Election denial has long been a bipartisan fetish within the American ruling class

It's critical to understand that criminalizing everyone's "wrong" opinions, not just Trump's, is the goal behind the goal of Jack Smith's bizarre indictment

Think of this essay as a supplement to Images only (#171). Often, when I attempt to use these kinds of posts to tell a more-or-less linear story, not every message in my head is translated neatly into the posted material, so it may look as though I’m asserting something I’m not or that I hold beliefs I don’t.

In this case, it might have looked like I was implying that Donald Trump shouldn’t have been indicted for the things he’s been indicted for because of a scattered few instances of election denial, or even the occasional gambit meant to actually overturn the results an election, from the Democrat side. That is, the post was just superficial “whataboutism.”

In reality, whether Trump actually committed any of the felonies he’s being charged with, the items of focus in U.S. Attorney Jack Smith’s indictment all relate to Trump allegedly knowing he had fairly lost the election and denying it anyway. For one thing, I think he really does believe the 2020 election was rigged against him, and for another, even if he was wrong—and frankly, there are increasingly solid reasons to consider the possibility that he was indeed screwed—it’s not a crime to be publicly wrong.

If Trump engaged in demonstrably illegal actions as a result of these beliefs—or for any reason—then he’s clearly on the hook for those. But what Smith is really trying to do is convict Trump of some kind of unpalatable “-information”—mis-, dis-, or mal-. If this happens, then it sets the stage for everyday Americans of sufficient influence who dissent from establishment narratives to go to prison for being wrong (unlikely) or for being factually right against the uniparty tide (count on it).

Smith’s indictment is also heavy in the word “conspiracy.” This is one of many things suggesting the indictment was actually written by MSNBC or CNN jabberheads, as this language allows these clowns to associate this indictment with the many “conspiracy theories” promoted by “right-wingers,” e.g., the covid jabs were a disaster; masking mandates and lockdowns were, and are, for suckers; Ukraine is a snakepit of eliminationist-nationalist goons (including some members of the Biden family) whose leaders deserve obliteration; trans women aren’t even close to being women; and Black Lives Matter is at the forefront of a combined mega-grift and sociological dirty-bomb thanks to walking, talking cock-knobs like Larry Fink that has also weaponized “queerness,” race, personal jabs-status, and body type and made the country’s awful public schools nigh uninhabitable for sane adults and wee ones alike.

Election denial in its many forms is not merely an established but occasional American phenomenon; nay, it’s been an obligatory component of all of this century’s national elections. But before viewing the goods, you should watch this four-and-a-half-minute George Carlin sermon from November 2005. (I know I posted the same speech recently, but embedded videos here enjoy dismal click rates, so I’m fighting back with all I have.)

What’s amazing about Carlin being so agonizingly on point with every word is that eighteen years ago, things weren’t nearly as corrupt as they are now. The Citizens United decision was years in the future, social-media platforms did not yet exist, and the complete capture of the media by both corporations and the government—which themselves have gradually but unapologetically enjoyed increasing fusion since 2005—was still a grim if foreseeable prospect.

Note that Carlin doesn’t utter the words “Democrat” or “Republican” once, or mention any names at all. Carlin—arguably one of the smartest raw philosophers who ever lived—was using a comedy routine to offer an unusually powerful lesson about the system. But if he had gone too far down the road of “the people really running the country,” he might have been dismissed as a bit loopy even by his admirers.

If you click on the video below, courtesy of Simulation Commander, you’ll be taken to a page where, with one additional click, you’ll be treated to ten unbroken minutes of Democratic politicians denying the results of the 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections, which coincidentally are the last three elections the Democratic candidate has lost.

The 2000 election was a special case because Florida really was close, and Dems were right at the time to play their hand until the end. Maybe Albert Gore, Junior really did win. But the point is that if denying the results of concluded and certified elections, sometimes for years or even decades, is a crime—and folks were being kicked off YouTube and elsewhere until very recently for contesting the results of the 2020 election—then there are not enough federal prison cells to house all of the people who have loudly cried “foul.”

