I was planning to write a big rumination on the election fraud question and publish it today. But other things intervened, and so it probably won’t happen until tomorrow or perhaps in the next few days.
In the meantime, I’m drawing your attention to this article and especially this one.
In this mess of an election, the topic of fraud has dominated. And with good reason.
But other things happened in the election that are worthy of mention. Whether the trends will continue and will become significant in future elections is anyone’s guess – it depends in part, of course, on the extent of fraud in the future. But these things are worth looking at, especially those that represent changes that shatter common beliefs on the left (and right) about voter behavior.
For example, in Texas and Florida, states that for the most part seem to have been free of election fraud, Hispanics voted Republican in numbers far higher than previously seen [emphasis and remarks in brackets mine]:
The candidate we had been told was the embodiment of white identity politics [that is, Trump] lost support among white voters while gaining ground among members of America’s largest minority. The president of immigration restriction and parent-child border separation won more votes from Hispanic Americans in 2020 than he did in 2016.
And it wasn’t just Miami’s Cuban-Americans and Venezuelan-Americans, perhaps the most vocal cheerleaders for Hispanic Republicanism. Heavily Hispanic counties across the country moved away from the Democratic Party. According to a Financial Times average of exit poll data, Trump gained by eight percentage points among Hispanic voters. Other estimates put the shift in the double digits…
Nowhere was the Republicans’ Latino surge more pronounced than in the poor, heavily Hispanic, traditionally Democratic corner of South Texas where Perez had predicted that Biden would carry the state. In a string of economically, socially and politically neglected towns along the Mexican border, Republican support surged. These counties saw bigger swings towards the GOP than swings in either direction anywhere else in the United States.
How big? Very big:
The most dramatic shift of all was in Starr County, in the Rio Grande Valley, the most Hispanic county in the country, and one of the poorest. More than 95 per cent of the county is Latino. In 2012, Barack Obama won 86 per cent of the vote there. Four years later, Hillary Clinton won with a comfortable 79.1 per cent share of the vote. This year, Joe Biden managed just 52 per cent. Shifts of that scale are almost unheard of…
The article goes on to explain the reasons: many residents of this border area work for border patrol, customs, and the police. That may be true, but it was also true in 2016 and it did not translate into major voting shifts towards Trump back then. But more recently other things have changed, as this voter explains:
…[T]he issues that dominated [in 2020] were Democratic calls to defund the police, threats to the energy industry and, more surprisingly, the unlikely rapport between Trump and Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Until 2016, Pat Saenz, a 57-year-old handyman and former high-school athletics coach, had always voted Democrat. When he voted for Trump four years ago, he split his ticket, opting for the Democratic candidates down the ballot. This time he voted Republican across the board and helped Barrera with the campaign, distributing Trump yard signs to other freshly emboldened Rio Grande Republicans.
I suggest you read the whole thing.
Can the traditionally shoot-itself-in-the-foot GOP capitalize on these changes? Again, I realize your answer might be “who cares, if fraud continues.” But I urge you to consider that if enormous numbers of Hispanic – and black – voters come to see that the Democrats do not have their good interests in mind, the right will make gains so large that it might become more and more difficult for fraud to make a difference or even to be committed.
Because of course it does:
YouTube announced that from Dec. 9 it will block and remove content that contains statements “alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. presidential election.”
The Google-owned firm said that it was because the “safe harbor” deadline on Dec. 8 in the presidential election had passed, claiming that “enough states have certified their election results.”…
“For example, we will remove videos claiming that a presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come,” the firm wrote. “As always, news coverage and commentary on these issues can remain on our site if there’s sufficient education, documentary, scientific, or artistic context.” It did not elaborate on the context it requires.
The company then said that it will “guide” people to “authoritative information” provided by corporate news outlets such as ABC, CBS, NBC, or CNN.
That last sentence is bleakly and unintentionally humorous.
