What Follows Coming Apart? Revolution?
The center isn’t holding—if there still is a center. Now approximately 39 percent of Americans believe the election was rigged. The belief is held by 67 percent of Republicans, 17 percent of Democrats, and 31 percent of Independents.
Peter Navarro, assistant to the president, director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and national Defense Production Act policy coordinator, has produced a 35-page report assessing the fairness and integrity of the election. The findings are distressing to believers in democracy and the American tradition of fair elections. The report examines six dimensions of alleged election irregularities in six key states, usefully compiling in one place the truly massive evidence we’re constantly being told doesn’t exist.
Numbers from around the country just don’t add up and Navarro’s not the only one to question the integrity of the election results. Patrick Basham, the director of the Democracy Institute, gave some specifics on the December 6 “Mark Levin Show.”
Basham pointed out that Trump improved his national performance over 2016 by almost 20 percent, and that no incumbent president has ever lost a re-election bid if he has increased his votes. President Obama’s vote total in 2012 was 3.5 million fewer than his 2008 total, but he still won comfortably.
Trump got even more votes from the white working class than he received in 2016. And he held his own among women and suburban voters against most of the polling expectations.
He did very well among Catholics. He improved his total from Jewish voters. He had the best minority performance for a Republican since Richard Nixon in 1960, doing well with African Americans, and importantly, with Hispanics. Biden actually received less than 90 percent of the African American vote.
So why didn’t Trump win? Why did he suddenly start losing in the middle of the night?
Basham concedes that that could have happened legitimately, but that it is most unlikely. And if that unlikely happening was legitimate, it should have shown up generally across the country and “not just in key precincts, in key cities, in key swing states, and nowhere else.” Basham said that even though Biden was the challenger, he allegedly received more votes than any candidate for president in American history. He did very, very poorly in most of the country, except where it absolutely mattered.
So in an election in which Republicans at all levels throughout the country did extremely well, and against all polling expectations, Trump lost. Not. Bloody. Likely.
In addition to the innumerable claims of fraud, there are technicalities—and technicalities count if we are a nation of laws. Georgia entered into an illegal Consent Decree, effectively gutting the signature-match requirements for millions of mail-in ballots.
Under the constitution of Pennsylvania, any changes to the election law have to be made by amending the state constitution. But the changes that were made in the last year and a half to allow mail-in ballots (of which there were millions) were not made by amending the constitution. Pennsylvania’s Democrat Secretary of State issued illegal guidance on the acceptance of naked ballots, ignored the direction from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to fix the problem, then allowed ballots to be illegally cured in contravention of state law.
Wisconsin’s Election Committee illegally placed five hundred drop boxes for absentee ballots, largely in urban Democratic strongholds, when by statute, any use of a drop box is illegal.
And those are just some of the problems. Navarro itemizes numerous others, including instances of official law-breaking in Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada.
Not surprisingly, Navarro’s report was treated with disdain by the usual suspects in the mainstream media. But they, along with so many formerly esteemed institutions, a short list including the FBI, Justice Department, and the intelligence community, lost all credibility years ago.
It is useful to remember that fifty former senior intelligence officials, including John Brennan, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency; James Clapper, former director of National Intelligence; and Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, signed a letter shortly before the election stating that the Hunter Biden laptop emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Now we’ve learned that the Justice Department has been conducting a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax affairs since late 2018!
And we have been told unequivocally that the voting machines in six key states were essentially unhackable—or at least not hacked. Yet we read on the front page of the December 18 edition of The Wall Street Journal a story on Russian hacking titled “U.S. Cyberattack Suggests More Sophisticated Hack.” If Russia, a gas station run by a drunk, can hack into the big stuff, it seems likely that crooked Democrats, perhaps with the aid of their Chinese friends, can fix a few voting machines.
But even if the voting machines weren’t hacked, even if every single witness is lying and every single one of their affidavits amounts to perjury; even if SCOTUS has suddenly become supremely disinterested in the equal protection clause they found so compelling when the rights of Bush voters were being violated, the patently illegal actions by officials in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin could well have been enough in themselves to give the election to Biden. There doesn’t need to be any fact-finding or, to quote the former Attorney General, “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome” to invalidate the election in those states.
What should people who are losing or have lost faith in the integrity of the democratic process do?
Seventeen state attorneys general and 106 Republican members of Congress joined an unsuccessful suit brought in the US Supreme Court by the state of Texas to block Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin from voting in the Electoral College because changes their legislatures made concerning mail-in ballots violated their own state laws and thereby the US Constitution.
