Politics etc.

I'm not interested in arguing the details. All I know is that several swing states stopped counting votes around midnight on Election Night, and when they resumed, Joe Biden enjoyed a remarkable surge of votes.

I also know that in some precincts, huge numbers of ballots were delivered in the middle of the night, during the vote-counting hiatus, that had no races filled out except the presidency – 100% for Joe Biden. This happened in Philadelphia and possibly other places.

Do I think the election was stolen? Yes, I do.

Biden left his house only (approximately) one out of every three days, attended "events" that consisted of a handful of media people listening to him read off a Teleprompter (very badly), and yet somehow managed to defeat an incumbent president with a huge base of support, a president who attracted more support and more votes, including minority support, than he did in 2016?

I don't buy it.

Perhaps this is just personal bias on my part. 

Nevertheless, I will never buy it. And that's that.

Readers are free to argue about it, if they wish. For the record, here is what I think:

The election was rigged. Moreover, it is likely that all future elections will be rigged. Your vote doesn't matter. The outcome has already been decided. This election was a sham, as it has been in Venezuela and other dictatorships. We have become an oligarchy of rule-by-billionaires. Yes, Trump is a billionaire (or at least he says he is) – but he is a rebel. The other billionaires, such as the software billionaires who are be running things at this point, have no populist instincts and are interested only in squashing the will of the people in order to enforce their own agenda at any cost. We have seen this in the attempts by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms to silence any criticism of the status quo.

The United States of America has entered a post-representative period in its history. In our case, Caesar was able to cross the Rubicon without anyone particularly noticing, thanks in large part to a willfully compliant national media, which certainly includes the highly overrated Fox News. From this point forward, elections will be entirely meaningless. The results will be determined in advance by the powers that be. Voting is no more than a ritualistic act intended to reassure the hoc polloi that their "voice" still counts. It does not.

I do not recommend voting in any future election whatsoever, except possibly local elections, which may (possibly)  not be rigged.

Basically, I would opt out of the political system at this point. This is what I intend to do. I'm no longer interested in politics, nor do I plan to engage in political controversies. I recognize that my opinion and my persuasive efforts are completely useless. We do not live in a country where the individual's opinion counts.

I'm not saying this merely because Trump lost. There were many negatives about the Trump presidency, not least his narcissistic and obsessive use of Twitter. But I think it should be obvious to any reasonable observer that Trump, whatever his (many) defects, was infinitely more popular than Biden, a dementia-addled candidate who was unable to hit the campaign trail two-thirds of the time.

Where we are now, I think, is in the Augustinian phase of Roman history. Augustus, as you may know, took over the leadership of Rome after the Republic collapsed. He permitted a fairly wide latitude in freedom of speech, and he continued the old forms of the Senate and consuls, but in fact he devised a new and quite practical method of leadership from the top down. He was a genius, which distinguishes him from the idiots who profess to know how to handle our political system going forward. The system authored by Augustus lasted for more than 400 years. I very much doubt that the system authored by Kamala Harris and AOC will last for even one-quarter of that time.

The $64,000 question is whether the 70 or 80 million people (who knows how many there really were?) who voted for Trump will accept this "new normal" or will eventually rebel. They are showing no signs of rebellion so far. I admit that this surprises me. I thought that under the circumstances, civil unrest would be much more widespread. I anticipated the kind of violence from the right that we have seen from the left (Antifa, Black Lives Matter) over the past eight months. Then again, I thought civil unrest would be ignited by the ridiculous demands to shut down businesses and wear masks in the face of a "pandemic" that is no more serious than the Asian flu or the Hong Kong flu. I was wrong about that; so apparently the American public, in general, is willing to conform to any level of authoritarian demands, no matter how unsupportable and absurd. And the same goes for our vaunted law enforcement officers, who have disgraced themselves by enforcing these ridiculous regulations, and who no longer deserve our support, even as Antifa and BLM target them for destruction. Let them be defunded and destroyed. 

To be completely honest, I now support Antifa. Their objective is to "burn down "America. I don't see a problem with this. I would rather see us die quickly than in a long, drawn-out, pointless death. There is dignity in national suicide. There is no dignity in the path we're on now. 

In any event, the worrisome complacency of Trump supporters may change as the new reality dawns on them that their votes are of no value. Right now, many of them continue to believe, naïvely, that they can still influence the outcome of elections by voting for the candidate they prefer. This faith will be tested and eventually broken in subsequent elections, probably starting with the two Georgia runoff elections for U.S. Senate. Then the question will be: How will the Trump supporters (i.e., the populist American right) react? Will they accept the road to serfdom, or will they rise up in blind, inchoate rebellion?

On this pivot point turns the future of our erstwhile "democracy." The alternatives seem to be a) willful acquiescence in a "soft" dictatorship of the tech elites or b) an effort at secession that may or may not succeed.

As far as the second option is concerned, I recommend the book American Secession by FH Buckley. This surprisingly levelheaded book presents a number of arguments for secession before ultimately (spoiler alert!) deciding against it. Buckley is a Canadian professor with a longtime interest in American history. His opinions are intelligent, well reasoned, and supported by copious historical evidence and contemporary data. Personally, I think he makes such a good case for secession that his last-minute conversion to a "unionist" standpoint is less than persuasive.

For me personally, I will say that I think some form of secession is the only hope left for preserving any form of freedom on the North American continent. But it is unlikely. We will simply march like lemmings into our 1984-style future. Or is it Brave New World?

I am, by the way, fully aware that by expressing such highly charged political opinions on this blog I will alienate people who don't share those opinions. However, I did not start this blog twenty years ago, when I was a mere lad of forty, in order to cultivate popularity. In fact, it never occurred to me that anybody would be interested in my nattering opinions. So whatever happens, happens.

I am a loudmouthed asshole, and I intend to continue being a loudmouth asshole, the matter what it costs me. Take it or leave it.

Comments

[Paul]

No I haven’t, I haven’t seen evidence of Democrat fraud either though of course I haven’t been looking for it. It doesn’t look like the courts have been very impressed either so far.

Do you think the the republicans have some sort of moral superiority that democrats don’t? Do you really think someone like Donald Trump would eschew fraud if he thought he could get away with it?

Looking in from outside and not professing to know much about American politics I’d be ashamed to be represented by Donald Trump. I don’t think anything is beneath him. Rightly or wrongly the way much of the world sees the US is through the president. As an outsider, the current presidency looks shameful to me. I can’t say that of any other presidency during my adulthood.

I wonder if things had gone the other way and the republicans had won, the world would have seen the same behaviour from the democrats?

[Talon]

People who have issues believing Biden could have won legitimately have been living in an info bubble. Trump has never been wildly popular in the US, his approval rating has consistently hovered about 45%. Trump's 2016 electoral vote hinged on about 70,000 votes in 3 states, he lost the popular vote then too.

Using comparative rally size to judge the candidates popularity is silly. Trump loves the rallies, he loves boasting about big numbers, they energize him and give him the "hit" he needs to keep going. Biden specifically discouraged large gatherings due to COVID-19 restrictions and recommendations, which Trump largely ignored.

Using the rallies as a metric to predict the election outcome also ignores that people will turn out to vote against a candidate they don't like, handing a win to his opponent. Biden wasn't everyone's first choice, but Never-Trumps, Independents, disappointed "Berners" and groups like Lincoln Project and VoteVets used social media to rally apathetic non-voters to participate and vote Trump out.

No, Biden probably doesn't have dementia. If you insist on using slips of the tongue of gaffs as examples, I can point you to 30 more incidents from Trump suggestive of the same thing. Trump slurs his speech, displays difficulty pronouncing words, called Florida Rep Matt Gaetz "Rick Gaetz" and called Tim Cook CEO of Apple, "Tim Apple". Trump currently speaks at a 4th grade level, lowest of any president, when he used to be more articulate, engaged in less repetition and employed a larger vocabulary. These symptoms are consistent with cognitive decline or possibly drug abuse. The claims of Biden's "dementia" from the Trump clan are most likely a kind of projection, an attempt at concealing Trump's own medical issues as age, poor diet and recreational drugs have taken their toll.

It's odd that if Trump's legal team had real evidence of fraud, they'd not offer it up in court. They don't have a lot of time to make the case, and much of it has been wasted with amateur efforts from Rudy Giuliani, efforts so bad they've lost almost every case they've brought before a judge. Perhaps Sydney Powell will have better luck but she's going to need to produce something fairly spectacular to pull it off. In the meantime, Trump's claims of voter fraud are hurting the Republican party in the Ga run-off elections, MAGA are encouraging a boycott via Twitter and Parler unless Kemp overturns the election for Trump.

Folks have suggested that Trump will burn the country and his own party to the ground rather than lose, no one can claim they're simply paranoid anymore.

[Michael Prescott]

Another poll, similar result ...

//According to Rasmussen, 30 percent of Democrats believe that it’s “very likely” that their own party won the election through illegitimate means.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans overwhelmingly believe the election was stolen with 75 percent, and Independent voters believe it was stolen at 39 percent. Overall, nearly half the country believes the election is illegitimate at 47 percent.//

Just because a lot of people believe something doesn't mean it's true. But it does mean that such a belief can't be dismissed as the "fringe" mindset of a handful of crackpots. In this case, the crackpots add up to 47% of the country, including 30% of Democrats.

Most likely, Biden will be sworn in on schedule. But half the country will regard him with deep suspicion.

https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2020/11/30/even-a-large-number-of-democrats-believe-biden-stole-the-election-n286942

[GabaBee]

I followed your blog a long time ago. It would likely have been around 2006-2008, and have happened upon it again because my interest in psychical research and parapsychology has been rekindled by a very unpleasant experience that has me looking again for answers.