And of course four years of fake Russiagate claims were allowed to stand and are still allowed to stand. But that’s because they serve the purposes of the left, and were the “authoritative information” purveyed by those stalwart defenders of truth known as ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN.
I wonder whether YouTube will let coverage of the hearings or the legal proceedings be posted at the site, or whether they’ll block those as well. I also wonder whether they’ll continue to allow viewers to access clips of Tucker Carlson et al. if they are interviewing guests who are speaking about widespread election fraud.
Commenter “OBloodyHell” writes (the first sentence of the comment is a quote from a previous commenter on the thread):
“Because conservatives do not riot but liberals do therefore it is better to do conservatives wrong then offending BLM and antifas.”
This is incorrect.
Conservatives CHOOSE not to riot.
When we DO decide it’s time to do violence, we aren’t going to just RIOT.
Remember, the Right has most of the retired military.
I’ve been hearing variations of that claim for many, many years. I don’t doubt there are some such people. I have no way to evaluate how many, how effective they would be, or any number of other details. Obviously, I hope it doesn’t come to something like that – call it civil war, call it what you will. But my sense is that the government, which has very big guns indeed, would come down very hard and fast on any such movement.
However, it seems to me that a general strike on the right would be more effective, although once again, I have no idea how many would participate. I doubt it would be all the many millions of Trump voters, but it might be a great many of them. I also don’t know what would trigger such a thing.
This is an area in which I must confess my thoughts are scattered and uncertain, because of all the unknowns. I have long hoped that it would not come to something like this, although I have long feared that it would. I definitely think that in the last year we’ve taken some leaps and bounds in that direction. The divide between the two sides of America’s political landscape has approached Grand Canyon dimensions, and I don’t see what could change that.
When conservatives – almost certainly still a majority, at the very least quite a substantial proportion of the country – judge the government that will try to rule over them completely illegitimate because of election fraud the Antifa riots will seem like Very Small Beans.
A comment at Powerline and highlighted by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit regarding the Texas filing with SCOTUS: “I wonder if the left, and the court realize this is a hail mary to prevent a civil war, not to keep trump in office. 30% of democrats and 80+% of republicans think the election was stolen. That is a loss of legitimacy of the nation’s governments from the state level through the federal.” SCOTUS can run and hide, which is probably what Roberts would prefer, but this gets resolved either by enforcing established Constitutional requirements and procedures and clearly under the rule of law or it gets resolved by The People, who will not resolve it at all gently; I would very much prefer seeing proof that the Constitution and Rule of Law matter and are taken seriously. Should it be necessary for The People to do the job government, and SCOTUS, is Constitutionally charged with, the result could damage the country beyond repair.
I think the country is already damaged beyond repair, and that it happened during the last few decades as the slow Gramscian march proceeded to the point where we have the situation we are facing now. Without the former, we would not be experiencing the latter.
[NOTE: The reference in the title of this post is to the famous quote attributed (perhaps falsely?) to Admiral Yamamoto of Japan in 1941 speaking about the results of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (the 79th anniversary of which was yesterday): “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”]
According to Jenna Ellis, one of Trump’s attorneys [hat tip: commenter “Molly G”]:
The Supreme Court only denied emergency injunctive relief. In the order, it did NOT deny cert. Mike Kelly’s suit is still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
They may ultimately decide not to hear it, however – and if so, I predict it would be on the grounds that it’s too late. When Roberts punted on the earlier suits about PA, leaving the Court’s vote at 4-4 and therefore letting the PA Supreme Court’s decision stand, that would have been the time to have activated an ounce of prevention instead. But it didn’t happen, and now it would take much much more than a pound of cure.
I don’t know what will happen with this or the suit by the states on the 14th Amendment and Electoral issues. But the following is what I’ve thought ever since the morning after the election. I wrote it in the roundup post this afternoon:
My own sense is that even though [these cases have] merit, SCOTUS will get cold feet…because the situation we have reached is so extreme that they don’t want to be the ones to blow the whistle. In other words, they are fearful of “the staggering upheaval, turmoil, and acrimony it would unleash.” Of course, the right is already in such turmoil. But the left is more violent and threatening – at least, it has been so far.
