One must read to the end of The Washington Post's editorial, "Abolish the electoral college," before hitting on the real reason the Post's editors want to upend the long-standing constitutional institution. "Mr. Trump's election was a sad event for the nation," notes the Post, "his reelection would have been a calamity."
Maybe, maybe not. That's a matter of partisan perspective. Those who are genuinely concerned about the future of American governance would be calling to strengthen institutions that provide political stability, not destroy them. But when your concerns about "American democracy" are really just a euphemism for partisan power grabs, you end up making lots of sloppy arguments.
Like so:
"It is alarming that a candidate came so close to winning while polling more than 5 million fewer votes than his opponent nationwide. The Electoral College, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy."
The fact that the Electoral College doesn't align with the "popular vote" isn't alarming; it is the point. If the Electoral College synchronized with the outcome of the direct democratic national vote tally every election, it wouldn't need to exist. It isn't a loophole; it is a bulwark.
The Electoral College exists to diffuse the very thing the Post claims is most beneficial: the "overbearing majority," as James Madison put it. If majoritarianism is truly always the best means of deciding an issue, then the Post would support a mere majority of states being able to overturn the First Amendment or decide abortion policy.
But if states still matter, then the Electoral College's "virtues" are far stronger today, in an era when federalism is ignored and Americans are more likely to cluster in urban areas, than it was in the founding generation when Washington was largely powerless. It is one of the institutions that makes a "democracy" tenable in a truly diverse and sprawling nation.
On the most basic level, the Electoral College helps compel presidents to govern nationally rather than represent a handful of states. We saw it when Biden was forced to temper his positions on fracking and defunding the police because he had to appeal to those outside of urban areas. If he is to be successful, Biden must govern in ways that are popular to diverse cultural and geographical areas -- such as North Carolina, Wisconsin and Arizona, and not just California and New York.
Running up the score in big states gives partisan activists fodder, but it is irrelevant. If Donald Trump ran for the national vote, he might well have won it by spending all his time in California and New York talking about things that matter to Californians and New Yorkers. The entire dynamics of elections would be different. Our election is geared toward winning states, not people.
It should also be noted that the system The Washington Post wants to nix has been the most stable in the world. A direct national poll would be a radical change, even by international standards. Most free nations don't have democratic majority votes for their executives. Parliamentary systems, for example, are not national polls. Between 1935 and 2017, the majority of British voters backed the party that formed a government on only two occasions. Voters do not even cast a ballot directly for the prime minister. In 2019, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau "lost" the "popular vote." By eliminating the Electoral College, we are far more likely to spark the creation of smaller parties that would keep presidents from gaining a majority.
The Historical Record Shows America Was Founded Against Racism, Not To Promote It
By Carson Holloway NOVEMBER 20, 2020
The following essay is part of The Federalist’s 1620 Project, a symposium exploring the connections and contributions of the early Pilgrim and Puritan settlers in New England to the uniquely American synthesis of faith, family, freedom, and self-government.
In recent years, some prominent voices on the left have contended that America is and has been from its inception a nation established on racism and racial subjugation. This judgment implicitly informs The New York Times’s 1619 Project. According to its introductory blurb, the project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery … at the very center of our national narrative.”
The American Civil Liberties Union is more direct: “America was founded on white supremacy.” What are we to make of such a disturbing claim?
Before examining its intrinsic merits, we might begin by noting — and rejecting — the improper use that is sometimes made of this interpretation of our country’s character. The assertion that America is a fundamentally racist nation has been deployed to discredit our traditional political institutions, including and especially the Constitution.
More than one article has been written holding that the Electoral College was devised to protect the political interests of the slave states. The same claim has been made more generally about America’s system of federalism. Federalism means “states’ rights,” and everybody knows that the southern defenders of slavery held that their right to self-government at the state level permitted them to enslave African Americans. Later on, after slavery had been abolished, southerners used “states’ rights” to defend their systems of racial segregation and denial of voting rights for black Americans.
Such arguments are both exaggerated and, of course, fallacious. Aside from a few provisions (such as the Fugitive Slave Clause) that were admittedly included to protect slavery, most of the Constitution’s structures and principles were not designed exclusively by or for slaveholders. They were intended instead to both empower the federal government to tend to the nation’s needs and prevent the abuse of that power. They should be judged today by how well they accomplish those (utterly non-controversial) purposes.
From the fact that federalism once sheltered slavery, it does not follow that state-level self-government today is unworthy of the Constitution’s protection. To take an even more obvious example, the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech are not bad or tainted just because some southerners once used that freedom to defend slavery or segregation.
It is also worth noting that today’s left, in claiming that America is founded on racism, aligns itself with some historical characters it might wish to avoid. Racial politics makes for strange bedfellows. This point was made many times by the late Harry Jaffa in response to an earlier generation of critics of America, and it is no less relevant now.
It was, after all, Stephen Douglas — a proponent of the right of territorial governments to establish slavery or not as they saw fit — who argued that “this government was made on the white basis, by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.”
It was Abraham Lincoln — the Great Emancipator — who contended in response that America was founded on the Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal.”
It was Chief Justice Roger Taney — writing in Dred Scott, holding that black Americans could never be citizens — who contended that at the time of the Founding:
[Black Americans had] for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit.
Dissenting from Taney’s view, Justice John McLean noted:
I prefer the lights of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay as a means of construing the Constitution in all its bearings, rather than to look behind that period, into a traffic which is now declared to be piracy, and punished with death by Christian nations.
Lincoln and Frederick Douglass likewise rejected Taney’s account as both a misinterpretation of and a slander on the nation’s Founding. Similarly, in the twentieth century Martin Luther King, Jr., presented the struggle for civil rights as a call to live up to the nation’s original principles, not as a call to reject and replace them.
The point here is not to taunt the left with this embarrassing pedigree of ideas. It is rather to ask which interpretation of America’s fundamental character has proven more constructive. It seems obvious, from even a cursory glance at our nation’s history, that most of the work of making America better has been carried out by people like Lincoln, Douglass, and King, who believed it was fundamentally good to begin with.
As important as these considerations are, they cannot excuse us from the duty of confronting more directly the claim that America was founded on white supremacy, that it was fundamentally characterized by racism from its earliest origins. But is this claim defensible?
Certainly, slavery existed in America from the time of its earliest colonial settlements. That fact alone, however, cannot settle the question. After all, a country with racism in its midst is very different from a country dedicated to racism.
The question is often difficult to address because we are apt to be misled, either by indignation or by protective love. Outraged by the injustices that were committed against generations of African Americans, we might be inclined to condemn the country that committed or permitted those injustices as fundamentally bad.
This is a common enough temptation in our judgments about individuals. Thus a man who has committed theft can be dismissed as nothing but “a thief,” when he is more than only that. On the other hand, a spirit of patriotic affection for our country might lead us to overlook some real defects or minimize their scope.
Just as an affectionate son would not want to admit that his father is a thief, no warm-hearted patriot would want to admit that his nation was founded on racism. How can our minds escape the distorting influence of these natural human passions?
We might try to avoid this problem by taking as our guide an intelligent, sympathetic, and honest outsider. Since it is so hard to judge our own country impartially, we might learn from the judgments of a candid and foreign friend, one who is willing to acknowledge and explain what is good and bad about America. We find such a guide in Alexis de Tocqueville, whose great work, “Democracy in America,” frankly, and honestly, confronts our nation’s experience with slavery, but without holding that it should be understood to define the nation’s core character.
