A glimmer of hope 616

The Supreme Court is about to rule on ballot “irregularities” in four battleground states, which might alter the result of the presidential election if the state legislatures have the courage to change their certification of electors.

While omitting some declarations of trust in “God”, we urgently quote Fredy Lowe, writing at Canada Free Press:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton … filed an “original jurisdiction” lawsuit on Monday (December 7, 2020), which means the case does not need to be heard at the district or state level, but goes directly to the Supreme Court. This lawsuit, that everyone is talking about (oh, with the exception of the cowards in our legacy media, that is) was filed against Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin for violating the Electors Clause of the US Constitution, by illegally changing their individual state voting rules and procedures by executive actions and/or at the state court levels. In no case were these changes made lawfully through state legislatures. The US Supreme Court has given Pennsylvania until Thursday for their rebuttal, where the outcome will be known soon.

President Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow said, “This is the most significant of the cases that have been filed … because it is completely outcome-determinative, which means that if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of Texas, those four states named in the complaint would require their state legislatures to determine the outcome [of the election], by choosing the electors instead of the fraudulent vote counts. It’s a very significant piece of litigation …”

These four defendant states have also violated the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution by implementing unlawful voting rules and procedures without seeking the approval of their state legislators. And, last but not least, one of the key issues in the lawsuit states that the aforementioned constitutional violations led to many “voting irregularities” that resulted in fraudulent election results, which must be overturned by the legislators in the interest of preserving free and fair elections in the United States.

To many, much of what we presented here are encouraging words that the outcome of this fraudulent election will soon be determined, but they are just that—words.

It is action by the state legislators that will be urgently needed if the verdict of the Supreme Court permits it. The writer addresses them –

To the individual state legislators on the ground in each one of these four states:

Your vote will require courage!

Think first about the courage of our Lion Donald Trump who stands in the breach, seemingly alone most days, fighting against many corrupt Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who want to remove him from office, and – lest we forget – their New World Order cabal of financiers. …

There are reports from veteran legislators stating how they will be afraid to vote in favor of President Trump, which would revoke the electors set by the fake majority votes for Biden.

They fear Antifa and BLM vengeful violence against them.

Courage is contagious. Once one brave legislator takes a stand, the spines of others [may be] stiffened. …

Be the one to take a stand, knowing that [millions of] Americans who voted to reelect President Trump will be standing with you.

As President Trump often says, “We’ll see what happens.” Tomorrow.

***

More Republican-led states join the challenge –

The Western Journal reports:

The attorneys general of Missouri and Arkansas signaled their support of Texas’ lawsuit shortly after the state’s Monday filing with the Supreme Court, while the attorneys general of Louisiana and Indiana said the court should hear the Texas case.

“Election integrity is central to our republic,” Missouri Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt tweeted Tuesday. “And I will defend it at every turn. As I have in other cases — I will help lead the effort in support of Texas’ [Supreme Court] filing today. Missouri is in the fight.”

“After reviewing the motion filed by Texas in the U.S. Supreme Court, I have determined that I will support the motion in all legally appropriate manners,” Arkansas Republican Attorney General Leslie Rutledge wrote on Twitter. “The integrity of our elections is a critical part of our nation and it must be upheld.”

Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall also vowed to secure election integrity, although he said he will wait to see if the Supreme Court grants Texas’ request to bring the case against the four swing states forward before acting in an official capacity. “The unconstitutional actions and fraudulent votes in other states not only affect the citizens of those states, they affect the citizens of all states — of the entire United States,” Marshall said in a statement. “Every unlawful vote counted, or lawful vote uncounted, debases and dilutes citizens’ free exercise of the franchise.”

Louisiana refuses to be left out of the fight, and the state’s attorney general [Republican Jeffrey Landry] released a scorching statement that urged the Supreme Court to consider the Texas motion: “Louisiana citizens are damaged if elections in other states were conducted outside the confines of the Constitution while we obeyed the rules.”

Indiana Republican Attorney General-elect Todd Rokita publicly spoke of the importance of Texas’ case, which revolves around the alleged disenfranchisement of American voters: “Millions of citizens in Indiana have deep concerns regarding the conduct of the 2020 Presidential election,” Rokita said in a statement, according to the Indianapolis Star. “Deeply rooted in these concerns is the fact that some states appear to have conducted their elections with a disregard to the U.S. Constitution.”

The call for the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit was echoed by outgoing Indiana Republican Attorney General Curtis Hill, who pleaded with the court in a statement to consider the case and to do so quickly.

While the cards may seem stacked against Texas, and by extension President Donald Trump, there’s still no guarantee as to who will sit in the Oval Office come Jan. 20.

If even more states join forces with Texas and these other conservative strongholds, this could very well be a critical legal battle in deciding the 2020 election.

***

Later same day: SEVENTEEN states have now joined Texas in the lawsuit.

The end of the rule of law 190

Without the protection of law, how will we survive?

How will we earn a living? Where can we live?

How can we protect ourselves, our dependents, our possessions?

Victor Davis Hansen writes at American Greatness:

Amid plague, national lockdown, riot and arson, iconoclasm, recession, and the most contested voting in history, the country leaves 2020 with some scars that won’t heal. …

Mail-in voting now joins open borders and promises to pack the Supreme Court and junk the Electoral College, as systematic efforts to change the system when the system cannot guarantee the Left the retention of power. It will be impossible to return to a mostly Election Day vote, and so another American tradition of more than two centuries has been jettisoned cavalierly. …

What was new about the recent destructive rioting in Seattle, Portland, Washington, and New York during the summer of 2020 … were three strange developments.

