American Pravda: Our Disputed Election
By Ron Unz • Unz Review • January 14, 2021
Although hardly suggested by our mainstream media, the officially-reported results demonstrated that our 2020 presidential election was extraordinarily close.
All the regular pre-election polls had shown the Democratic candidates with a comfortable lead, but just as had been the case four years earlier, the actual votes tabulated revealed a contrary outcome. According to the official vote-count, the Biden/Harris ticket ended up millions of votes ahead, having racked up huge leads in overwhelmingly Democratic states such as my own California, and also winning by a very comfortable 306 to 232 margin in Electoral Votes. But control of the White House depends upon the state-by-state tallies, and these told a very different story.
Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record 158 million votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around 0.01%. So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind, Trump might have received another four years in office. One American voter in 7,000.
Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern American history. For decades, the very tight Kennedy-Nixon race of 1960 had been a byword for close races, but Biden’s margin of victory was much smaller. More recently, George W. Bush won a narrow reelection over Sen. John F. Kerry in 2004, but Kerry would have required a voter swing nearly five times greater than Trump’s in order to claim victory. Indeed, with the sole exception of the notorious “dangling chads” Florida decision of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, no American presidential candidate in over 100 years had lost by so narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump.
If our incompetent or dishonest media had correctly reported these simple facts, perhaps Democratic partisans would have been somewhat more understanding of the outrage expressed by so many of their Republican counterparts, who believed they had been cheated of their election victory. Admittedly, Trump backers seem equally unaware of the historically slender margin of their candidate’s defeat.
The emotions on both sides of the Trump reelection campaign were among the strongest in modern American history, and the outcome was determined by the tiniest sliver of voters in a few states. So under these circumstances, last week’s controversial events in DC were perhaps not so entirely unexpected. Indeed, during the weeks before the election, I’d half-predicted such a scenario, speculating about possible claims of a stolen election and the resulting civil unrest. For example, the following was my response to a question from a longtime commenter:
Many Trump supporters are alleging that there could be massive voting fraud in the 2020 election. Some believe that if Trump is ahead on election night, Democratic machines will manufacture ballots to give a victory to Biden. Do you think this is possible or do you see this as improbable?
Well, I suppose it’s possible…
Frankly, both sides are so totally agitated and extreme, the Trumpists would be saying and believing it, even if it were entirely false and impossible. It’s hard to figure out what’s happening when everyone involved is so dishonest and corrupt. Trump has always seemed like an ignorant buffoon to me, but I think the Democrats and liberals have almost gone insane in their opposition to him.
As I’ve been telling people for weeks, the whole political situation certainly seems very bizarre and I’ve seen some pretty plausible arguments that we might end up with a “disputed” election if the numbers are fairly close in key states. Apparently, the Republicans are overwhelmingly going to be voting in person, while the Democrats will be voting by mail, meaning their ballots will be much slower to come in and be counted.
So Trump could be ahead by wide margins on Election Night and declare victory to the cheers of his partisans. And then as the mail ballots come in, the numbers turn against him, but he and his die-hard supporters cry “Fraud!” and refuse to recognize the result. Hard to say what would happen, but I’m glad I live in California which is generally quiet and peaceful these days.
Obviously, Bush/Gore was “disputed” in 2000, but only party loyalists much cared at the time, while today the country is filled with Trumpists and Trump-haters, both very suspicious and angry.
Although I think my speculative scenario turned out to be reasonably correct, the actual post-election developments were far greater in magnitude than I had expected, and may have dire consequences for maintaining American civil liberties.
I haven’t investigated the matter, but there does seem to be considerable circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so many of their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump victory would be catastrophic why would they not use every possible means, fair and foul alike, to save America from that dire fate?
In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins they provided may have been heavily “padded” to ensure the candidate’s defeat.
Even leaving aside some of these plausible claims, the case for a stolen election seems almost airtight. I don’t know or care anything about Dominion voting machines, whether they are owned by Venezuelan Marxists, Red Chinese, or Martians. But the most blatant election-theft was accomplished in absolutely plain sight.
Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself. But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once they story was finally published in the pages of the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, all links to the Post article and its website were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had cast their ballots.
Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a Trump partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of the Intercept, the $100 million publication he himself had co-founded, refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America’s media and tech giants formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.
The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in modern presidential election history and Biden’s official victory margin was just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to learn the truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone who continues to deny that the election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous.