Tocqueville famously notes the decisive importance of a nation’s “point of departure” for its subsequent development. If you want to really know a man, you have to know his childhood. “Only then will you understand the origin of the prejudices, habits, and passions which are to dominate his life.” So it is, Tocqueville adds, with nations. “Peoples always bear some marks of their origins. Circumstances of birth and growth affect all the rest of their careers.”
If we can examine a nation’s birth and infancy, there we will find the origins of its “prejudices, habits, dominating passions, and all that comes to be called the national character.” Here Tocqueville might seem to offer decisive support for the contemporary left’s criticism of America. But unlike many contemporary voices, Tocqueville does not view slavery and racism as fundamentally shaping the nation’s dominant character.
In the first place, he points out that slavery primarily influenced only a particular, localized part of America. Virginia “had hardly been established when slavery was introduced,” and this institution ended up exerting “an immense influence on the character, laws, and future of the whole South.” For Tocqueville, slavery shaped the South but not the whole country’s way of life.
In the second place, Tocqueville presents the origins of slavery in America less as a deliberate choice of the New World settlements and more as a tragic accident the consequences of which gradually grew to immense proportions. Here is how Tocqueville suggests American slavery should be understood:
[An] evil which has percolated furtively into the world. … It began with an individual whose name history does not record; it was cast like an accursed seed somewhere on the ground; it then nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spread with the society that accepted it.
Tocqueville clearly regards the original southern settlers as less moral and less enlightened than their northern counterparts. The northerners came to America primarily to found self-governing communities based upon their (lofty and demanding) religious vision of a righteous society. The original Virginians came primarily in the pursuit of gain. Nevertheless, as Tocqueville reminds us, it would be unjust to the original southern settlers to say that they came to America with a premeditated purpose to establish slavery.
For Tocqueville, the North’s combination of religion and self-government — and not the South’s experience with slavery — set the tone for all of America.
In Tocqueville’s view, America’s original national character was not characterized by the local introduction of slavery by certain settlers, but instead by the long-established culture and deliberate aims of the Anglo-American colonists as a whole. They were, to begin with, liberty-loving Englishmen. They came from a country that had long been agitated by party conflict, and therefore in which “each faction, in turn, had been forced to put itself under the protection of the laws.” Thus, they had learned the value of the rule of law, and had acquired “more acquaintance with notions of rights and principles of true liberty than most of the European nations at that time.”
In addition, by the time of the first settlements, “local government, that fertile germ of free institutions, had already taken deep root in English ways.” Thus the English settlers came to America already committed to “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people.”
Moreover, the northern settlers — and particularly the Puritans of New England — came to America not only with the general habits of freedom characteristic of all the English but with a peculiarly intense inclination toward self-government. They came, Tocqueville says, driven by a “purely intellectual craving,” seeking the “triumph of an idea.”
They wanted to establish communities based upon their Puritan religious and moral convictions. “Puritanism,” however, “was not just a religious doctrine; in many respects, it shared the most absolute democratic and republican theories.” These settlers had “shaken off the pope’s authority” and “acknowledged no other religious supremacy.” Accordingly, they “brought into the New World” a “democratic and republican” form of Christianity,” and “this fact singularly favored the establishment of a temporal republic and democracy.”
For Tocqueville, the North’s combination of religion and self-government — and not the South’s experience with slavery — set the tone for all of America. “New England principles spread first to neighboring states and then in due course to those more distant, finally penetrating everywhere throughout the confederation.” As a result, America was able to embark on its experiment with self-government at a time when most European nations were still ruled by absolute monarchies.
Tocqueville thus offers us a balanced account of America’s origins, one that is both critical and respectful, one that acknowledges the fundamentally good character of our country without ignoring the evils that have marked its history.
The despotism of slavery arose within America and did much to mar its development. But the Americans who built the country were not fundamentally a despotic people. On the contrary, they were a freedom-loving people who sought to establish and perpetuate republican self-government.
This Tocquevillian interpretation of America’s point of departure is certainly more plausible than the claim made by some today that America was “founded on white supremacy.” It is reasonable to suppose that what is fundamentally bad will tend to deteriorate and what is fundamentally good will tend to improve. Nazism was fundamentally established on an ideology of racism. Its evil accordingly grew more malignant over time and was only stopped by the application of overwhelming external force.
Self-generated improvement, however, has obviously been the course of American development. If slavery and racism were the deepest marks on America’s national soul, then why would it have moved so consistently away from them and toward the establishment of freedom and equality?
Christianity provided Americans with the moral and spiritual resources to overcome differences of race, to cast aside old prejudices, to seek and to bestow forgiveness for past injustices.
A fundamentally racist nation would not have produced the generation of leaders who, in 1787, placed in the Constitution a power to abolish the foreign slave trade and who publicly condemned slavery and openly hoped for its eventual abolition. A nation founded on white supremacy would not have exerted itself first to limit the scope of slavery, later to abolish slavery, and finally to eliminate racial discrimination.
Ultimately, in a certain sense, America turned out to be a better country than even Tocqueville appreciated. He was deeply pessimistic about the potential for racial peace in America, even if slavery should be eliminated. Because slavery had been based on race, he thought, nobody on either side would be able to forget it or move beyond it. White Americans would never overcome their prejudices against black Americans, and black Americans would forever burn with resentment about the wrongs that had been done to them.
Tocqueville was certainly correct that the dire legacy of slavery would not be eliminated immediately upon its abolition. America’s path toward racial justice was long and difficult, continuing for many decades after the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, over time the process turned out better than Tocqueville expected. The country was not engulfed in a race war, and whites and black Americans gradually learned to live with each other as fellow citizens.
Here Tocqueville may have overlooked something about the Americans that he actually appreciated and examined closely in other contexts. Tocqueville is famous for his positive account of Christianity’s influence on American democracy. Besides noting the aforementioned role of Puritanism in planting the seeds of self-government, he emphasized Christian morality’s role in placing limits on the power of the majority in America, as well as its ability to elevate the souls of Americans above the narrow individualism and petty materialism that threatened to dominate their lives.
This is the truth but not the whole truth about Christianity. It also teaches its adherents to love their fellow human beings as created in the image and likeness of God, and demands that they forgive those who have wronged them just as they hope God will forgive their own wrongdoing. Indeed, Christianity provided Americans the moral and spiritual resources to overcome differences of race, to cast aside old prejudices, to seek and to bestow forgiveness for past injustices.
Racism existed in America from the beginning, but America was not founded on white supremacy. It was instead founded, as Tocqueville teaches us, on the spirit of religion, freedom, and self-government — a benevolent spirit that gradually overcame racial injustice. This is the true and constructive account of our country that we ought to teach our children.
Carson Holloway, a political scientist, is a Washington Fellow in the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life.
By now it should be obvious - even to conservatives - that we are in a war. It is a conflict that began nearly fifty years ago when the street revolutionaries of the Sixties joined the Democrat Party. Their immediate goal was to help the Communist enemy win the war in Vietnam, but they stayed to expand their influence in the Democrat Party and create the radical force that confronts us today. The war that today’s Democrats are engaged in reflects the values and methods of those radicals. It is a war against us - against individual freedom, against America’s constitutional order, and against the capitalist engine of our prosperity.
Democrat radicals know what they want and where they are going. As a result, they are tactically and organizationally years ahead of patriotic Americans who are only beginning to realize they are in a war. The Democrats’ plan to steal the 2020 election was hatched many years ago when Democrats launched their first attacks on Voter I.D.s, and then every effort to secure the integrity of the electoral system. Those attacks metastasized into an all-out assault on Election Day itself with early- and late-voting grace periods, and a flood of 92 million mail-in ballots, hundreds of thousands of which were delivered in the middle of the night to be counted behind the backs of Republican observers after Election Day had passed.
