breaking some cherished taboos. That’s a longer discussion. But for now, the first step is to name the problem and define our goals. If we were able to achieve the sort of gains in the living standard brought about by things like electricity, the automobile, and flight in the early 20th century, we’d find that there would be a place for everyone and that some of our most difficult political conflicts would go away.

Already Stolen...

What You're NOT Hearing About Covid-19 from the MiniTru Outlets in the "Main Stream" Media...

More than a Feeling...

The Biden Agenda - Do Nothing.

Covid-19 and the Active DNC Campaign Against American Kulaks...

Thomas Lifson, "Liquidating America’s kulaks"

Small business owners in the United States constitute one the strongest bases of support for the Republican party and conservative causes. Is it purely coincidental, then, that Covid-19 restrictions imposed by Democrat governors and local officials are shuttering millions of small businesses while largely leaving their large corporate competitors (think: Amazon, Walmart, and McDonald’s) not just open, but picking up market share? Democrats, unquestionably, have become the party of big business, in particular the tech oligopolists that censored news unfavorable to Joe Biden.

Marxists of all stripes despise the petite bourgeoisie, a disparaging French term for small business and wealthier peasantry. Running a business and employing people qualifies one as an exploiter in Marxian terms, but in today’s elitist social circles, it also connotes small-mindedness, lack of sophistication (“If you’re so smart, why aren’t your rich like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg?) and an alarming tendency toward self-reliance.

For racialists, minority-owned small businesses are even worse, betraying the left's bigoted view that the natural tendency of minorities is to vote Democrat and be dependent on government.

Joseph Stalin, when attempting a Great Reset of his own (collectivization and absolute tyranny), faced a huge obstacle in the existence of millions of small landowners, those employed the labor of others, called kulaks. They were his equivalent of small business owners in the largely rural Soviet Union, as he attempted to industrialize and impose communism on all aspects of life in his first five-year plan (1928-32), following an earlier period of relative permissiveness. As historian Robert Conquest wrote in Reflections on a Ravaged Century, the land of landlords had already been spontaneously seized by peasants in 1917-18 and the land of richer peasants, with fifty to eighty acres, was subsequently seized by the Bolsheviks. But by 1928, peasants with a couple of cows and five or six acres of land were labeled 'kulaks,' and targeted for land seizure of their land, imprisonment, and execution. They were liquidated by the millions.

In twenty-first century America, big business and the educated professional classes are allied with the left as partners in ruling the masses, in the name of justice for the underclasses, purportedly afflicted by systemic racism. Their enemies are the middle classes, especially those who own their own businesses.

That may be why we see outdoor dining areas of small bars and restaurants closed while within spitting distance, Hollywood film companies set up identical facilities with the blessing Democrats Gavin Newsom and Eric Garcetti:

This is the most heartbreaking thing I have watched in 2020.
These people are monsters
Wow. pic.twitter.com/yTPNDeXw9c

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) December 5, 2020

There is no science at all behind this restriction, so please tell me what other explanation there is for such obvious hypocritical and cruel measures.

And consider the “disparate impact” (normally a key concept employed by the left) of shutdowns on minority-owned small businesses:

Nearly half of Black small businesses had been wiped out by the end of April as the pandemic ravaged minority communities disproportionately, according to a report from the New York Fed.

Black-owned businesses were more than twice as likely to shutter as their white counterparts, the report found.

"Nationally representative data on small businesses indicate that the number of active business owners fell by 22% from February to April 2020—the largest drop on record," the report said.

"Black businesses experienced the most acute decline, with a 41% drop. Latinx business owners fell by 32% and Asian business owners dropped by 26%."

We know from the behavior of political leaders who flout their own restrictions on others that they don’t believe that their own health is imperiled by, for example, dining shoulder-to-shoulder at The French Laundry with lobbyists (their self-described “friends”). And we know that their defenders respond that it was a “mistake” and they have “taken responsibility” by apologizing, and that the solution is double up on propaganda. In other words, not reconsider pointless destruction of lives and businesses. Watch as California Congresswoman Karen Bass, who lusts to be appointed as Kamala Harris’s Senate replacement if the election steal works out as expected, prescribes more propaganda as the solution to official hypocrisy:



Almost on cue, Gavin Newsom announced yesterday that California would spend $80 million, not on relief for small business, but on billboards to spread more propaganda on locking down:

.@CAgovernor @GavinNewsom says California is spending $80 million on a education campaign to help with public health messaging including 1,000 billboards.

— Elex Michaelson (@Elex_Michaelson) December 7, 2020

Of course, nobody is proposing dragging out small business owners and shooting them, not yet, at least. Liquidation in the present context means financially ruining, and making dependent those who dare to raise themselves by dint of effort, innovation and enterprise.

The Rise of the Obscene Masters....