I can recall you being justifiably hard on the intellectually dishonest pseudo-skeptics, sceptical about the Breatharians, denouncing 9/11 truthers as 'literally insane', and praising M Lamar Keene's book The Psychic Mafia, which reveals many of the tricks used by phony physical mediums, and showing so many signs of a dispassionate interest in pursuit of knowledge.
Here's you from your essay 'Why I'm Not a Skeptic': 'Far from being a state of habitual open-mindedness, today's skepticism is characterized by resistance to any new ideas or new evidence, and unwillingness to critically examine its own biases.'

How are we to reconcile this with the attitude you are taking now, which is to say explicitly that the Democrats stole the election (on no evidence whatsoever) and that you're utterly dogmatic in this belief? You say 'I will never buy it. And that's that' and that you're 'not interested in arguing the details'. This is at least as awful as the worst of Randi's or any other sceptic's trivialisation and dismissal of psi phenomena.

The fraud case is absolutely preposterous. We are to believe that somehow the Democrats, on the same ballots, lost seats in the House and failed to take the Senate, yet were able to fix it to win the presidency by 6 million votes. We are told absurd fairy tales about hacking of the machines that do the counting, some of these involving long-dead Venezuelan dictators, and then when hand recounts take place in Georgia the results are entirely in line with the original counts.

The polls prior to the election had Biden with a clear lead. And, as Talon says above, Trump's approval rating never got above 50%, so on what grounds can you possibly make the statement that he was 'infinitely more popular than Biden'? Doesn't it strike you as odd at all, that the final result should in fact show a much larger swing towards the Republicans than the polls suggested? Why aren't there grounds for suspicion in that? Why have Trump's lawyers failed utterly in convincing the courts? Why has nobody been able to produce evidence of the massive voter fraud, which would take organisational deception beyond imagination and surely be the greatest scandal in the country's history?

To some of your other points, Biden is slower than he used to be, no doubt about it, but calling him 'dementia-addled' is a disgusting and foolish slur. Did you actually watch the debates? And the town halls? And the primaries before that? The GOP had been priming us to think that he would barely be able to get a sentence out, and did that happen? Of course not. He didn't tell incessant lies in the most belligerent and boorish manner imaginable as Trump did in the first debate (where it also remains an open question if the oaf had had a positive Covid test because he missed the venue's testing and then refused to reveal his most recent negative test). As for being unable to be on the campaign trail, did you ever grant the possibility that maybe he was not in favour of exposing people to the dangerous pandemic that's raging all around us? Trump, ever the malignant narcissist, more concerned with satisfying his own ego than anything else, didn't give a damn about those spectators exposed in his superspreader events.

Worse yet, Trump has been absolutely explicit about his intentions. Jonah Goldberg has a good piece on this (https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/this-was-always-the-plan). He lied and said that Ted Cruz had fixed the Iowa results in 2016. He claimed that massive fraud was responsible for his losing the popular vote by 3 million in 2016, and that Obama's crowds at the Inauguration were smaller than his. His refusal to agree to a peaceful handover of power should he lose. His statement that if he didn't seem to win on the night the Supreme Court would assure his win even if it wasn't plain on the night, saying 'if we win on Tuesday or — thank you very much, Supreme Court — shortly thereafter…'. You haven't said a peep about his absolutely brazen efforts to steal this election outright by disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of largely black voters. Would you have been content and regarded it as legitimate if the courts were prepared to do this? Imagine if the Obama/Romney results were reversed and Obama pulled all the manoeuvres Trump is trying now. How would you have reacted?

It's so tragic how this profoundly mentally disturbed mountebank, who would make L Ron Hubbard blush, has created perhaps the world's largest cult and led otherwise sensible people to lose their minds. He cannot admit he has lost because his narcissistic personality disorder prevents the possibility from entering his mind. It's a greater tragedy that the Democrats didn't win resoundingly, because that had a chance of putting an end to Trumpism and bringing about a period of reflection which might have led to a saner Republican party. Who knows how this gets better in years ahead. There's very good reason for substantial pessimism.

[Michael Prescott]

I don’t see it that way, GabaBee, but I like your passion. I disagree that I’ve offered no evidence. Check out the links upstream in this thread.

Should the election be overturned by the courts? Of course. I thought my opinion on this was obvious.

*Will* the election be overturned? It’s vanishingly unlikely. Our institutions don’t work anymore. We’ve entered the post-representative phase of American history.

[Paul]

Very well put GabaBee

[Matt Rouge]

A good overview by National Review--a Conservative publication--about how unsubstantial the claims are on the Trump side:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/trump-election-fraud-disgraceful-endgame/

[Eric Newhill]

The comments here are as ironic as they are sad.

I guess everyone has their own inner James Randi or Keith Augustine.

[Michael Prescott]

Another lawsuit, this one in Michigan:

//Citing state records, the lawsuit claims that Benson’s office sent out 355,392 unsolicited ballots. [Unsolicited ballots are illegal in Michigan, which requires a signed application for a mail-in ballot.] ...

A survey found “29,682 people said they requested a ballot, said they voted, and their ballot wasn’t counted. The state’s records show it wasn’t counted.”

Why did their ballots not make it to the final tally? Northon said the Amistad Project has “more than three dozen affidavits” testifying that officials threw out ballots when they did not like the result ...

Michigan officials counted another 35,109 ballots that were not associated with any address. [This is illegal.]

Michigan officials also counted 13,248 ballots cast by individuals who were registered to vote in another state. ... Finally, election officials mailed out at least 74,000 absentee ballots that voters requested online [where no signature is possible — another violation of Michigan law].//

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/11/30/explosive-michigan-illegally-counted-or-ignored-500k-ballots-lawsuit-claims-n1181826

More on out-of-state voters who cast ballots (or, more likely, had ballots cast in their name):

//[The Voter Integrity Project] looked at suspicious ballot activity in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Among the most significant VIP findings involved people who changed their state of residence, yet voted absentee using their prior address. In Arizona, which Biden “won” by 10,457 votes, there were 19,997 questionable votes. In Georgia, which Biden “won” by 12,670 votes, VIP found 138,221 such votes. In Wisconsin, which Biden “won” by 20,608 votes, there were 26,673 such votes.//

https://spectator.org/legitimacy-of-biden-win-buried-by-objective-data/

And yet some people still say there’s "no evidence" of irregularities.

[Michael Prescott]

Matt, you may not know it, but National Review is a NeverTrump publication. They ran a whole issue called "The Case Against Trump" in 2016, and they haven’t changed their editorial stance.

[Michael Prescott]

Eric wrote, "I guess everyone has their own inner James Randi or Keith Augustine."

Or Paul Kurtz — founder of CSICOP, now called CSI. Years ago, Kurtz appeared on a TV show and asserted (I'm quoting from memory), "We'd all love to believe in an afterlife, but there's just no evidence for it."

Though I was new to the issue, even then I knew enough to understand that Kurtz's claim of "no evidence" was bogus. As he himself must have known, there is evidence of various kinds, including NDEs, veridical mediumship, and past-life memories. He might not see this evidence as persuasive, but that's different from saying there's no evidence at all.

If pressed (which he wasn't), he probably would have retreated to a more defensible position: Sure, there's some evidence, but it's not good enough. This is known as a motte-and-bailey defense. Medieval castles had an outer area called a bailey and an inner fortification called a motte. In battle, the castle's defenders would first fight for control of the bailey. If overwhelmed, they would retreat to the motte, where they would regroup and attempt to retake the bailey at a more propitious time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

Here we see a similar pattern. People say there's no evidence whatsoever of any irregularities in the election. This is the bailey — the more sweeping position, and also the more difficult one to defend. When specific irregularities are cited, those on the other side change their position and say: Well, okay, there may be some evidence, but it's not enough. This is the motte — a narrower, more restricted position, easier to defend. As soon as they feel safe to emerge from the motte, they resume their original tactic of saying there's no evidence at all.

As an argumentative strategy, it's similar to moving the goalposts. Probably most people aren't even aware they're doing it, although I suspect that Paul Kurtz knew.

With regard to Biden's obvious signs of early dementia, I can't help linking to this brief animation that illustrates Biden's unedited remarks at a public event. Biden's audio is unedited. Besides his rambling incoherence, note that he injects the word "roaches" into the story for no reason whatsoever. (Nothing he said in his talk involved roaches.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeRIByWjdnEinhg yo

Here's a bizarre moment where Biden makes multiple errors in just a few seconds. He seemingly confuses his granddaughter with his son Beau, then thanks the crowd for helping to elect Beau to the senate. Three problems here: a) Beau never ran for any senate seat, b) Beau was not present at the event, and c) Beau has been dead for four years. Biden also misstates his granddaughter's name, saying Natalie when he means Finnegan. This is reminiscent of an earlier instance in which he mistook his wife for his sister as they stood on stage. There's a reason the Biden campaign "called a lid" on almost two out of every three days, and why he is rarely seen in public even now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dVlO5-zELE

[sbu]

well, complaints and allegations does not equal evidence.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/william-barr-doj-fbi-voter-fraud-2020-election

[Michael Prescott]

In the spirit of fairness, here's Trump's AG William Barr saying that so far the FBI and DOJ have not found enough fraud to change the outcome of the election. I don't know how long they've been on the case, though. And some of the court filings, if substantiated, would have the potential to swing key states.

https://redstate.com/jeffc/2020/12/01/ag-william-barr-no-evidence-of-enough-voter-fraud-to-change-the-outcome-of-the-election-n287653

[Michael Prescott]

"allegations does not equal evidence."

Actually, an affidavit (testimony under oath) is pretty much the definition of "evidence." It's equivalent to giving sworn testimony in a courtroom, which certainly qualifies as evidence.

[Eric Newhill]

Michael,

Agreed.

I told you a short while ago that I was done with social media and politics for good. Well, it turns out that I am - and I'm not.

I guess I'm dipping a toe back in the water, but with a new perspective. For the reasons you so finely illustrated with the analogy of the castle defense system, I find no point whatsoever in arguing facts and meaning. The vast majority of people really don't care about fact and reason. So why approach life from that angle?

I've been thinking about that state of affairs a lot lately.

