Assassins of Freedom: Expect Delays

59 years ago today, President John F Kennedy was publicly executed. Although it was seen by most people as a shocking abomination, very few realised what it really was: a coup d’etat against democracy by the Unelected Criminal State and its allies.

Nearly six decades later, innocent people are still being threatened, smeared and wiped out by the increasingly megalomanic power objectives, grubby schemes and manipulated information held dear by these appalling ethical cripples.

Over time, media control, technology and exaggerated threats to the Union have allowed these psychopaths to neuter liberal democracy as the prelude to establishing a unipolar New Global Order. But the breathtaking bestiality of their methods has hardly changed at all.

Here today, John Ward and AJC Boone examine how reality is being twisted out of any recognition in policy popularity and blatant electoral perversion respectively.

RAISE HIGH THE LIBERAL MEME, SPIN-DOCTORS

Last Saturday/Sunday early morning, there was another horror-shock-shooting event in the US, this time in Colorado at the Club Q – a haven for LGBTQ and transsexual people. A young man – named by police as 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, is now in police custody. Five Clubbers were shot dead and twenty-five injured.

But was this just a random tragedy, or a disgraceful accessory to murder on the part of the US State?

ABC was first out of the blocks to interview the parents of victim and trans performer-cum-barman David Aston. He was, they said, “very special and a huge personality”. Mayor John Suthers of Colarado Springs said there was “incredible bravery” on display as “LGBT heroes” tackled the gunman in acts of “selfless courage”.

One wonders why Aldrich (dressed from head to foot in body armour) was allowed entry to the Club without at least some kind of cursory check. Brief research by The Slog has established that the shooter “had a record of police interactions”. In fact, it seems that Aldrich was involved in a bomb-threat incident in June last year but no charges were brought. Indeed, he rang editors in local papers asking them to drop the story, which they duly did.

Hmm. In fact, after the bomb incident he was charged with two counts of menace felony and three of first degree kidnapping. But he was let go. Just over a month ago, however, he was the subject of a wellness check by the local authorities.

So he was a known nutjob, with dropped serious charges on his record and a recent follow-up….who then turns up just before midnight in full body armour carrying a full-length rifle at a notorious adult entertainment Gay Club and strolls in benignly in the manner of a Jack Ruby.

As it happens, his middle name is Lee. Today is the 59th Anniversary of the JFK assassination. And all the LGBTQ people were heroically brave.

I can’t be the only person with a twitching nose here. Can I?

Keep a close on his indelible stain on any US claim to be civilised…and, as today develops, how this senseless attack might be weaponised.

It’s fifty-seven years now since Dorothy Kilgallen – best known to US baby-boomers as the mega-bright top guesser on the What’s My Line? panel – was found dead in her ritzy Manhattan apartment from “an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates”. The NYC authorities in fact dropped that H-bomb smear into the Inquest – and then closed the file as quickly as possible. Both the FBI and the CIA then spent nearly half a century (a) depicting her as a pill-addled drunk – but (b) doing everything in their power to stop the file being reopened…..this after they appeared mysteriously within hours of the discovery of her corpse, and turned over her entire flat, confiscating millions of word notes about her investigation of the JFK killing.

Just four days earlier in her syndicated column, Dorothy had (perhaps foolishly) said she was about to “bust wide open” the truth of the Dallas assassination”. Foolish or not, her claim was far from idle: and it’s this part of her life that most people have never understood.

Kilgallen’s main calling was far from an emerging TV panel show. No less a curmudgeon than Ernest Hemingway described her journalism as “the best media prose in the World anywhere” and if other hacks really wanted the inside info on a famous case, they flocked to wherever she was at the scene. She was and remains the only journo to get private interviews with Jack Ruby before and during his trial for the murder of Oswald. In short, she was uniquely well-informed about what was really behind the disgusting public slaughter of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy: and perhaps above all, she was a close intimate of the immediate White House Kennedy family.

Dorothy’s best male friend was the celebrity hairdresser Marc Sinclair….to whom she confided everything. Following her death, he said, “They would like you to believe she was a lush….frankly, she was a hard-drinking, hugely capable and clear-minded woman feared by the guilty everywhere. If there had been any drunkeness around her TV appearances, they would have been spotted and dealt with immediately. The idea that she was the hopeless case depicted at the Inquest was simply ludicrous”.

The same is true of her effective free-pass into the White House. Jacqui Kennedy was ruthless about keeping husband Jack clear of anything that might be used against him: she dumped Frank Sinatra, for instance, because of his mafia connections. Jacqui was a magnet for toxic gossip, and JFK hugely appreciated her role in this sense. Fact is, she adored Kilgallen and rightly saw her as totally discreet on the issue of “off the record”.