I plan to write at much greater length on these issues tomorrow.
[NOTE: I see that Judge Sullivan has finally let Moby Flynn swim away. He dismissed the case, but not without sinking a parting harpoon:
But Judge Sullivan, who has demonstrated a personal dislike for Flynn and desire to punish Flynn, took a last cheap shot, issuing a gratuitous 43-page opinion arguing, basically, that Flynn is a bad guy and that Judge Sullivan was right all along.
What a nasty, power-mad piece of work Sullivan is.]
What is the Seattle City Council contemplating these days? This:
In October, the Seattle City Council floated legislation to provide an exemption from prosecution for misdemeanor crimes for any citizen who suffers from poverty, homelessness, addiction, or mental illness. Under the proposed ordinance, courts would have to dismiss all so-called “crimes of poverty”—which, according to the city’s former public-safety advisor, would cover more than 90 percent of all misdemeanor cases citywide. In effect, the legislation would create a new class of “untouchables,” protected from consequences by the city’s powerbrokers.
This is the latest and most brazen effort in the city’s campaign to establish what might be called a “reverse hierarchy of oppression.” The underlying theory is that society has condemned the lower class to a life of poverty and stigma, which leads to addiction, madness, and indigence. The poor, in the logic of Seattle’s progressive elites, are thus forced to commit crimes—including violent crimes—to secure their very existence. Therefore, as society is the perpetrator of this inequality, the crimes of the poor must be forgiven. The crimes are transformed into an expression of social justice.
It hasn’t passed – yet. But it’s emblematic of the type of thinking that’s become standard from the leftists who run deep blue cities such as Seattle and who are trying to run the country.
Los Angeles’ new DA George Gascon seems to be aiming for something similar. Take a look, and pay special attention to the section headed “Misdemeanor Case Management.” It’s the opposite of the “broken windows” concept, on steroids.
Although these policies constitute a big change, the concept is not exactly new, however. It’s old.
Recently I happen to have been reading the excerpt from Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” in this old post of mine, and I came across the following (to refresh your memory, the speaker here is Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who in the novel The Brothers Karamazov is addressing Jesus, who has returned to earth):
Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee–a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel…
…It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name.
That was published in 1879-1880. And Rudyard Kipling wrote this in 1919, after the First World War:
…And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
It’s time for another roundup of links, because there’s just so much out there to cover.
(1) “Cornhead” (aka attorney David Begley) talks about the Pennsylvania absentee ballot case. Excerpt:
The Respondents assert that if the Court grants some remedy to the Petitioners, then there will be massive disenfranchisement. I submit that the legal votes in Pennsylvania have been diluted and disenfranchised by all the fraudulent mail-in ballots.
My favorite argument is that the Respondents claim that in this case the parties seeking relief fail to acknowledge, “the staggering upheaval, turmoil, and acrimony it would unleash.” DDB’s response: It is okay for the Dems to steal the election because if the steal is stopped, then the cheaters will be real mad and might riot. Heck of an argument there. Essentially, we stole it fair and square and you can’t stop us.
(2) Tying into #1 above somewhat, I see that Texas has filed a suit against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin stating that their changes in election laws constituted a violation of the 14th Amendment and the Electors Clause. I had wondered whether one state might have a cause of action against another – in other words, is there a limit on how loose a state can get in its voting (and how it accomplishes this loosening) before it is actually diluting the votes of people in other states so much that another state would have a cause of action against that first state? I guess we may find out.
Here’s Professor Jacobson’s take on it. My own sense is that even though the case has merit, SCOTUS will get cold feet on it because the situation we have reached is so extreme that they don’t want to be the ones to blow the whistle. In other words, they are fearful of “the staggering upheaval, turmoil, and acrimony it would unleash.” Of course, the right is already in such turmoil. But the left is more violent and threatening – at least, it has been so far.