In my line of work, I have to delve into huge blobs of meaningless data and "noise", organize it, format it, analyze it and come away from the effort with a a story that is both objectively true and actionable. I have to weigh risks, cost and benefits. Then I have to present all of that in a coherent manner to teams of higher level people who make decisions involving(for real) $billions. Of course I am usually not flying solo when the stakes are that high. I have a team of analysts that I lead. I often have coordinating departments that are working on other facets of the same inputs and data. We have to come together and agree on a common reality that is based in fact before actions are taken.

All of that makes me dull and frustrated. I find myself occasionally downright envious of those who are free to live within their flights of fancy.

So I've been thinking about how most people can afford to mistake their opinion for fact. It sounds a little crazy to me, yet also somehow liberating. I have a younger brother that is a chronic schizophrenic and all that entails and has been since age 19. I'm his legal guardian. And, of course, my son has a serious head injury from combat overseas. My adult life has involved seeing what it looks like to have lost the ability to reason and that experience has caused me to have a deep seated fear about losing mine.

I mean no one knows if there was election fraud or not. I see a lot to strongly suggest there was. In my opinion, enough to merit investigation. It is important enough that if there is a strong suggestion, it should be professionally investigated until all significant allegations are closed out. I really don't see how people can just proclaim that there was no fraud. Where does that come from? It seems thoroughly intellectually dishonest to google up some link that confirms one's opinion or biases and then declare the matter settled.

I think we've all seen enough "expert" squawking heads being wrong as wrong can be over the past four years or so that trust in such people should be at a minimum; even when they say what we want them to say; perhaps especially when they say what we want to hear. I remember when Trump had "no path to victory". Then, when he won, it was because he "colluded" with Russians. Everyone "knew" it to be true. Then Mueller couldn't find a damn bit of proof. Then it was on to removal from office via impeachment, which also fell flat. Then it was the "Blue Wave" is coming! Except there wasn't one. The Rs gained seats in congress. Oh, and the polls! The polls! Except they were all wrong too. I won't even get into Fauci et al.

So why would someone paste a link from any of these people? Why would I argue points of fact with people that do? The hell with it. Be wrong. I don't care. Maybe I'm wrong. Outside of work, I don't care.

At this point I'm just observing people and how they are; not to try to help them. I can't. Rather, just to identify what they do and see if I'm doing it too (I probably am).

It's actually all kind of funny - until someone gets an eye put out.

[Matt Rouge]

Michael wrote,

||Matt, you may not know it, but National Review is a NeverTrump publication. They ran a whole issue called "The Case Against Trump" in 2016, and they haven’t changed their editorial stance. ||

Well, they just had a series of editorials about reelecting Trump (before the election) entitled,

"Hell, Yes"
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/hell-yes/

"Hell, No"
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-tuesday/hell-no/

"Trump: Yes"
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/02/trump%E2%80%88yes/

"Trump: No"
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/02/trump-no/

"Trump: Maybe"
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/02/trump-maybe/

So they covered every possible position. Is that the sign of a "Never Trumper" publication? And would it really matter if they were? They couldn't possibly offer any valuable facts or opinions in that case?

Note that I read Conservative media too! Even Karl Rove has said that there has been no evidence of voter fraud:

https://www.nationalreview.com/videos/karl-rove-states-there-is-no-evidence-of-voter-fraud/

As I said earlier, I don't doubt that there were irregularities. But what is their actual scale, how are they different qualitatively and quantitatively from what went on in the past, and what is their potential for meaningfully impacting the results?

I think one actually has to be an expert to make any kind of judgment. I would think that judges would know the difference in such matters. I would think that if Trump's team of lovable losers had *anything* substantial, *anything* of a "wow!" nature, they would have gotten that in a brief and in front of a judge by now. It's not as though their cases have been ignored.

Can anyone here cite an actual case that a judge seems to have flubbed on? I haven't seen a single thing in the media or even a single case that Trump supporters say was substantial but nevertheless dismissed or ruled against incorrectly by a court. Do you have anything of this nature?

I personally think the circumstantial evidence to be wholly worthless. It's nothing more than folk wisdom about what should have happened. And it cuts both ways. If the Dem Election Fraud Ninjas could alter/add *millions* of votes so as to prevent Trump not just from winning in certain states but in the popular vote as well, why didn't they swing some senate races so that the Dems would control that house? That would be comparatively easy, wouldn't it? Why is the single, unitary, and sole person saying s/he got robbed of victory Donald Trump? Why aren't any of the other losers saying that they were victims of fraud and making their case in court? Etc. etc.

[Michael Prescott]

More non-evidence:

//“ Not one of the military ballots was a registered voter and the ballots looked like they were all exactly the same xerox copies of the ballot,” the witness testified to the state’s Senate Oversight Committee at the Binsing Office Building in Lansing, Mich.

She continued: “They were all for Biden across the board. There wasn’t a single Trump vote. And none of the voters were registered.”

She said they would enter the person’s birthdate as 1-1-20 to override the system and the fact that they weren’t in any of the poll books they had because they weren’t registered.

If true, this is absolutely crazy and maybe easily trackable given the birthdate clue. How many did this involve?//

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/12/01/287744-n287744

[Michael Prescott]

Matt, I mentioned NR's longtime antipathy to Trump because you made a point of saying that NR is a conservative publication. The implication was that even Trump’s allies have found no merit in his election claims. But NR has never been a Trump ally. They have one or two contributors who support Trump (I think Victor Davis Hanson still writes for them), but overall they’re an anti-Trump publication. So there’s nothing surprising about their stance.

By the way, Trump's legal team has responded to AG Barr's statement that the FBI/DOJ investigation has "so far" not uncovered enough fraud to change any results. As I expected, they simply pointed out that very little, if any, investigating has been done by the FBI and DOJ "so far."

This dovetails with what I read over the weekend — that the FBI only got around to asking the Voter Integrity Project for their data on Sunday. Since VIP has collected masses of data impacting several states, there’s no way the feds could have done much with it yet (assuming the FBI is interested in doing a serious investigation, which I’m not at all sure of).

[Matt Rouge]

Michael wrote,

||Matt, I mentioned NR's longtime antipathy to Trump because you made a point of saying that NR is a conservative publication. The implication was that even Trump’s allies have found no merit in his election claims.||

To me, the implication was that there was no perceived Liberal bias to get in the way of Conservative readers seeing the value the NRO article.

OTOH, it's also true that some Trump allies, such as Barr (whom my side has seen as maximally in the bag for Trump, at least until now), do *not* see merit in his claims at this juncture.

Trump has divided everyone at this point. If you are going to invalidate Conservative pubs as "never-Trumper," then I guess there's not going to be anyone left to cite.

[Eric Newhill]

Matt Rouge,
Why do you need someone or something to cite? Why take that risk when all of the experts and talking heads are proven liars and disinformation operatives?

Why not evaluate the source material yourself? Listen to the hearings, read the legal complaints, etc

This is a time for everyone to think for themselves and not trust those who strut around around as authorities.

Analysis of blood samples taken back in Jan 2020 show that they all contained covid-19. Analysis of various sources in Europe show that covid-19 was there in Oct and perhaps earlier. The official narrative cannot be true based those facts alone. Yet in various places round the country people are basically under house arrest and unable to meet with loved ones, attend religious ceremonies, have weddings and funerals or be normal in any way. Businesses and lives are being destroyed. Tech companies are demanding group think around the whole thing.

Why do you enjoy being lied to? Is it a desire to be "right"? Why do you want to trust people in power - or who seek to be in power - to tell you that you are "right"? What did Jesus say about that? Doesn't power corrupt? Why do you want to be led by power seekers you will never meet or know? Important questions to ask oneself if one cares about one's soul.

[Eric Newhill]

"Trump has divided everyone at this point. "

This to me also seems to violate basic life truths, like "it takes two to tango"

Was it spiritually unifying when the Democrats instantly accused Trump of colluding with Russia to steal the election and hounded him for years on that allegation that was proven baseless by a long hostile investigation? Was it spiritual and unifying when they brought out baseless and vile slander against Justice Kavanaugh? How about when candidate Clinton referred to Trump supporters as "deplorable" and "irredeemable"? How about when the DOJ and FBI agents did the same? Was # resistance spiritual and unifying? Was it spiritual and unifying and Pelosi made a point of publicly shredding Trump's state of the union address? Were the riots and looting spiritual and unifying?

IMO, the most important aspect of spiritual development is an honest and often difficult self-assessment. There are no people without sin and that is especially true in the halls of power and politics.

[Michael Prescott]

FWIW, I think Trump's legal pathways are largely exhausted, and the wilder theories, such as the Stuttgart sever farm, haven't panned out. I also reject the fevered calls for holding a new election under martial law (!), which General Flynn and others have signed on to. That's a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

I continue to believe there was significant fraud in a handful of metropolitan areas sufficient to put Biden over the top in those swing states. This fraud, I think, took the form of manufactured ballots delivered to the polling places in the middle of the night, during the otherwise inexplicable pause in voting. This theory would account for most of the anomalies and much of the sworn testimony, without requiring complicated international conspiracies out of a Tom Clancy novel.

It explains:

- why several states, in concert, stopped counting votes for three or four hours, something that (AFAIK) has never happened before on any election night.

- why Biden's totals spiked immediately after the "pause" was over, while Trump's totals barely moved.

- why Biden's totals were registered in the form of huge data dumps (example: 570,000 votes for Biden vs. 3,000 for Trump, in one update).

- why boxes of ballots were delivered to polling places throughout the "pause," as stated by multiple witnesses.

- why those ballots were "pristine" and uncreased, indicating they had never been mailed.

- why those ballots were all marked for Biden, and not for any down-ballot races.

- why those ballots were described as looking "identical," and said to look like Xerox copies.

- why a recount (feeding the same ballots into the machines) would not change the results.

- why Biden hugely overperfomed both Obama and Hillary in those metro areas but not in other metro areas with similar demographics, or in the country generally.

- why the voter participation rates in these key districts approached (or exceeded?) 100%, unheard of in a US election, while remaining within normal parameters elsewhere.