In short, here we have yet another case in the seemingly infinite series of tediously predictable methods employed by the cover-up dimension of the US Unelected State.

Innocent but ethically horrified people suddenly drop dead, have “single vehicle car accidents” or turn out to have unsuspected weaknesses that inevitable lead to their downfall. They become mere statistics in that infinite anti-science these days declaring ‘why’ the ridiculous is now the normal. The development of these emergency tactics has, over time, become the casual, default strategy of the election stealers: bungled FBI attempts to reverse the flying direction of Presidential brains on Zapruder cinecam tapes has now matured into a digitopia that makes every fiction credible….and worse still, justifies the State’s unwillingness to investigate.

“Expect Delays”

When my eldest boy was about ten or so, I read a passage aloud to him from the book I happened to be reading, because I was curious as to whether his reaction would match mine.

It was Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction chronicle of a murder in a contemporary polygamous Mormon community, interspersed with historical episodes from the life of the founder of that church. In the passage I read to my son, the venerable Original Mormon was relaying to his wife a dream he’d had, in which God commanded that he take a second bride, and that this bride should be, as a matter of fact, it just so happened, wow,-you’re-never-going-to-believe-this… the cute teenaged neighbour girl. My son, listening closely, reacted with a quick, involuntary scowl of scepticism. The venerable Mormon founder’s wife must have made a similar face, judging from her recorded reaction, per Krakauer.

But, soldiering on, the Mormon leader woke the following morning and, lo, and behold, he’d had another dream, which he duly recounted to his wife, in which God again made an appearance, and spoke to him again about the upcoming additional spouse. This time, God made sure to predict that the man’s current wife would probably object, even vociferously (God being Himself a pretty fair analyst of human nature), but He confirmed that a wife must nonetheless accommodate herself to her husband, and a husband could not but follow God’s commands.

Mighty convenient dreams.

My son amused me with his reaction to this little behavioural Rorschach test; his comments post-scowl reflected no particular moral judgement as to the practice of polygamy, of which he had no experience and therefore no opinion whatever, but did convey his contempt for the cheek of trafficking in comically self-serving fabrications, something a 10 year-old knows a thing or two about.

And so to Election Day in the US…

In the settling dust of the 2022 Midterms, a few key phenomena have become visible:

-that the audacity of the 2020 election-rigging/theft — with attendant diversionary propaganda — was largely replayed in 2022;

-that the immediate bipartisan purpose of stealing select contests in the midterms was to derail the Trump-Train by disabling the perceived king-making powers of its engineer, and to try to usher any remnants of a stunned and disoriented Red Wave onto a different train, one that may look similar to Trump’s but is driven instead by Florida governor, and former GOP Congressman, Ron DeSantis;

-that the machinery of the federal state will be brought to bear on the matter of elections in new and creative ways.

(Some of my argument comes in the form of tag-lines, tweets, headlines, and bumper-sticker imagery. Such is the world in which we live. Apologies in advance.)

The 2020 template

Through the fulminating craziness of 2020 — Ukraine-gate impeachment, the national orgy of violence in pretend-commemoration of one George Floyd, the p(l)andemic “from Wuhan” and consequent feints towards atomising totalitarianism and glimmers of the Great Reset– the vanishing point on the political horizon was always the November presidential election. It is then that we would learn whether or not Fate would grant the (global) Establishment’s cherished wish to spike the sitting US Commander-in-Chief. (In fact, one might well wonder whether the craziness was fulminated with that very Establishment wish in mind.)

What was indisputable at that time, early to mid-2020, was that within his base of support and at its periphery, because his policies (whether diplomatic, economic, or national in nature) seemed vindicated by signs of their success, the popularity of Donald Trump had strengthened over the period of his Administration. Granular analysis of voter sentiment across counties and states found Donald Trump doing frankly well in polls. His daily briefings on federal efforts to combat covid proved such a “ratings hit” (New York Times) that MSM pundits like WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin actually argued that the networks should stop broadcasting them. Trump’s regional rallies drew crowds by the thousands, with supporters even at times breaking into a spontaneous-looking chant of “We love you!”