First, local and state authorities did not regularly try to suppress the violence. They either sympathized with the complaints of lawless Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters or found the general chaos and sense of unrest during the Trump Administration conducive for Joe Biden’s candidacy in the November presidential election. … Rarely in modern times have authorities abdicated … as Seattle officials did with the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” over the summer.

Second, when violent demonstrators, arsonists, and looters were on rare occasions arrested, in most cases they were released by local and state public prosecutors, many of whom clearly sympathized with their use of violence. The result was a crash in police morale. To arrest a violent offender was simply deemed a waste of time and money, given his near-instant release and likelihood that he would never face any consequences for his actions. In other words, as is the case in former Third World countries, America’s criminal justice system became warped. Now there was good and bad looting, permissible and outlawed arson, correct and incorrect resisting of arrest, and quarantine-violating mass rallying and mass rallying that is exempt from lockdowns. Carving out a swath of autonomy for rioters and looters in downtown Seattle proved “legal”; had a row of restaurants and bars done the same to be allowed to serve the people, they would have been fined, closed, and likely jailed.

Third, Democratic mayors are now avowed revolutionaries, at war with their own police departments—or at least those other than their security details that protect their families and property from the very Jacobins they empowered. In the old days, Democrats ran the cities, but a Richard Daley in Chicago, Jerome Cavanagh in Detroit, Sam Yorty in Los Angeles, or Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia at least assured the public that there would be consequences for law breaking and often begged for more federal support to quell unrest.

If one believes some of these prior mayors were racist, illiberal, or corrupt, then that indictment reflects the inherently racist traditions of the Democratic Party and its long history of delivering votes to Democratic candidates as the price of exempting their city machines from civil rights and racketeering investigations by mostly Democratic state and federal attorneys.

Coups, revolutions, and civil wars often witness the toppling of statues, usually of those identified as “tyrants” by self-described liberationists, reformers, and democratic activists. But in times of peace in general, and, in particular, in a constitutional United States, iconoclasm, Taliban-like destruction of statuary, and the Trotskyization of the past—whose luminaires are suddenly deemed enemies of the people—was mostly unknown.

Not now. By summer 2020, the Left was well beyond defacing, toppling, and destroying en masse statues of Confederate generals. The mob of Antifa, BLM, and renegade students had gone on to “dead white males” in general, whether it was Miguel de Cervantes, Father Junipero Serra, or Abraham Lincoln. What was new in American history was that mobs could assemble on spec and destroy or deface any statue or icon they wished—with impunity. For the foreseeable future, no civic organization or municipality will erect a statue, without first informally consulting the local Antifa thugocracy.

Antifa and BLM so terrified authorities that the latter often preemptively retired their once revered statutes, usually by night and without a vote of a local council or plebiscite. Hundreds are now hidden away in sheds and storage, apparently on the chance that a saner generation in a century or so may one day resurrect them as reminders of 21st-century mass insanity.

The reverse of statue toppling was also true, as the work of destructive creation was sanctified. BLM could simply declare plazas or sections of streets its own, brand them with its trademark BLM signature, and rightly assume mayors in Washington and New York would protect their sloganeering with the force of law—in the fashion of the Old West in which cowboys were given free rein in saloons to shoot and destroy. Defacing had now been redefined as the good ruining of public property. What is illegal is the attempt to restore a street to its original condition before it was illegally painted over with BLM slogans. From now on, mobs know that destroying art, statues, and monuments is their birthright—at least if they are professed revolutionaries.

Well before Trump, the country was bifurcating into two nations, two globalized bicoastal, wealthy internationalized ribbons within 50 miles of the Atlantic and Pacific, with a vast red interior in between. …

[The ribbons] were left-wing … and had higher percentages of the college educated and pseudo-credentialed, but more also without practical ability. They were mostly in control of the nation’s culture and politics—as defined by the administrative state, bureaucracies, media, academia, foundations, corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the elite echelon of the military, professional sports, and entertainment in general.

Yet [the Trump-supporting interior] …  was what still fed, built, and fueled America. That is, the interior is where the food grows, oil and gas gets pumped, timber is cut, cement, steel, and building materials are fashioned, and things get built—from cars to tractors to plastics to shingles.

Globalization gave the coastal elite a new market of 7 billion—and the interior, outsourcing, offshoring, and stagnant incomes. [And during the COVID-19 pandememic] millions lost their jobs. …

Like it or not, the Democratic Party is run by billionaires … Barack Obama is the master of the script, now and then emerging from one of his three mansions to lecture the nation on the revolutionary logic of adding new states, or the false-consciousness of [Trump-supporting] black males, or the voting pathologies of counter-revolutionary Latinos. The Left’s officer corps is the wealthy professional of the upper middle class, its legions of highly paid and well pensioned government employees, and the elite woke apparatus, all united by the fierce protection of their privileges … [They assure]  minorities that they are the vanguard of the woke and know best how to spot “white privilege” among those who have none of it. …

Rarely has illiberality and bias been so redefined as social justice.

