By J.B. Shurk | American Thinker
Image: John via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
If you have been keeping an eye on the election audit taking place right now in Maricopa County, Arizona, then you also know that Democrats, news propagandists, and "concerned" NeverTrump Republicans are beginning to sound more and more like trapped rats squeaking in fear.
An army of lawyers — many of the same political
operatives who manipulated the November election by contravening existing
election laws and flooding battleground states with uncontrolled and unverified
mail-in ballots — are begging state and federal courts to stop the audit
midcourse and petitioning Arizona's Democrat secretary of state and Merrick Garland's Department of Justice to intervene under the absurd pretense that ensuring
election integrity somehow deprives voters of their civil
rights. Arizonan and Biden-supporter Cindy McCain has publicly called the vote recount "ludicrous" because
"the election is over."
And MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is so terrified of what
the auditors might find that she insists that the whole exercise is not only
"dangerous," but also the "end of democracy."
Even though the entire audit is being conducted with unprecedented
transparency and live video
feeds that invite viewers anywhere in the world to watch the process,
reporters and adverse political agents have been repeatedly caught
attempting to infiltrate the well run operation or laboring to expose the identities of workers.
If there is a reason for inserting spies into an
already open process other than to later cast doubt upon the integrity of the
auditing process itself, I don't know of it. And if there is a
reason to expose workers' identities to the public other than to make them
targets for campaigns of harassment and intimidation, reporters have made no attempt
to provide it.
Compare the highly professional audit taking place in Arizona
to the orchestrated chaos of the presidential election. It took five
days last November for vote-counters to find enough mail-in ballots for Joe
Biden for the Democrat press corps to declare him the winner, and in the voting
precincts where Trump leads disappeared over those days, transparency was
nowhere to be seen.
Vote-counters covered windows with cardboard to block outside
observation of any kind; counting paused and restarted in secret; and ad hoc procedures were established on the
fly and without consistency from one precinct to the next when determining
whether to include ballots lacking legally required voter identification
metrics, including even the rudimentary safety protocol of a loosely matching
voter signature.
If "free and fair" elections require
basic security, verification of ballot authenticity, and consistently applied
standards at least across the precincts and counties of any one state, then
there was obviously nothing free or fair about the 2020 election.
The remarkable thing is that most Americans have actually come to this correct
conclusion. After six months of some of the worst gaslighting in
America's history, during which corporate news propagandists and tech behemoths
have colluded with federal and state authorities to paint the presidential
election as aboveboard and all those who question its legitimacy as kooks,
"extremists," "violent insurrectionists," and
"terrorists," the nearly universal narrative drumbeat from the press
and the psychological warfare deployed against regular Americans have failed
miserably in their desired effect.
Whether spray-painted on highway overpasses, discussed in uncensored online forums,
or spoken aloud, more and more Americans have concluded that the election was
stolen from President Trump.
State legislatures were useless in ensuring election
integrity. Election lawsuits in Arizona, New Mexico, Georgia, New
Hampshire, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin failed to provide any timely
mechanism for remedying violations of states' own election laws, let alone for
redressing the likelihood of outright fraud.
The Supreme Court shirked its own constitutional
duty to safeguard American enfranchisement by declining to hear on appeal the
merits of lawsuits alleging electoral misconduct, consenting to review
controversies only after Biden's inauguration and then largely booting them as
moot, and outright refusing to exercise its original
jurisdiction over Texas's suit against other states for their failure to ensure
equal application of their own voting laws as required by the
Constitution.
At every step of the way, America's institutions utterly failed to safeguard the security of the 2020
election beforehand, to protect Americans' votes once the predictable
catastrophe of mail-in balloting unfolded on November 3, or to provide any
semblance of the rule of law afterward that could have remedied the election's
obvious and multifaceted failures and halted America's downward decline toward
a banana republic farce whose elections look less reliable than those in
Venezuela.
Yet the common sense of the American people has largely
prevailed over the "Big Lie," an astonishing accomplishment during a time
when Americans have never been more controlled by government authorities
micromanaging everything, from what they wear across their faces to which
pronouns they use to refer to others.
I have always been of the opinion that whether the full
scale of the 2020 election's fraud and manipulation ever comes to light, the
historical record will never be able to account for three facts that betray
most Americans' common sense:
(1) no president for a century and a half has won
more votes during re-election than he did for his first election yet lost
re-election, and President Trump gained over ten million new votes over his
2016 victory;
(2) Joe Biden, a man evincing obvious signs of mental
decline and dementia who generated historically low levels of excitement among his own
Democrat voters, somehow won over fifteen million more votes than Barack Obama,
the political rock star who energized Democrats like no other politician in
recent memory, managed in 2012; and
(3) President Trump won almost every traditional bellwether county in the country from coast to coast
by double-digits.
After a year when Facebook and Twitter did everything
they could to minimize Trump's reach to his voters and his voters' reach to
each other, and after years of outright Pravda corporate news that pushed the
Deep State's "Russia collusion" and Ukraine "quid pro quo"
lies to take down a sitting president, President Trump's vote totals in 2020
were still so remarkable that they would have normally indicated a resounding
mandate from the American people.
It is revealing that, unlike other past election losses,
there was no great Republican "autopsy" done in order to pinpoint
what went wrong, as there was after Mitt Romney's 2012 failure.
Other than an occasional assertion that Republicans
"must do better with suburban women," there is no serious analysis
about how Republicans should improve upon President Trump's 2016
totals. The reason why is obvious: he did better with voters, in
general, than any other sitting president in history, and with minority voters
in particular than any Republican in sixty years.
When George Bush recently remarked that Republicans would lose future
elections if they appealed only to a "white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant"
base, his out-of-touch assessment of the 2020 election was apparent to anyone
paying attention.
However WASP-y George Bush's Republican Party may
have been, it is Donald Trump who expanded the party's reach to Americans of
every background, and Trump's direct engagement with black voters has been so
successful that even Obama was forced to minimize the accomplishment as merely
due to Trump's "macho style."
Trump built that. Most Americans seem to have
figured that out.
The problem with using the organs of the State to advance
outright lies is that the State becomes less and less credible as more lies are
revealed for what they are.
The audit in Maricopa County, Arizona involves the
votes of one county out of roughly 3,100 in the United States, but after six
months when Americans' collective common sense has been at odds with the
collective narrative of the powers that be, one county's truth could expose a
whole nation's lies.
No wonder Democrats find it so "dangerous."