In fact, one saw everywhere signs that a bemused detachment of 2016 had morphed in many quarters into earnest and vocal support by November 2020. The Establishment’s dedicated, relentless, and coordinated campaign to annihilate Trump seemed in the end to be failing, as unremitting histrionic denigration pumped out of every orifice of the infotainment media for three-plus years had boomeranged in spectacular fashion with a sizeable portion of the American public. The intended demolition of Trump had, in fact, compelled millions of people to pay far closer attention to political events, and to the press’s misleading and manipulative coverage of them, than they had ever done in the past. And their scrutiny was rewarded with enlightenment, justified cynicism, and massive loss of faith in institutions of governance and the press.

Polls of the black and Hispanic US voting demographics, traditionally unbreachable Democratic Party strongholds, alone should have schooled the Democratic Party on the meaning of the phrase “point of diminishing returns”. An upward tick in Trump’s Hispanic approval levels appeared, shockingly, in June 2018, exactly when the choreographed hysterics against the Very Idea of a border wall reached a crescendo. (It shouldn’t have come as a shock: Hispanic Americans know better than anyone what lies on the far side of a southern border wall.) In a separate significant development, increasingly visible black independent-media commentators mocked the messaging that only “white-supremacists” could applaud Trump’s emphasis on job-creation, basic law & order, non-cavalier attitude to abortion, border integrity, energy independence, and patriotism.

It is also worth pausing to remember how Donald Trump’s instincts led him, among his first and last acts as president, to withdraw from the globalist agenda: pulling the US out of the Paris Accords, turning off the hosepipe of CIA funding for Middle East unrest, wondering aloud at a mid-2020 rally if covid wasn’t part of a “hoax”, and ending US membership in and funding of the World Health Organisation.

Nonetheless, every time a member of my apolitical household asked me in 2020 who I thought would win in November, my very best guess, based on everything I could see, was: “Trump will win, and they will steal it.

I had no clear idea of how this might happen, but a massive early indication came from two of the very biggest of Big Dogs on Team Biden, David Frum and John Podesta, when they ran (with many other highly-motivated activists in a supposedly bipartisan research effort) the keystone psy-op of the election: the Orwellianly-titled Transition Integrity Project.

This was an extended strategy session in summer 2020 whose purpose was patently, if tacitly, to create a digestible Alternative Narrative to explain away the inevitable, outrageous irregularities that couldn’t be avoided if a winning number of votes for Lunchbox Joe were to be conjured from the ballots returned on November 3rd.

Primarily what was needed was time, and the extra time required would have to be found after polls closed, because it would only be clear how many pro-Biden ballots were needed once the number of pro-Trump ballots was known. Trump voters, meanwhile, were hoping that their massive turnout on Election Day would overwhelm the infamously manipulable postal/drop-box early voting which Democrats fervently advocated (“because covid, to keep you safe,” they intoned, with a straight face).

Frum and Podesta would have anticipated a massive Election Day turnout (as it happened, Trump’s 2020 total bested his 2016 performance by some 12 million votes) and they would have known that this would require time to counteract.

See the first, parody-like “key finding” in the Project’s August 3, 2020 report, which reads like something that Frum and Podesta might allege God told them in a dream:

Got that? The very “concept of ‘election night’” is hereby pronounced defunct. Replacing it will be something called voting “contestation” that could last “until January 20th”. Expecting Election Night returns on Election Night — as we had expected such returns since the start of the broadcast-media age a hundred years before — was, suddenly in 2020, something not merely inaccurate but “dangerous”, something that might assist “an unscrupulous candidate” in drawing attention to questions of election legitimacy, and something about which the public must have its expectations “adjust[ed]…starting immediately”.

The adjustment started even earlier than immediately, since the reliable brainwash vector of National Public Radio had begun already in June, via proxy “experts and election officials”, to “sound the alarm” and urge listeners to “get into [the required] mindset”:

The furrowed eyebrows and curled lips of newspapers-of-record and The Atlantic, of course, among others, all got busy adjusting-public-expectations. Establishment social-media figure, Mark Zuckerberg adjusted-public-expectations in an early September 2020 interview, with a script containing the key Frum/Podesta message-elements, that “there’s nothing illegitimate about this election taking additional days, or even weeks, to make sure all the votes are counted” (you want all those votes counted, don’t you?!), and that Facebook would “do a bunch of different messaging around that just to make sure people know that that’s normal.”

One wonders exactly how Zuckerberg, fully two months before Election Day, could foresee the tallying being delayed, could himself be certain that this wouldn’t imply shenanigans (how possibly could that be ruled out ahead of time?), and could be moved to encourage people to perceive this as “normal” as opposed to indicative of election malfeasance.

(See also the sting in the tail in the reportage below, the whiff of violence and the gratuitous implied accusation that Trump would react to being “antagonised”, with the risible assertion that any of these participants would hesitate to antagonise him.)