POWER, APPEARANCE, AND OBSCENITY: FIVE REFLECTIONS

The obscene public space that is emerging today changes the way the opposition between appearance and rumor works. It is not that appearances no longer matter since obscenity reigns directly; it is, rather, that spreading obscene rumors or acting obscenely paradoxically sustain the appearance of power. Things are in a way similar to what happened in the last decades with the figure of detective in crime fiction: he or she can be crippled, half-crazy, or whatever, but his/her authority as the infallible detective remains untouched. In the same way, a political leader can act in undignified ways, make obscene gestures, etc., but all this, by contrast, strengthens his position of a master.

It is similar with Trump who surprises us again and again with how far he is ready to go with his vulgar obscenities. As a climax of Trump’s attacks on the ex-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, at a Minneapolis rally in October 2019, he performed a mock re-enactment of her texts with Mr Strzok, her ex-lover, as though the couple were in the middle of sexual act, imitating her orgasmic throes. Lisa Page understandably exploded with rage. But the same story seems to repeat itself: Trump survives yet again what his enemies consider the final straw, which will destroy him.

We are here at the opposite end of Stalinism where the figure of the Leader should be kept unblemished at any price. While the Stalinist leader fears that even a minor indecency or imperfection would destroy his position, our new leaders are ready to go pretty far in renouncing dignity. Their wager is that this renunciation will work somewhat like the short note on the back cover of a book by a famous contemporary writer, the note intended to demonstrate that the author is also an ordinary human being like us (“in X’s free time, X likes collecting butterflies”). Far from undermining the greatness of the author, such a note strengthens it by way of contrast (“you see, even such a great person has ridiculous hobbies…”). We are fascinated by such notes, precisely and only because he or she is a great author; if such a note was about an average ordinary person, we would be indifferent towards it (“who cares what a nobody like that is doing in free time”).

The difference is, nonetheless, that these kinds of leaders are like the Kim Kardashians of politics. We are fascinated by Kim because she is famous, but she is famous just for being famous; she is not doing anything significant apart from ordinary things. In a similar way, Trump is famous not despite his obscenities but on account of them. In the old royal courts, a king often had a clown whose function was to destroy the noble appearance with sarcastic jokes and dirty remarks (thereby confirming by contrast the king’s dignity). Trump doesn’t need a clown; he already is his own clown, and no wonder that his acts are sometimes more funny or tasteless than the performances of his comic imitators. The standard situation is thus inverted: Trump is not a dignified person about whom obscene rumors circulate; he is an (openly) obscene person who wants his obscenity to appear as a mask of his dignity. Alenka Zupančič elaborated the contrast between this logic and the classic logic of domination in which

“the smear of the king’s image is simultaneously the smear of the king himself and as such inadmissible. The new logic is: let the image be castrated in all possible ways while I can do more or less everything I want. Even more, I can do what I want precisely because of and with the help of this new image.”[1]

This, again, is how Trump functions: his public image is smeared in all possible ways, people are surprised at how he again and again manages to shock them by reaching a new depth of obscenity, but at the same time he governs in the full sense of the term, imposing presidential decrees, etc. – castration is here turned around in an unheard-of way. The basic fact of what Lacan calls “symbolic castration” is the gap that separates me, my (ultimately miserable) psychic and social reality, from my symbolic mandate (identity): I am a king not because of my immanent features but because I occupy a certain place in the socio-symbolic edifice, i.e., because others treat me like a king. With today’s obscene master, “castration” is displaced onto his public image. Trump makes fun of himself and deprives himself of almost the last vestiges of dignity, he mocks his opponents with shocking vulgarity, but this self-depreciation not only in no way affects the efficiency of his administrative acts; it even allows him to perform these acts with utmost brutality, as if openly assuming the “castration” of the public image (renouncing the insignia of dignity) enables the full “non-castrated” display of actual political power. It is crucial to see how the “castration” of the public image is not just a signal that this image doesn’t matter, that it is only actual administrative power that counts. Rather, the full deployment of administrative power, of enforcing measures, is only possible when the public image is “castrated.”

But what about a politician who acts like an efficient no-nonsense administrator and also publicly assumes such an image (“a matter-of-fact guy who despises empty rituals and is only interested in results…”)? The gap between public image and actual person is still at work in such an identity, so that one can easily detect the difference between a really efficient administrator and the one who plays this role. But more important is the fact that assuming the image of an efficient administrator seriously constrains the space of what I am able to do in reality, of how I can exercise my power: I have to obey certain rules. Why, then, do I have to renounce the dignity of my power-role in order to exercise full power? Trump’s exercise of presidential power involves three and not just two elements: his ruthless exercise of power itself (enforcing decrees), his clownish-obscene public image, AND the symbolic site of power. Although this site is emptied of its positive content (dignity), it remains fully operative, and it is precisely its emptiness that enables Trump to exercise fully his administrative power.

-Slavoj Zizek 

Why Bother to Vote? It's the Rigged "Dominion" Voting System....

 Exclusive – Venezuelan Pollster: Socialists Threatened Starvation and 81% Still Didn’t Vote

Venezuela’s illegitimate socialist regime attempted to celebrate the results of its rigged legislative elections Sunday as a “people’s victory” despite record-low turnout that the polling firm Meganálisis estimated to be less than 20 percent of eligible voters.

