American Fraud
Fraud is a serious charge, one of the most serious. Dante places the frauds near the deepest circle of his infernal damnation, far lower than the murderers. Fraud on a national political scale, in fact, would be teasing the edges of treason, which is Dante’s absolute lowest sin – the sin epitomized by Judas Iscariot and by Satan himself.
To throw accusations of widescale electoral fraud around is tantamount to claiming that the foundations of the representative republic have been systematically violated by…someone. If you have evidence of such a one, and of his (or their) having acted in such a way, then present that evidence, make the case, not rhetorically and provokingly on television, but legally and by means of presenting and defending that evidence in the proper judicial and political channels.
An old friend from my American Thinker days, C. Edmund Wright, the day after the election, was featured at AT cheering on Trump’s incendiary bluster, and specifically, repeatedly, insisting that this fight over the thousands of mail-in ballots being counted in Biden’s favor is a case of nefarious agents (any names?) pitting “theoretical pieces of mail” against “real live voters.”
But wait a moment. If you have hard evidence that this or that batch of mail-in votes was mass-produced illegitimately, rather than each ballot at some point being filled out by a “real live voter,” then present that proof.
Were there fraudulent votes cast in this election? Almost certainly. Were some ballots miscounted by deliberate malfeasance at vote-counting stations? I assume that is highly likely too. These are explosively charged emotional times in American politics, and many Americans these days are absurdly undereducated, particularly in the realms of personal honor and respect for the rule of law, so it is quite believable that there are pockets and trash cans around America stuffed with ballots deliberately “spoiled” by temporary election workers who, in the fever of the moment, decided to take matters into their own hands in a manner that is truly undermining of civil society and democratic legitimacy. But were there enough of such cases to turn any districts this way or that, or to falsely determine a statewide winner? Again, if such is the case, then this must be proved, not simply accepted on hearsay and raw anger because it suits one’s party preference to believe it.
The process questions that need to be asked by “conservatives” today, it seems to me, have more to do with the widespread use of absentee and early voting as such, rather than with the question of whether vast numbers of such votes were produced in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’ basement. Allowing anyone and everyone to vote seemingly whenever he feels like it, and without even having to get up and go to a polling station to accomplish this, is a recipe for expanding the electorate with millions of the idle and ill-informed, the unserious and irresponsible. This is a grave threat to the future of any nation hoping to survive as a representative republic, as it greatly exacerbates the danger Benjamin Franklin pointed to when he warned that the republic would be finished when men realized they could “vote themselves other people’s money.” Expanding the voter rolls with the disengaged and self-absorbed – the sort of people who would not vote if they had to do so through active effort and practical inconvenience – holds the potential for political catastrophe. The politicians who promoted this expansion, or failed to resist it forcefully, have much to answer for today – but not to Trump fans, who are merely panicking because in their fantasy world Donald Trump cannot lose without destroying everything their fragile emotional edifice depends on.
At the end of the day, the great fraud perpetrated in this election is not likely to be anything related to the tallied output of the election process, but rather to the content of the input. That is to say, the real fraud relates to the nomination process, the people and motives behind it, and the mendacious salesmanship involved in masking the true movers and devious purposes behind the two ignorant old idiots presented to America as the official presidential candidates.