More adjusting-public-expectations was taken up by allied corporates as well. Here, it is camouflaged as investor advice:

All this expectation-adjusting paid off, and the public had its expectations duly adjusted, and members of the public even sought to adjust their fellow citizens. Here (below) a masked citizen unironically shares a version of the talking point expressed as the now dog-eared formulation of mockery: that a system not working is evidence that it’s working:

And so, with the public properly anaesthetised, the election “fortification” could commence.

We may all remember that as November 3rd election night returns came in, Donald Trump “led in all the battleground states by a decent margin”; and by midnight on the East Coast, “betting odds [by] more than 75%” favoured a Trump win.

However, vote-tallying abruptly stopped in the wee hours of November 4th in a way that seemed as coordinated as it did inexplicable in five critical states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina); in addition, a reported burst water-main (turned out to be a leaky urinal) was cited as the reason counting stopped in Georgia.

When the count resumed, Joseph Biden’s vote totals found him suddenly and miraculously on top. Voters watched, bewildered but oddly quiescent – expectations, you see, had been adjusted — as the “counting” process stretched on for weeks. By November 25th (with “ballots still being counted”-NPR) the number alleged to be cast for Joe Biden surpassed 80 million, to Trump’s 74 million.

A phrase began to be circulated by pundits, and woven into headlines, starting just hours after the bizarre and unexplained Election Night vote-count stoppage: “No evidence of fraud”. This seemed likely another instance of expectation-adjustment, designed to predispose the public to see anyone reporting problems as either mistaken or ill-intentioned.

Nonetheless, those poll-workers, election-machine technicians, and state-level officials whose expectations resisted adjustment, who would not be persuaded that abnormal was “normal”, compiled evidence of irregularities, which was in part aired in a series of state-level hearings, and which fills hours of video, acres of affidavits, and websites (if you are interested: hereistheevidence.com, electionfraud20.org).

The gist of that evidence simplifies the he-said,-she-said war-fog of a stolen election into crystalline clarity: from the six “swing-states” alone, problematic ballots outweigh the margin of victory for Biden by a cartoonish degree (chart).

Table 1 SOURCE: electionfraud20.org

The grounds on which ballots were “disputed” are by no means trivial or contrived. Ballots in question include not just those from ineligibly out-of-state or under-aged voters but from deceased ones; over 200,000 defunct voters were cleared from the Wisconsin rolls alone in the months after the 2020 vote – ten times Biden’s margin of victory in that state. The problem with the count is not just statistical anomalies (for instance, bellwethers that weirdly in 2020 don’t hold) but statistical impossibilities. In Pennsylvania, for instance, GOP state legislators held a press conference to object to the state’s submission of its election result, as records showed 6,760,230 voters having cast a total of 6,962,607 votes.

As we see from the right-most column, 79 electoral college votes were at stake; shifting 36 of these would have changed the 2020 electoral outcome.

The robust and feisty American republic was built to anticipate and withstand electoral malfeasance, so between a beady-eyed fourth estate, authorised recounts, court challenges, and the Electoral College, surely one of these would provide a backstop against the theft of presidential elections?

In the event, each institution failed. It turns out that these institutions, like Stalin’s constitution, however marvellous on paper, only function when animated by good faith and commitment to underlying rules-of-the-game.

The last chance to resist the corrupting desire to “just move on” came with Congress’s formal state-by-state certification of the vote tallies, on January 6,2021. The aggrieved voters who made their way to Washington that day saw only a bare handful of their elected representatives prepared to defy their peers and challenge the juggernaut of institutional consensus around a seriously questioned electoral outcome.

And no wonder: as of this writing, 948 of those aggrieved voters have “been charged” and the FBI is still actively hunting down participants in what the public has had its expectations-adjusted to believe was an “insurrection.” (See the scrupulous reporting on this subject by independent investigative journalist Julie Kelly, or Darren J Beatty of Revolver News.)

Many warned at the time that if the brazenly fraudulent-looking electoral result of 2020 were allowed to stand, without a formal and genuinely objective investigation, then brazen-electoral-fraud would recur, and would indeed be assimilated as just another facet of a post-democratic, post-capitalist New Normal.

And so it has.

The 2022 Repeat

Echoing the 2020 elections, the context of the 2022 midterms appeared to predict gains, potentially huge gains, for Republicans. This piece of tea-leaf reading is typical:

In addition to the traditional midterm losses sustained by the party-in-power, there was Gallup data and the Real Clear Politics poll-of-polls registering eye-watering dissatisfaction with the Biden Administration.