Heated election campaigns have consequences, and this is especially true when all of America’s most powerful corporations and ruling elites unite to essentially steal a reelection from a populist incumbent, hero-worshiped by a large fraction of the American citizenry. And when despite all that blatant unfairness and theft, the margin of defeat is just one vote in 7,000, an explosion of popular outrage should only be expected.
Solid estimates appear unavailable, but it seems that hundreds of thousands of grass-roots Trump supporters traveled to our nation’s capital to protest against what they regarded as a stolen election, and then peacefully assembled to listen to their hero’s speech.
Afterwards, a tiny sliver of this vast assembly of angry individuals—perhaps less than one in a thousand—barged their way into the strangely-undefended Capitol building of Congress, taking souvenir selfies, livesteaming their antics, and generally played the role of tourist-protesters while the lawmakers they so despised as corrupt mostly fled or hid. These Trumpists and some of their colorful costumes brought to mind the radical Yippies of the late 1960s.
The previous year had seen an unprecedented wave of violent riots, arson, and looting across some 200 American cities, which our entirely corrupt and dishonest media had generally characterized as “mostly peaceful protests.” In previous years, angry mobs of organized Democratic activists had repeatedly invaded and occupied the Wisconsin Legislature, often winning praise from the media. But when unarmed Trump supporters now did something similar for a few hours in Washington, they were quickly branded “domestic terrorists” seeking to overthrow our democracy.
A video shows Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed female protester, being shot dead by a security guard as she tried to climb through a window, an incident not dissimilar to the famous Kent State shootings of a 1960s campus protest, but hardly treated by the media in a similar light.
A couple of other Trump protesters, perhaps elderly, overweight, or in poor health, died of strokes or heart-attacks during all the excitement, and one Capitol police officer later died of his injuries, allegedly struck in the head with a fire-extinguisher though solid facts are lacking. Yet this confused tableau of chaos and popular anger, which recalls scenes from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests, has been portrayed as a “coup attempt” incited by President Trump, and therefore justifying his second impeachment.
Even more importantly, the incoming Biden/Harris Administration may be considering the most sweeping domestic crackdown upon traditional American civil liberties since the Patriot Act was passed in the hurried aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks twenty years ago. This has been justified by the need to suppress “domestic extremism.”
Many of the most zealous Trump supporters, including the unfortunate Ms. Babbitt, have apparently become committed followers of the “QAnon conspiracy theory,” ferociously demonized by the American media and now heavily censored and deplatformed by the Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the other Tech giants. Although I’m only very slightly familiar with QAnon, it appears to be a bizarre mishmash of many strange ideas, notably including the belief that many of our ruling elites consist of exceptionally corrupt and criminal individuals, sometimes even being Satanic pedophiles.
Although much of that doctrine seems like total nonsense to me, we should note the massive suppression the movement has experienced and bear in mind that “the wicked flee when no man pursueth.” And indeed, my own articles over the years have solidly established that such seemingly ridiculous notions probably contain a very large nugget of truth:
Trump’s been deleted from internet, and any one of us could be next
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | January 14, 2021
Donald Trump has been deleted from the internet. He hasn’t been put behind a warning or had his followers reduced, or been forced to switch platforms. He’s gone.
Snapchat. Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. Google. Amazon. Instagram. Shopify. Twitch. Tiktok. Gone.
And he’s the President of the United States. If they can do it to him, they can do it to anyone.
Indeed, that’s the message being sent. It’s an intimidation move, designed to frighten people into policing themselves.
Many people have picked up on this already.
But unfortunately, many more are still lost in what they falsely believe to be the heady scent of victory. They’ll realise their mistake eventually, but it may be too late for us all by then.
It didn’t even stop at Trump, either. Tens of thousands of other people were banned in the following days.
For years the refrain from people defending censorship on social media – ironically, people who would usually identify as “socialists” – has been that private companies have the right to police their platforms as they see fit, and if you don’t like it you can switch to another social network.
… but now those other social networks are being shut down too.
It started with Gab a few years ago, but the recent assault on Parler was even stronger. Gab survived, Parler has not. The tech giants got together and stamped the life out of a smaller competitor. (Pretty sure antitrust laws are there to prevent exactly that scenario, but nevermind.)
The whole week since the “Capitol Hill Riot” has been one long display of dominance. A peacock fanning its tail or a silverback banging on tree trunks.
They are telling us who’s in charge, but some people are refusing to listen.