- why the swing states kept "finding" more Biden votes until he had a lead outside the margin that would trigger a recount, at which point they stopped.

- why the media have been studiedly uncurious about Biden's precedent-shattering victory, in which he won the presidency without carrying the bellwether states of Ohio and Florida, without carrying the vast majority of bellwether counties and districts, and without running much of a campaign.

This explanation has the further advantage of requiring only the routine fraud perpetrated by corrupt machine politicians in big cities. No one, I hope, will deny that outfits like Tammany Hall continue to exist in many urban areas. All that was needed to steal the election was a warehouse full of high-speed copiers and a few hours in which the vote count was suspended. A high-speed copier can turn out 100 pages per minute, or 24,000 pages in four hours. Put ten or twenty of them in a room, and if you have enough paper and ink, you can produce as many identical ballots as you like. Nothing high-tech about it. And unless the ballots are subjected to a close visual inspection, nothing will give you away.

I'm not saying the entire fraud was carried out in this fashion. In some districts, the rejection rate of mail-in ballots was far lower than the rejection rate of absentee ballots in prior elections, indicating that essentially every mail-in ballot was counted, regardless of procedural errors such as the wrong address, no signature, and no chain of custody. Ballot harvesting also allowed the collection of blank ballots that could be filled out later. Some ballot harvesters boasted (on hidden camera) of paying for blank ballots. People who had moved out of state still voted (or at least someone voted in their name). Etc.

But the key thing was the post-midnight pause and the rapid production of Biden ballots in the wee hours of the night. There's already evidence of this, and I expect more to come out, but not in time to make a difference in the outcome. For the sake of national stability, that may be just as well.

BTW, if this whole scenario is dismissed as a conspiracy theory, then please note that this assumes a conspiracy on the other side — a conspiracy of all those people making sworn statements about the post-midnight delivery of lookalike ballots and other irregularities. One way or the other, a conspiracy is afoot. It's just a question of whether poll watchers testifying under oath, or corrupt ward-heeling pols, are more likely to be participating in it.

[Michael Prescott]

I didn’t expect additional evidence of my theory to show up only about an hour after I posted it. But it did!

In Georgia, vote counters told poll-watchers to go home, because no more ballots would be counted that night. But after the poll-watchers left, four vote counters stayed behind and continued counting, unsupervised, for two hours. When the poll-watchers got wind of continuing activity, they returned to the site around one AM, only to be told that the vote counters had just left.

Coincidentally, an update to Biden’s vote total at 12:18 AM (just before the vote counters left) shows Biden getting 98% of a batch of more than 23,000 votes.

https://twitter.com/jayfivek/status/1334596276298670080?s=21

Okay, so no big deal, right? Sworn testimony, a data dump, but there’s no hard evidence of misconduct ...

Except the vote counters didn’t realize that security cameras were recording their every move.

Oopsie.

The four cameras show the poll watchers being ushered out. Then the remaining vote counters pull large cases out from under tables, where they seem to have been hidden. They spend two hours feeding these ballots into machines, each of which can process 3,000 ballots per hour. Apparently there were three machines (originally I said there were four). Three machines times two hours gives you roughly 18,000 ballots (corrected from my earlier estimate). The big Biden ballot dump was 23,487 ballots.

Note that a) it was illegal to count the ballots without the poll watchers being present, b) the large crates of ballots were concealed until the poll watchers left, c) the number of votes in the Biden dump approaches the number processed in the two hours recorded by security cameras, and d) it’s statistically improbable that Biden received 98% of the vote anywhere.

Below is some of the footage, speeded up (which unfortunately means the lawyer’s audio commentary is also speeded up, a la Alvin and the Chipmunks).

https://twitter.com/crabcrawler1/status/1334568511323189251?s=21

So here’s my question. Suppose you’re on a jury. Mr. Joe Blow is charged with robbing a convenience store. Multiple witnesses swear they saw him do it. Surveillance footage is played showing him do it. Would you convict?

Or would you say the witnesses are lying, the video is fake, and Mr. Blow is the victim of a baseless conspiracy theory?

[Matt Rouge]

Eric wrote,

||Why do you need someone or something to cite? Why take that risk when all of the experts and talking heads are proven liars and disinformation operatives?||

All the judges that have looked at the briefs, etc.? Bill Barr? Republican officials in Georgia? All liars and disinformation operatives? This is classic CT thinking.

The reason I rely on experts, both in this case and many other areas, is that I don't have the knowledge and experience to make my own judgments.

This applies to all the evidence that Michael has cited. I have no idea about any of this stuff. Certainly, however, *some* judge *some*where who has had a chance to look at this evidence would find it to be problematic? Trump's Legal Eagle A-Team has whiffed on almost *every* case. Why? Did they not present the evidence Michael has cited, or was this evidence rejected?

I'm glad, however, Michael, that you are not in favor of declaring martial law in order to right this grave wrong against the eternal victim, Trump.

[Matt Rouge]

Michael wrote,

||So here’s my question. Suppose you’re on a jury. Mr. Joe Blow is charged with robbing a convenience store. Multiple witnesses swear they saw him do it. Surveillance footage is played showing him do it. Would you convict?

Or would you say the witnesses are lying, the video is fake, and Mr. Blow is the victim of a baseless conspiracy theory?||

Bait and switch. I know what a convenience store robbery is and what it looks like. I don't know if the video of the people shown counting votes shows anything untoward. It doesn't *sound* legit from your description--maybe it wasn't. I would indeed like to hear an explanation of what was going on. But again, I know nothing about how vote counting works, so I am not prepared to point a finger and cry "fraud!"

[Michael Prescott]

Here’s another interesting video. At the link there’s a four-minute analysis. We see a Georgia vote counter palm a USB drive, then surreptitiously slip into it someone’s pocket. The recipient then casually walks away. What was on the drive? Why did the transfer have to be hidden?

https://twitter.com/xbenjamminx/status/1334908143319572481?s=21

These are the people we’ve been told are trustworthy and highly professional. Incidentally, the woman who first handles the USB drive and passes it to her accomplice (who palms it and slips it into a man's pocket) is Ruby Freeman, who also appears on the surveillance video showing the big steal.

[Michael Prescott]

By the way, huge holes are already appearing in the Dems' defense of the Georgia vote count. They claim that no one, neither the media nor the poll watchers, was told that the ballot counters were going home at 10:30. But tweets from ABC News, dated Nov, 3, have already surfaced, showing that the media were told exactly that. This corroborates the poll watchers' sworn testimony as to what they were told that night, and contradicts the Democratic spin.

https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1335006414616616960?s=21

So we have a lying coverup. But why does there need to be a coverup if nothing illegal happened?

And what’s up with that surreptitious transfer of the USB drive? How many kinds of corruption went on at that facility?

[Eric Newhill]

"All the judges that have looked at the briefs, etc.? Bill Barr? Republican officials in Georgia? All liars and disinformation operatives? This is classic CT thinking."

Matt, I am not going to get into arguing facts because it instantly devolves into the castle defense system phenomenon that Michael described. It raises my blood pressure and achieves nothing. I'm trying to keep my discussions at a higher level. I will simply say that you you are totally wrong about the judges and briefs. There have been several Trump motions granted. Also, not all of the court decisions to date have been based on an examination of the evidence - that takes an actual trial. Many of the unfavorable decisions have been on legal technical points only. Also, only a fool would think that lower courts are highly political. When a hearing appears to be unfavorable to Trump, it is actually favorable to his strategy. It gives him leave to appeal to higher courts and gets him closer to getting into the Supreme Court, which is where he needs this decided before time runs out.

Bill Barr has admitted that he hasn't looked at the evidence. He has not been in the machines. He has not interviewed witnesses, etc. DOJ hasn't done any in depth investigation. So of course they haven't found anything so far. This is what I'm talking about. Instead of repeating what the media says, one needs to think for oneself.

Which leads leads us to the larger point I'm trying to make. The whole CT thing is really a "no true Scotsman" argument. A favorite sound bite of the left is "Science says". All science agrees there is man made global warming that is going to wipe out the "planet". When we point to well credentialed scientists that disagree with global warming, the left discredits those scientists as being somehow not real objective scientists.

If a scientist with the right credentials (and there are many of them) disagrees with the government view of the covid situation, then that scientist is dismissed as being a CT nut job and not a true scientist.

If people testify under oath about election fraud, videos show it happening, statisticians analyze results and find impossible vote tally patterns, etc - then all of those people are dismissed as kooks and not real experts *because the left has already decided that election fraud couldn't and didn't happen". Then the media steps in and surpasses the speech of all of those now labeled as CT kooks.

This is just like all of the scientific materialist skeptics who say the "paranormal" is impossible and won't even read the evidence; or, if they do, they misrepresent it to arrive at a conclusion that supports their inherent bias.

Now you're being that guy. It's really a passive aggressive form of the "might makes right" approach. If we can shout loudly while suppressing your dissenting voice, then we are "science", "truth", whatever.

Finally, what experts are you relying on? How is the media expert on anything? I am unaware of anything in college communications and journalism classes that would prepare one to arrive at a conclusive analysis of any of this. Those people are just talking heads following corporate media direction.

I wish you could see how deeply biased your opinion appears to people outside your bias bubble. It is probably frustrating to you that people you once thought smart and worthy of respect are buying into what you see as Trumpian CT theories. Just a suggestion, but if smart people are taking a stance, maybe there is something to it. Maybe it shouldn't just be dismissed off hand. Why do you think that the smart people have suddenly gone off the deep end?

Here's another example - back when people were freaking out over the release of an old tape wherein Trump was recorded saying something about "grab 'em by the....", I was thinking about how democrats near worshipped Ted Kennedy (the "lion of the senate"), who, literally, drunkenly killed a woman and left her at the bottom of the river before calling the police so he could sober up and get legal advice first. There is a lot of people withdrawing into information bubbles and then expressing animosity toward anyone not in the bubble. There is a belief developed that the bubble is the realm of truth and anyone outside of it is wrong, dangerous and even evil. This is a very sad of affairs and it won't end well.