And to take us right up through Election Day itself, CNN ran an exit poll of voters who had just voted either in person or by mail. CNN asked, among other things, the same overall sentiment question, if people were happy with “the way things are going in the US”: 74% responded that they were either “dissatisfied” (41%) or even “angry” (33%), with just 5% “enthusiastic” (see chart below).

(Note that these CNN charts can be misleading: a cursory glance could leave the false impression that “78%” of Democrats were “enthusiastic” and “87%” were “satisfied” with the status quo, when the correct inference should be that Democrats make up 78% of the mere 5% who are “enthusiastic” and 87% of the 20% who call themselves “satisfied”. The top line numbers indicated by the yellow arrow and red-underlined in each chart are the important ones.)

As to which party they expected to solve the problem they ranked most troubling, the GOP was twelve points ahead on “handling inflation”, 54% to 42%. The GOP was more trusted to sort out immigration and crime as well. (“Best handling” of abortion and gun policy cannot be captured in a single question, as the meaning of “handling” these diverges completely depending on one’s political position. So, while 27% of respondents named abortion as the most important issue, the 23% of that which is GOP has a good chance of meaning by that the prohibition of abortion.)

In the absence of a federal database, the CNN exit poll offers the best approximation for two last points relevant to this discussion: the age and the political persuasion of voters participating in the 2022 midterms.

Democrats hoped that last summer’s Supreme Court Dobbs ruling that made abortion a state-level matter and eliminated federal protection of it as a right would bring impassioned young people to the polls. They added the Biden Administration’s eleventh-hour sweetener of student-loan forgiveness. Nonetheless, the “youthquake” that Dems tried to trigger failed to materialise (see chart, below). (To be fair, the White House’s student loan forgiveness offer also failed to materialise, being predictably struck down by a judge just hours after polling-stations closed.)

In fact, only 7% of midterm voters were in the 18-24 aged student demographic, and just 12% of midterm voters were in the 18-29 age group at all (it’s 16% of the population-at-large). At the same time, 59% of the midterm voters were in the over-50 age bracket, vastly overrepresenting its 34% share of the actual US population. Young voters were proportionately missing in the mid-terms, though pundits continue to pretend the opposite.

And lastly, if the Democrats had any hope of counteracting the traditional losses by a party-in-power at midterms, let alone the seriously negative poll numbers, they would have to outnumber their GOP adversaries in voting turnout. Did they? In fact, it looks like there were more GOP voters, with Independents splitting between the parties about evenly.

One of the most transfixing contests of November 8th was the Arizona governor’s race, pitting former local newscaster Kari Lake – a feisty “Make America Great Again” candidate with strong, experience-informed views on border control and her peers in the media — against Katie Hobbs, a mild-mannered sitting state-level secretary of state. Hobbs’s official position, remember, entails responsibility for the integrity of election processes and hardware. (To the ten year-olds among you, feel free to cock an eyebrow here.)

Lake consistently leaned into the flak she took for holding unauthorised views, just like her model, Donald Trump, and the national press corps struck back, covering her invariably with scorn and contempt as an unwanted exotic and “election-denier”. Yet here (see graphic below) is Establishment pollster “FiveThirtyEight” unable quite to make their version of reality stick, showing that running their election-simulation forty-thousand times gives the hated Lake the win 68:32 times in 100, even through Election Day’s last update:

From everything that could reasonably be expected of these midterms, then, it should have been a blood-bath for the Democrats. But that is not what happened.

Midterm Election Day 2022 was far closer to the strangeness of Election Day 2020.

First of all, a catalogue of squirrelly coincidences, of which the following is a sampling. Social media feature videos of apparently-rigged machines that seem to tabulate ballots on their own in the absence of actual ballots, with poll-workers asking in the background, “Is it supposed to do that?”

There was an epidemic of sudden death afflicting ballot-tabulation machines: per pollster Rasmussen on Twitter, over 48% of Arizona’s Maricopa County polling centres reported malfunctioning printing machines and tabulators, largely if not exclusively in GOP areas (and remember that Election Day voting leans heavily GOP). Poll-workers were filmed telling voters that if tabulators failed to count their ballots, then these uncounted ballots should be put in a designated box; it was later reported that uncounted ballots — some 17,000 of them — were then mistakenly mixed in with the already-counted ballots, and so lost to the process.

Long queues and inconvenience caused by “technical difficulties” and last-minute changes in venue caused voters to give up without voting in more than one state.

