This is not the way I hoped to start things. Normally, introductory blogs allow one to connect to their writer and get a feel for what they are like. Perhaps this will do some of that, but I'm not holding my breath when it comes down to that. You get an understanding for a writer and make your judgements based upon that. Let me introduce who I am first. I am Kristoff Sorrenson, given the nickname 'Kit' by an English friend of mine who was an English major at Oxford when I attended there. I am also Jewish by birth, and I have kept my faith since the day I recited my first Shiva during my Great-Oma's commemoration, on the fifty-ninth anniversary of her murder. I never truly understood faith and identity until I was a little older and appreciated until I was older. The reason why I bring this up in a discussion about the (shall we say) unbelievable events of this week will come into fruition, and why I offer some advice to the President-elect ahead of his inauguration on the 20th of January next year.
So, I'm currently at home, like most of you. It's November, the day after the announcement that Joe Biden has been elected President of the United States. I have been refreshing Twitter and the news channels constantly for the past few days in between my research, waiting for the moment when either the Democrat or the incumbent Donald Trump would be announced as the victor. On the eve of the election, my fiancée made the bold prediction that Biden would edge it, predicting that he would not win the key states of Arizona, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio, but would flip Pennsylvania, Florida and even North Carolina. It was hard to argue against what she was saying, but I went one further and before going to bed, I had made the audacious prediction of believing that it could end in a 269-269 stalemate. That is to say, Trump would retain Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, but lose Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona. So far, we were nearly correct. Biden yesterday picked up the key state of Pennsylvania, thus giving him the necessary 270 electoral college votes to make him president. What has followed has been ugly from both Democrats and Republicans alike. President Trump throwing his toys out of the pram and Democrat sweetheart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez planning to make lists of people 'complicit' in Trump's administration, fanning fears that this could also extend to the electorate. It is amazing however, that in the less than twenty-four hours since Biden assumed the victor of the election that racism, sexism and COVID itself have miraculously disappeared overnight! Even Van Jones, a man notorious for saying that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a 'whitelash' against a 'changing country' could not help but burst into tears at the thought of another old, white, senile, perverted and (I'm going to say it) racist man becoming President, albeit this time tears of joy because this old, white, senile, perverted and racist old man happened to be a Democrat.
So, why bring up my identity at all about an election happening thousands of miles away? I didn't get a vote, so why should I get a say in anything? This is all true. I was in Connecticut four years ago, for a year of study. I had arrived in the September, moved into my dorms and found myself completely alone. I rarely interacted with the American students. I was 'foreign' to them, but the wrong type of foreign. Even my fellow American Jewish students thought that there was something wrong with me. You'd expect the next thing for me to say is that these were Trump fans who had taken on board his message of anti-immigration and light white supremacy. The opposite couldn't be more true. Most of these students were campaigning for Hillary Clinton. I never declared that I was a Trump fan, and I was not. The problem was, it transpired, was that I was not pro-Hillary. On the day of the election that year, once it became clear that Clinton was losing, I heard something from one of her supporters in the middle of the Yale University grounds that I never thought I would hear. It was a young, Muslim woman peddling an agenda that the 'Zionists' had been behind Mrs Clinton's defeat, with one young Muslim man going one further, suggesting that it had been a 'Jewish conspiracy' against the Obama administration and they had 'rigged the electoral college' to ensure a Trump victory. None of this went challenged, I hasten to add. I'm not hear to make some clickbait story about how I bravely came to the front, challenged their bigotry and then everybody cheered, because that would be idiotic and false. I was more stunned that this open bigotry was being accepted. In the months that came, those who had backed establishment Clinton became part of the 'resistance', radicalised by professors who had not expected a Trump victory, donning black masks and taking out riot gear. In November, they had backed a woman who was in bed with big pharma, and now they were reading Marx and Engels. The University had also started to tighten its control on what was acceptable speech, censoring, gagging and shaming people like myself who questioned the unfounded ideas of Critical Race Theory and challenged identity politics that were starting to become more ridiculous by the day.
Of course, we had it in the UK too following the unexpected Brexit result of 2016, something Mr Biden has been vocal in his bitter hatred of in the past, along with Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Biden is a globalist: someone who believes that America's interests should be in the expansion of its sphere into the lives of other countries. He had been vital in the US invasion of Libya, backed intervention in Kosovo in 1999, supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan...but Joe Biden has a weapon that he could use in a way that President Trump could not. He had cable media that could back him. It's the same problem that Johnson does not have, and it is one that I implore that he does not use. You see, Joe Biden is favourable amongst media elites, not only because he is a liberal, but because he is a deep state stooge. Trump could not been bought by the big media companies, and for that I applaud him, though he is an character of immoral values. Biden has consistently done what the media wants him to do: start wars so that they can get viewership; support the Black Lives Matter movement so that a race war can begin. It's all for views, and whilst Trump gave the media what they wanted in lots of ways, because he was able to expose cable news networks for what they were, he was Undesirable Number One. The win in 2016 meant that the coverage of the presidency was under the kybosh since day one, and anything the president did had to be analysed. Don't get me wrong, Trump has done awful things, from not dealing with COVID earlier, to his own business affairs interfering with the Oval Office and failing consistently to denounce white supremacy. Trump may have isolated what were America's 'allies' in the EU, but he strengthened those in the Middle East to Israel, brought around talks between Kosovo and Serbia and brought together talks between North and South Korea. An administration that had been setting itself on fire had moments of extinguishing its own flames. With internal conflicts between Trump, Sean Spicer, John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Anthony Scaramucci, etc. the White House never seemed so divided, and soon it would fall. Trump became the first President to remind the press that they cannot always get to him, but they reminded him that he was not above the law.