[Eric Newhill]

Michael,
I think all of this points back to your civil war thread.

What the left/democrats are doing is obvious to tens of millions of Americans. They are engaged in a passive aggressive coup d'etat. They think they can pull it off entirely - with the exception of BLM and Antifa riots - bloodlessly, using media disinformation and cencorship and social pressure (loss of employment, loss of friends, etc). They have created a quasi-cult that believes the only true information is that which comes from left aligned media and government "experts". Actually, there is little or no gap between the media and government. Many of Biden's admin picks have been hanging out of the MSM for the past four years. They are the same people. This is precisely the approach utilized by the Soviets, the Chinese and dictators all over the world.

The United States was founded on not trusting government. The founders knew that power corrupts and that freedom is what this country must be all about. The left has flipped that American spirit on its head. One is now officially deemed crazy and dangerous if one does not trust the government bureaucracy and democrat party - and a good citizen if one simply goes along unquestioningly with government edicts.

Now that elections no longer matter, censorship is the rule, petty tyrants can lock us in our homes and destroy businesses and lives, and the ruling party sees 50% of the country as deplorable racist monsters, tens of millions of armed Americans will have little to lose. My civil war probability meter is at 80% likely as of today. Sorry :-(

[Michael Prescott]

Here's a good takedown of the Lead Stories spin on the surveillance videos. It includes a video that appears to show Ruby Freeman running the same batch of ballots through a machine three times. Ruby is the person who passed the USB drive to her daughter, who slipped it into someone's pocket (another video, linked above in my 2:23 AM comment). The link below also shows the statistically incredible spike in Biden votes registered at 1:14 AM, concurrent with the surveillance videos.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/democrats_defense_of_georgia_election_fraud_video_doesnt_hold_water.html

Another part of the spin is that a "monitor" was present even after the polls watchers left. However, it has now been admitted that the monitor (apparently hired by the county) left the arena for 82 minutes. One source claims he went out for "a drink," which, if true, gives a good idea of the professionalism and integrity on display in this whole process.

As I said above, the entire Lead Stories defense, which was supplied by Democrats, collapses in light of the fact that ABC News reported on Election Night that the vote counting had stopped. In order to believe the Democrat spin, you have to believe:

a) GOP poll watchers would voluntarily leave on Election Night while votes were still being counted.

b) These poll watchers lied under oath, risking charges of perjury.

c) The election official who told ABC on November 3 that vote counting had stopped for the night was wrong — even though that official is in charge of vote counting in Fulton County.

d) This official failed to show up for her scheduled appearance before the state legislative committee because she had better things to do than clear her name.

e) Ruby Freeman and her daughter surreptitiously transferred a USB drive to someone's pocket so he could walk out with it, but they are impeccably honest.

f) Ruby triple-counted a stack of ballots but is impeccably honest.

g) And if this tweet and mug shot are accurate (I can't confirm it), Ruby was arrested for fraud in 2010 ...

https://twitter.com/ViktoriiaUAH/status/1334983802851106819?s=20

Half the country isn't buying this BS. I saw a doctor yesterday for a routine checkup and she spent most of our session venting about election fraud. Ordinary people are getting worked up. Anyone who thinks that only a handful of diehards and kooks are passionate about this story is not getting out enough. (Admittedly, there *are* diehards and kooks, and I continue to be very skeptical of the wilder stories like the server farm shootout, but complicated international conspiracies aren't necessary if you can get rid of the poll watchers on a pretext, triple-count the votes, and make sure unwanted data on USB drives disappears).

And I haven't even mentioned the testimony of that USPS driver ...

[Eric Newhill]

Michael,
I saw something today that claims that a huge spike in Biden votes in the county occurred precisely at the same time as the events that you describe (during the counting after everyone was sent home for the night). I'm trying to verify that it is accurate.

[Eric Newhill]

Matt,
I've already discussed this more than I wanted to. Before I drop off let me make sure I've got this straight. If I'm not mistaken, you think that global warming is a massive scam and you've come around to seeing the covid hysteria in a more or less similar light.

Those are both huge society changing "scientific realities" according to the democrats and other liberal governments. Indeed, the democrats and other liberal governments have stated they want to fundamentally change society using those "realities" as an excuse.

Yet you do not think that stealing an election would be beyond such people and you think Trump is the real threat. I hope you can see why I am perplexed by your position.

As for declaring martial law to keep Trump in office - or whatever - actually, I'm all for it, though I doubt it will happen. As I see it, the country is ruined at this point. Four years of covid lockdowns (or whatever the excuse is), Green New Deal climate regulations, open borders, interventionist wars, reparations for black people (and other perpetual victims), quota systems in all hiring, social media and MSM censorship, , legalized hard drugs, 1619 projects and other ant-American brainwashing that democrats love to instill in our children along with gender confusion/ 6 year olds on opposite gender hormones, stacking the Supreme Court, adding DC and territories as states and massive taxes to pay for it all - the country will no longer be reconizeable and the change will not be good. I used to be a democrat. This is not the democrat party I was a member of.

I prefer to just fight it out now. If that means martial law, civil war, whatever, I say let's get it on and let's get it over with. IMO, there will be sufficient numbers of Americans ready for the same by mid-January.

Best to fight from a position of strength than to wait too long.

[Matt Rouge]

OK, let me summarize a bit, review, and then respond to some specific points.

The following are what I perceive to be the *direct claims* of Michael and Eric stated as simply as possible. Correct me if I get something wrong:

1. Donald Trump would have won in specific states had voter fraud not occurred, and he would have won in the Electoral College and therefore won a second term as President of the United States.

2. Donald Trump also would have won the popular vote by a small margin. Since Biden is now said to have won the popular vote by 7 million votes, the total number of illegal votes is greater than that number.

3. Vote fraud occurred in a number of ways, including A) Cheating via false tabulations on voting machines and B) Completely false ballots being introduced into the system.

The following would also seem to be things your side believes in, either through reasonable extrapolation or you have said something to the effect. I am not trying to put words in your mouth but merely summarize what follows from the first three points. Let me know if I get anything wrong here.

1. Bill Barr, who has been a staunch Trump supporter until now (a perception widely held on both the Left and the Right) is either in on the fraud or lacks what it takes to perceive the fraud (and this despite his position as AG, including the potential for any number of very smart people to tell him he is wrong).

2. Similarly, Republican officials in Georgia, including the governor and secretary of state, are complicit in the fraud or similarly being fooled.

3. Other Republican stalwarts, such as Karl Rove, are in the same position, despite having decades of advising presidents, etc., about elections. The Department of Homeland Security said that it was the most secure election in US history. Etc. etc.

4. A full recount was performed in Georgia that, it is said by those same Republican politicians, showed no fraud and no major discrepancies with the original count. This additional count is supposedly also a fraud of some sort, yet of such a nature that cannot be detected and described by those who have an interest in doing so.

5. Trump, despite having the money, humanpower, and wherewithal to put the best evidence in front of courts, has not been able to get a single judge to concur that fraud had occurred or something close enough to fraud to warrant further action. (Observers were allowed to stand closer in one case the Trump side won; I believe the other win was about something similarly minor.) This despite the fact that many of the judges involved were appointed by Republicans.

6. Despite the Democrats ability to fake *millions* of votes, they chose to use this power only to ensure the victory of Biden and not win the Senate or many, many other down-ballot races that they sorely needed to win. In particular, there was massive vote fraud committed in favor of Trump in Georgia but not in favor of the two Democratic Senate candidates, whose victory would have put the Senate in the hands of the Democrats. Currently, to my knowledge, the *only* person complaining of fraud and being cheated out of victory is Trump.

As it stands, your ongoing attempt to prove your case involves presenting evidence that either wasn't presented to the courts or was rejected by the courts. This would appear tantamount to saying that Trump's legal team is ignoring much of the very evidence that you are capable of presenting. Or, if they are indeed presenting it all, then why are the courts rejecting it all? Is the claim then that the courts are *incapable* of acting on any of the evidence that you cite?

Important point: this isn't a paranormal phenomena we're talking about! Your assertion is that MILLIONS of votes were physically or electronically faked. Those are not things that can be swept under the rug by Democratic ninjas. The alleged fake physical ballots still exist, at least most of them, and people could in theory find pallets and bundles of the stuff and say, "Here! These are all fake!" People could presumably look at the tallies from the voting machines, etc., and show that hacks were employed that favored Biden.

These things haven't happened. This puts your on the horns of the dilemma:

Horn 1: You are adducing evidence that you say shows fraud and that, in theory, could be followed up on with physical/electronic checks of some type and *prove*, conclusively, that fraud has occurred.

Problem: Why haven't *any* such checks been performed, or, if performed, not shown that fraud has occurred?

OR

Horn 2: You are claiming that the fraud was of such a nature that it is impossible to detect it.

Problem 1: Then why are you citing evidence? That leads back to Horn 1.

Problem 2: The implication then is that the election was completely, absolutely insecure and that *all* of the people who are saying it was secure are lying or fooled. This would include thousands of people: all of the officials in charge of running elections, the designers of the equipment and systems, etc. etc. Everyone.

Problem 3: What makes this election different from any other, then? Mail-in ballots, you say? Those are physical artifacts, so back to Horn 1.

Problem 4: If fraud is undetectable, then how do you know that the Republicans didn't engage in fraud as much as the Democrats? Isn't that simply a biased assumption?

---

In conclusion, your position arises from bad epistemology and bad, biased thinking (i.e., you wanted Trump to win and you would now prefer to see him as having been cheated than having lost).

Note that I have addressed above the framework of your thinking and not any individual piece of evidence. I don't need to assess the evidence, since I am saying that, were the evidence real and substantial, things would of necessity be other than they are: i.e., there would be smoking guns that the courts would recognize, and people would be getting in trouble.