There were ballot-paper and ink shortages in, among other places, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Harris County, Texas, where local GOP officials told a press-conference: “Twenty-three precincts ran out of paper. And guess what—all 23 were GOP strongholds!” One Pennsylvania county top election official, Randy Robertson, hired a mere five months ago, resigned the day after the midterm election paper-shortage chaos; asked whether the shortage was intentional, pitch-perfect cut-out Robertson replied “I don’t think so but I don’t know”. A mysterious power outage stalled the count in tight contests in Nevada.

There was pre-election stage-setting as well. This included Pennsylvania’s governor fighting for court permission to count ballots with post-election time-stamps, or even (gee, why not?) no date at all. A second Pennsylvania case sought extra time for ballot counting. The firm of Democrat Party lawyer/Beltway-fixture Marc Elias brought a suit in Arizona to make it illegal for citizens to monitor drop boxes, the latter being the subject of the controversial 2022 documentary “2000 Mules” which captured dead-of-night mass ballot drops that seem to have contributed to suspicious anomalies in the 2020 voting patterns. Courts had already seen fit to demand any monitors keep a certain distance away from the drop-boxes. Elias’s suit ultimately failed with a decision in the last days of October, though it would have discouraged drop-box monitoring while the decision was pending. As a separate but related matter, the two drop-box monitoring specialists whose video footage formed the core of the “2000 Mules” film were themselves arrested and jailed in Texas just days before Election Day, supposedly for refusing to name an FBI whistle-blower source, but no doubt sending a message. And two high-level Arizona election officials – who presided over drawn-out shock defeats of pro-Trump candidate Kari Lake and others – are now discovered to have founded an “anti-#MAGA” political action committee in 2021.

The last key ingredient to last week’s election was plenty of by-now-familiar expectation-adjustment, from the highest-powered female influencers, like NY Congresswoman “AOC”, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, and her predecessor Jen Psaki, as well as “trusted” news and fact-checking entities like Vox and Politifact (funded by Soros, Deep-State front organisation National Endowment for Democracy, and the Koch Brothers, among others).

The analgesic refrain that the election results would take longer than usual to come (and “this is normal”) was in some cases coupled with a clairvoyant warning to anticipate a GOP surge which would ultimately subside.

The Election Result

An overall impression of the midterm results has been muddled by the delay in returns. Headline stories pretend to rue the “confusion” over even so basic a metric as total turnout, which, the Washington Post assured us, may “take weeks” to ascertain. The GOP seems to have won the House of Representatives, but the Senate remains in Democrat hands. Of the fifty governorships, 36 were in play; the status quo ante of 28 GOP to 22 Democrat narrowed in the Democrats’ favour: 25 GOP to 24 Democrat. Information on the various contests can be found here.

In sum, as the strange outcome of last week’s election, we are meant to believe that older, unhappy-to-angry voters, stung by inflation, at least half identifying as GOP, turning out in near-record numbers, voted in this midterm election to vote for… more of the same.

A crucial factor shaping a conclusion that “no Red Wave!” happened is that a number of high-profile candidates to whom Donald Trump gave his endorsement, and who ran on a “Make America Great Again” theme have failed to win. These included those needing an Election Day boost, like Lee Zeldin and Doug Mastriano; or those whose directional momentum should have produced Election Day victories, like Blake Masters, Hershel Walker, and “Dr Oz”; or even those whose victories seemed certain like Adam Laxalt, Joe Kent, and Arizona star Kari Lake. Defeat came even for candidates fighting quite poor opponents who dodged debates and ran anaemic campaigns.

In coming to grips with the post-mortem conversation, I am surprised how few serious watchers on the Republican side dare use words like “cheat” or “rig”, as if to avoid repeating the delusional whining and lack of self-awareness that has plagued the Democrats (though there might be more sinister reasons – more on which below).

Instead, the “GOP fielded poor candidates” explanation is often tried, though this simply does not match the reality of people like Mastriano, Zeldin, Lake, Masters, and Kent, who have shown grit bordering on heroism starting well before this year’s election.

Somewhat more convincing is that the GOP/RNC made eccentric decisions about which candidates to support and with how much funding. This not only helps explain outcomes but also reveals the anti-Trump bias of the GOP/RNC machine. GOP funding levels are a matter of public record, and both amateur election watchers and professional pollster-consultants have wondered what the GOP’s objective possibly could have been, since in no rational way could it be seen as aimed at winning.

Indeed, the bipartisan Establishment and its mainstream media are pushing their preferred “take-away” of the 2022 midterms, that it was a referendum on Trumpism, and Trumpism lost. (Trump queried this by asking the audience at the Tuesday night announcement of his 2024 candidacy if “232 wins against 22 losses” is really such a bad record.)