(3) China states what we already knew – which is that a great many of our elites are in their pay and in their pocket:
(4) Today is the earliest sunset of the year where I live. A day to celebrate as far as I’m concerned. Yay!!! The days will keep getting shorter for a while more, but for me it’s the earliness of that afternoon sunset that’s so hard.
(5) It seems that Judge Sullivan may not be finished with General Flynn yet:
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan appears to have given outside groups permission to file legal briefs again in the case involving Michael Flynn – despite President Donald Trump granting the former national security adviser a pardon.
The Justice Department has requested the case be “immediately dismissed.” But, according to the Washington Examiner, the judge’s latest action indicates he may stall on dismissing it.
Apparently Captain Ahab wants to sink another harpoon into Moby Flynn’s flesh. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone impeached Sullivan? Not a chance, IMHO.
I don’t usually post so many videos, because they take time to watch and many people don’t have patience with them. But I’ve been posting more of them lately because sometimes there seems to be no substitute This one is extraordinary, and I think it’s emblematic of so much of the testimony given in the state hearings on the claims of fraud and/or incredible incompetence during the counting of votes in this 2020 election.
You may need to meditate after you watch it, because what the witnesses describe is so disturbing and so infuriating. These two people are especially articulate, and they have a deep sincerity and believability. So it may be useful to send a video link to some Democrats you know who are still speaking to you and who are claiming there’s no evidence and that the eyewitness testimony is bogus. They may respond by dismissing this, too. But I think it’s worth the effort.
When one of the witnesses described watching poll workers take ballots with split ticket votes and then marking the box for straight tickets, which makes them disputed ballots that were then counted as straight ticket votes, it made me realize that this may have been one of the reasons that Republican Senate candidate John James had a similar trajectory as Trump in the state – leading by a lot in the late hours of the evening and then fading precipitously in the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps that was fraudulent, too, through the mechanism of this straight ticket marking by poll workers. It would be interesting to find out how many Michigan ballots had both a straight ticket mark and split ticket votes and were entered as straight ticket ballots.
I’m also curious whether there were any Republican poll workers in a city like Detroit, or whether all the Republicans in the room were observers or challengers. It would seem to me that there should be a rule that poll workers should be half and half.
Georgia’s DeKalb County officials don’t know if it’s in possession of the ballot transfer forms used to record the chain of custody for absentee ballots dropped into some 300 drop boxes around the state.
In response to an open records request from The Georgia Star News for the forms, county officials wrote that “it has not yet been determined if responsive records to your request exist.”…
“VRE is expected to make this determination within thirty business days.”
Thirty business days. That’ll be oh-so-timely and helpful.
More:
Georgia election rules require ballots from drop boxes to be picked up by teams of at least two people, who must complete a transfer form upon doing so.
“The collection team shall complete and sign a ballot transfer form upon removing the ballots from the dropbox, which shall include the date, time, location, and number of ballots,” the relevant rule states.
“The ballots from the drop box shall be immediately transported to the county registrar and processed and stored in the same manner as absentee ballots returned by mail are processed and stored. The county registrar or a designee thereof shall sign the ballot transfer form upon receipt of the ballots from the collection team.”
“Shall” this and “shall” that mean absolutely zero if there is no enforcement. Once the ballots are counted and there’s no chain of custody to prove their validity, what’s the remedy? Oh, I know you can come up with ideas for appropriate remedies – but I mean what’s the remedy that’s likely to happen. What remedy does the law provide, and if there is one – which I tend to doubt – will it be enforced and is it meaningful or some sort of minor penalty that changes nothing and deters nothing?
This election has been a joke, and a very unfunny one – although I suppose the left is laughing up a storm.
Former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who pled guilty to altering the email about Carter Page in order to get FISA warrant number four, is about to be sentenced. When I heard that, I immediately thought “he’ll get a slap on the wrist.” He hasn’t been sentenced yet, but Viva Frei and Robert Barnes are in agreement on the fact that he will almost certainly get a penalty that’s way too light for his offense.