So the Left weaponized an entire culture – everything from lifestyle magazines and NBA games to Netflix and fashion. …

How weird that the party once of the Bushes and Romneys is now the [Trumpist] party of the working-class … earning the everlasting hatred of the NeverTrump elite, whose interest in conservatism was mostly its bicoastal cultural cachet, not in any concern with bettering the plight of millions of the working lower middle classes.

The summer of COVID-19, quarantines, riot and arson, and an absence of confidence in the sanctity of voting ended with a lot of scars—and we will always bear them from now on.

Worst of all, Professor Hanson states firmly that at the end of this annus horribilis – 

There is no longer the rule of law as we once knew it

You live in – say – Seattle and you have been assaulted? Robbed? There is nothing you can do about it. No law, no law-enforcement by police – there are no police who can come to your aid. That is what Democrat “government” means.

So if now the entire country is coming under such “government” by the Democrats, will it mean that unless you are part of that “government” you can be assaulted, robbed, even murdered, and there will be nothing you can do about it?

Not exactly, citizen. You need not be entirely helpless.

Arm yourself.

Posted under Anarchy, United States by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, December 8, 2020

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Seventy-three million problems 161

… with the story that Joe Biden has won the presidency.

Roger Kimball writes at American Greatness:

The Associated Press called the election for Joe Biden a couple of weeks ago. Other news agencies, from the Wall Street Journal and Fox News to CNN, the New Woke Times, and the Washington Post were right there on cue, hailing him the winner. Time, the former news weekly, devoted its cover to Joe Biden, “46th President of the United States.” Twitter was on the case, adding little warning messages to tweets about the election it didn’t like, suspending the accounts of people whose opinions it disagreed with, throttling the ability of those who dissented to broadcast their dissent. Who knows what Google and Facebook are doing with their search results. Some secrets are too deep for the light of day.

And that is my point. The strongest argument for Biden’s victory is not the vote tally. It is the monolithic narrative, pumped up like one of those inflatable play castles at a child’s birthday party. With every passing day, that narrative becomes more boisterous, more assertive, more uncompromising. It is a collective primal scream, emitted with eyes shut and ears plugged.

There is a problem for the narrative, however. Or more to the point, there are 73 million problems. A major concession in the Biden-won-give-it-up-narrative is revealed by the hawkers of the “Unity Now” meme. Let us all come together as one nation, under Joe, and reassert the American normality that has been so sorely missing under the despotic reign of Donald Trump.

No. No, that’s not going to fly, and not only because of the snarling viciousness that attended Donald Trump and his entire administration from the moment he was elected until now. Granted, Democrats are masters of hypocrisy. … They are utterly unembarrassed by double standards. Indeed, they glory in them. …

[Kamala Harris’s] sense of entitlement is unshakable, beyond embarrassment. “When we do it”—go without masks, eat out with friends after telling hoi polloi to stay home, run a private email server for government business, collude with Russians to upset an election, leak classified material, lie under oath, etc.—“It’s OK because—reasons.” …

But glaring hypocrisy is not the only reason that the narrative’s call for unity is failing. There is also its essential fragility. It is loud. It is seamless. It is asserted by all the best and most beautiful people, the really smart ones with fancy degrees, the right attitudes, the impressive ZIP codes. But it is also like an elaborate barque in high winds and choppy seas on a leeward course off a rocky coast.

That coast is the anti-narrative, otherwise known as reality.

The really hard and jagged part of the impinging reality … is the actual vote tally in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Huge anomalies have been alleged in all of those key states. …

Inquiring minds want to know, how is it possible that voter turnout in just those key cities in just those key states was so high: often 90 percent or more? How is it possible that Joe Biden, who barely campaigned, garnered more votes in just those spots than even Barack Obama had done? How is it possible that, as everyone was getting tucked into bed on the night of November 3, Donald Trump had notable leads in almost all of those states and then, suddenly, all at once, in the wee hours, floods of votes poured in and—wouldn’t you know it—they were overwhelmingly, sometimes exclusively, for Biden?

And what about those voting machines from Dominion: are we confident that they are secure?

Aristotle tells us that “Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.” Do we have instruments capacious enough to measure the improbabilities that attend Joe Biden’s performance in these key states?

There seems to be a couple of different attitudes towards voter fraud. For some, a little voter fraud is just the cost of doing business. …

That, anyway, is one point of view. But even if one grants that in principle, it seems legitimate to ask, how much voter fraud is OK? I am not aware of any political FDA weighing in and telling us what percentage of the vote can be tainted before it is ruled inadmissible. In this election, hundreds of thousands of votes are alleged to be fraudulent. At the moment, Joe Biden is said to be ahead by some 150,000 votes in Michigan, 80,000 in Pennsylvania, 20,000 in Wisconsin, and 10-12,000 in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. What if his standing in a majority of those states were shown to be the result of fraud?

Then there is that stretch of coastline known as election law. The particular rules of our elections are generally entrusted to legislatures of the various states. But in several instances, courts or various executive entities weighed in at the last moment to change the rules about how votes would be counted. Pennsylvania is an especially egregious case. … Election officials clearly violated the law by inspecting mail-in ballots before November 3, in clear defiance of the law, which requires such ballots to be safely kept in “sealed or locked containers” until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

Because of this and other irregularities, a state judge on Friday, finding that mail-in ballot procedures likely violated the Pennsylvania constitution, ordered that Pennsylvania halt the process of certifying the vote. “Petitioners,” Judge Patricia McCollough wrote, “appear to have a viable claim that the mail-in ballot procedures set forth in Act 77 contravene” the law. In a blow to Team Trump, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated Judge McCollough’s order Saturday night, clearing the way for the state to certify the election. Next stop? The Supreme Court of the United States.