A striking and important anomaly here: one place among midterm 2022 contests that stood out with an Election Day that actually met poll-backed expectations of rampant #MAGA forces winning the “Red Wave” victories that broken-tabulators, paper/ink shortages and infinite drop-box in-flows prevented elsewhere, was Florida. Done in a day, massive turn-out, unambiguous victory for Trump’s rumoured running-mate or heir apparent, Governor Ron DeSantis.

(Curious.)

Overall, however, the mismatch between 2022 midterm voting outcomes, and the pre-election documented levels of dissatisfaction and anger towards the status quo, can only, as in 2020, be described as cartoonish. The gap looks as frankly unaccountable as the puzzling abiding confidence of Democrat Party candidates who, like their template Joe Biden, drew sparse crowds, generated little enthusiasm, but won by historic and/or unexpected margins just the same.

A key observation with future relevance has been the distinction between “votes” and “ballots”. Anonymous commentator “Sundance” makes the essential, and observable, point that while GOP/#MAGA candidates are trying to win the hearts and minds of the voting public, the Democrats focus on winning elections by merely generating ballots; interestingly, his essay was put beyond “security” hurdles by Twitter within hours of publication. This, apparently, is dangerous thinking.

The All-important Messaging

Just as in 2020, attention must be paid to how the news-interpretation industry characterises events because ready-made opinions play a growing role in our public space.

Noteworthy is the rising tone of opprobrium across the “news media” applied to anyone (outside of the Democratic Party) who is sceptical about glaring electoral oddities. “Election denier” (in the linked NBC article) is the newly-minted vilifying rhetoric, reeking of perception-adjustment. We are relentlessly encouraged to think of anyone raising an eyebrow at even ludicrously implausible election outcomes as nefarious, threatening, “dangerous”.

And do not believe this is relegated to rhetoric. Or rather, be assured the rhetoric is backed up with the threat of legal force. Even though the US Constitution spells out that election logistics are the domain of the individual states, just as with Biden-era covid overreach (using every instance of interstate-commerce to push federal mandates as far as they could be pushed) the federal Department of Justice is exploiting the existing federal voting rights laws to insert itself into elections. It issued this press release the day before the midterms to announce that federal official election watchers would be sent to 64 counties in 24 states, as a matter of civil rights and national security. Hilariously, three counties where Feds were to be sent were Luzerne (PA), Harris (TX), and Maricopa (AZ,) where the most egregious disenfranchisement occurred; it will be interesting to see what, if anything, is reported.

In addition, beginning in 2021, the Department of Homeland Security, in its assessments of threats to national security already designated election scepticism about the 2020 presidential contest as an actual terrorism threat source; and this was renewed in a DHS Bulletin from February to June 2022. The Department of Justice’s sub-legal treatment of January 6th protesters – who are essentially rigged-election protesters — is proof of what it is prepared to do to extinguish election-scepticism.

The January 6th protest was recast to imply it represented “violent domestic
terrorism”, and no less than ex-CIA chief John Brennan and one of his former station-chiefs posted to Afghanistan took to the news media to underscore the comparison with “insurgencies we face abroad”. In a letter of 26 April 2021, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas urged that the impulse behind January 6th needed rooting out of his own organisation; and the DHSreferred explicitly to election scepticism about the 2020 presidential contest as an actual terrorism threat source in a DHS Bulletin from February 7, 2022.

On March 1, 2022, Secretary Mayorkas addressed a group of state-level secretaries of state (responsible for voting integrity and logistics in their respective states) to lay the groundwork for elections, and public discussion about elections, to become a target of federal law-enforcement’s attention:

Department of Justice’s sub-legal treatment of January 6th protesters – who are essentially rigged-
election protesters — is proof of what it is prepared to do to extinguish election-scepticism.

Even social media posts showing Barack Obama himself raising the subject of election-machine failure are being slapped with warning labels:

Perhaps this explains right-leaning pundits’ reluctance to remark upon what looks like rigging and cheating?

So, leaving that topic and restricting ourselves to authorised Narratives, how are we meant to perceive Midterms 2022?

Confusion being the perfect fertile medium in which to plant Official Narratives, the Day-After headlines from the mainstream media came as the bracing face-slap to instil RightThink read-outs. Of which there were many – in number that is, not in kind. Note the absence of variety or ambiguity, indicative, perhaps, of foreknowledge or coordination.

