Why would Republicans worry about democrats cheating in next Tuesday’s election? Cleta Mitchell has a good explanation.
This is long. It is in response to two things: 1) the continued media attacks against the Election Integrity Network and me, as its Founder, and 2) the question that Joe Rogan asked President Trump: “Was the 2020 election stolen?”
William Doyle responds to the WSJ’s assertion that “no evidence of widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 Presidential Election can be found.
They stole it all right, but they stole it more cleverly.
[T]here is another side of the argument regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 election that The Wall Street Journal has relentlessly ignored.
The hypothesis is that a deeply corrupted corporate media, Big Tech censorship, legally questionable intervention by the courts, and infiltration of key election offices by lavishly funded Democratic activists resulted in “heavy-handed election interference of a kind we have never seen before” that decisively “rigged” the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
The WSJ editorial board would know this if they had read this, this, this, this, this, this, or our work on the role of Big Tech money in Wisconsin’s 2020 election. All of these studies present indisputable evidence of a “rigged election” in Wisconsin and in other key swing states, where the highly partisan distribution of big Center for Tech and Civic Life money, and obvious election interference by CTCL-funded election offices, was more than sufficient to flip those states toward Biden.
The WSJ then opines “the stolen-election theory doesn’t hold up [according to the WILL Report]. President Biden won Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, and mass fraud would likely have resulted in some discernible anomaly.” But this is a perfect example of the “red herring” fallacy. The problem is not “mass voter fraud,” but a very “discernible anomaly” involving a highly coordinated and privately funded “shadow campaign” for Biden that took place within the formal structure of the election system.
By injecting more than $419 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s money, laundered through the CTCL and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), the professional left presided over a targeted, historically unprecedented takeover of government election offices by demonstrably ideological activists and nonprofit organizations in key areas of these swing states. Nothing like this has happened in at least the last 150 years of American elections.
Treating CTCL spending as if it were just another example of one campaign outspending another, or the insidious role of “dark money” in the 2020 election, misses the point entirely. Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, media buys, lobbying, or Citizens United v. FEC-related campaign finance issues.
It had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by Democrat activists and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and surgically targeted, door-to-door get-out-the-vote efforts in areas heavy with Democratic voters.
In Wisconsin and other swing states, big CTCL money introduced structural bias in favor of Biden into the entire 2020 election. This involved favoring certain voters and voting practices over others and disfavoring other classes of voters and voting practices, giving CTCL’s preferred voting methods—especially no-ID absentee ballots—and “New American Majority” voters and voting methods an outsized effect on the final election results. CTCL targeted heavily Democratic jurisdictions for heavy spending, and provided little or no funding to election offices in more Republican-leaning cities and counties.
People ask me all the time whether or not I believe that Joe Biden is the President of the United States. I find this question strange and insulting, of course, because it’s simply crazy to think that Joe Biden is not the President of the United States. To entertain that kind of stuff is ludicrous — dangerous really. Pure conspiracy theory nonsense for the rubes. Who do they think wakes up inside the White House bedroom every morning and gets lost in the hallways before the nurse corrals him to the breakfast table?
“Actually,” I tell them, “Joe Biden is the most popular President that we have ever seen in America.” This just stops them right in their tracks. Not that these folks are serious about arithmetic or Socratic dialogue, mind you, but I just knock them over with numbers. Data. Math. Usually, I start with Maricopa County in Arizona because we have so much information leaking from the audit there. Did you know that Joe Biden is so popular that he broke all the electronic voting machines and the authorities still can’t find the router passwords? That’s true. That number of Biden voters has simply never been counted before and it probably just melted the router passwords right off the computers. Nobody can find them.
That’s not all: Twitter just deleted the accounts of the Maricopa Arizona audit team because they probably weren’t sure if the audit team could count that high. That was the right call. Biden’s win was so astronomical and embarrassing for the Trump campaign that, simply out of compassion and politeness, the Maricopa Board of Supervisors refused to comply with state subpoenas to tell Trump the exact number by which Biden kicked his ass. I think that’s wonderful. It really shows how far Biden is willing to go to unite the country. Heck, the guy got 74,000 ballots (EV33s) that Maricopa County didn’t even know they sent out (EV32s) during the election! You know what that means: people were so enthusiastic about Joe they wanted people to know regardless of the legality of their feelings. I mean 3,981 people even registered and voted for Biden after the deadline to register to vote had passed! You can’t put a price tag (or a jail sentence) on that kind of love.
