Similar to the 2020 election, the 2020 election has been dragged into overtime. ‘Stop the steal’ has become a rallying cry against alleged fraud that cost Trump reelection.
I don’t care that much who wins or who had the election stolen from whom. It does not affect my personal life much either way. I think the last time presidential policies had a direct impact on average people’s lives was possibly Obamacare in terms of causing premiums to rise and patients to lose their doctors, as well other problems. The Trump Tax cuts to some extent, too, but nothing too dramatic. But the possibly greatest overreach of power in U.S. history–the Covid lockdowns and shutdowns, in which millions of law-abiding individuals and thousands of business were forced to close, social distance, or quarantine–was enacted entirely by state and city governments, not Washington.
When you look at all the people who are making money–whether online , in the stock market, or at tech firms, etc.–they are not losing sleep over the outcome of this. Unless you’re a political pundit with a large following or a political strategist, lawyer, or consultant, no one is making money off the outcome of this either way.
Even if Trump were given 4 more terms, 10 more terms, etc., there would still be nothing done about immigration, tech censorship, ‘bringing jobs back to America,’ or any of the other stuff ‘we’ care about. Given that Trump has shown an unwillingness/inability to do anything about those things in his first 4 years, what makes everyone thinks that having another 4 years will make a difference. Even if this the fault of Congress and judges for undermining the Trump agenda, does it matter whose fault it is if the outcome is the same anyway? America is flooded with so may immigrants–legal and illegal,–that the demographic change and ‘browning of America’ is irreversible anyway.
I disagree that Texas will turn solidly blue as some are predicting, but it will be interesting to see if America can still function and remain cohesive as a ‘union’ when it bears no resemblance to how it was 100+ years ago. Some such as Vox Day say it cannot; I disagree, and argue that diversity helps the economy and promotes stability even if we oppose it at the same time. Look at Apple, for example. In the 80s and 90s it was a computer company; now it is a smart phone company that also sells computers on the side. Apple bears little resemblance to how it was decades ago yet it’s more successful than ever. I wish it weren’t this way, but all the economic metrics show America doing better than ever, especially compared to the rest of the world, in spite of all this diversity.
I think also many are overestimating the badness of a Biden, or worse, a Harris presidency. Biden is going to do pretty much the same stuff Trump would do if given a second term: getting a Covid vaccine distributed, and more stimulus spending. Court packing, tax hikes, and amnesty are wildcards, but I do not see those happening. Regarding wars in the Middle East, it was both Bushes who got America into wars, not Clinton or Obama, so this concern about Biden starting new wars in the Middle East may be unfounded.
Regarding allegations of fraud, imagine that Trump had won the swing states by large margins and Biden conceded; would there be investigations by the Trump team into fraud? Certainty not.
Imagine if Rudy and others had forewarning/foreknowledge that any investigation would show a bigger lead for Biden, and that there was fraud committed by both sides, would he continue to press the issue for the ‘sake of upholding the integrity of the democratic process’ even it it still meant Trump lost? Maybe not.
In 2004 dems cried fraud in regard to Ohio and Diebold voting machines. We told them, rightfully, to suck it up. Now we’re acting like the whiners. The problem with politics is that it cannot be held to a standard of consistency. If our desired candidates win, then it reflects ‘the will of people’; otherwise, the other side cheated. Both sides succumb to this type of thinking.
There are calls by some on the Trump-right to disavow Tucker for having the temerity to merely press Powell on her sources. This shows how petty this has become in that a journalist merely doing his job of trying to substantiate a claim, is perceived as an attack. It is absurd how Tucker’s loyalty is being called into question when for the past 3 years he has done so much to help Trump and has even risked his own personal safety and reputation in doing so.
A counterargument is that because this is an ongoing investigation, such specific evidence must remain clandestine, so as to not help the opposing side. This does not really make sense because if the Biden team cheated with the aid of Dominion, surely they would know of it and such information would be revealed during the discovery process of the case anyway. But how about this: when the election is over, regardless of the outcome, Powell and her team do a full disclosure showing the exact evidence of fraud, including source code and anything else they have. If her claims are true, then as Tucker noted, it would be among the greatest frauds in the history of the United States, a way bigger deal than the Nixon Tapes or the Pentagon Papers, and she would be a hero among conservatives and legal scholars.
It is hard to know who is right. Vox Day posted about Dominion voting machines flipping votes to Biden, but this is refuted by numerous sources. So who is right? Vox or someone else makes some claim about fraud, and then a Google search refutes it. If we cannot see the actual source code proving such flipping, then who knows. It may not even be possible to reverse engineer the code–assuming that fraud investigators have possession of a machine, which in itself is highly unlikely and disputed–given that that the software is propriety, and therefore to get these exact percentages cited by “Robb Hurst, CPA” is not possible. If Dominion actually coded their software to flip votes, it is reasonable to assume that they would take steps to make the code impossible to reverse-engineer or have some automatic and remote-controlled mechanism deploy non-fraudulent code, switching out the fraudulent code after the election is over, similar to how malware on an infected system can download updates from a central and remote server.
This comes across as self-serving and feet dragging. If they want to position themselves of exemplars of democracy, then this means, if we’re being consistent, that possible fraud for states in which there is no possibly of Trump winning must also be investigated with equal intensity and certitude as Georgia and Pennsylvania. Same for states in which Trump won by a large margin. If the goal is to find fraud and irregularities, in order to maintain and uphold the sanctity and integrity of the democratic process, the odds of finding such irregularities would presumably be higher in California than Georgia, owing to the much larger number of votes cast, but such findings would not benefit Trump.
Because I and others have no pretense of wrapping ourselves in the sanctity of democracy, it should not concern us if there was fraud or not. Why are dissidents who just months ago were opposed to or critical of democracy, suddenly champions of it when it serves their ends? That seems inconsistent.
But if both sides are acting out of trbalistic ingroup preferences, who can lay claim to the moral high ground? Who is really right when both sides insist they are right, are on the side of ‘good’, and appealing to ‘logic and reason’? Even the most rabid SJW on twitter thinks he or she is on the side of good. If we can say that Trump’s policies are preferable to Biden’s, and that therefore fraud needs to be investigated, then is the left justified in doing the same when they lose, as they are motivated by the same ingroup preferences? This leads one down a rabbit hole on finding the meaning and source of objective truth: some say it is in the Bible; for others, it is science; for others, the Constitution.
I have also observed that it’s mostly the platform-right (people with big social media platforms, big online presences ) who are pushing the fraud narrative, whereas ‘anons’ on 4chan and Reddit are more skeptical of the fraud narrative. A similar trend was observed with Q, with guys like Vox Day, who has a large platform, pushing the Q narrative, but people on 4chan were much more skeptical after none of the Q prophecies came true, after in 2018 initially supporting it. They see this narrative as self-serving by people who want more ad revenue and followers that comes from spreading false hope, than about the pursuit of the truth or aspiring to a new framework of politics, but also the failure of the fraud people to provide any substantive proof or evidence of fraud or evidence that refutes the fact-checkers.