Two last “takes” are significant. First, from the Lincoln Project, recognised as a ruthless, if much-ridiculed, brain trust of “conservatives” and Republican strategists known for their honed and polished singular message of Never-Trump. Please click on the link for their semi-sincere big kiss for DeSantis from the Lincoln Project

And if the instructions from the information gatekeepers are still too inconclusive, here in the clearest possible terms is the Last Word from Democrat Party puppet-master David Frum (noted above as co-author with John Podesta of the “expecting Election Night returns on Election Night is dangerous” op), published on the day after Election Day:

The DeSantis Train

If the attentive portion of the global public has learned anything since 2016, it is to react to a unified message from the Establishment with the question: “But why do you want me to believe that?” and to begin research with the assumption that the opposite of whatever is contended is likelier to be true.

The explicit instruction to reject Trump and embrace Ron DeSantis must therefore cause us to wonder why voices so closely allied with the Establishment power-base – the “Swamp”, in other words – urge us so strenuously to do that.

Most people know Ron DeSantis as the “governor who resisted lock-down”, though this is not quite accurate, as lock-downs, mask mandates, and school-closings did happen in Florida, though they tended to be shorter than in many other places, and DeSantis has generally and laudably championed the side of common sense in covid policy and welcomed experts who were shunned elsewhere for telling too much truth. DeSantis presides over a state that is increasingly seen as a haven from suicidal cod-Leftist governance prevailing in places like California and New York.

The basic question that an angry portion of the American public are demanding an unambiguous answer to: is your loyalty with the electorate, or is it with the ruling class? In other words: are you #MAGA or are you Swamp? There are many who worry that DeSantis is a Trojan horse by which the Establishment will capture the #MAGA vote without the remotest intention to deliver on its singular objective. The dependence DeSantis will have on the Establishment-controlled media and on oligarch and Establishment figures (with their own agendas) for financial backing is a concern. (Trump in contrast has shown he can operate with less than no help from the media and without as crippling an allegiance to outside big-money sources.) A 2017 local news item shows DeSantis attending an extended Koch Brothers event alongside GOP Establishment figures like Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Ted Cruz, and Mike Pence, who in the Trump era showed varying capacities for treacherous-if-hidden antagonism towards the #MAGA idea.

Also of relevance is a 2013 letter to then-Secretary of State John Kerry about potential turbulence in Ukraine signed by seven Congressmen including DeSantis. The bare text is anodyne enough, the product of a Congressional Committee, of course, but its context implies that this is a communication addressed to the DeepState to signal Congressional backing to whatever actions might “need” to be taken, and that DeSantis is unavoidably part of this apparatus. Within weeks of the letter being sent, the CIA executed the 2014 Maidan coup. What does this, along with the fact that Governor DeSantis’s spokesperson, feisty blonde Christina Pushaw also worked in Georgia and Ukraine in the NATO/national security space and for Volodymyr Zelensky himself, imply? (If anything?) We have two years to figure that out.

Making it Make Sense

In the days after the midterm election, when election returns were still trickling in, I found in the 2008 book by Mark Crispin Miller (et alia), Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, the following passage:

[…The] evidence of fraud was overwhelming. Americans reported by the tens of thousands that their votes had been tipped electronically; or that their polling places had too few machines and, therefore, lines so long that voting was impossible; or that they’d been told that they couldn’t vote because they hadn’t been registered (although they had registered) or because they had committed felonies (although they had not); or that their polling sites were closed, or had been moved elsewhere; or that the few machines on hand had broken down, or wouldn’t boot up, or, if they used paper, had run out of paper; and so on…

What was interesting was that the volume documenting electoral malfeasance from nearly twenty years ago could have been written about 2022, with the GOP and Democrats swapping roles.

And what puzzles the book’s author/editor Crispin Miller in 2008 is what is puzzling today: why was the aggrieved political party, and why were particular politicians themselves, like John Kerry, so silent, so coy, and even so dissembling about denouncing and investigating brazen crimes that cost them electoral power?

The explanation Crispin Miller entertained at the time was that the proposition that American elections could be stolen, and forced not to reflect the electorate’s will but some other, hidden power, was so monstrous that it could not bear contemplation, particularly not by politicians of a noble or delicate nature, like Kerry. (Insert ironic hilarity emoji here). Crispin Miller revised that and now believes that the Democrats were quiet about election-theft simply because they were biding their time until they themselves could exploit such techniques.

I think he was right the first time, in the sense that what is at stake is an almost incomprehensible change to the bedrock reality about how our world works.

And what we need to come to grips with is that there are those willing to use not merely voting-machine skull-duggery, but also the tools of mass psychological operations and the machinery of law enforcement to guarantee our democracy is merely performative.