Something similar is happening in all the battleground states. Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, part of Trump’s official legal team, are pursuing alleged violations of the law in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and elsewhere. Sidney Powell, an activist lawyer who is not on Trump’s official legal team, has filed suit in Georgia and Michigan, alleging massive voter fraud significant enough to overturn the vote there.

If state legislatures and the courts find the courage to stop the momentum carrying Biden to the White House, if Trump is declared after all to be the legitimate winner of the election, a general strike is threatened, and rioting and arson, murder in the streets, are to be expected.

That outcome is not to be shirked at all costs. It is not worse than the loss of America to the globalist Left. May the executive, led by Donald Trump, have the courage to meet force with force, and defeat the saboteurs, the killers and destroyers, wherever they arise, whatever they do.

***

Here is a clear discussion of Sidney Powell’s case. It demonstrates that Joe Biden has NOT won the presidency. His party is committing a gigantic fraud against the American people and making a mockery of the democratic system:

https://youtu.be/Xbx-MKEet7M

 

(Hat-tip to our commenter pepaz for the video)

The stench of fraud 65

Is there still some cause for hope that the 2020 election will not result in the corrupt senile crook Joe Biden being inaugurated as president of the United States?

Can it be shown that there was, for instance, electronic manipulation of vote counting machines on a massive scale?  If so, are there experts who can prove it?

The “smartest man in the room” has joined Sidney Powell’s team …

… investigating election fraud, writes Andrea Widburg at American Thinker.

She goes on:

In her Georgia complaint, Sidney Powell included the declaration of Navid Keshavarz-Nia, an expert witness who stated under oath that there was massive computer fraud in the 2020 election, all of it intended to secure a victory for Joe Biden.  Dr. Kershavarz-Nia’s name may not mean a lot to you, but it’s one of the weightiest names in the world when it comes to sniffing out cyber-security problems.

We know how important Dr. Kershavarz-Nia is because, just two and a half months ago, the New York Times ran one of its Sunday long-form articles about a massive, multi-million-dollar fraud that a talented grifter [named Garrison Courtney] ran against the American intelligence and military communities.  Dr. Kershavarz-Nia is one of the few people who comes off looking good:

Navid Keshavarz-Nia, those who worked with him said, “was always the smartest person in the room”. In doing cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I., he had spent decades connecting top-secret dots. After several months of working with Mr. Courtney,  he began connecting those dots too. He did not like where they led.

Not only does Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have an innate intelligence, but he’s also got extraordinary academic and practical skills in cyber-fraud detection and analysis. …

His qualifications include a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in various areas of electrical and computer engineering.  In addition, “I have advanced trained from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), DHS office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) and Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT).”

Professionally, Dr. Kershavarz-Nia has spent his career as a cyber-security engineer.  “My experience,” he attests,” spans 35 years performing technical assessment, mathematical modeling, cyber-attack pattern analysis, and security intelligence.”  I will not belabor the point.  Take it as given that Dr. Kershavarz-Nia may know more about cyber-security than anyone else in America. …

So his opinion carries weight. What is his opinion?

Dr. Keshavarz-Nia concluded with high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump being transferred to Vice President Biden.

It is a plain accusation that the Democrats cheated to gain a win for their senile corrupt cooked candidate.

Will the battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – where the electronic fraud was most dramatically practiced, be able to ignore the accusation and carry on certifying the results for Joe Biden and so advancing the process of getting him inaugurated?

We’ll see what happens.

Government by the stupid for the stupid 218

… but not of the stupid.

Paul Joseph Watson is on to them.

He shows some of the ways Big Virtue tries to discombobulate us.

Trump the Hero: triumphant or tragic or both? 182

What we find hardest to bear about this hugely frustrating, painfully devastating election result putting a senile corrupt crook into the presidency, is that so much good that President Trump did for America, both at home and abroad, will be undone. The bad men and women who did terrible harm in the Obama years will be back and doing more of it, even worse than before.

Under the regime looming up over us, as regulations are reinstated and taxes are raised, most Americans will be poorer. We will be less safe as a nation because our enemies, most notably China and Iran, will be strengthened. When, as seems probable, law and order is rubbished as a “white privilege” invention, and police, if allowed to exist at all, are stripped of effective powers, we will be less safe as individuals.

Worst of all, our freedom will be lost. 

The glorious four years of the Trump presidency will have been a brief interlude in the decline of the West. However –

Donald Trump will always be one of the great heroes of American and World history. 

Only –  Eric Landrum asks at American Greatness – is he to be reckoned a triumphant or a tragic hero?

Landrum is not ready to give up hope that America (and so the World) might yet be saved from the Biden doom. But he regretfully concedes that even if saved, America will not be the same united Republic it was founded to be and has been since the end of the civil war.

Donald Trump is a hero. That’s an objective statement of fact that no fake news outlet or phony fact-check can change.

The only question remaining, then, is: Will Donald Trump be remembered as a triumphant hero, or a tragic hero?