It is true that courts have not been receptive to any of the lawsuits charging election irregularities, but claims by the woke media that no court has found even a single instance of fraud are—this will surprise you—misleading. The court’s rulings have been based mostly, or entirely, on procedural grounds, not merit—which means they haven’t considered the evidence. Some of the courts have been controlled by partisan Democrats. And a court may be an imperfect forum for discovering the truth of election fraud claims in the time allowed. And, we should always remember, even Abraham Lincoln expressed concern about a free people being ruled by the Supreme Court.
And so we find ourselves with a large segment of the population convinced, with justification, that the election was stolen. And yet the FBI and Justice are acting deaf, dumb, and blind, and the courts have apparently decided that the Constitution is optional when it comes to Trump.
There’s one last chance to right the election wrong before things go far enough to get ugly. Congress could intervene, throwing the election of the President into the House of Representatives, where Trump might win, and of the vice president to the Senate, where Pence might win.
Twelve senators and perhaps as many as 140 representatives plan to challenge the electoral votes during the January 6 joint session of Congress. But if the effort fails, what happens next? Revolution?
Millions of Americans might well approve of … some effort to demonstrate their outrage. For the last four years, they have suffered through what it seems fair to describe as an attempted coup mounted by corrupt deep state officials at the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of State, Department of Defense, and the intelligence agencies, among others, together with eager congressional accomplices. That crowd promoted the Russia-collusion hoax and, when that ploy failed to remove the president, the impeachment hoax—all of it supported by a dishonest, left-wing, woke media.
Who among the lefties would have the standing to complain about Republicans engaging in their own, let’s call it civil disobedience—or to put it less euphemistically, massive civil unrest? Those who manage “sanctuary cities” and their supporters? They are perfectly happy to flout the nation’s laws and protect illegal immigrants. Those who refused to stop or condemn the BLMing chaos last spring and summer following the death of George Floyd? People killed. Businesses destroyed. Billions of dollars lost. Those people like violence.
How could they reasonably object to any expedient the nation’s disenfranchised voters think up—such as a little martial law, perhaps? We The People Convention, a non-profit Tea Party-affiliated organization based in Ohio, has published a petition calling for just that—a very partial martial law in order to supervise a re-do election and make sure it’s conducted fairly this time. The most prominent person to join them so far is General Michael Flynn, which is not surprising given how he was mauled by the “intelligence” agencies, the deep state, and the Democrats—when they were out of (official) power.
Even a limited martial law lasting only a short period of time might seem un-American to most people—other than students of Abraham Lincoln’s actions during the Civil War—but they should contemplate what the Democrats have in store for us. Senate majority leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) has already issued the call to arms: “Now we take Georgia, then we change America!” Republicans are right to worry about what that means.
Trump voters and Republicans in general aren’t usually of the activist, disgruntled type that normally takes to the streets. Their few demonstrations are made up largely of middle-aged, middle-class citizens who hold down steady jobs and start small, sometimes large, businesses. They believe in the rule of law and treat the police with deference and respect. There are no hoods. No baseball bats. No “commercial grade firecrackers,” no broken windows or broken heads; no looting or attempts to seal the doors of a police precinct and burn people alive, as happened in Seattle. For all the talk of “right-wing violence,” when the media reported on November 4 that Trump had lost, all the plywood boarding came down. Apparently, it wasn’t marauding Trump voters the shopkeepers were worried about.
But all the Deep State operatives, election officials, editors, columnists, and talking heads who think they can disenfranchise a large segment of the American people, and all the judges and lawyers and professors who think the usual legal mumbo jumbo will convince the American people simply to accept this patently corrupt election and return to business as usual, are playing with fire—and playing loose with American history.
There are different types of revolution. The American Revolution was led and fought by shopkeepers, small businessmen, and farmers, a demographic not dissimilar to modern-day Trump voters. Here’s the tragedy: much as everyone may deploy the thought, a revolution seems not out of the question. Perhaps, but only perhaps, not this week, or this month.
But a feeling of contempt for the political class is likely to grow, as well as contempt for US institutions and the rule of law. If violence does come in the future it may be triggered by some seemingly new or separate event. But in reality, it will be a direct result of a large portion of the country’s being disenfranchised, disrespected, and having their small businesses closed down, while the oligarchs got filthy rich, and congressional staffers, whose salaries were been paid in full and on time, got the vaccine before the taxpayers.
If Republicans lose both Senate seats in the coming Georgia election, this much seems certain: a revolution we will have. The only questions are, which one will it be? And when?
Published:
January 5, 2021
Ricochet