The result of these efforts is that Election Day no longer really exists as a day when the votes are cast and counted. This is a fact that offers generous opportunities for the election saboteurs to do their work. Those saboteurs’ opportunities were greatly enhanced this year with the installation in battle ground states of voting machines specifically designed to calculate how many votes were required to steal an election and then to switch ballots already cast and deliver them to the chosen party. Mail-in ballots were indispensable to the realization of this plan.
I will not dwell at length on the years it took the Republican Party, and American patriots, to recognize what the Democrat Party had become or the threat it posed to our country as an enemy within. Suffice it to say that Republicans can still be heard referring to Democrats as “liberals” when it is obvious even to them that there is nothing liberal about their principles or methods. They are vindictive bigots who are actively destroying the First Amendment in our universities, on the Internet and in our once but no longer free press. Suffice it to note that while Democrats accuse Republicans including the President of being racists and traitors, the response of Republican leaders is this: “Oh, the Democrats are just playing politics.”
This is not “playing” people. It is war. They are trying to kill us politically, and we need to respond accordingly, to fight fire with fire. Today’s Democrat Party is a party of character assassins and racists. Republicans know this but are reluctant to say it. That is how a pathological liar and corrupt political whore like Joe Biden can accuse the choice of 73 million Americans of being a white supremacist and also murdering 220,000 corona virus patients. That’s why Biden and his gunslingers can do so with no consequences – without so much as a wrist slap – from “moderates” and independents, who know better. The Democrats’ ability to intimidate well-meaning Americans is that great.
Is this too blanket a condemnation? Where, then, is the Democrat who was outraged by the four-year Russia collusion hoax and the failed coup and impeachment attempts – all of which accused the president, without a shred of evidence, of treason? Where was the Democrat who dissented from the public lynching of an exemplary public servant, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, over an incident that never happened 37 years ago at a time when he was a high school kid? Where is the Democrat who has condemned the violent street criminals of Antifa and Black Lives Matter who got away with conducting the most destructive civic insurrection in American history, orchestrating mayhem and disrespect for the law that led to the murders of scores of people who happen to have been mainly black?
What follows is a basic vocabulary for understanding the political war that has engulfed us. When it is used by enough Americans who love their country, it will cancel the surreal universe that Democrats’ lies have imposed on us, and the war will be on its way to being won.
Democrats are not democrats; they are totalitarians. They have declared war on the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the election system, and the idea of civil order. They have called for the Republican President of the United States to be de-platformed and jailed. Their obvious goal is a one-party state that criminalizes dissent. To them, support for such basic necessities as borders and law enforcement are racist. If you oppose their efforts to legalize infanticide, they will condemn you as enemies of women, and if you make videos of their confessions to selling body parts of murdered infants, they will - like Kamala Harris - throw you in jail.
Progressives are not progressive; they are reactionaries. They are out to abolish liberal value systems and create a status hierarchy where race, gender, and sexual orientation define and confine you to an unalterable place in their new social order. If you are white or male or heterosexual or religious – Justice Kavanaugh was all four - you are guilty before the fact.
But if you are a member of a designated (but increasingly imaginary) “victim” group you are innocent even when the facts show you are guilty - like the reprehensible female who lied to Congress in a calculated attempt to destroy Kavanaugh’s life and career. If you are a member of a “victim” group you have an unlimited license to persecute others. Thus, the LGBTQ lobby is currently behind a nation-wide crusade to strip Christians of their First Amendment rights and criminalize their religion. They use their victim status to leverage their hate of people who don’t embrace their agendas, and deploy it to crush them – and only Republicans seem to care.
Identity politics is a pure form of racism, yet Trump is the only Republican I’m aware of who has had the political spine to call a Democrat a racist. Identity “wokism” is a totalitarian politics because it encompasses every aspect of life, down to the pronouns one is ordered to use. The progressive police state will leave no space free.
Racists and aspiring totalitarians are what Democrats have become. The only moral principle they are guided by is the old Bolshevik saw, “the ends justify the means.” They will say anything however false and condone anything, however criminal, which advances their goal of maximum power.
Since race is the principal weapon wielded by Democrats, this is most evident in their claim that there is “systemic racism” in America, which needs to be rooted out even if it means destroying the very foundations of law and order. When two Republican canvassers refused to certify the election result in Detroit – a city once the richest in America but now mainly black and poor thanks to fifty-nine years of misrule by Democrats – they were accused of “systemic racism.” This charge and the accompanying threats by the Democrat mob were so intimidating the two withdrew their objections. But if there was in fact election fraud in Detroit, to object to it is not by any stretch of the imagination “systemic racism.” To believe otherwise is to believe that black people, due to their skin color, are incapable of committing election fraud. How racist is that?
“Systemic racism” is an assertion made reflexively by Democrats that is never accompanied by evidence. For good reason. Systemic racism has been outlawed in America since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If there were actual instances of systemic racism in 2020, there would be lawsuits – plenty of them. Even making the racist assumption, which the Identity Politics crowd does make, that all white people are white supremacists by dint of their skin color, there are tens of thousands of black lawyers, prosecutors, district attorneys, attorneys general, and elected officials who would be filing lawsuits over a practice that is illegal. You never hear of massive lawsuits over systemic racism, because “systemic racism” is a myth. The myth lives because it is an indispensable weapon wielded by Democrats to advance their anti-democratic agendas and quests for power.
But the only reason Democrats are able to do this so successfully – even going so far as to justify the arson, looting and general destruction in more than 600 American cities this summer – is because Republicans, and conservatives generally, are too cowardly to confront them. This war will continue until patriotic Americans summon the courage to call Democrats the racists, liars, character assassins and aspiring totalitarians that they actually are. And to do so in so many words. Blowback works.
David Horowitz is the author of The Enemy Within: How A Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, which will be published by Regnery on April 6, 2021.
Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley questioned Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan to pay for a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, asking where the money will come from when she wants to pay people to stay home and not work and she wants student loan forgiveness.
As CNSNews.com reported, Ocasio-Cortez is pressuring former Vice President Joe Biden to keep his promise of a $2 trillion Green New Deal.
Joined by members of the so-called squad – Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (R-Mich.) – and other leftists at a press conference outside the Democratic National Committee on Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez said, “We’re winning. It's working. It's happening. And we are going to secure our future. We're going to secure the basic tenets of a Green New Deal, a multi-trillion jobs program for climate, for environmental, racial, gender and class justice.”
That same day, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “To get the virus under control, we need to pay people to stay home.”
“Republicans are mad at this when they literally just voted to do just this in March. The reason they’re opposed to it now is because last time they got a Wall Street bailout and this time all that’s left is helping working people, the disabled, the poor, etc.,” she tweeted.
Haley asked where the money will come from to pay for a Green New Deal if she wants people to get paid to stay home.
“AOC, Are you suggesting you want to pay people to stay home from the money you take by defunding the police? Or was that for the student debts you wanted to pay off, the Green New Deal or Medicare for All? #WhereIsTheMoney,” Haley tweeted on Thursday.
Haley said it’s just “another reason” for Republicans to win the Senate runoffs in Georgia in January so the Senate remains in Republican control and can “stop bad things from happening.”
“Another reason we need to win the Ga races, to stop bad things from happening. AOC and her liberal squad are pressuring Biden to pass their $93 trillion Green New Deal, which would cost up to $600,000 per household estimated by the American Action Forum,” she tweeted on Friday.
Will You Join Us in Praying Over these FIVE STRATEGIC PRAYER POINTS and forwarding this email to at least 10 other people who are prayerfully concerned about our nation?
