APOCALYPSE NOW?

posted by John Hindraker at Power Line

Did Joe Biden and the Democrats steal this year’s presidential election? Polls suggest that a great many Americans, including many Democrats, believe that they did. I don’t know whether the election was stolen or not. I will say this: the Democrats went to great lengths to commit, or enable, voter fraud. To cite just a couple of examples, in a number of states, including my own, they used corrupt, collusive litigation to eliminate the minimal safeguards that prevented fraudulent mail-in votes from being submitted, like the requirement that signatures be witnessed. Why would they do this? Obviously, they didn’t want those safeguards to stand in the way of fraud.

And in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Detroit, Democrats locked Republican poll watchers out of the buildings where mail-in votes were being evaluated and tabulated. The Republicans had to get court orders just to be admitted to the premises, long after counting was under way. Why would the Democrats lock out Republicans? Because they intended to count the votes honestly?

Voter fraud has been a problem for a long time, and I think it was worse this year than ever. Did fraud swing the election? Key questions remain unanswered, as far as I know. In several pivotal states, ballot counting was shut down (or allegedly shut down, in the case of Georgia) in the middle of the night. Then, when counting resumed, enormous numbers of ballots that were overwhelmingly in favor of Joe Biden–by margins that can’t possibly be right, not 60/40 but, say, 98/2–suddenly turned up and were counted. Have the Democrats offered any explanation for what happened, or any confirmation that these near-unanimous tranches of Biden votes actually existed? Not that I know of.

The bare facts are suspicious, to say the least. More than 74 million Americans voted for President Trump, 12 million more votes than he received in 2016, and more, by far, than any presidential candidate of either party has ever gotten. And we are supposed to believe that Joe Biden, a mentally impaired senior citizen who didn’t campaign, who rarely left his basement, about whose candidacy virtually no one was enthusiastic outside his immediate family, smashed all records by getting 81 million Americans to vote for him, 12 million more than voted for Barack Obama in 2008? Actual live Americans, voting legally, and only once? While millions of those same voters didn’t vote down-ballot, so that, apart from the presidential race, it was a good year for Republicans? I don’t believe it.

The cold reality is that the Electoral College will meet on December 14, eight days from now. There is no way that the Trump campaign’s various legal challenges, whether meritorious or not, will be resolved in time to make a difference. Which means that that Joe Biden will be inaugurated under a cloud. Close to one-half of Americans will believe, likely correctly in my opinion, that he did not actually win the election. Legal proceedings will continue, but perhaps more important, enterprising authors will write books about the election. Some will argue that the Democrats stole the presidential race, others will try to defend Biden’s “win.” Book authors will have the advantage of time, but what they will not have is subpoena power. They will not be able to compel production of documents or the testimony of witnesses, so their analyses will inevitably be speculative to a great degree. The debate will go on, with partisans on both sides mostly believing what they want to believe.

So what will conservatives do? Two friends of mine who are not given to hyperbole see this emerging situation in terms that one might call apocalyptic. Roger Kimball writes at American Greatness:

As more and more “anomalies” surfaced, the Narrative had to shift again. A couple of weeks ago, the line became, “Maybe there was pretty widespread fraud—it’s a big country, after all—but it was not so serious as to alter the course of the election.”

I thought that an odd response because—speaking of “after all”—Biden’s margin of victory varied between thin and razor thin: some 11,000 votes in Arizona, about the same in Georgia, 20,000 votes in Wisconsin. Biden’s margin in Pennsylvania is 80,000, but that, too, is thin when one considers that around midnight Trump was ahead by some 700,000 votes. What happened?

I think I know, but let’s check back in on the Narrative here next weekend. Now the voice of the Narrative is saying, “Maybe be there was widespread fraud, and maybe, just maybe, it affected the outcome in some places, but it is too late now. The electors meet on December 14, and to persist with any challenge would be to disrupt the process, which is sacrosanct.”

What should conservatives do?

If the legislative and legal powers being asked to scrutinize the election acquiesce in the Narrative and reject Donald Trump, I believe that the “process” they affirm will be that process through which the election was manipulated and then stolen. It will be an affirmation of illegitimacy in the guise of principled face-saving. The real goal—unstated but omnipresent—is to make sure that no one like Donald Trump can ever again be elected. They might just succeed in that. The cost will be the further, perhaps fatal, undermining of our electoral system’s legitimacy.
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The faith in fairness has been shattered beyond recovery and the assumption of anything like a shared consensus seems more and more like a naïve pretense when it isn’t just a cynical hustings gambit.

Roger Simon, meanwhile, writes in the Epoch Times:

2021 will be a year of massive civil disobedience in the United States of America.

How this civil disobedience will manifest, I am not certain, but it will come.
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[T]he seventy-four or so million Trump supporters who feel disenfranchised not only by the manipulations of the opposite party and their media friends but also by the considerable number of self-interested leaders in their own party who have betrayed them, are not likely to resort to violence like the Antifa sociopaths.
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But if these same patriotic people, known as the “deplorables,” are violently opposed, all bets are off.

Civil disobedience will morph into civil war.

I think civil war is a remote possibility, but disunion is starting to look like a practical alternative. That is a big topic for ongoing discussion.

[M]y guess is this new (and more genuine) “resistance” will take three forms: 1. Mass and growing demonstrations; 2. Non-payment of taxes, threatening to bankrupt the national treasury since most of these people are hard-working and employed; 3. A general movement of what we might call John Galt-ism, after the character in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Vast numbers of our citizens will simply check out and return to their own farms, or versions thereof, like the Roman emperor Cincinnatus was alleged to have done.

That strikes me as an optimistic hope.

A third commentator, Michael Barone, the dean of American political analysts, also writes about how conservatives may react to the presumed inauguration of Joe Biden:

[W]e have — or had — a norm against delegitimizing election results. In 1960, Richard Nixon chose to observe that norm and not challenge results in multiple states. In 2000, Al Gore contested the results in Florida but conceded after the final court ruling and segued to issue advocacy.

Not so in 2016. In violation of longstanding norms, Obama administration intel and law-enforcement agencies spied on the opposition party campaign. Officials proffered the dodgy Steele dossier before the FISA court without revealing it was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

In violation of longstanding norms, Democrats refused to accept the result as legitimate. “I will not accede to this. I will resist,” tweeted liberal think tank head Neera Tanden (President-elect Joe Biden’s choice to head the Office of Management and Budget) five days after the election. Democrats took to calling themselves “the Resistance,” suggesting the Trump administration was morally equivalent to the pro-Hitler Vichy regime in France.

Again and again, leading Democrats — Hillary Clinton, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the late Rep. John Lewis, Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter — called Trump an “illegitimate” president. For three years, Democrats advanced the Russia-collusion hoax without finding or producing any evidence except for the discredited Steele dossier.

After that appalling record, Democrats are asking the rest of us to “unify” the country behind the mentally challenged Joe Biden. It isn’t going to happen.

Democrats who are dismayed that many Americans aren’t meekly accepting the legitimacy of the Biden presidency are in the process of learning a lesson taught a very long time ago. You reap what you sow.

I don’t know whether civil disobedience to the Biden regime will be widespread, but I doubt it. Nor will we #Resist by illegal or dishonest means, as the Democrats have done for the last four years through the insane Russia collusion fraud and many other means. But within those parameters, conservatives shouldn’t give an inch. For the sake of what is left of our country, we should #Resist the Biden administration and the Democrats every step of the way for the next four years.