This excerpt from them is worth listening to in order to refresh your memory (as they say in the law biz) on what the FBI actually did to Carter Page – how deep the rot is, and how much they got away with, how extraordinary was the MSM coverup, and how most people don’t even know what happened (or care) today.
[NOTE: This is a somewhat-edited version of a previous post.]
Today is the seventy-ninth anniversary of the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attack. The generation that reacted to it by mobilizing and fighting World War II is on its last legs. But they were the ones we still call “the Greatest.”
I was reminded of this a few years ago while watching one of those Oliver North “War Stories” TV shows about Pearl Harbor. It featured some of the elderly participants reminiscing about that long ago day. Before each one spoke, there was a photograph of him back in 1941: young, vibrant, handsome, full of life. Now they were ancient, and most only vaguely resembled their former selves. But they still transmitted great moral strength and a kind of Gary-Cooperesque stoicism and understated bravery as they told their stories.
On the 75th anniversary there were still quite a few WWII veterans alive:
The Department of Veterans Affairs doesn’t have data on veterans of individual battles, and an alumni association for the battle disbanded in 2011, at the 70th anniversary, when it believed just 8,000 of the 84,000 uniformed Americans on Oahu during the attack remained alive. Since 2011, roughly half of veterans of World War II who were alive then have died, according to VA projections, leaving fewer than 700,000 alive today. Roughly 400 American WWII veterans die each day.
Obviously the number of Pearl Harbor veterans alive has only gotten smaller since that was written—as it will every year until the number is zero. And then, we will still remember? In fact, do most of us remember Pearl Harbor now? Time marches on, and even 9/11 has faded into the background for most people.
I’m not really sure what our younger generation today remembers, or wishes to remember – or through what strange leftist prism it will be taught to remember it if it’s taught at all.
Here’s a post I published twelve years ago on Pearl Harbor Day. It focuses on FDR’s famous speech afterward, and the will and resolve he amply demonstrated.
Here is just a little bit of Roosevelt’s post-Pearl Harbor speech, in case we need reminding of what American resolve used to sound like:
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
“Righteous might.”
Here’s the speech itself:
The memorable phrase that began FDR’s address, “a date which will live in infamy,” wasn’t in Roosevelt’s earlier draft. That draft reads “a date which will live in world history.” That sounds like a high school essay; Roosevelt crossed out “world history” and added “infamy” in his own hand. He also changed “simultaneously and deliberately attacked” to “suddenly and deliberately attacked.”
Wise choices.
I love these:
This one is great but the added sounds are awful:
From a comment there:
The children names and what they became:
0:03 : this is Madeleine Koehler, born in 1895, second child of Jeanne Lumière (sister of the lumiere brothers) and René Koehler (doctor, zoologist and professor). In 1914 she married Josseph Larousse, a naval officer who recieved the french knight honor and who killed himself in 1919. The married again in 1924 with Jean Henric who died a year later. They had one kid. She died in 1970.
1:59 : this is one of the Lumiere Brother (Auguste) and his daughter Andrée. Andrée was born in 1894. She’s in many of their film (like in the famous film “le repas de bébé” where she have a meal with her parents when she was a baby). She died in 1918 at the age 23 from the spanish flu.
3:00 This is Madeleine Koehler with her brother Marcel, born in 1892. He was a engineer, he created the Koehler Escoffier brand of motorcicle then run the company Facel (wich later became the luruxy brand Facel Vega). During ww1 he fought in Petrograd, Russia as a mechanic then as a pilote. In 1921 he married Olga Scgreider at Riga , Lettonia and took her to France. No children. He died in 1958.
4:32: this is Madeleine, Marcel and Suzanne Lumière (daughter of one of the Lumiere brother: Louis). She was born in1894; married Albert Trarieux in 1917 and had 3 children included one daugther named Renée. She died in 1973.