Conspiracy theories always relies on the trick of accusing anyone who doesn't support the CT as being a "liar or fool," as Bill Barr is now being accused by those who support the fraud theory. Eric has done so consistently in this thread.

Further, a key problem with conspiracy theory thinking is that most of those* who support the theories are blind to the fact that our understanding of reality itself would be completely undermined if the theory were true. To wit:

• If the moon hoax CT were true, our understanding of more or less everything about the past 50 years would be a lie.

• If 9/11 trutherism were true, then we would have to believe in a vast cabal of people who can do such a thing and never be caught--not a single person involved.

• If the UFO CT conspiracy were true (i.e., UFOs are coming here all the time and a group within the government knows it), then, well, a *whole lot* would be different than we think it is!

• If this vote fraud conspiracy were true, then wow. Same kind of thing. *Everyone* involved in managing elections is completely stupid or is in on the fix. Our election and presumably every election in the world is completely insecure, and millions of votes can be interpolated into the system with no one able to prove that it happened or get any traction on proving that within the government--even by people one would think are sympathetic to that cause. The conspiracy itself would have to involve thousands of people--and not a single person has been caught red-handed or come forward to reap the benefits of showing what a whole fraud the whole thing has been being a media star for doing so. Mission accomplished!

But otherwise, everything you thought was true about reality is the same. In Conspiracy World, it's always just this *one* thing...

So that's it. This is classic CT thinking, and it's completely, absolutely, embarrassingly untenable.

[Matt Rouge]

Oh, I had a footnote:

*Some conspiracy theorists *do* say that everything you thought was real is not. David Icke comes to mind. Alex Jones is another.

At least these guys take their thinking to its logical extreme and say so. The problem with most conspiracy theorists is that they do *not* make the extrapolations that they clearly need to make.

[Matt Rouge]

Eric wrote,

||When a hearing appears to be unfavorable to Trump, it is actually favorable to his strategy. It gives him leave to appeal to higher courts and gets him closer to getting into the Supreme Court, which is where he needs this decided before time runs out.||

That forward momentum does not seem to exist right now.

||Bill Barr has admitted that he hasn't looked at the evidence.|| Why has he made a statement at all, then? Why hasn't he simply said that he needs to take a closer look at things?

||The whole CT thing is really a "no true Scotsman" argument.||

To me, it's a matter of pointing pathological thinking that 1. Affects many, many people, 2. Has common elements regardless of the topic, and 3. Is applied to many different topics. CTers tend to believe in many different conspiracies, not just one, such as a certain friend of mine on Facebook who seems to believe in every single one.

One problem is that CTers can be very smart people. To me Richard Dolan, whose channel on UFOs I subscribe to on YouTube, is an excellent UFOlogy historian and a super-smart guy, but he is also a dyed-in-the-wool CTer. I know you're a smart guy, and I'm not sure if you are a general CTer, but you are thinking like one in at least this case.

||A favorite sound bite of the left is "Science says".||

I myself am not a fan of "truth through social pressure," but one problem is where do we draw the line and consider certain things to be beyond the pale and unworthy of discussion. The line has to be drawn somewhere because we do not have infinite resources, including time, energy, and money, to discuss and deal with every possible point of view. But inevitably the line will at times be drawn in the wrong location.

||If people testify under oath about election fraud, videos show it happening, statisticians analyze results and find impossible vote tally patterns, etc - then all of those people are dismissed as kooks and not real experts *because the left has already decided that election fraud couldn't and didn't happen". Then the media steps in and surpasses the speech of all of those now labeled as CT kooks.||

I don't see it that way *in this case* because, as I say above, this is not a paranormal phenomenon or even something like Climate Change involving a complex model. It's a black-and-white physically provable issue for which evidence exists in high abundance if it exists at all. IOW, it's not a matter of opinion or judgment or feeling whether it happened or not. Find and show the fake ballots and tampered-with vote tallies.

||This is just like all of the scientific materialist skeptics who say the "paranormal" is impossible and won't even read the evidence; or, if they do, they misrepresent it to arrive at a conclusion that supports their inherent bias.||

I think they are two completely different cases. Fake paper ballots are physical artifacts that either exist or not. If they are produced, then I don't think skepticism is possible. Skeptics know what paranormal phenomena are said (by our side) to be, and they simply choose not to believe that they are real (for reasons that our side believe and feel to be unacceptable and unreasonable and often disingenous).

||Now you're being that guy. It's really a passive aggressive form of the "might makes right" approach. If we can shout loudly while suppressing your dissenting voice, then we are "science", "truth", whatever.||

I'm not being passive-aggressive at all. I'm not being biased. If the Democratic party conducted mass election fraud as is alleged, then I want everyone involved to be caught. It would be a major mind-effer to process it all, but process it I would. (Seriously, I do *not* want Joe Biden to have won via cheating. I want completely clean and fair elections.)

||Finally, what experts are you relying on?||
See my main post. I hope we can at least agree that there *are* such things as experts when it comes to the mechanics of running an election. If there are not, then an assessment of the truth of anything pertaining to an election is not possible, I'm afraid.

||It is probably frustrating to you that people you once thought smart and worthy of respect are buying into what you see as Trumpian CT theories.||

The whole phenomenon of Trumpism has been frustrating. It is a movement that has, on the whole, thumbed its nose at the very concept of objective truth and substituted its own false reality. The election fraud claims are merely the latest in a long series of abuses of the truth. E.g., Trump claimed in 2016 that he had actually won the popular vote, that millions of illegals had voted in the election and that's why he'd lost the popular vote, etc.

||Just a suggestion, but if smart people are taking a stance, maybe there is something to it. Maybe it shouldn't just be dismissed off hand. Why do you think that the smart people have suddenly gone off the deep end?||

For any given point of view, there are *always* smart people (in some sense) who support it. There were idiots in the Nazi regime like Göring and Ley, and there were quick-witted people like Goebbels and intellectual theorists like Rosenberg.

Trumpism is, in my view and in the view of most on the left, characterized by the support of the less intelligent and intellectually curious, but it has also had some support from high-IQ individuals like yourself (at an early date) and Michael (at a later date) for various reasons.

||I was thinking about how democrats near worshipped Ted Kennedy (the "lion of the senate"), who, literally, drunkenly killed a woman and left her at the bottom of the river before calling the police so he could sober up and get legal advice first.||

Yes, completely unacceptable. And I was a proud non-supporter of Bill Clinton (and Conservative at the time!) who found the hypocrisy of the Left insufferable. We are not immune to it, and the Left has its own pathologies that warrant close monitoring and decrying as needed.

||There is a belief developed that the bubble is the realm of truth and anyone outside of it is wrong, dangerous and even evil. This is a very sad of affairs and it won't end well.||

I'm not in a bubble and read Conservative media and even check Trumpist media like Breitbart from time to time. You have a tendency to speak as though only you are objective and everyone else is getting fooled (i.e., all the pollsters are wrong; you are right; all the epidemiologists are wrong; you are right). I do admire much about your intellect, but this is a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card that you use too frequently, my friend!

[Michael Prescott]

Matt, that’s a lot of words to try to process. My position is relatively simple by comparison.

I see that the Atlanta ballot counters sent the poll watchers home, then counted ballots when they thought they were not being observed. I also see that Biden scored an anomalously high "outlier" spike of votes at just this time — sufficient votes to more than cover his eventual 12,000 vote margin of victory. In addition, I see evidence that the same ballot counters secretly disposed of a USB drive and triple-counted some ballots. And one of these ballot counters may have a criminal record for fraud. I also see that the official response to these allegations is riddled with factual misstatements, and that no one on that side of the issue seems too eager to testify to a committee under oath.

I conclude that significant fraud occurred in Atlanta.

You talk at length about epistemology, conspiracy theories, whatever. I’m talking about specific allegations made by people under oath and backed by surveillance video.

You are undoubtedly right about conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking in general, but these things must be evaluated on a case by case basis. Most money is not counterfeit, but some of it is. Most people are not serial killers, but a few of them are. Conspiracies on a large scale are rare enough that we should be wary of such claims. But when we have evidence piling up, we need to set aside the philosophy books and go to the videotape.

[Matt Rouge]

Michael wrote,

||I see that the Atlanta ballot counters sent the poll watchers home, then counted ballots when they thought they were not being observed. I also see that Biden scored an anomalously high "outlier" spike of votes at just this time — sufficient votes to more than cover his eventual 12,000 vote margin of victory. In addition, I see evidence that the same ballot counters secretly disposed of a USB drive and triple-counted some ballots. And one of these ballot counters may have a criminal record for fraud. I also see that the official response to these allegations is riddled with factual misstatements, and that no one on that side of the issue seems too eager to testify to a committee under oath.

I conclude that significant fraud occurred in Atlanta.||

Is that the standard by which such a conclusion is to be reached? Why can't the fake ballots and counterfeit tallies be identified? Was the full recount of the entire state incapable of finding these discrepancies?

I'm talking about epistemology at length because people are coming to conclusions based on inappropriate standards.

I'm no lawyer, but I know that it is difficult to convict someone of, say, murder based entirely on circumstantial evidence. That seems to be what you are trying to do: say that a murder was committed without the ability to show the body. It would not seem very difficult to locate the body (fake ballots and tallies) in this case.

[Matt Rouge]

Eric wrote,

||If I'm not mistaken, you think that global warming is a massive scam and you've come around to seeing the covid hysteria in a more or less similar light.||

You are mistaken. I have what I would call nuanced positions on both issues. If I had to say what both issues have in common is that the proponents of countermeasures against the threat have done a very poor job of speaking in terms of concrete costs and benefits, and in both cases politicization has muddied the water to the detriment of finding a good solution.

||Yet you do not think that stealing an election would be beyond such people and you think Trump is the real threat. I hope you can see why I am perplexed by your position.||

I don't think it has been shown that the technology to steal an election as has been alleged actually exists.

||As for declaring martial law to keep Trump in office - or whatever - actually, I'm all for it, though I doubt it will happen.||

Surely you know the consequences of such an action. It would set the precedent of allowing *any* bad actor (even if Trump is not one) of pointing to voter fraud (real or alleged) in order to stay in power.