PRAYER POINT ONE: Expose and hold accountable those who practice the seven things God hates and He says are detestable to Him: According to Proverbs 6:16-17, There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are detestable to Him:
1. haughty eyes 2. a lying tongue 3. hands that shed innocent blood 4. a heart that devises wicked plans 5. feet that are quick to rush into evil 6. a false witness who pours out lies 7. a person who stirs up conflict in the community. Heavenly Father, we humbly ask that in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada please silence every lying tongue and convict the hearts of those who devise wicked plans intended to invalidate and nullify the expressed will of the voters. Stop those who would be quick to rush into evil. Expose and silence every false witness who utters lies and operates in deceit. Thwart the efforts of every person who attempts to stir conflict within their community.
PRAYER POINT TWO: Expose all wickedness intended to steal, kill and destroy the electoral process in these battleground states. Heavenly Father, we humbly ask that in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada that you “reveal deep and hidden things. You know what lies in darkness. Light dwells with You.” (Daniel 2:22) Please bring to light and expose every lie, deceit, deception, misrepresentation and illegal act intended to “steal, kill and destroy” the electoral process and the expressed will of the citizens and these states. (John 10:10).
PRAYER POINT THREE: Frustrate those who seek to steal, kill, and destroy electoral integrity and authentic, accurate vote counts in these battleground states. Heavenly Father, please, “Frustrate the plotting of the shrewd so that their hands cannot perform their enterprise or attain success.” May no weapon formed intended to steal, kill and destroy the authentic, accurate vote count and expressed will of the people in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada “be allowed to prosper.” (Isaiah 54:17).
PRAYER POINT FOUR: Frustrate and thwart the plans of those who attempt to sabotage the state’s election laws and subvert the expressed will of the people. Heavenly Father, please “Capture the wise by their own shrewdness and quickly thwart the advice of the cunning” (Job 5:12) whose intention is to sabotage and subvert state and federal election law and the expressed will of the people in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. “Hold them guilty O LORD, by their own devices let them fall.” (Psalm 5:10)
PRAYER POINT FIVE: Psalm 5 for protection and favor for President Trump. Heavenly Father, please “Give ear to President’ Trump’s words, O LORD, consider President Trump’s groaning. Heed the sound of his cry for help, His King and His God. For to You does he pray. In the morning O LORD, you will hear his voice; in the morning he will order his prayer to you and eagerly watch. For you are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness; no evil dwells with You. The boastful shall stand before Your eyes; You hate all who do iniquity. Destroy those who speak falsehood You abhor the man of bloodshed and deceit. But as for President Trump by Your abundant lovingkindness he will enter Your house. At your holy temple he will bow in reverence for you. Lord, please lead President Trump in Your righteousness because of his foes. Make his way straight before him. There is nothing reliable in what they say; their throat is an open grave; they flatter with their tongue. Hold them guilty, O God, by their own devices let them fall! In the multitude of their transgressions thrust them out for they are rebellious against You. But let President Trump take refuge in You and be glad. Let him ever sing for joy. May you shelter him. May he who loves Your name exult in You. Bless President Trump, O LORD. Surround him with favor as with a shield. “Heavenly Father, please give supernatural wisdom, strength and discernment to the President and his advisors regarding how to navigate the road ahead. In the Mighty Name of Jesus We Pray
SIDNEY POWELL: DOMINION WAS DESIGNED TO CHANGE ELECTION
NOVEMBER 19, 2020 | FROM NEWS MAX
Lord, protect the freedom we still experience in our nation today. Please heal our land and give us wisdom of how to move forward. Encourage our hearts in the midst of so much discouragement.
In building its case for multi-state audits of those relying on Dominion Voting Systems, the Trump legal team has a former Venezuelan official saying it was designed to rig elections, according to former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell on Newsmax TV.
“The math just doesn’t add up for anything and we know Dominion has a long history of rigging elections, because that’s what it was created to do to begin with,” Powell told Tuesday’s “Greg Kelly Reports,” noting even the “founder of the company admits he can change a million votes, no problem at all.”
Powell told host Greg Kelly the team has an affidavit of a former high-ranking Venezuelan military officer who now lives in America, saying he saw the rigging of Venezuelan elections for Hugo Chavez.
“So don’t tell me there’s no evidence of fraud,” she continued. “We’ve got increasingly mounting evidence of significant fraud across multiple states that casts into question the validity of elections in every swing state.”
It is not just limited to Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia either, she said. adding “it went beyond that, too.”. . .
“It was created so Hugo Chavez would never lose another election, and he did not after that software was created,” Powell said. “He won every single election and then they exported it to Argentina and other countries in South America, and then they brought it here.”
Powell also argued, as a foreign company, the use of that election system already violated President Donald Trump’s order against foreign interference in our election.
“Our votes were eventually counted in Barcelona, Spain, or Frankfurt, Germany, on foreign servers,” Powell claimed. “It’s absolutely stunning.”
And that includes the Democrat and mainstream media’s efforts to ignore the corruption.
“What’s really stunning is the efforts against getting the stuff out on this,” she concluded. “But you have to realize every tech company, every media company, every social media company, scads of globalist corporations have been doing business in countries with these dictators that have been installed through this rigged election system for decades.”
(Excerpt from News Max. Article by Erick Mack. Photo Credit: Getty Images.)
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research.
Celebrities and politicians urging people to visit Georgia and falsely claim residency for the sole purpose of voting in two critical U.S. Senate runoff elections Jan. 5 are advocating criminal actions and should be ashamed of themselves. This call for voter fraud should be rejected.
The Georgia runoff elections are extraordinarily important because they will determine which political party controls the U.S. Senate.
Results of the Nov. 3 election gave Republicans 50 seats in the 100-member Senate and gave Democrats 48. If Republicans win one of the Georgia seats Jan. 5, they will hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate; if the GOP wins both seats, it will hold a 52-48 majority.
But if Democrats win both Georgia races, the Senate will be split 50-50 between the two parties. Assuming that President Donald Trump’s lawsuits fail and he is replaced by Joe Biden as president Jan. 20, Kamala Harris will be vice president and can break the 50-50 tie in the Senate to give Democrats majority control of the chamber by the slimmest possible margin.
Multiple candidates ran for the two Senate seats representing Georgia, preventing any candidate from gaining a majority. As a result, Georgia law requires the top two candidates for each seat to face each other in runoff elections to be held Jan. 5.
It is a felony for people to visit Georgia and falsely claim to be residents just so they can vote. Millions of us have visited states on vacation or business, but that doesn’t make us residents entitled to vote there.
Georgia Code §21-2-561 states that providing false information when you are registering to vote is a felony. So is voting by an “unqualified elector” under §21-2-571. So if you register to vote when you know that your assertion of residency is false, and then you vote or even just attempt to vote Jan. 5 knowing you are not a qualified voter of the state, you have violated both of these state criminal statutes.
The punishment for this illegal activity under Georgia law is a minimum of one year and a maximum of up to 10 years in prison and as much as a $100,000 fine. Georgia obviously takes this crime very seriously.
No matter how interested nonresidents of Georgia are in that state’s crucial election, they should not listen to the ill-informed, manipulative, and reckless tweets and calls for them to break the law and pretend to be Georgia residents just so they can vote in the two Senate races.
This call for illegal voting—coming primarily from Democrats—is a basic betrayal of the democratic process. Everyone who urges or participates in this criminal activity should be ashamed of themselves and deserves to be criticized, no matter who they are and which party they favor.