Just as with 2016, the movie-like narrative of the 2020 election was building up to be yet another truly glorious comeback victory from the greatest political underdog in modern history, Donald J. Trump. He was actively fighting against Big Tech, the polls, Hollywood, academia, the media, Wall Street, the Democratic Party, establishment Republicans, the international community, violent anarchist mobs, a Chinese plague, and the deep state—virtually the same rogues gallery he was up against in 2016, with a few new additions and even higher stakes.

By midnight of November 3, he was speeding towards a stunning landslide reelection victory. He had effortlessly taken Florida by the biggest margin for any presidential candidate in 16 years. He had won Ohio by a slightly higher margin than in 2016, which itself was the biggest margin of victory in that state for any candidate since 1988. Turnout from the rural, working-class areas he needed to win was at historic levels, and he had insurmountable leads in the three crucial Rust Belt states. He was winning, and winning big.

The sudden, and nearly simultaneous, stopping of the counts in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia somewhere between midnight and 1 a.m., followed by the abrupt restart and announcement of new leads for Joe Biden in all of those states at around 4 a.m. the following day, are at the heart of the very legitimate and credible claims of voter fraud by President Trump and his supporters.

There is a path for victory for the president, both legal and political, despite the media’s best efforts to pull a “nothing to see here” routine as they rush to declare the race over in favor of Biden, insisting that there is no voter fraud despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It has been said before, and needs to be said again: At this point, it is far too late for our Republic as once we knew it.

No matter what happens, no matter whose hand rests on the Bible on January 20, 2021, to take the oath of office, half of the country will deem that president’s term to be illegitimate. Half the country will claim that the election was stolen, either by voter fraud or by voter suppression. Half the country will spend the next four years demonstrating in the streets, whether it be militant communists and frothing black nationalists determined to destroy the country, or furious patriots trying to save it.

To that extent, a second Trump term may matter just as little as a Biden presidency, even if a Biden Administration is as short-lived as some predict it will be in favor of a Kamala Harris presidency. If President Trump does indeed serve a second term, a betting man would be wise to put his money on the likelihood of a second impeachment, for starters.

Should Trump prevail in this election, the media, globalist leaders, the Democrats, and Big Tech most likely will be reading the same four-letter word from the same script: coup. With this one word, often used by Trump supporters (accurately) to describe the deep state’s efforts to sink his presidency with the “Russian collusion” hoax, the Left will begin explicitly making the argument that President Trump is a usurper and a dictator who should not be in office.

At this point, the evidence seems to suggest overwhelmingly that whatever victory Trump may be able to pull off will be a bittersweet one, with the president and the nation robbed of the landslide triumph toward which he was heading, and any second term will be marred by even more obstructionism in the halls of Congress and targeted violence in the streets.

But there is still a victory to be achieved here, and it is not the possibility of earning a second term in the face of insurmountable odds, as satisfying as that would be. Indeed, it is true poetic justice that this election fiasco in and of itself, chaos and all, could be a victory for Donald Trump.

President Trump’s greatest achievement was not the monumental tax cuts, the renegotiated trade deals, crushing ISIS, or building the wall; his greatest achievement was exposing the sheer corruption, unholy levels of power, and vicious contempt of the ruling class in our country. It was evident in every single thing they did to try to destroy him over the last five years, with their determination matched only by President Trump’s willpower, fueled by his love of country and determination to save it from the forces that were out to destroy him.

Adding to that, it must be said that nothing has exposed their corruption more than this debacle of an election. Now, at least 74 million Americans are well aware of the fact that the elite will even undermine our own electoral processes from within just to get their way, the will of the people be damned.

The true kicker, however, is not the revelation that they have done this—as cheating surely has been part of our electoral politics throughout our history. It’s that Donald Trump was the one who exposed it by finally fighting back, whereas all other Republicans instinctively would have recoiled in fear. That is why his efforts to fight back now, even if they are ultimately for naught, will still leave behind a legacy that will last far beyond the next four years.

Indeed, many of his most recent achievements surely will be swept under the rug, undermined, or retroactively stolen from him by being blindly credited to Biden. But there is no denying that he leaves behind a framework for a stronger country in every way possible.

He saved the economy, not once, but twice; he ultimately defeated the Chinese virus, giving us a vaccine in the final months of his first term; he restored American strength around the globe, through more calculated but restrained uses of our military as well as a tougher approach to trade. And he leaves behind a clear blueprint for how an unapologetically nationalist and populist message can, barring mass voter fraud, win electoral landslides and create previously unprecedented political coalitions, even against overwhelming opposition from the elite.

As such, it is clear that Donald Trump has already secured his place in history as a tragic hero. …

He exposed the media. He exposed the leadership of both political parties. He exposed Hollywood, academia, Big Tech, and the globalists who are in charge of nations that we previously thought to be our closest allies. He awakened millions to the realities of the culture war that was already raging against us, and the scourge of mass immigration. He drew back the curtain, pulled the wool from our eyes, and led us out of the cave so that we would no longer stare endlessly at the illusions of the shadows on the wall. …

The true tragedy of the story of Donald Trump is that he may not see the fulfillment of what he started. But he showed us the way to a better place, and nothing can take that away from him.

Posted under Commentary, United States by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, November 25, 2020

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No news good news 79

Trying to find and share a bright side of the election calamity, we offer the following.

Highly trustworthy Victor Davis Hanson tells us (at American Greatness):

The media has now vanished—kaput, no more, ended. 

Oh, good!

There are still persons calling themselves “reporters”, and even “journalists”, pretending to find out what is happening of public concern and making it known to the public, just like real reporters used to do, but it is all just masquerade, parody, travesty; lies; smoke.