So if Biden were to do this in 2024 if he were to lose the election, then you would be fine with it? I think the opposite would be the case. You would see no evidence of voter fraud and would decry Biden as a would-be dictator.

Also, if voter fraud really happened on the scale that was alleged and Trump *really* cared about the truth and doing the right thing, then would martial law be the course that was best for the country? I would think having some sort of caretaker government that undertakes a full investigation of the fraud and a new, fair election would be the way to go, right? Allowing the self-perceived loser of an election to become dictator would seem to encourage the scenario I outlined above, would it not?

[Michael Prescott]

In this case, I’m convicting them based on sworn testimony plus video plus a disproven alibi. Yes, you could definitely convict someone of murder with that evidence.

The epistemology stuff just seems like a smokescreen to me. Abstractions are fun, but facts are dispositive.

[Michael Prescott]

Matt, I agree that martial law is not the way to go. Not only would it backfire on Trump very badly, but as you say, it would set a terrible precedent.

In this respect I can't help but think of Roman history. As you probably know, the Romans allowed for the legal office of dictator – someone who would be appointed in a crisis to govern without restraint for one year. At first this office was used rarely, if ever. But eventually it started to be used more often.

Sulla, for instance, declared himself a dictator and could have held that position for life, but surprisingly enough, he resigned and went off to live on his farm, where he died peacefully in bed. A generation later, Julius Caesar declared himself dictator for life and had no intention of ever resigning. After he was assassinated, those who succeeded him became, in effect, a triumvirate of dictators, leading ultimately to the Imperial system which continued for more than 400 years. The Republic, at that point, was dead.

I'm afraid that any invocation of martial law to resolve an electoral deadlock would lead in the same direction.

At the same time, if the Deep State (which I firmly believe exists) is going to ally itself with big tech and the media in order to negate the will of the people and steal an election, then the Republic is already dead.

So we are between a rock and a hard place. I don't know the way out. People are flailing, looking for an answer. I think many of us sense we are trapped in a worsening situation.

I have suggested for some time that we may be headed for a civil war or, more optimistically, a peaceful, negotiated national divorce. I do not see very many other alternatives.

As it stands, no matter who is sworn in on January 20 (the odds still favor Biden), half the country will see that person as illegitimate and will be furiously angry and frustrated. This level of internal division is not sustainable for long.

Incidentally, I think you see Trump as a cause when, for me, he is more of a symptom. It’s not that Trump has caused all of this Sturm und Drang on the right. It’s that the right has become increasingly concerned about the direction of the country and the rising influence of the so-called elites (including the country-club Bush-family elites). Trump is merely a symbol or a standard-bearer, a very imperfect one — vulgar, narcissistic, ham-handed, petty, often plain silly.

There *are* Trump cultists who believe the Donald can turn water into wine (and who have insisted to me that he was never unfaithful to his various wives), but I think the vast majority of Trump supporters have a more "nuanced" view (to use your term). We recognize his many defects, we wish we had someone better, but we figure he’s the best available for now. We're like Lincoln excusing Grant's alcoholism because Grant, unlike the other Union generals, was at least willing to fight.

Trump can survive or fall, it doesn’t make that much difference. As the saying goes, the cemeteries are full of "indispensable men." What matters is that many of us believe the US is morphing into a technofascist police state where speech is restricted, elections are rigged, propaganda is "news," science and facts are manipulated, war is permanent, and the Bill of Rights is obsolete. You can say we’re paranoid; we would say you’re in denial. To me, it’s blindingly obvious (though that sounds like an oxymoron) that the US is in crisis, and that if radicals like AOC and Kamala Harris gain ultimate power, we are likely to make a rapid transition from a "soft" dictatorship to a very hard one.

From that perspective, it’s very hard to keep any option off the table, even martial law. You know, Democrats have already imposed the equivalent of martial law in some localities — curfews, stay-at-home orders, arrests of people who dare to go to the beach or drive out of their county, SWAT teams sent to shut down hair salons. This is in the name of COVID, a disease that, for most people, is less dangerous than a bad seasonal flu. Many of us are not eager to see what new dictates these people will come up with if they know they cannot lose another election.

[Matt Rouge]

Michael wrote,

||In this case, I’m convicting them based on sworn testimony plus video plus a disproven alibi. Yes, you could definitely convict someone of murder with that evidence.||

OK, so then we should have an actual indictment and trial, right?

And we should ascertain how many votes they actually were able to change, correct?

You have said that you think the courts should overturn the election. But wouldn't we need to know not just whether *some* fraud occurred but whether the fraud was sufficient to swing the election? If that were not the cause, then any election could be invalidated through a small amount of fraud.

||The epistemology stuff just seems like a smokescreen to me. Abstractions are fun, but facts are dispositive.||

I support you in the search for facts. Thus I have asked numerous questions about the facts. Such as, Why haven't actual fake ballots or rigged voting machines been identified--and is it even possible to do so? And how does the recount in Georgia relate to the fraud that you say occurred there?

[Michael Prescott]

By the way, mentioning Roman history reminds me that the HBO series “Rome,” which is available on HBO Max, is well worth watching. Though not always historically accurate, it captures the feel of daily life in Rome better than anything I’ve seen, and the writing and performances are outstanding.

Another fine series, as long as I’m in a recommending mood, is “The Queen's Gambit” on Netflix. Yes, it’s about chess. But it’s surprisingly addictive.

I’m glad, by the way, that we’re able to discuss the election etc in a civil way, despite obvious disagreements. If more Americans could do this, we would not be in the fix we are in.

[Eric Newhill]

Matt,
The logic of much of your argument allows the following: Al Capone was not gangster and very bad guy. He was merely a businessman that got in trouble for cheating on his taxes *because that's all they could prove in court*.

Court -on a short time frame for discovery at that - appears to be your ultimate arbiter of truth. I guess that's nice because that is an important way the system works. So why then do you think Trump is a Nazi fascist crooked con artist racist so and so? None of that has been proven in court.

As for civil war, martial law and all that- yes. I know what that means and I think it's horrible. Btw, We're already under quasi-martial law anyhow with the covid restrictions. Maybe you don't notice that as much because you're in a republican state. My point is that everything your side wants leads to something like martial law anyhow. That it is my cost/benefit analysis.

The people you like are the ones that did a poor cost/benefit analysis on covid and global warming, as you say. These are not small matters. Why should I trust them to not proceed to do serious damage? What other serious issues will they similarly fail at analyzing correctly?

You dodged a lot of what I questioned. Also, I'm happy to be proven wrong,. That's why I try to interact with smart people. I'm as capable to succumbing to bias as anyone else.

Otherwise, what Michael said. We can see clear evidence.

[Michael Prescott]

Matt, yes, I very much want a trial. I want Ruby and her co-conspirators to spend many decades in a SuperMax cell. Unless they flip and rat out the higher-ups.

But right now time is short and we’re focused on providing probable cause for not certifying some state elections. Trials take years.

The Biden spike that was recorded during the illegal ballot counting is more than sufficient to swing Georgia to Trump. Biden leads by only about 12,000 votes. The anomalous spike was far higher. And we have Ruby on video triple-counting ballots.

The recount was performed by the same people, right? If recounts are sufficient to answer all questions, why do we have poll watchers? Why do we have audits?

Incidentally, serious allegations aren’t limited to Georgia. Check out the postal service worker from NJ who believes his truck was used to transport illegal ballots to Pennsylvania.

Okay, this is fun, but I’m going to sign off for tonight and watch "King Kong" for the 200th time. The original, of course. THERE IS NO OTHER. 😁

[Eric Newhill]

"The whole phenomenon of Trumpism has been frustrating. It is a movement that has, on the whole, thumbed its nose at the very concept of objective truth and substituted its own false reality. The election fraud claims are merely the latest in a long series of abuses of the truth. E.g., Trump claimed in 2016 that he had actually won the popular vote, that millions of illegals had voted in the election and that's why he'd lost the popular vote, etc."

Matt, I have been sorting through your lengthy comments, which are well written and well thought out to an extent, though I totally disagree with most of your points.

You have to understand that the quote above requires evidence. Could you provide examples? I can't think of any.

Meanwhile, people like me are being told by the left that we are inherently racist and we have a set up a society and government that is systemically unfair and, well, evil from its founding to current. So ingrained is this racism that a lot of the bias is "unconscious".

So, according to the left, I can't even know objective reality because I'm Caucasian. I don't even know what my own thoughts are. Only the left can define objective reality. That's a neat trick. Reality is what we say it is. Now shut up and take your beating, racist! In the meanwhile we will dismantle this racist evil country.

Also, according to the left, we are all going to be dead in like 12 years anyhow from global warming, if covid doesn't get us first. Maybe, just maybe if we give the left complete control of everything, we can survive! - yeah sure Matt. Your side is definitely grounded in objective reality. Do you really believe the things you write all of the time?

Sorry if your complaints against Trump seem hollow to me; especially given the alternative.

"Also, if voter fraud really happened on the scale that was alleged and Trump *really* cared about the truth and doing the right thing, then would martial law be the course that was best for the country? I would think having some sort of caretaker government that undertakes a full investigation of the fraud and a new, fair election would be the way to go, right?"

Yes. That is vastly preferable to martial law. However, who is going to do that? Trust in government is just about gone at this point. That is the problem. We had years of Russian collusion insanity. 0 evidence at the end of the day. Without skipping a beat it was on to impeachment over a stupid phone call. We had text messages between philanders in the FBI and DOJ wherein they expressed outright contempt for the lawfully elected President and the people who voted for him. Are these the people that would establish and run your committee of excellence and our "caretakers". They hate us and conspired against us. They are supposed to be the caretakers of the system already.

You, yourself, display the same disdain here, "Trumpism is, in my view and in the view of most on the left, characterized by the support of the less intelligent and intellectually curious, but it has also had some support from high-IQ individuals like yourself (at an early date) and Michael (at a later date) for various reasons."