Fox News reports, for example, that in a now-deleted tweet, New Yorker journalist Eric Levitz wrote: “These run-offs will decide which party controls the Senate and thus, whether we’ll have any hope for a large stimulus/climate bill. If you have the means and fervor to make a temporary move to GA, believe anyone who registers by Dec 7 can vote in these elections.”
Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang also tweeted that he and his wife are moving to Georgia to help the two Democratic contenders.
In the Nov. 3 election in Georgia, Republican Sen. David Perdue received 49.71% of the vote and Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff received 47.96%, forcing them into a runoff.
The other Senate race on the ballot Nov. 3 was a special election. Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson retired in 2018, before the end of his term. Republican Kelly Loeffler was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp to fill the seat until the special election.
She and Rep. Doug Collins split the Republican vote Nov. 3; Loeffler received 25.9% and Collins got 19.95%. Democrat Raphael Warnock got the highest vote total, with 32.91%. Therefore, the two top vote-getters, Loeffler and Warnock, will be in the Jan. 5 runoff election.
Dec. 7 is the deadline to register to vote in Georgia for the Jan. 5 election for any residents of the state who have not already registered, including voters who have just moved to Georgia. But under the Georgia Election Code, §21-2-217, you have to be an actual resident of the state to vote, not just a visitor.
Georgia law says that a voter cannot be in the state “for temporary purposes only without the intention of making [Georgia] such person’s permanent place of abode.” In other words, if you head to Georgia for the primary purpose of helping the candidates in the special election with no intention of actually staying in the state and living there, you are not eligible to register or vote.
Those who think they can get around this requirement by simply lying and asserting their intention to make Georgia their permanent abode should beware. Under the law, county registrars are given the authority to consider a long list of other factors that may contradict the “applicant’s expressed intent.”
These factors include an individual’s “business pursuits, employment, income sources, residence for income tax purposes … leaseholds, sites of personal and real property owned by the applicant, motor vehicle and other personal property registration, and other such factors that registrars may reasonably deem necessary to determine” the applicant’s legal residence for voting purposes.
And it is not just registrars. Under Georgia law, §21-2-230, any registered voter can challenge the eligibility of any other registrant in his or her county or municipality. So there is an entire army of grassroots Georgia voters out there who can be, and should be, on the lookout for out-of-staters registering to vote who falsely claim to live in their neighborhoods and their communities.
The Jan. 5 Senate races in Georgia are understandably capturing national attention, and both Republicans and Democrats are mounting major efforts to win the seats. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. But having out-of-state voters visit a state for a few weeks to masquerade as Georgia residents is not a democratic exercise—it’s a crime.
Anyone who visits Georgia temporarily and falsely claims to be a resident cheats the real residents of the state—no matter which side of the political aisle they favor—by interfering in their choice of who should represent them in Congress. There’s no justification for that, no matter how passionate you are about the outcome of an election.
Vote in your own home state when elections are held—not in the home state of others.
Even though the votes are still being counted, Joe Biden declared that he is the President-Elect, a shadow government office invented by Obama and invested with a pseudo-government seal, and he has been holding fake briefings and taking phone calls with foreign leaders.
The United States only has one president at a time. Maintaining a fake shadow presidency undermines the sitting administration to the American people and to foreign governments.
It’s illegal and inappropriate. So the Democrats are doing it anyway.
Incoming presidents, since Truman’s day, receive briefings and, since Kennedy’s day, get funding for their transition teams, but, according to the law, only once it’s clear who won. The last time this happened, the Bush transition was blocked by Democrats until December.
But the media is boosting its Biden cable network coup by threatening the head of the GSA.
A week after the election, the media descended on Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration (GSA), demanding that she release funds to a Biden transition.
Media hit pieces like the New York Times' "How Emily Murphy Stands Between Biden's Team", Bloomberg's "Who Is the GSA's Emily Murphy, Trump Appointee Holding Up Biden Transition", and the Washington Post's "Trump Appointee at GSA Declines to Sign Letter Authorizing Biden Transition", personalized the issue and set off a lynch mob swiftly leading to threats against her.
It’s still early in November. The media conveniently forgot the time its party blocked a presidential transition for over 4 weeks, not just through November, but into December.
David Barram, a top Clinton donor who supported every one of their campaigns since 1992, and tech industry figure, who had been appointed to head the GSA, didn't get this kind of treatment when he turned down transition funding to the Bush-Cheney campaign after the 2000 election.
Not only did Barram block funding until Florida’s vote was certified, but he kept blocking it until the Supreme Court had made its decision, leaving very little time for any transition to happen. The Bush-Cheney campaign pursued its own privately funded transition, as did Al Gore, the way presidential transitions used to work until the Presidential Transition Act changed all that.
Despite all this, Barram was never publicly attacked or threatened the way that Murphy is.
Worse still, the media recently trotted out Barram to argue that the GSA should release transition funding to the Biden-Harris campaign. “First off, all these media outlets who call the election have called it for Joe Biden, I think the winner is pretty clear,” Barram recently insisted.
Media outlets, it ought to go without saying, but no longer does, don’t pick presidents.
But, as with so much else, the same media that amplified claims that Gore votes were thrown out in Florida, that Secretary of State Katherine Harris discriminated against minorities, and that Jeb Bush had rigged the election for his brother, now yells that such claims are not only false, but dangerous, and must be censored at all costs. The media that had allowed every Democrat to hold forth about the Florida election, now won’t even allow Republicans to speak.
Democrat claims of election fraud must be heard, but Republican claims are “disinformation”.
Even while the Washington Post warns Republican claims of election fraud are dangerous, it just ran an article suggesting that Harris rigged the 2000 election to win an ambassadorship.
It’s dangerously irresponsible for Republicans to cast doubt on an election result, but not for Democrats. And it’s also dangerous for Republicans, but not Democrats, to block a transition.
And yet the arguments that Barram made to block GSA funds back then hold up well today.
"With legal action being pursued by both sides, it is not apparent to me who the winner is," Barram had argued.
"Until the results are clear, and as long as both sides are going to court, the results are not clear yet," GSA spokeswoman Beth Newberger had insisted.
The legal standard for authorizing a GSA transition is, in the words of the Democrats, the end of legal action over the results of the election. As long as legal action is being pursued, including a trip to the Supreme Court, the GSA cannot and should not release funds to a transition.
In congressional testimony, Barram took it further and cited an authoritative Democrat source.
"Congress made it perfectly clear that if there is ‘any question’ of who the winner is 'in a close contest' this determination should not be made," Barram pointed out.
He then quoted, Rep. Dante Fascell, the sponsor of the Presidential Transition Act.
Rep. Fascell had stated that, “If the Administrator had any question in his mind, he simply would not make any designation in order to make the services available as provided by the Act. If as an intelligent human being and he has a doubt, he would not act until a decision has been made in the electoral college or in the Congress."
Kennedy had recently won, through Daley’s voter fraud in Chicago, and after spending $360,000 on JFK’s expenses, the Democrats wanted government funding for presidential transitions. They also wanted some assurance of getting government assistance from the administration of an opposing party even though no such issues had come up to date.
Fascell’s boundary went further than Barram’s, with the cutoff being the electoral college and congressional certification. That’s an objective and solid constitutional standard, unlike the end of legal proceedings, let alone cable news network election calls, that are subjectively partisan.
More importantly, these are the rules that Democrats, not Republicans, had made. And Democrats were happy to live by these rules in Bush v. Gore when they helped them.
Now the same rules are suddenly oppressive, dangerous, corrupt, and treasonous.
Much like casting doubt on the election results in 2000, 2004, and 2016, was “patriotic”, but casting doubt on the election results in 2008, 2012, and 2020, is “deeply dangerous”.
