The 7% relationship to reality

I have a friend who is morose about our current political climate and the degradation of public discourse. He sees the shadows of violent totalitarianism in the words and deeds of our statist establishment politicians, antifa, and the champagne socialists of the mainstream media.

I am much more optimistic. As Tom Wolfe observed:.

“He [Gunter Grass] sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”

The richer we get as a nation, the more our income elite can indulge themselves with destructive and evil philosophies such as utopianism and socialism. But 95% of Americans are well-off but not self-indulgently destructive rich. The polarization and fear and anxiety you see from academics, politicians and the mainstream media is hard to find among ordinary folk down at the level of neighborhoods where we all live. Democrats and Republicans, Jews, Gentiles and Muslims, black, white, and Asian, we all rub along, enjoying economic growth, rising incomes, falling crime, and fewer wars grinding up our children.

The panic and fear is a product of the increasingly rejected establishment figures.

My argument is an observational one based on random but not systematic data.

Another piece of random evidence is New York Times Kavanaugh book bombs, just 3,120 sold, Amazon rank #6,795 by Paul Bedard. Some time in the past couple of months, two New York Times reporters released a new book seeking once again to make the case that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a sexual predator.

The new allegations from the book crashed in flames once it became apparent that their new purported victim disavowed their entire claim. The authors were left looking like they were sloppy researchers pursuing an ideological vendetta with no evidence to support their malicious claims.

The latest book on Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a critical biography from two New York Times reporters that made new sexual assault charges that were immediately undermined, has suffered an epic sales crash, according to publishing insiders.

Expected to sell at least 10,000-12,000 in the first two weeks and propel The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation onto the newspaper’s bestseller hardcover list, it has sold about a third of that in the first two weeks.

A publishing source provided the latest BookScan numbers, which can account for about 80% of sales. That number is 3,120. “If you add in ebooks — they may have sold a total of 4,000. That's one of the most epic bombs in political publishing over the past decade,” said the source.

So the discerning American reading public is not buying the tall tales the NYT reporters are selling. Good. Supports my hypothesis that the American public are far better quality than the insider clerisy.

Well maybe Americans are simply tired of the Kavanaugh folderol? Perhaps that is why sales are low.

Apparently not. There is a market for fact-based reporting.

By comparison, another Kavanaugh book, Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court, which details the Democratic war on the Trump nominee, has sold 60,000 books and a total of 100,000 copies since its July 9 debut. It was written by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino and published by Regnery.

The horror stories and hysteria from the hot house imagination of establishment interests and the mainstream media have only a tangential relationship to the real America. We might even crudely quantify it as a 7% relationship to reality (4,000/60,000).