Same thing Strzok and Page and Clinton have stated; Trump voters are smelly, stupid, racist, deplorable, bumpkins. This is also the language of technocrats that think they are so smart that they will cure the perennial ills of humanity if only the bumpkins would stand down and follow the lead of the enlightened ones. That has never worked out in history and no reason to think it would now. To the contrary, it always involves oppression - and even death - on a mass scale. Who is smarter? People that know some history or those who ignore it?

"I support you in the search for facts. Thus I have asked numerous questions about the facts. Such as, Why haven't actual fake ballots or rigged voting machines been identified--and is it even possible to do so? And how does the recount in Georgia relate to the fraud that you say occurred there?"

If you fill out a bunch of bogus ballots using dead people, out of state residents, copy machines and ballot harvesting and then recount them, you still have the same amount of ballots and same final count.

Fake ballots have been identified and judges have ordered investigations. Michigan has been ordered to investigate as has AZ and now GA. PA got blocked not on the evidence, but of the "theory of laches', which just means the suit was filed too late. That one is definitely going to Supreme Court. So you facts are wrong.

[David Chilstrom]

Michael said:

I’m glad, by the way, that we’re able to discuss the election etc in a civil way, despite obvious disagreements. If more Americans could do this, we would not be in the fix we are in.

Just yesterday, my wife and I were observers of a red/blue dialogue over Zoom hosted by the non-partisan organization Braver Angels. I found it very enlightening, and my wife and I both agreed that the folks on the other side of the red/blue divide came across as considerably more focused and coherent. I was reminded a bit of the Will Rogers quip "I'm not a member of an organized party. I'm a Democrat."

Another non-partisan organization I would highly recommend checking out is Verified Voting. The red/blue site design and the logo with the word "Verified" in red and "Voting" in blue, I think accurately conveys the prioritization of values held by those who identify as "reds" and those who identify as "blues". Democrats are constantly harping on perceived efforts by Republicans to disenfranchise voters, while Republicans seem particularly smitten with the word "illegal", with reference to immigrants, votes, and voters. We need to dismiss the clownish stereotypes and acknowledge that both reds and blues are fundamentally in agreement that our elections should be both free and fair.

Michael, thanks for the recommendation to watch Rome. I'm trying out HBO Max for a month or two (we binge watched Game of Thrones), so I'll give Rome a spin.

[Eric Newhill]

Matt,
I think I'm done at this point. I will leave you with this Big Win for team Trump in the Michigan courts. Let's see how it turns out. The court has ordered that they will be looking into the machines; starting with the one that "glitched" and flipped thousands of Trump votes to Biden - a "glitch" that no one seems to dispute and that I recall being reported as it happened.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/12/06/trump-lawyers-celebrate-court-order-in-case-involving-dominion-voting-machines-n2581120?fbclid=IwAR2JbFZmgFvilDvdPvnjbUps5YkH0idRn-oWmolUi_987lR5ays2fLDoS-8

[Matt Rouge]

Eric wrote,

||You have to understand that the quote above requires evidence. Could you provide examples? I can't think of any.||

Here is what Trump said in 2016 about winning the popular vote:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/27/donald-trump-i-won-the-popular-vote-if-you-deduct-the-millions-of-people-who-voted-illegally/

||So ingrained is this racism that a lot of the bias is "unconscious".

So, according to the left, I can't even know objective reality because I'm Caucasian. I don't even know what my own thoughts are. Only the left can define objective reality. That's a neat trick. Reality is what we say it is. Now shut up and take your beating, racist! In the meanwhile we will dismantle this racist evil country.||

Oh, yeah, Emiliano and I constantly talk about the excesses of the left, and you raise a point about bad epistemology right here. I think there is such a thing as "systemic racism"--but it can't remain a vague thing with which to beat people over the head with as convenient. What is it, what's a fair and productive way of dealing with it, etc. These are the questions we need to ask. Also, just as I ask the right to follow the implications of its thinking, I ask the same thing of the left: So, is racism even a thing that we can ever cure ourselves of? If not, what do we do? And so on. There has to be a vision of what success means, and it can't involve a political catechism that's too complex for the average person to memorize and implement (regarding race, homosexuality, trans issues, etc.).

||Also, according to the left, we are all going to be dead in like 12 years anyhow from global warming, if covid doesn't get us first. Maybe, just maybe if we give the left complete control of everything, we can survive!||

Yeah, that is nonsense and completely unproductive. Ultimately, the left has a pattern (a pathology, if you will) of using issues to have power over others instead of actually, you know, proposing solutions. However, the right also has the tendency to focus on the worst of the left as though that's all we're about. I call myself a "practical Liberal." I want to take care of people and achieve a realistic amount of justice without implementing cures that are worse than the disease.

||Your side is definitely grounded in objective reality. Do you really believe the things you write all of the time? Sorry if your complaints against Trump seem hollow to me; especially given the alternative.||

My side is not the only alternative. Practical, grounded Conservatism (a la Mitt Romney) was also an option--until Trumpism drove it out of the Republican party.

||Yes. That is vastly preferable to martial law. However, who is going to do that? Trust in government is just about gone at this point. That is the problem. We had years of Russian collusion insanity. 0 evidence at the end of the day. Without skipping a beat it was on to impeachment over a stupid phone call.||

The problem is that Trump is not the right representative for the cause of righting the wrong of voter fraud, inasmuch as he doesn't have the trust of half the country and has always--for fun or whatever--said autocratic things, such as maybe he wouldn't respect the results of the 2016 election, encouraging people to chant, "12 more years!" etc. George H.W. Bush declaring martial law would have been totally unacceptable (even had voter fraud *actually* occurred in 1992), but at least a much larger number of people would have trusted him to tell the truth and not arrogate dictatorhood out of a lust for power.

If you want to say that the Russian disinformation accusation and impeachment were ultimately unjust to Trump, well, he brought a lot of mistrust on himself by the things he was saying and doing. Reagan and Bush Sr. survived Iran-Contra largely because they were not erratic politicians constantly shooting their mouths off, destroying trust, and purposely sowing discord. People were able to believe they were not involved when they said they weren't, and Bush Sr. even went on to get elected. (Personally, I think impeachment was a bad idea, though Trump should have been pushed to resign long before that by his own party for a number of reasons. Similarly, I think Clinton should have resigned/been pushed out when the Lewinsky scandal came to light. As for Russian disinformation, I think Trump was sloppy about that as he is about everything, but I doubt that he was actively colluding with the Russians in a smoky room, etc.)

||You, yourself, display the same disdain here [...] Same thing Strzok and Page and Clinton have stated; Trump voters are smelly, stupid, racist, deplorable, bumpkins.||

I have been living in Alabama for a year and I assume there are many people around me who support Trump, but I don't know who they are, and people generally seem as normal as anywhere else. There is a difference, however, between a Trump voter and a true Trump supporter. The real MAGAheads, the Qanon freaks, etc., that really get into Trump *are* deplorable. There are not a small number of people in this country that would be overjoyed to see Trump become dictator for life and putting the "Libs" in their place. These are people who, as I put it, "want the wrong things." People who vote for Trump because they just want tax cuts and Conservative judges are a different story.

||This is also the language of technocrats that think they are so smart that they will cure the perennial ills of humanity if only the bumpkins would stand down and follow the lead of the enlightened ones. That has never worked out in history and no reason to think it would now. To the contrary, it always involves oppression - and even death - on a mass scale. Who is smarter? People that know some history or those who ignore it?||

I think you are basically correct about this. I mean, I think the future is Liberal, but we need to understand that ideology is at best a tool and not an end in itself, and human life and freedom are values that can't be compromised in the cause of creating an ideal society. OTOH, characterizing any program that helps people and rights intolerable wrongs as "socialism" leading to the next Cultural Revolution is also an incorrect (and usually disingenuous) way of presenting things.

||If you fill out a bunch of bogus ballots using dead people, out of state residents, copy machines and ballot harvesting and then recount them, you still have the same amount of ballots and same final count.||

You are making a confident statement based on expertise you just don't have. And I also asked the question whether the fraud is physically undetectable at this point. You seem to be saying that it is. If that's the case, then... well, read my original post, but that leads to arguments based wholly on circumstantial evidence in which neither side can really be shown to be right.

||Fake ballots have been identified and judges have ordered investigations. Michigan has been ordered to investigate as has AZ and now GA. PA got blocked not on the evidence, but of the "theory of laches', which just means the suit was filed too late. That one is definitely going to Supreme Court. So you facts are wrong.||

I have been following the media closely, but I see no particular action by a court that is leading in that direction. Feel free to post a link. The understanding on my side is that Trump's attempt to alter the election result is completely dead in the water.

[Shaun]

Just a value free comment on Matt's observation:"I think the future is Liberal" The future isn't liberal. Religious people and conservatives are breeding at a much higher rate. Evidence indicates that political inclinations are influenced by our genes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038932/#:~:text=Almost%20forty%20years%20ago%2C%20evidence,be%20explained%20by%20genetic%20influences.

[Eric Newhill]

Matt,
Thank you for acknowledging the excesses of the left.

I don't think they can be summarily dismissed, as you do. The excesses have serious policy ramifications. Indeed, they are basing major initiatives on the very excesses. That, to my calculations, makes them dangerous and unfit to make policy. They do not represent 74 million Trump voters and, based on surveys, they don't represent a significant portion of the democrat party.

Believe it or not, I used to be a democrat. The first time I voted it was for Reagan. I voted for Bush senior too. After that it was straight democrat to include Obama his first term. However, the left's excesses drove me away. I will never vote for them again. Under Trump, the Rs became an all inclusive party that addressed the needs of the working man; just like the old style Ds. Yes, Trump can be obnoxious and a boor. I'll take that imperfect style over the utterly flawed substance and content of the left.

Romney? Really? One of the guys who made a bundle sending American jobs overseas? Never!