Political factions can have different views, but they cannot be allowed to have different laws.
That’s called equality, not “equity”, before the law.
The core crisis of political power is that Democrats only respect the law when it’s in their favor and ignore it, attack it, or dismiss it when it isn’t. A Democrat Senate blocking Bush’s judicial nominees was a noble defense of civil rights, but a Republican Senate blocking Obama’s judicial nominees was an attack on democracy, and then Democrat Senate members trying to block Trump’s judicial nominees was once again noble. The legitimacy of the Senate as an institution, or the filibuster as a tactic, changes every time the Senate changes hands.
Counting every legal vote was noble in Florida in 2000, but is a disgusting lowball tactic in Pennsylvania in 2020. Fighting the election results in the Supreme Court was in the highest traditions of our political system in 2000, but is an outrageous abuse twenty years later.
It was appropriate for the GSA to block presidential transition funding in 2000, but doing so in 2020 may kill people, and the relevant GSA officials should be threatened and harassed.
Living in a nation of laws means having to live with those laws.
Harassing the head of the GSA is political intimidation and only highlights the fundamentally terroristic and abusive nature of the political coup that the Democrats are perpetrating.
Rep. Dante Fascell, the Democrat sponsor of the Presidential Transition Act, was quite clear about the GSA administrator not taking personal initiative in a disputed election. So was Bill Clinton’s GSA boss. As long as a presidential election is being contested, there’s no transition.
That’s not only the law, it’s the rules that Democrats made. Now they have to live by them.
In a segment this week discussing how the political Right is handling the results of the 2020 presidential election, CNN reporter Pamela Brown suggested that it was a “threat to democracy” that people were turning away from dominant social media platforms like Facebook and signing up to be on more pro-free speech platforms and sites.
CNN reporter Brian Stelter bemoaned smaller conservative news channels garnering more viewership in recent weeks as Trump world has clashed with Fox News over some of the network’s recent coverage
“I think, big picture, Pamela, here is the concerning trend line here. People are going more and more into their own echo chambers, more into their own bubbles, especially Trump voters,” Stelter said. “There’s this new social media app, called Parler, getting a lot of attention. Because conservatives are leaving, saying they’re leaving Twitter and Facebook, going off to Parler because they believe Parler is a safer space for them.”
“What we’re seeing is even more of a bunker mentality in right-wing media,” Stelter continued. “Ultimately, that’s not good for the country.”
“No, it is not good,” Brown responded. “It is a threat to democracy that these people are in echo chambers and they’re getting fed a diet of lies essentially.”
TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED VIA CNN:
PAMELA BROWN, CNN REPORTER: Instead of publicly focusing on the pandemic or stimulus or the presidential transition, today President Trump is taking on FOX News. As you see here, retweeting days-old replies, bashing the channel, and suggesting that FOX is to blame for his defeat.
Joining me now, CNN chief medica correspondent, Brian Stelter, anchor of “RELIABLE SOURCES.”
Brian, this country is in a crisis now, looking at the coronavirus alone. Why is the president doing this? Why is he focused on FOX in the midst of what this country is going through right now?
BRIAN STELTER, CNN REPORTER: He is tweeting more about FOX News than about COVID. It shows his five stages of grief. And it signals he is still in the anger phase. He is angry at FOX.
And so are some of FOX’s loyal viewers. They’re angry FOX called Arizona for Biden early on. They’re angry FOX has rightly identified Biden as the president-elect. And so Trump and some of his fans are lashing out on social media.
Pamela, this has always been a marriage of convenience between Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. It’s always been a marriage of convenience. Certainly, both sides are saying hurtful words now, but it is still a marriage. Trump may be threatening to see other people, but it is still a marriage.
Trump is promoting Sean Hannity, sharing clips that he likes on FOX. It is complicated. And divorce could be down the road, but not yet.
BROWN: Right. He seems to like the opinion hosts —
STELTER: Yes.
BROWN: — like Sean Hannity more than the actual straightforward news journalists. You’re tracking other right-wing media outlets. What patterns are you seeing among voters?
STELTER: When I refer to a divorce, that’s because there are other suitors out there.
There are these smaller right-wing channels, like “Newsmax” and “One America News,” that are further to the right than FOX News. And Trump is promoting those channels right now.
“Newsmax” has seen an extraordinary surge in viewership. Still a lot lower than CNN or FOX. But this is a channel that had 50,000 viewers before the election. Now sometimes a half million viewers. There’s clearly an audience for a channel that’s so far right that they deny Biden is the president-elect, that they promote voter fraud innuendo all day long. So some FOX fans are going off to other channels instead.
It is possible, after Inauguration Day, that Trump may do the same, whether he wants to launch a streaming service, host a radio show or go off to a channel like “Newsmax.”
There continues to be a lot of chatter about what his future media platform might be. Could he end up with a show on FOX News? It is not out of the realm of possibility. But there are definitely other options for the outgoing president. That’s something to really keep an eye on.
I think, big picture, Pamela, here is the concerning trend line here. People are going more and more into their own echo chambers, more into their own bubbles, especially Trump voters.
There’s this new social media app, called Parler, getting a lot of attention. Because conservatives are leaving, saying they’re leaving Twitter and Facebook, going off to Parler because they believe Parler is a safer space for them.
What we’re seeing is even more of a bunker mentality in right-wing media. Ultimately, that’s not good for the country.
BROWN: No, it is not good. It is a threat to democracy that these people are in echo chambers and they’re getting fed a diet of lies essentially.
STELTER: Lies, that’s what it is. Thanks.
BROWN: Yes. Brian Stelter, thank you so much.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.
A lawsuit filed Nov. 8 in Michigan alleges that Detroit, Mich. elections officials oversaw and openly encouraged election fraud totaling many “tens of thousands” of fraudulent ballots, plus other illegal election-tampering.
The complaint filed by an in-state conservative nonprofit legal group alleges numerous instances of illegal and suspicious activity in the Democrat stronghold encompassing Detroit, Wayne County. President Trump’s legal team has filed a separate lawsuit alleging additional voting crimes and irregularities in the county.
The current results of the presidential race in Michigan suggest an approximately 146,000-vote gap between President Trump and Joe Biden, and an 84,000-vote gap between U.S. Senate candidates Gary Peters (D) and John James (R). The Associated Press and the state’s Democrat officials say Biden has won the state’s electoral votes and that Trump’s claims of fraud are insulting and inaccurate.
Wayne County is estimated to have been the site of some 850,000 votes this year. If this lawsuit is accurate, however, a massive portion of these votes is fraudulent.
The Great Lakes Justice Center complaint provides “eyewitness accounts and direct evidence” that “approximately 40,000” unsecured, irregular ballots arrived in vehicles with out-of-state license plates at Detroit’s only vote-counting location, TCF Center, in the wee hours of the Nov. 4 morning during a shift change in election workers. Eyewitnesses signed affidavits saying that every one of this group of 40,000 ballots they saw “was counted orally and attributed only to Democratic candidates,” specifically Joe Biden.
Other eyewitnesses signed affidavits under penalty of perjury stating they saw multiple other piles of ballots, together additionally numbering in the tens of thousands, that were counted despite violating election law, sometimes at the direction of local election officials. This allegedly happened both before the election, during early voting, and during the election and subsequent vote count.