A common meme doing the rounds among “liberal” voices – who are these days well-schooled in missing the point – goes something like this: “If he’s too dangerous to have a twitter account, why does he have the nuclear codes?”
But, of course, the real question is – if they don’t even let him have a Twitter account, do you honestly think they let him anywhere near the nuclear codes?
Do you really think he has, or had, any power at all? Do you think Joe Biden does?
Do you think the same architecture that just publically castrated the “most powerful man on Earth” and the “leader of the free world” will suddenly start doing what it’s told when a “progressive” voice is in charge?
If they don’t bow to the will of the people now, why should they ever?
They won’t. They never have.
We’ve been told, in very clear terms, who has the power. And it is certainly not us, nor is it our elected representatives.
In fact, it’s not anyone with either democratic mandate or legal accountability, but rather a series of nameless executives, faceless bureaucrats and a succession of tech-billionaires forming a new breed of royalty.
Deleting Donald Trump wasn’t just a “panic response” to the “violence” on Capitol Hill, and it wasn’t a punishment for the man himself – It was a calculated display of honesty. A declaration of intent.
A notification of the limitations we’re all going to face as the increasingly dystopian new normal shapes a different kind of society.
It’s all been clearly co-ordinated. The Deep State and big business and the media working together. Police are instructed to create unrest on Capitol Hill, allow “rioters” into the building. The media report it as an “attempted coup”, while the social networks remove all of Trump’s denunciations so he can be blamed for “inciting violence”.
They created the lie. They spread the lie. They silenced anyone who would gainsay the lie. They have, as Karl Rove would put it, “created reality”, and now we’re here analysing it.
It was a big lie, this time, because it had to be. Because the man – or rather the office – was big. But for Joe Bloggs it can be a small lie. “he posted child porn” or “he was spreading hate” or “he was denying the pandemic”.
The precedent has been created. They can ban anyone they want and make up the reasons later.
Frank Zappa famously said:
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
Well, we’ve been shown the wall, and we’re being encouraged to cheer because the first person to run into it was Donald Trump. Rather predictably, millions have fallen for it.
Moderna CEO says the World will have to Live with Covid ‘Forever’
Comments by Brian Shilhavy | Health Impact News | January 14, 2021
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel announced today that the “SARS-CoV-2 is not going away,” and that “We are going to live with this virus, we think, forever,” at a panel discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference.
The CEO of Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna warned Wednesday that the coronavirus that has brought world economies to a standstill and overwhelmed hospitals will be around “forever.”
Public health officials and infectious disease experts have said there is a high likelihood that Covid-19 will become an endemic disease, meaning it will become present in communities at all times, though likely at lower levels than it is now.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel appeared to agree Wednesday that Covid-19 will become endemic, saying “SARS-CoV-2 is not going away.”
“We are going to live with this virus, we think, forever,” he said during a panel discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference. (Source.)
Who these “Public health officials and infectious disease experts” were was not mentioned, nor any references to studies or anything else.
But they don’t need them, apparently, as simply stating it as so is enough, especially if the major networks owned by Big Pharma back you up.
And there couldn’t be a conflict of interest here, could there? After all, he is the CEO of one of the two companies currently distributing billions of doses of the new COVID mRNA injections, making him a very wealthy man.
What else would you expect him to say? He wants a continuous revenue stream, and his company has already stated that the mRNA technology being injected into people is an “operating system,” the “Software of Life,” so just like any other operating system it needs to be regularly updated to fight new viruses.
The bigger news story here is that the vast majority of the American public will actually believe what this guy says and line up to get their injections.
See also:
Poland slams social media deplatforming of Trump as government readies anti-censorship law
RT | January 14, 2021
The Polish government has decried social media platforms’ (mis)handling of US President Donald Trump’s accounts as Warsaw prepares to pass its own legislation to stop ideological censorship.
Facebook’s decision to remove Trump’s account was politically motivated, hypocritical, and “amounts to censorship,” Deputy Justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta told local media.
Under the country’s new anti-censorship law, “removing lawful content would directly violate the law, and this will have to be respected by the platforms that operate in Poland,” he explained to Polish outlet Rzeczpospolita.
PM Mateusz Morawiecki made similar comments earlier this week, though he did not mention the US president by name. “Algorithms or the owners of corporate giants should not decide which views are right and which are not,” he wrote on Facebook. “There can be no consent to censorship.”