Trump’s people simply can’t handle the truth because Biden’s win is so much bigger than most minds can comprehend. At least 11,326 people who were not even on the voter rolls in Maricopa on November 7th just came out of the woodwork to go for Joe on December 4th. Now I know what you’re thinking: isn’t that after Election Day? Isn’t that sorta impossible? That’s just how big this landslide really was – all the technicalities like dates simply melted away in the final tally. And we’re just talking about the Biden voters who showed up in person. There were another 74,240 mail-in ballots that got counted for Joe and nobody even knows who sent in those ballots. I don’t want to hear any of your bullshit about suspicious ballots coming out of nowhere in the middle of the night to be counted either: the same thing happened in lots of other counties across America so you know it’s true.
Michael Anton (famous for the 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay) reflects on all the arm-twisting going on anent acceptance of the 2020 Election’s legitimacy and he has plenty of intelligent observations.
Recently, I appeared as a guest on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast. Sullivan is vociferously anti-Trump, so I expected us to disagree—which, naturally, we did. But I was surprised by the extent to which he insisted I assent to his assertion that the 2020 election was totally on the level. That is to say, I wasn’t surprised that Sullivan thinks it was; I was surprised by his evident yearning to hear me say so, too.
Which I could not do.
Sullivan badgered me on this at length before finally accusing me of being fixated on the topic, to which I responded, truthfully, that I was only talking about it because he asked. As far as I’m concerned, the 2020 election is well and truly over. I have, I said, “moved on.”
So I thought. Then I received two emails from a friendly acquaintance who is a recognized Republican expert on elections that suggested he, too, is troubled by my lack of belief. Then came two other data points, which I noticed only after the first draft this essay had been completed. Ramesh Ponnuru snarked (snark seems to be the go-to, indeed the only, device his in literary quiver) that one of the anomalies I cited in my most recent article in the Claremont Review of Books had been “debunked” by the partisan left-wing FactCheck.org. While I appreciate the insight into the sources from which National Review editors get their “facts” these days, the quote provided admits that the statistic I cited is, well, accurate. Ponurru naturally ignores all of the other points raised in my earlier article.
Jonathan Chait wrote yet another (his 12th?) article denouncing me, for this same sin of disbelief. Why did he bother? Is there even a remote chance that a single one of his New York magazine readers either read my article or encountered its argument? Or is he worried that the “narrative” of the election is so fragile that it needs to be shored up?
I wanted to move on, I really did. But when Left (Chait), center (Sullivan), faux-right anti-conservative ankle-biter (Ponnuru), and genuine, if establishment, Right (my correspondent) all agree that my lack of belief is a problem, I wondered why this should be so, and the following observations came to mind. Read the rest of this entry »
John Hinderaker notes that all the gaslighting and censorship we see is not the typical behavior of people enjoying the conviction of innocence.
Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred. That naturally makes me want to write about voter fraud, and who really won the election.
First, this question: why are the Democrats so hysterical in their insistence that fraud not be mentioned? One reason is obvious. Joe Biden will take office under a cloud, since close to half of all Americans doubt that he really won the election. The Democrats want to stamp out such doubts to preserve Biden’s authority as president.
But there is a second reason that may be more important. The Democrats want the lax voting procedures that prevailed in 2020 to continue in the future. They know that efforts will be made in many states to improve ballot integrity, and they want those efforts to fail. By rendering all discussion of voter fraud out of bounds, they hope to forestall reforms that would make it harder for them to cheat, or enable cheating, in the future.
So, did the Democrats steal the presidential election, or not? I don’t know the answer to that question. No one does. A number of statistical analyses have been done, which on their face suggest large irregularities. I wrote about one such analysis, by John Lott, here.