“After poll challengers started discovering the fraud taking place at the TCF Center, Defendant election officials and workers locked credentialed challengers out of the counting room so they could not observe the process, during which time tens of thousands of ballots were processed,” the complaint says. It also alleges:
“Defendant election officials and workers allowed ballots to be duplicated by hand without allowing poll challengers to check if the duplication was accurate. In fact, election officials and workers repeatedly obstructed poll challengers from observing. Defendants permitted thousands of ballots to be filled out by hand and duplicated on site without oversight from poll challengers.”
Poll challenger Daniel Gustafson signed an affidavit stating he “witnessed tens of thousands of ballots being delivered to the TCF Center that were not in any approved, sealed, or tamper-proof container…Large quantities of ballots were delivered to the TCF Center in what appeared to be mail bins with open tops. Contrary to law, these ballot bins and containers did not have lids, were not sealed, and did not have the capability of having a metal seal.”
The Federalist reported earlier this week on one affidavit filed in this complaint, from former Michigan Assistant Attorney General Zachary Larsen, but there are many, many more, and the details are scandalous.
The First Big Batch of 40,000 Suspicious Votes
An affidavit signed by poll challenger Andrew Sitto tells more about the 40,000 ballots he says he saw brought in: “At approximately 4:00 a.m. on November 4, 2020, tens of thousands of ballots were suddenly brought into the counting room through the back door…by vehicles with out-of-state license plates (Exhibit C). It was observed that all of these new ballots were cast for Joe Biden,” summarizes the complaint.
Sitto’s affidavit expands on what he saw while observing the vote-counting process from election night, Nov. 3, overnight into the early morning of Nov. 4. He says by 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, right before a 5 a.m. shift change between poll watchers, one of two men in charge of the vote counting “got on the microphone and stated that another shipment of absentee ballots would be arriving and would have to be counted.”
“At approximately 4:30 a.m., tens of thousands of ballots were brought in and placed on eight long tables. Unlike the other ballots, these boxes were brought in from the rear of the room. The same procedure was performed on the ballots that arrived at approximately 4:30 a.m., but I specifically noticed that every ballot I observed was cast for Joe Biden,” his affidavit states. “While counting these new ballots, I heard counters say at least five or six times that all five or six ballots were for Joe Biden. All ballots sampled that I heard and observed were for Joe Biden.”
There Was a Second Big Dump of Suspicious Ballots
The lawsuit alleges the 40,000 vote dump is not the only suspicious one observed on Nov. 4 in Detroit. Poll challenger Robert Cushman attested that on Nov. 4, 2020 at approximately 9 p.m., he “was surprised to see numerous new boxes of ballots arrive at the TCF Center in the evening… I estimate these boxes contained several thousand new ballots when they appeared.” He noticed that none of the names on these new ballots were of registered voters, which poll workers were supposed to verify.
“I saw the computer operators at several counting boards manually adding the names and addresses of these thousands of ballots to the QVF system,” his affidavit states. “When I asked what the possible justification was to counting ballots from unknown, unverified ‘persons,’ I was told by election supervisors that the Wayne County Clerk’s Office had ‘checked them out.'” Subsequently, Cushman challenged the entire process encompassing these “thousands of ballots.”
Election workers are supposed to match the name on each ballot with a registered voter on the state’s official lists. Instead, Cushman says, the Wayne County Clerk’s officers told poll workers to add all the names on the ballots from these boxes to the state’s list, giving them all a false birth date of January 1, 1900.
Election rules also say absentee voters are supposed to be added to the state’s registered voter lists before 9 p.m. on Nov. 3, election day. All of the voters for these ballots were added after this deadline, at the direction of local election officials, Cushman says.
“None of the names of these new ballots corresponded with any registered voter,” the complaint says.
Whistleblower: Election Officials Broke the Law Big-Time
One of the affidavits is signed by a Detroit Elections Department worker whose identity is concealed in the court documents under whistleblower protections. A Great Lakes Justice Center attorney told The Federalist she snuck out yellow sticky notes during ballot processing to be able to stay and observe some of the illegal activities alleged in her affidavit. The affidavit alleges numerous illegal activities conducted by Wayne County election officials, affecting thousands if not tens of thousands of votes atop all those outlined above.
The whistleblower says that during her work processing early votes, “I was instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than they were actually sent. The supervisor was making announcements for all workers to engage in this practice.” If true, this is fraud and election tampering.
The same sort of fraud, she alleges, happened on Nov. 4. That day, she says, “I was instructed to improperly pre-date the absentee ballots receive date that were not in the QVF [the state’s registered voter list] as if they had been received on or before November 3, 2020. I was told to alter teh [sic] information in the QVF to falsely show that the absentee ballots had been received in time to be valid. I estimate that this was done to thousands of ballots.”
Throughout her daily elections work in September through November 2020, the whistleblower says, “I directly observed, on a daily basis, City of Detroit election workers and employees coaching and trying to coach voters to vote for Joe Biden and the Democrat party.” This is also illegal. “I witnessed these workers and employees encouraging voters to do a straight Democrat ballot. I witnessed these election workers and employees going over to the voting booths with voters in order to watch them vote and coach them for whom to vote.”
The whistleblower also says Detroit election officials actively avoided verifying voters’ identities: “During the last two weeks while working at this satellite location, I was specifically instructed by my supervisor not to ask for a driver’s license or any photo I.D. when a person was trying to vote.”
The whistleblower also alleges encouraged voter fraud through the possibility of double voting: “I observed a large number of people who came to the satellite location to vote in-person, but they had already applied for an absentee ballot. These people were allowed to vote in-person and were not required to return the mailed absentee ballot or sign an affidavit that the voter lost the mailed absentee ballot.”
The suit names the City of Detroit, the Detroit Election Commission, Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett, and the Wayne County Board of Canvassers as defendants. The Democratic Party has made a motion to join the lawsuit as defendants, meaning it is volunteering to be also sued for these alleged crimes.
Here we go. We have drama over the Speaker of the House again. Yes, it’s fun to ponder who will wrest the gavel away from Speaker Pelosi, but there’s always a lot of hype and then a rather anti-climactic ending that usually ends with the California liberal keeping her residency in that office.
House Democrats did not have the best election cycle. The so-called experts said they were on track to gain 10-15 seats. They ended up losing races. Conservative women dominated. Period. Reagan noted that earlier this week and Katie wrote about the latest round of Republican pick-ups. The House Democratic majority has been whittled down. Can the GOP retake the House? It doesn’t look that way, as some have already said the Democrats will retain the majority, albeit a very slim one. And remember there are 20 or so moderate Democrats who really cannot get on board with the more far-left and insane elements that are peddled by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her squad.
House Republican Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said that a) Pelosi doesn’t have the votes to keep her gavel, and b) the GOP could steer the ship in the lower chamber with the help of those moderate Democrats in vulnerable districts (via Newsweek):
The House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said the Republican Party could "control the floor" of the House if a small number of Democrats were to join them on votes after the party gained seats in the lower chamber on Election Day.
Appearing on Fox News on Sunday, the California representative added that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could lose her role if 10 of the 15 Democrats who voted against her bid in January 2019 did so again at the start of next year.
He also warned that "internal fights" in the Democratic Party were emerging after the party failed to build on its House majority despite President-Elect Joe Biden's victory in the presidential contest.
[…]
"If those 10 vote against her again, she will not be speaker of the House, because she won't have 218 because of the gains of the Republicans. We are close enough now that we can control the floor with a few Democrats joining with us."
Bold prediction. But we’ve heard these tales before about internal issues between Pelosi and her caucus and every time they always back her. The latest challenge to her speakership in the elections fizzled quickly. And she’ll remain in a strong position to get the votes needed. After all, a good share of the House Democratic majority hails from three very liberal states, California, New York, and Massachusetts. We’ll see what happens. For now, let’s focus on making sure every legal vote is counted in the 2020 election. And let’s prepare for the Georgia runoffs.