It’s fun to see many of the same people who remain rathole figures doing their rathole thing back in the day. Jamie Raskin had not yet blown off all of his hair with a probably-jab-induced internal malignancy, Dianne Feinstein looked like a human bitchbag instead of a refugee from a John Carpenter film, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz just might have been close to sober for a second back then.

And they’ve denied election results for all sorts of reasons. 2000 was a vote-count issue. But in 2004, the Diebold voting machines came under fire in Ohio. And after Trump won in 2016, the Democrats—led, as recently revealed in the John Durham report, by Hillary Clinton herself—concocted, simply concocted the idea of Russian interference and made it go thermonuclear by claiming Trump was at the center of this. It was weird watching people throughout 2017 who like me believed Trump was basically an addled blaring fool become convinced by people like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that Trump had actually been a James Bond-like figure all along. (The first sign the Mueller investigation was crap was when people in his orbit started getting indicted. Most of his haters believed this was a sure sign Trump would surely be at the end of this chain of captures, when it was clear after a few months that these small fish would later need be used to in some sense justify a long, expensive, nation-rivening investigation that would ultimately leave Trump himself unscathed.)

And, while I’m not doing to dig up specific examples now, members of both parties have engaged in advance election denial, too, with this becoming more of an open thing in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections as well as the 2020 mess. There’s no real downside in this when members of both parties do it; a win means the evildoers were thwarted, while a loss “validates” the advance theatrics.

Now, this would be a good place to end, except for the fact that Trump is an ex-president and harried 2024 presidential candidate, while the sitting president is really too beyond trashed for either genuine laughter or meaningful tears. Joe Biden, Junior is not a sympathetic figure, but will very likely spend what few cogent moments he enjoys for the rest of his life experiencing pangs of fear, if not shame.

It amazes me that much the country is pretending this is remotely okay. And since we’re on the topic of election denial, I don’t know any real thinkers who haven’t at least considered the possibility that the 2024 election will be completely rigged. Why wouldn’t it be? The Dems have already openly dismissed the idea of Biden even being allowed outside challengers, and are plainly seeking to replace Biden with someone other than the shockingly unmoored and dissociated Kamala Harris.

The media spent all of July lying their asses off about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Junior. Yet at the end of the month, he was by far the most popular public figure among Americans in this Harris Poll, factoring in his approval-disapproval gap.

If Trump runs against Biden, he will trounce him. If he runs against a uniparty surrogate such as Michelle Obama or Gavin Newsom, he’ll trounce that person, too. And if Kennedy is allowed to become the Democratic nominee, he’ll beat Trump because Kenndy will draw all of the independent voters and some Republicans, whereas not one BlueAnon figure (basically, all registered Democrats, at least by then) will ever pull the lever for Donald Trump.

“They”—or in Carlin’s parlance, the people really running the country—cannot have either of these men reach the Oval Office. Both have vowed to take on the security state, and Kennedy is perhaps perceived as more dangerous because he actually knows how to go about this, even if in the end it would all go nowhere fruitful.

Maybe “the next pandemic” will be unfurled late next summer, just in time to lock the electorate down and create an excuse for delaying the election or sharply modifying how it is conducted. And removing any excessive friction around this is that next year will surely feature even more citizen unrest than the dispiriting modicum of violence and needless death already underway. The media will be screaming about domestic terrorists, almost all of whom ironically work for the media, lead government agencies, or are federal agents dressed up as members of the Proud Boys. If “they” don’t openly scuttle the election, “they” will make sure it goes the way they need it to anyway.

Who would doubt this? The government is already practicing censorship and is keeping it up despite a recent court order to piss right off as well as growing, if still=insufficient, awareness of just what the feds are really up to. The Internet looks to the average yutzoid almost precisely how the establishment wants it to. “They” own everything, and with BlackRock being essentially in charge of Dominion Voting Systems, the election result numbers can be transformed into whatever “they” want.

If there is any solace in all of this, it’s that we* can predict more or less how things will continue to go in the United States regardless of who’s “elected” to “lead” it, even if that knowledge isn’t especially comforting.