Beyond that, major questions remain unanswered. In several key swing states, there were midnight dumps of 100,000 or more votes, virtually all of which were for Joe Biden, something that can’t normally happen. Those dumps may have made the difference in the election. I have seen no attempt by any Democrat to explain or justify them. Maybe I’ve missed it, and maybe they somehow reflected actual ballots cast, but the burden of proof is on those who seek to justify such anomalies.
Even greater doubts about the election arise from the deliberately loose procedures that governed voting. Something like 69 million mail-in votes were cast, and until two months ago, everyone agreed that mail-in voting is highly susceptible to fraud. But the laxity in 2020 went far beyond the risks inherent in mail-in votes. I put it this way: I don’t know whether the Democrats stole the 2020 election, but I do know that they tried hard to steal it.
Those who followed my blog will be aware that I vehemently opposed Trump’s nomination and did not vote for him in 2016. Watching his behavior at the inauguration, I became persuaded I’d been wrong, that he really was sincere, and I sat down and mentally compared Trump’s deficiencies to those of other presidents during my own lifetime (Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, &c.) and concluded that, really, compared to others, he was not worse. Not every president was Ronald Reagan.
As his administration progressed, I found myself very happy with his appointments and his policies, by and large. I was always an opponent of Protectionism, but one must admit that it has a long political tradition in this country, and de-industrializing America and enormously enriching and empowering China is undoubtedly a very dangerous thing to do.
A lot of Trump’s appointments did not work out. He seems to be bad at working with people with strong opinions and large egos. Trump obviously is a spoiled, narcissistic millionaire. But, oddly, I thought the appointees I liked the very best, Jim Mattis and John Bolton, turned out to behave, IMO, even worse than Trump. Mattis revealed himself to be a great talker and self promoter, but an empty uniform principally concerned with being well aligned with establishment opinion. Mattis did nothing to oppose fashionable PC in the military.
John Bolton obviously proved to be an egomaniac fully competitive with Trump, and a greedy and disloyal subordinate, bent upon revenge and so eager to cash-in with a tell-all book that he felt not need to wait until the administration he would be savaging was out of office. A lot of people would not be quite so willing to give aid and comfort to the democrats.
Trump’s policy decisions, on the other hand, were generally great. Trump dismissed catastrophist superstition out of hand. He cleared away regulatory obstacles to oil production, creating millions of jobs, helping the economy, dramatically lowering energy prices, and making America energy independent again. He gave America back working dishwashers and useful showerheads. He blocked communist Woke propaganda where he could. He sold oil leases on the North Slope. And he restarted the Space Program.
Trump suffers obviously from Trumpiness, but he has one great and supreme virtue: he fights. We live in an emasculated age of trimmers, grovelers, conformists, and opportunists, all sticking a wet index finger up to find out which way the wind is blowing. When the Establishment turns its unlimited powers of credentialing and decredentialing, of ridicule, spin, and narrative framing, strong men surrender and run and hide. Not Good Old Trump. He stood up to them and fought back.
I could today be saying: I told you so. I said, back then, that Trump was limited and could very well screw up and hand the presidency and big fat mandate over to the democrats after one term, but I won’t be doing that.
Yes, Trump as out of his depth dealing with the stolen election mess. Yes, he did not seem able to locate and employ effective professional legal representation. But, when you come right down to it, most of the GOP leadership and the conservative commentariat funked out. It was Trump and a handful of real conservatives, Cruz and Hawley, who actually tried to fight. There was obviously little time, the holidays come between the election and the vote certification. Our judges tend to be democrat tools or just too timid to venture into the stormy waters of a contested presidential election. The Republican Party was not united and did not have Trump’s back. Shit happens. Ephialtes showed the Persians the way around the pass at Thermopylae. General Ewell should have taken the high ground on July 1st.
Things look black today. They have the presidency, the House, and the Senate. And they are vindictive. They will try to impeach Trump a second time. As Instapundit put it: “Big Tech today settles all family business.” But it is not the end. 74 million Americans voted for Trump. There will be resistance.