Rubén Chirino Leañez, the CEO of Meganális, told Breitbart News in an interview Sunday that the turnout was especially embarrassing for Nicolás Maduro’s regime because the socialists used extortion and threats, including the threat of losing access to food, to get people to the polls.

“The government was going to deploy its entire apparatus, everything: the infrastructure, the pressure, the military,” Chirino explained. “They pressured people with [threats of] losing [government-distributed] packages of food, losing social assistance, losing their jobs. And of course, that entire infrastructure creates pressure.”

Maduro regime officials were not opaque in their threats. Diosdado Cabello, a senior Maduro henchman, suspected drug lord, and television show host, stated plainly during a campaign rally: “those who don’t vote, don’t eat.”

“There’s no food for those who don’t vote. I don’t know. Those who don’t vote, don’t eat; they get put in quarantine with no eating,” Cabello said last week, evoking harrowing testimonies from survivors of Maduro’s rudimentary Chinese coronavirus quarantine who have said they did not receive food while imprisoned in abandoned motels.

Chirino added that, in addition to threats, the Maduro regime used other tactics like going door-to-door and pressuring people to leave and vote and, towards the evening, “they extended the voting time because they said there were too many people on line waiting to vote, which was false.”

Venezuela is entering a third decade of socialism, marked by extreme shortages in food, medicine, fuel, and basic goods. Dictator Nicolás Maduro placed the national food supply under the control of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) of Venezuela, which is loyal to Maduro and implicated in several major drug trafficking investigations, in 2016. This allows Maduro’s regime to control access to food in the country and thus deny it to people who do not openly support the regime. Less than a year later, reports began surfacing of large quantities of food rotting under military custody as soldiers demanded bribes for food, but civilians did not have enough money to pay for them. At the same time, reports showed a growing number of Venezuelans digging through garbage for food, killing zoo animals to eat, and brawling over small items like a bag of onions.

Meganálisis estimated that only 19.13 percent of eligible voters in Venezuela participated in Sunday’s election, meaning over 80 percent of the country boycotted the race. This means that about 16.7 million people chose not to vote, compared to the 4 million who did. The Maduro regime claimed a 31-percent participation rate.

BALANCE FINAL DE PARTICIPACIÓN REAL 6-D-2020
Abstención 80.87% pic.twitter.com/ENLO4qJDY3

— Meganalisis (@Meganalisis) December 6, 2020

Chirino told Breitbart News that, taking into account voters who showed up to vote because of threats, the true turnout – meaning people who voted because they wanted to vote – was closer to 12 percent.

“When we get to a 19-percent participation rate, we’re talking about a 19 percent of which I am convinced that there is a six or seven percent that is doing it under pressure, is being extorted, that is doing it under coercive measures imposed by the state, which threatens people to participate.”

“If we are talking about people voting voluntarily, I think we are talking about a 12 or 13 percent,” Chirino concluded.

Maduro, who has not been the constitutional president of Venezuela since January 2019, organized the first National Assembly elections since 2015 on December 6. The last elections resulted in a resounding loss for Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and victories for center-left opposition parties, which campaigned together under the umbrella name “Democratic Unity Roundtable.”

This time, Maduro made sure to appoint key allies to the National Electoral Council (CNE), which counts the votes, and forcibly replace the leadership of major opposition parties with socialist cronies, resulting in all options on the ballot for voters being controlled directly by Maduro. The Organization of American States (OAS) urged the world to reject the results of December’s election a month ago, stating a free and fair vote there was impossible.

As the results of the election were a foregone conclusion – the PSUV swept the race, according to socialist propaganda outlet VTV – the true measure of the public support for Maduro and his party is how many people bothered to participate in the farce.

“We have had a tremendous and great people’s victory,” Maduro said on Sunday. “A cyclical change is coming, a positive, virtuous, change, a change of work and recovery. We are moving towards the recovery of the nation, of the economy, and overcoming the blockade,” he said, referring to U.S. sanctions on his top henchmen.

“An 80-percent abstention rate is a crushing number for the system,” Chirino told Breitbart News.

“Generally, the weakness of the socialist system in Venezuela, of the model as it is structured, is significant,” he explained. “People do not believe in electoral paths in this system because they know that, later, some contraption is going to appear and the participants are going to lend themselves to legitimizing the contraptions as part of a negotiation so … this high abstention rate consolidates that this system is wasted away.”

“The socialist system in Venezuela needs an urgent structural change. The institutions have absolutely no credibility whatsoever, they are on the floor,” Chirino added.

“Venezuelans are tired of this. Venezuelans seek a total rupture from this model. Venezuelans aspire to a country where a different model of government exists, where family is respected, where property is respected. where honest labor is respected,” Chirino said. “They expect the application of order, the application of the law, [and] that corrupt people be punished, whether they are of the government or of the opposition.”

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