Within a few hours, [the so-called press] ] goes from a Ministry-of-Truth love session with Joe Biden to a steaming verbal assault on the president’s press secretary—without a shred of awareness how ridiculous they appear in their passive-aggressive schizophrenia. The only constant is that reporters unapologetically seem to jettison their principles and professionalism to calibrate what they say and do by whose politics they support. They would prefer to be entirely discredited under a Biden presidency than be real journalists during a Trump Administration. …

[They] poorly prepared the nation for their envisioned Biden presidency. To foster that agenda, journalists have done enormous damage to the country. The bias inherent in Silicon Valley’s monopoly of the internet and social media communications was poorly disguised in efforts to aid the progressive effort. It is a matter now of only when, not if, these trusts and monopolies will be regulated and broken up.

Good again!

There will still be half-hearted defenses of episodic accurate polling at the national or state level. But these pleas will be in vain, given that by and large, pollsters, as in 2016, did not just get the critical state voting wrong but predictably wrong in a predictable direction for predictable purposes. In pursuit of short-term gain, pollsters irrevocably ruined their reputations.

A frail Joe Biden was never fully vetted. Rather, he was protected and sheltered by the media. Now 330 million Americans will see whether cognitively he is up to impromptu press conferences, 18-hour days, tough negotiations with opportunistic foreign leaders, and the demands of traversing the country to rally both the country and his party adherents. A media that fed 25th Amendment hysterias during the Trump administration will have to pivot, and now declare any such talk absurd—lest Biden be subjected to the same sort of Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test that Trump aced.

His keepers will drag him about, like the ventriloquist’s dummy that he is, and no one will notice whether or not he is still alive.

The disturbing revelations about the Bidens and Burisma in October were never covered. As a result, for the duration of the Biden Administration, Hunter Biden will remain an object of scrutiny and investigation, along with many of his now angry associates who feel betrayed and are ready either to talk of their misplaced loyalty or broker ways out of their complicity. Who knows how long the [zombie] media, without their ratings propped up by the Trump bogeyman, will ignore the buzz of a Biden familial syndicate—with a Kamala Harris always waiting in the wings.

Lurking in the wings. Crouching in the wings. Ready to spring with a loud tirumphant cackle.

So no one knows to what degree further revelations will emerge about Biden family corruption—only that all these allegations have heretofore not just been ignored but deliberately smothered by the media. And that is not a sustainable effort. The smell of scandal will linger throughout the Biden presidency. …

But most importantly, Americans have no idea of what the latest incarnation of Joe Biden will bring. Biden gave only scripted and teleprompted bromides from his basement. The media never pressed him to be clear on issues like the China reset, the Middle-East recalibration, fracking, the Green New Deal, reparations, the wall and open borders, proposed tax increases, and on and on.

The ventriloquists hadn’t thought about those trivialities. They were wholly concentrated on the great task of destroying President Trump.

So the country has little warning whether the Biden Administration will be guided by the hard Left agenda of Kamala Harris, “the squad,” or Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—or stung by the rejection of progressive extremism in the congressional elections and the close presidential race enough to move to the center.

Will Biden pursue or give up notions of ending the Electoral College, packing the court, admitting in new states, ending the Senate filibuster, neutering the Second Amendment, and other assorted radical promises? Whatever he decides will disappoint his leftwing BLM/socialist base, swing-state terrified congressional Democrats—and likely the bewildered American people. …

The American people are trending toward the Trump agenda that is winning despite the overwhelming odds against it. Even the combined efforts of Wall Street, academia, the media, Silicon Valley, the corporate boardrooms, the Washington government establishment, entertainment, and professional sports cannot beat an angry and mistreated people–if they are united.

The Trump base has won without all of the above, and will win without emulating the Left’s tactics of street brawling, mass violence, looting, and arson. Nor has it sought to undermine the federal courts, abuse the intelligence services, warp the Justice Department, or welcome the help of the retired officer corps or anonymous sleeper opponents within the bureaucracy. It was the self-righteous Obama, not the much pilloried Trump, who sought extra-legal means to monitor his opponents, weaponize the government, and likely violate the law.

There is a series of battles to come in January 2021, in 2022, and in 2024. And they can be won and will be definitive …

And we will know about them … how?

There will need to be a new Fourth Estate. New Googles, new Twitters, new YouTubes. Many of them. All in cut-throat competition to be the quickest to tell us what is happening, and the most accurate, the most truthful.

And they will identify the hand working the jaw of the Biden dummy.

The age of true information filling the ether will have come at last.

O brave new world that will have such virtual papers in it!

Thoughts on a chaotic election 17

Are these thoughts encouraging or do they sharpen the pangs of doubt and despair?

Fred Fleitz, president of the Center for Security Policy, former (2018) deputy assistant to the president and to the chief of staff of the National Security Council, writes:

Despite elaborate efforts by the mainstream media, liberal politicians and others on the left to destroy Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency, the 2020 presidential election is on knife’s edge. Many, many Americans defied the media and voted in favor of Trump’s presidency and his policies. We may see a protracted legal battle before we know the victor of the election.

