RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/14/the-empire-strikes-back-but-maga-will-strike-h arder/

I’ve written many times that I thought Donald Trump would win the 2020 election. The question always was whether he would win it beyond the margin of fraud and litigation. 

Did he? It’s touch and go. Television networks and even some foreign heads of state tell us Joe Biden won the election. The electors have yet to be appointed and meet to vote. Still, the forces arrayed against Trump are formidable. It’s not just, as Joe Biden bragged, that the Democrats had put together “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” That does appear to have been the case. 

But if Donald Trump loses, it won’t only be because of that “extensive and inclusive” organization. Perhaps more important is the ambient jelly in which that organization has operated. I mean the eructations of the swamp, or to give it a more cinematic name, “The Empire.” 

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. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16761/us-elections-cultural-war

“If this election was about an attempt at ditching the American narrative, it failed. But the cultural war is far from over.”

Now, however, that narrative is challenged by a good segment of the American elite, especially in academia and media, in favor of a new narrative that replaces heroism with victimhood. In that narrative you must show that you or your ancestors have somehow suffered, granting you the status of a victim deserving empathy, apology and compensation from “the system.”

With the confederacy of minorities in mind, he [Biden] promised to protect and advance community rights, while forgetting that human rights, as spelled out in the Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, also largely an American product, are individual not collective rights.

For more than a century, America offered the world a different socio-politico-economic model, implicitly trying to make others like itself…. The classical American model remains the most attractive around the world. The irony, however, is that the model in question is being challenged inside the US itself. Rather than wanting to make others like the US, a growing segment of US establishment wants to make the US like others, notably European social democratic models.

Although we don’t yet know the denouement of last week’s election in the United States, one thing is already clear: this was an exceptional event in America’s more than 200-year-old democracy.

To start with, this was the first time that the election was not fought within the rules of the traditional two-party system. The Republican Party offered no manifesto or program, allowing the exercise to become a duel between President Donald J Trump and his opponents. That, in turn, gave the election a personal aspect never seen before. The Democratic Party did offer a program, but mostly to furnish the vacuum — a program half of which canceled the other half. The party’s presidential candidate, Joe Biden, claimed he had a secret plan to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic but mostly campaigned as anti-Trump and attracted support from diverse sectors largely on that basis.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/what_it_was_like_to_be_a_republican_pollwatcher_in_new_york.html

Call it civic duty.  Call it curiosity about the other side of the process.  Call it profound commitment in getting insight into knowing who won.

Whatever you call it, I was on the other side of the election procedures I’d been teaching for about a decade.  I’d always cautioned students in the election law classes to beware of poll-watchers, since they are not “part of the election team.”

They are to be accorded courtesy. They are not to be given privileges when the election staffers at the tables, scanners, BMDs (Ballot Marking Device — essentially a large metal device that functioned as a giant pencil, amplifying type, changing the color of background so voters could more easily vote, or doing a variety of tasks that can be utilized by the visually impaired or the physically challenged.  These devices have a variety of accessories, too, for the quadriplegics or those with breathing difficulties.  But for all that, it’s still a big marker device, not a scanner), and privacy booths are otherwise busy with voters.  They are people who come, usually, from one party’s HQ, or they come from a candidate.  There are accordingly rules for poll-watchers prominently posted in all official polling sites.

But this time, I knew that poll-watchers were needed, and I decided to join their ranks for the first time.

The room where tables and absentee vote ballots were being opened and screened was vast — by rough estimate, 3,000 or 4,000 square feet.  All separating room dividers usually in use during the rest of the year were down, and conjugal tables, each about 6 ft long and 3 ft deep, were juxtaposed against another identical table, with two seats for a bipartisan pair of readers on one side and, usually, one or two chairs for a poll-observer or watcher on the other.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/the_dominion_software_story_keeps_getting_worse.html

Dominion software’s reputation for reliability may have taken another hit with the claim that Eric Coomer, a vice president and dominion, and the person in charge of the software’s security, is an Antifa supporter and Trump hater. This information is disturbing when added to the way in which the software churned out impossible pro-Biden results in the wee hours of November 4 in Democrat-run states following a Trump wave.

Wikipedia has deleted most of Dominion’s history. I visited the page a few days ago and read about its origins in Venezuela. If you go to the Wikipedia page today, that history is gone and, in its place are accusations against QAnon. At the “view history” page, you can see dozens of recent changes since the election. The primary editor – Molly White – is a recent college grad and bisexual leftist.

These changes, along with endless “fact checks” from leftist media outlets keep burying ever more deeply the history behind Dominion. However, that history is worth dredging up because it goes a long way to explaining where we are now.

As a predicate, remember that the system is so vulnerable to hacking that, in January 2020, Texas’s Secretary of State refused to certify it:

The examiner reports identified multiple hardware and software issues that preclude the Office of the Texas Secretary of State from determining that the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system satisfies each of the voting-system requirements set forth in the Texas Election Code. Specifically, the examiner reports raise concerns about whether the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system is suitable for its intended purpose; operates efficiently and accurately; and is safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation. Therefore, the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system and corresponding hardware devices do not meet the standards for certification prescribed by Section 122.001 of the Texas Election Code.