Back to 2008, when I was younger and more naïve, I had been bought in by the then-Senator Obama's message of 'Hope' and 'Change' coming to America. Being 18 and living in Denmark meant that I was obviously not eligible to vote, but if I had the opportunity, I would have voted for the Senator from Illinois and his running mate from Delaware. Like many Obama voters, seeing a changing country does not always make a good country, and with an era of radical liberal change, the word 'identity' became more of a badge of free pass rather than one of honour. Like many people (Democrats and Republicans alike), I had been shocked by the wave of unarmed black men being killed unlawfully by police, even before the death of George Floyd earlier this year. It birthed a new, radical movement under the term Black Lives Matter, which sought initially to end racial injustice, but instead became a moniker for black supremacy and separatism, antisemitism and racism. It said that being black was a disadvantage and that white people needed to pay for their sins because of their genetic makeup. With leaders cuddling up to racists like Louis Farrakhan and the change of the Democratic Party to the left, moderate Democrats changed to Donald Trump, a candidate who strongly believed in an America First policy, attacking the globalists and loving his country, something that horrified both the media and the new-left Democrats. Sure, Trump didn't cover himself in glory by calling illegal immigrants from Mexico 'rapists' or in a 2005 interview boasting that he could 'grab women by the pussy', and that would generate ire and anger from most of the American public. However, in the era of #MeToo, when we were expected to naturally believe the testaments of women who had been sexually assaulted or raped, why was it that Tara Reade's allegations against Biden suddenly revoked? What is the difference between Reade and Blaise Ford in her allegations against Kavanaugh? It's not the act that they're against - it's who they accuse that matters. Seeing the decline in traditional values, the dismantling of the family unit and political correct cancel culture infect society helped for the rise of Donald Trump, a man who said he could put everything right. Biden now has to act on the decline of decency, moral integrity and establishing order in American society if he is to succeed.
My honest prediction is that Biden may last two years. His declining mental state and his own skeletons in his closet may come back to haunt him. After all, Trump was impeached for calling out something that Biden and his son Hunter had done, rather than acting in his own right. Biden's own record on racial issues, including help the completion of the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Bill that saw mass incarceration of black men, and trying to whitewash claims that 'poor kids are just as smart as white kids' and black voters who planned to vote for Trump 'ain't black' by having an African-American woman run as his Vice Presidential nominee, will not fool anybody for long. Biden and Obama had also helped extend the Patriot Act and oversaw the DSA and the FBI spy on the American public, be part of an administration that bombed seven countries using drone strikes and sell private data through the Affordable Care Act should also come under scrutiny. If Biden wants to maintain support, even from moderate Republicans, he will need to go back to values that Trump ignored during his time in office: defence of liberty, freedom of the press/speech, tolerance of religious values, restoring American patriotism rather than nationalism, and bringing decency back to the White House.
As a libertarian, I was apprehensive during this election. Of course, as someone who is an outsider looking in, I had no say in the running of the United States. I wish not to do either, but there is this sense of American entitlement that will further isolate the rest of the world that Biden should be aware of. Obama believed that he was untouchable, just like his successor, and that was in part true because he had liberal media supporting him and helping sway the mood of the American public, who are glued to cable television. Obama could get away with so much that Trump could not because of this, as did Hillary Clinton and now Joe Biden. For libertarians, seeing two authoritarians battle for the Oval Office is not something that we want to be a part of. The cable networks not allowing Jo Jorgenson speak is clear to their own agenda, that it can only be Republican or Democrat. Democrats accuse third party voters of allowing 'fascists' to get in, and Republicans have accused third party voters of allowing Biden to get in. Truth being, both Democrats and Republicans have let down the American public for generations now, but much like in the UK where we need to get over Conservatives and Labour all the time, it is time that Americans change their attitude away from Democrats and Republicans, otherwise they will end up with the same cosy, inbred liberal politics that have meant that until this vital election, millions do not turn up to vote in person or cast a ballot (that unless they were dead in certain swing states!) Bottom line is if that you vote the same, expect the same.
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