“Censorship of free speech, which is the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now returning in the form of a new, commercial mechanism to combat those who think differently,” Morawiecki continued.
The new anti-censorship law, first unveiled last month, will allow users whose content is taken down by the Big Tech companies to petition a special court if they believe the content did not violate Polish law and should be restored. The user may first file a complaint to the platform, which has 24 hours to restore the ‘offending’ content if they agree it does not violate Polish law.
If the platform refuses, however, the user has 48 hours to petition a court newly created for this purpose. Should the court find in favor of the censored user over a seven-day consideration period, the censoring platform can be fined up to €1.8 million.
Polish government figures, especially those on the right wing of the political spectrum, have had their own struggles with Facebook censorship in the past. The platform kicked Konfederacja party MP Janusz Korwin-Mikke off the site in November despite some 780,000 followers, alleging he had repeatedly violated “community standards.”
Morawiecki has called for the EU to adopt similar rules for governing social media, though the multinational group’s current trajectory seems to lean toward punishing platforms for not removing ‘offensive’ content quickly enough.
However, individual countries such as France are starting to push back against the dominance of Big Tech. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire recently referred to the tech titans as a “digital oligarchy” and “one of the threats” to democracy.
As when Poland first announced the new rule, social media users tired of being tread on by Facebook and Twitter expressed their approval.
Trump Impeached Again, Nearly Half the Country Opposed
By Stephen Lendman | January 14, 2021
There’s no ambiguity about Trump’s legion of supporters.
On average, polls show that nearly half of voting-age Americans oppose impeaching Trump and removing him from office.
Yet Wednesday on the House floor, lynch mob “justice” triumphed over the rule of law.
Trump became the first US president impeached twice.
Both times were for politicized reasons with no legitimacy — Wednesday’s process largely along party lines.
Ten Republicans joined with 222 undemocratic Dems.
One article of impeachment falsely accused Trump of “willfully inciting violence against the government of the United States.”
His public remarks and tweets did nothing of the sort. He urged nonviolence on January 6, not the other way around.
Once again on Wednesday from the White House, Trump denounced week ago Capitol Hill violence, urging calm.
The die was cast. Dems out for blood and their establishment media, press agents have been going all-out to deny Trump a second term — along with wanting him defrocked, humiliated, and prevented from holding public office ahead for the wrong reasons, not legitimate ones.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that the article of impeachment will be sent to the Senate straightaway.
Separately, he turned reality on its head by the following Big Lie on national television, saying:
“The timing was thrust upon us by the actions of the president of the United States (sic).”
“The fact that he is leaving should not divert us from holding accountable behavior which many of us believe is treasonous behavior and criminal behavior (sic).”
At earliest, Senate trial won’t begin until January 19 as things now stand — two days before Trump’s tenure ends.
A two-thirds super-majority is needed for conviction, a high bar to cross, what never happened before in US history.
Will Trump be the US president to be removed from office following impeachment?
If not, will he be convicted by a Senate super-majority post-tenure?
What’s unthinkable based on the fabricated charge of inciting insurrection is unlikely but possible.
That’s the depth to which the state of the nation sank, greater depths likely ahead.
The rule of law died long ago in Washington.
9/11 added an exclamation point.
Made-in-the-USA covid (that’s renamed seasonal flu) and orchestrated Main Street economic collapse last year, continuing with no end of it in prospect, added two more.
Orchestrated by anti-Trump dark forces, last week’s Capitol Hill coup attempt added another.
In response to Trump’s politicized impeachment 2.0, Law Professor Jonathan Turley said the following:
Wednesday’s “snap” impeachment of Trump “dispense(d) with the traditional hearing or inquiry of impeachment.”
“There was no opportunity to debate the language or the implications of the language.”
“(T)he rush to judgment could become a parade of constitutional horribles.”
It’s “ripe for challenge on the Senate floor and even later in the federal courts.”
Impeachment “language… is sweeping and raises serious concerns of this standard for future presidents.”
Trump’s remarks did not rise to the level of “criminal incitement…”
“(T)he Senate should reject the impeachment if on the basis that an impeachment of a former president is unwarranted and likely unconstitutional.”
It’s based on invented reasons, not legitimate ones.
Turley is a sharp Trump critic as am I — for justifiable reasons, not phony ones to satisfy vengeful Dems.
Impeaching Trump twice for politicized reasons — along with seeking lynch mob “justice” against him throughout his tenure — proves conclusively that Dems are self-serving and unfit to lead the nation.