Over the summer I had written about why Fox News was not in a good position as the television ecosystem shifted to streaming. (TL;DR: Fox is the only major cable or network news service not affiliated with a major Flix (multibillion dollar subscription streaming service), e.g., MSNBC has Peacock, CBS News has Paramount+, ABC News has Hulu. And so as cable audiences shrink, they do not seem to have a Plan B.)
But Fox News has another problem: a small right wing service called Newsmax that has done a much better job of distributing its TV programming online via the FASTs–free ad-supported streaming TV services.
As of this writing, Newsmax has a presence on Sling, Pluto, Xumo, Distro, Fubo, Roku, Chromecast, AppleTV and Amazon Fire TV (the latter four via its own free app.)
This is in addition to carriage arrangements with most all the major services, including DirecTV, Dish, Comcast, Charter, Cox, U-verse and Verizon FIOS.
Now granted Newsmax’s viewership is tiny compared to Fox’s and it’s not exactly a start-up–the website was launched in 1998 and the TV service in 2014.
But as viewers shift to streaming and go looking for their fix of free right wing news, they may find it to be a compelling option.
The Concession Factor
The events of the coming week may well determine how successful Newsmax becomes. For while Fox News and the rest of the Murdoch empire has chosen to declare Joe Biden the winner of the presidential election and to cast doubts on President Trump’s assertions that the elections were somehow fraudulent, Newsmax has gone in the other direction.
Their website carries a banner claiming that they are not yet calling the election, and their founder Chris Ruddy has been making the rounds of talk shows to explain their position while making clear his desire to partner with President Trump in any future media endeavors the Trumps may wish to engage in. This of course has resulted in a spate of free publicity for the site.
Whether this gives the network enough juice to gain any sort of real traction and steal disgruntled Trumpist viewers from Fox remains to be seen.
And while Trump fans should not have much trouble finding them, it’s also unclear whether their sizable presence on streaming sites will make any difference in winning over an audience that, like most news audiences, tends to skew older and less tech savvy.
The Fox Factor
Fox, at this point, still has a very limited presence on streaming, via Tubi (a popular FAST that Fox bought earlier this year) and a subscription superfan app that only a few hundred thousand people subscribe to.
That’s right now though.
Fox Corporation, which also owns Fox Broadcasting and Fox Sports, is a savvy organization, and if their cable revenue begins to shrink rapidly as audiences shift to streaming, there’s no reason to think they would not react quickly and establish a more substantial streaming presence, where their well known brand name would give them a decided advantage over Newsmax.
There’s also the potential of an actual Trump network of some sort, whether as an independent service or in partnership with Newsmax. Both options would pose a threat to Fox in terms of stealing audience, but success would depend, as always, on what sort of content play the competitors had and whether viewers felt comfortable switching between the various conservative media options, the way many viewers on the other end of the political spectrum switch between MSNBC and CNN, depending what’s on.
Streaming Is Not A Trend
One thing I do feel fairly certain about is that the end of the cable news era is near. Not that the actual cable news networks themselves are going anywhere–if anything, a shift to streaming will likely leave them in a better position as viewers will find it tougher to flit from one to the other–but rather the domination of cable overall as viewers quickly realize that streaming offers them both more and better programming for less money than cable, along with plenty of linear options via the FASTs.
Sports, one of the two types of programming that keeps viewers tied to cable, is still a ways off from being easily accessible on streaming (all those rights deals, especially around the regional sports networks (RSNs).
News, OTOH, is much more widely available, both via the various cable and network news services and via new startups like Cheddar and Newsy, and via smaller, more partisan services like Newsmax.
Local news is still an issue however, though as many affiliate stations don’t have any sort of streaming presence. While local news aggregator services like Haystack, and networks bringing their O&Os (owned and operated broadcast stations) onto services like Tubi and CBSN are helping to bridge the gap, local still has a long way to go.
Rev. Franklin Graham is urging Americans to pray that God’s will be done in the ongoing elections, especially since the “the enemies of God” may be perpetrating voter fraud.
As batches of ballots, overwhelmingly cast for Democrat president Joe Biden, began suddenly appearing after polls closed on Tuesday, Republicans have expressed concern that election fraud may be taking place.
On Wednesday morning, Rev. Graham took to Twitter to call on Americans to pray that efforts of God’s enemies will be thwarted:
“I ask that you continue to pray for our nation and this election. Many fear that some are trying to steal the election, so join me in praying that the will of God would be done. Pray that the enemies of God would be quieted and that all their plans would be put to nothing.”
“Be anxious for nothing,” but seek comfort through prayer, Graham tweeted on Tuesday, as Americans waited for election results and fretted over the outcome of the election:
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God;” (Philippians 4:6)”
Tuesday night, and into Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump has been tweeting about his suspicions the voter fraud is taking place, CNSNews.com reports:
"Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled," Trump tweeted. "Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the 'pollsters' got it completely & historically wrong!"
….
"WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?" Trump asked in response to a tweet saying that a ballot update in Michigan "gives Biden 100% of new votes — 128k+"
“So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, okay?”
NOTE: I know this was written in 2017, but it is STILL worth the read!!
Evan Sayet|Posted: Jul 13, 2017 1:57 PM
My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer:
We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same.
This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.
I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”
The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today.
The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.
With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.
During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”
General George Patton was a vulgar-talking, son-of-a-bitch. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum, then Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.
Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!” That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics.
That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis. It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.
Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do.
First, instead of going after “the fake media” – and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri – Trump isolated CNN. He made it personal. Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”
Everyone gets that it’s not just CNN – in fact, in a world where Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof are people of influence and whose “reporting” is in no way significantly different than CNN’s – CNN is just a piker.
Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. With Trump’s ability to go around them, they cannot simply stand pat. They need to respond. This leaves them with only two choices.
They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.
The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.
Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s, church.
Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.
This makes “going high” a non-starter for CNN. This leaves them no other option but to ratchet up the fake news, conjuring up the next “nothing burger” and devoting 24 hours a day to hysterical rants about how it’s “worse than Nixon.”
This, obviously, is what CNN has chosen to do. The problem is that, as they become more and more hysterical, they become more and more obvious. Each new effort at even faker news than before and faker “outrage” only makes that much more clear to any objective observer that Trump is and always has been right about the fake news media.
And, by causing their hysteria, Trump has forced them into numerous, highly embarrassing and discrediting mistakes. Thus, in their desperation, they have lowered their standards even further and run with articles so clearly fake that, even with the liberal (lower case “l”) libel laws protecting the media, they’ve had to wholly retract and erase their stories repeatedly.
Their flailing at Trump has even seen them cross the line into criminality, with CNN using their vast corporate fortune to hunt down a private citizen for having made fun of them in an Internet meme. This threat to “dox” – release of personal information to encourage co-ideologists to visit violence upon him and his family -- a political satirist was chilling in that it clearly wasn’t meant just for him. If it were, there would have been no reason for CNN to have made their “deal” with him public.
Instead, CNN – playing by “Chicago Rules” – was sending a message to any and all: dissent will not be tolerated.
This heavy-handed and hysterical response to a joke on the Internet has backfired on CNN, giving rise to only more righteous ridicule.
So, to my friends on the Left – and the #NeverTrumpers as well -- do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do. These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.
So, say anything you want about this president – I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights.
Evan Sayet is the author of The KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks. His lecture to the Heritage Foundation on this same topic remains, some ten years later, by far the single most viewed lecture in their history. Evan can be reached at contactevansayet@gmail.com.