There was no “blue wave”. It appears Republicans held the Senate and gained a few seats in the House. If the GOP does keep the Senate, this means that even if Biden wins the 2020 election, he won’t be able to implement his most radical policies that his critics feared. There won’t be any constitutionally-dubious ploys to add DC and Puerto Rico as states. There will be no packing of the Supreme Court. A President Biden won’t be able to raise taxes, provide huge tax relief to blue states by reinstating the SALT tax deduction, or “transition” our country away from oil. The New Green Deal is dead.

If the Republicans hold the Senate, no matter who wins the White House, this will be a huge defeat for far-left radicals like Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and violent anarchist groups like BLM and Antifa who thought this election would move our country toward socialism. On national security, if Biden wins, a Republican Senate will refuse to confirm far-left, corrupt and partisan nominees. That means Adam Schiff can forget about becoming the next Director of National Intelligence.

On the other hand, if GOP control of the Senate slips away or if there is a tie under a Biden presidency (under which Kamala Harris would break ties as President of the Senate), our country is in real trouble.

But even if the Republicans keep the Senate under a Biden presidency, this does not mean a Biden administration would not undermine our freedom and security. It would do enormous damage to the economy and our freedom once it controls federal bureaucracies, the Justice Department, and the FBI. There will be increased efforts to “cancel” conservative thought. Our intelligence agencies could once again be used to spy on the Democrats’ political opponents. And Biden national security policies likely would be far worse than the incompetence and appeasement of the Obama administration.

Moreover, if a Biden administration decides to rejoin the fraudulent nuclear deal with Iran, President Trump’s Middle East peace efforts probably would collapse. The Middle East will become more unstable. America’s relationship with Israel likely would deteriorate. The Jerusalem Post reported on Nov. 2 that Palestinian officials have already been in touch with the Biden campaign.

If President Trump pulls out a win, he has an historic opportunity to finish what he started. Trump administration’s efforts to bring peace to the Middle East has scored major successes over the last few months with the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan signing agreements to normalize relations with Israel. More agreements are on the way.

President Trump will face tough challenges in dealing with North Korea and China, but he has made progress in dealing with both states. His reelection would bolster his standing on the global stage and enhance his ability to negotiate with them.

President Trump must complete his efforts to take back the administrative state for the American people. The permanent federal bureaucracy thinks it works for itself and the left which is why government bureaucrats and Democratic politicians fought so hard to destroy the Trump presidency. They failed. In a second term, President Trump must move quickly to name a new crop of officials to top positions in federal agencies who will clean house and streamline to eliminate waste, corruption and duplication.  But most important, these new Trump officials must press federal employees to do the jobs the taxpayer pays them to do and keep politics out of their work.

This will require President Trump naming officials who will not be coopted by the bureaucracy and be easily cowed by criticism from the mainstream media and the left.  The President must give them strict instructions to clean house when they assume their new posts.

Our country may face some difficult days over the next few weeks before we know for certain the winner of the 2020 presidential election. We are a strong nation and have survived political tumult much worse than this election. We will get through this.

To find ourselves in a Trumpian America, free and prosperous, or in a fresh hell of Democrat dictatorship?

Posted under United States by Jillian Becker on Thursday, November 19, 2020

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The implacable anger of the ruling class 107

The ruling class of America resents an outsider seizing the levers of power.

The outsider Donald Trump did that, which is the real reason why the ruling class hates him.

That is the view of Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion. He writes about it at American Greatness:

Children in the United States are (or at least they used to be) told that in America, anyone can become president.

Of course, that has never really been true. At any given time, there are plenty of people who, for various reasons, could never become president. But the pleasing story did name a sort of half-truth that was also an ideal, an ideal that revolved around the effort to maintain a society that rewarded talent, ambition, and hard work more than it valued wealth, connections, or pedigree.

Donald Trump put that ideal to the test. The test failed.

Trump was the first candidate since Andrew Jackson really to challenge the dominant narrative. Trump was rich, which is a plus for candidates these days. But he came not just from the wrong sort of family, but also from the wrong consensus, the wrong universe of opinion and sentiment.

It was not so much his particular policies that were at issue. It was rather what he himself represented. Some people have banged on and on about Trump’s “character”, which they said was a bad character. But I do not believe that his character was ever really the issue. The issue was that he represented an existential threat to the governing consensus.

This consensus is not fundamentally Democratic or Republican. It is not really even left-wing or conservative. John Fonte came close to identifying it with his phrase “transnational progressivism.” The “transnational” part was just as important as the “progressive” element, not least because the definition of “progressive” is always a mutable and hungry thing. Yesterday’s progressive ideas routinely become tomorrow’s reactionary throwbacks because the critical thing is not specific policies but specific attitudes.

The transnational ruling class meets at Davos. It governs the EU. It conducts the raucous orchestrated evil worked continually by the UN. It is perpetually, stubbornly, ardently against the idea of people doing whatever they want to do.

It helps explain why so successful a president—has anyone in history had a more successful first term than Donald Trump?—could still be so cordially hated by the credentialed elite, both in this country and abroad.

Cordially? No. Not cordially. Bitterly. Furiously.

That elite has “gone beyond” such parochial affections as patriotism [and] national identity … To a large extent it has even “gone beyond” or at least redefined family. Donald Trump was a walking rebuke to every finer feeling with which they congratulated and fanned themselves. For four years, they stood together as one to emit a primal scream of repudiation. Nothing worked. Not the Russia collusion delusion, not the preposterous Ukrainian impeachment follies, not the dark talk about invoking the 25th Amendment, nothing.