Their involvement in staging a Capitol Hill coup attempt against a sitting president left the state of the nation and rule of law in tatters.
Post-inauguration of unelected Biden/Harris next week, will they declare martial law?
Will tyranny follow on their watch?
A pox on both right wings of the one-party state.
On her website, Sharyl Attkisson posted results of what she called “a recent unscientific poll of more than 640 people,” adding:
“When asked if they generally trust (US) election integrity, 70% said ‘Absolutely no’ and 19% said ‘More no than yes’ for a total of 89% expressing skepticism.”
“Another 6% said they tend to trust election integrity: 2% said ‘Absolutely yes’ and 4% said ‘More yes than no.’ ”
Along with earlier stolen US federal elections since the early 19th century, media-supported Election 2020 theft may have been most brazen of all.
Events post-election, leading up to last week’s orchestrated Capitol Hill coup attempt, Wednesday’s impeachment, and what may follow are proof positive of a nation dismissive of the rule of law.
It’s on a fast track to full-blown tyranny if not challenged by nonviolent mass action in the streets before it’s too late.
Stephen Lendman’s two Wall Street books are timely reading:
How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion, and Class War
Alert: the operation to squash protests in America – PART ONE
By Jon Rappoport | January 14, 2021
The Department of Justice has announced it’s mounting a full-scale operation to arrest and charge people who broke into the Capitol on January 6.
There will be a wide-ranging menu of charges, starting with criminal trespass, and moving all the way to weapons possession, theft of National Security data, assault, and sedition.
The DOJ list of charges is meant to impress the American people.
Of course, an impressive DOJ list could have been leveled against thousands of people who participated in Antifa/BLM-led burning, looting, theft, and assault across the US over the past six months.
But that didn’t happen.
Those violent riots were a form of “insurrection,” but the label was never applied.
And Big Tech never considered banning social media users who planned and supported the riots.
From here on out, people will need to announce quite specifically what they’re protesting against. I’m talking, of course, about protests against the brutal COVID lockdowns.
Because you can be sure the government/media complex will paint such people with the “Capitol-break-in” brush. That’s part of this operation to squash dissent.
On a related note, social media are censoring users, and news media are censoring their own talent, if the issue of the stolen election continues to be raised. However, there is no expiration date on accusations of vote fraud.
Remember, after Trump won the 2016 election, Democrats spent the next three years claiming he didn’t win, but instead was part of a Russian conspiracy that handed him the presidency. Who was censored for saying THAT?
Back to the protests: As I’ve mentioned in prior articles, equating distinct events, and thus turning them into “the same event,” is part and parcel of mind control.
A hundred bereft business owners, who have been driven into bankruptcy by the COVID lockdowns, gathering near a governor’s office to protest, will be equated with “crazy dangerous Trumpers who believe the election was stolen.”
This is no accident. It’s standard operating procedure in the world of intelligence-agency campaigns.
If the CIA wants to maintain a foreign dictator in office, because he makes favorable deals with mega-corporations to loot and plunder his country, they’ll spread vast disinformation about the rebels who want free elections:
“The rebel force threatening to unseat the president is led by the cult of child-killers who have been ravaging families in the countryside…”
Closer to home, imagine something like this: “The group called Citizens for a Free Nation, who showed up at the governors’ mansion last week to protest COVID safety measures, is largely composed of unhinged anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters, some of whom may have attended the January 6 rally at the Capitol, which resulted in an act of insurrection. Police and FBI are investigating…”
Behind it all? A determination to suppress resistance to the COVID lockdowns, aka mass imprisonments.
The Police State knows the months of lockdowns and economic destruction have driven more and more people to the wall. The US population is a dry tinder forest in a season of high heat and no rain.
Controlling the population is a major problem. So those who stand up and visibly break out of jail have to be made into despicable illustrations of Something Else.
What label is at hand? By mere coincidence: INSURRECTIONISTS, “who broke into the Capitol on January 6, the day that will live in infamy.”
That label can now be applied anywhere. It’s a major item on the game board of intelligence-agency operations. When dissenting heads pop up, paint them with it.
Nevertheless, protests are still legal and legitimate. People who run them need to articulate what they’re about, over and over, in very clear fashion.
Americans, who’ve lived with more freedom and security than people in other parts of the world, tend to think their government, when it muscles in, signifies The End and Total Defeat.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Freedom never dies.
It is an eternal quality.