Now, finally, their concerted assault against a U.S. presidential election may have done the trick. …

But …

Some 73 million people voted for Donald Trump. They are not retreating in silence to their caves. They are galvanized with the MAGA spirit that Trump inculcated in the country and, except for a handful of soy boys, in the Republican Party. As I write, thousands upon thousands of people are descending upon Washington D.C. for “a million MAGA march”. There is the “Women for Trump” contingent, the “Stop the Steal” contingent, and more. These are the people who are fleeing Fox News, Twitter, Facebook, not to mention CNN, The New York Times, and the entire woke establishment to create a counterforce …

I suspect that Donald Trump may have the last laugh.

Many people have bet against Donald Trump over the years. Most came to regret it. …

Donald Trump advises:

Never bet against me.”

If Kimball is right – and I think he makes a good case – the republic of the United States is not governed by the people for the people, but by a few people for their own gratification.

They risk allowing general suffrage, and occasionally the risk takes their assumed birthright of power away from them as Donald Trump did in 2016. They are trying to snatch it back by any means, however immoral, violent, and persistently arrogant.

They need to be permanently overthrown, and the movement of the people launched by Donald Trump may yet succeed in doing it. It would be the greatest historical triumph since the founding of the American republic.

Posted under United States by Jillian Becker on Sunday, November 15, 2020

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Democracy is dying in the daylight 99

Democracy as the choice of the people, as one voter one vote, with the power of each branch of government balanced and checked by the power of the other branches, is not wanted any  more by half the electorate of the United States.

Democracy has other definitions. Regimes such as those of the Congo, North Korea, the late German Democratic Republic, have called themselves democratic but are not; “Communist dictatorships” describes them accurately. It is only in that sarcastic sense that the Democratic Party of the United States is democratic.

In the election of 2020, have the people of the free republic given to them by its Founders, failed to keep it?

Auguste Meyrat writes at American Greatness:

As votes were first counted on Election Day, Donald Trump seemed to lead in nearly all of these [“swing”] states.

Donald Trump not only seemed but was in the lead in nearly all of those states.

Then the counting mysteriously stopped. When counting resumed the next day, Biden appeared suddenly to have taken a narrow lead that would allow him to win those states. …

This situation clearly outrages those who voted for President Trump …

Clearly.

In order to prove that cheating has occurred, they now have to rely on famously unreliable institutions for conducting investigations and providing updates: legacy media, social media platforms, Democratic government officials, and federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI.

This means that with the exception of a few alternative conservative media outlets, independent journalists, and outspoken politicians, the people hoping for justice in this election must look to themselves. … It ultimately falls on them to organize and uphold accountability.

They need to protest, take legal action, support reporters uncovering fraud, and put pressure on politicians to take action. 

Will those who took power by cheating care about protest?

Will taking action in the courts be a fair risk when many of the judges are the enemy?

Through what medium will “reporters uncovering fraud” make their reports known? (Even Fox News has largely gone over to the dark side.)

Which politicians can be pressed to take what action?

The sheer size of the task has already caused some conservatives to give up. Instead of confronting the challenge, they are more willing to cut their losses, celebrate keeping the Senate and winning a few seats in the House, and take comfort in the fact that the polls and media were wrong after all.

But a stolen presidential election tends to negate most of this. True, most limits to unbridled Democratic power, like the current size and makeup of the Supreme Court, the number of states currently in the Union, and keeping the filibuster, will remain. Yet so will the forces that rigged the election in the first place [remain]. A Biden-Harris presidency effectively would be the first step in making the whole nation a one-party blue state like California.

By contrast, if Trump fights this and wins, his administration can work to fix this system and would have every reason to do so. As Jeb Bush tweeted to someone wondering why Florida could count their votes on Election Day while smaller states struggled, “Because we learned our lesson after 2000 and changed our laws.” The same could happen in the rest of America where this year’s election showed the overwhelming stupidity of universal mail-in ballots, legalized ballot harvesting, early voting weeks before the election, and not requiring voter identification. These simple fixes to the voting process would go far to ensure greater trust in the system

The Republicans in power saw all that coming and failed to stop it. They did not even try to stop it.

It’s not an overstatement to say the outcome of this election will determine all foreseeable future elections.

The country’s democratic system is at stake. If Democrats win this election through cheating and fraud, all future elections will become meaningless and the country’s political leadership will be determined by an oligarchy of progressive and socialist billionaires. 

And all of this is plainly visible with each new update. The oligarch-owned Washington Post needs to change its motto, “Democracy dies in darkness.” As it stands, American democracy is dying in the daylight, and normal Americans need to save it before it’s too late.

Yes, Americans who value freedom need to save the republic.

One of our commenters, James Johnson, recently wrote:

We need a new Republican Party – one that’s unified. Trump was our guy, but the party squandered its opportunity to pass real legislation that withstands changes in the administration.

Personally, I’m using the coming two years to take a leaf out of the left’s book and engage in conservative activism. To win against the deep state will require massive conservative majorities; it’s tough to achieve those without matching the level of energy the left expends on direct action.

That is the sort of resolution that is needed. Only if the half of America that still wants freedom supports this idea, and a sufficient number – a great many – of the voters who have been cheated of their victory in this election become active and work with unremitting energy, can the free republic be saved. Or, if it is already lost, restored.

Posted under corruption, United States, US Constitution by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, November 10, 2020

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