patrick.net

AUGUSTA, ME — In a move designed to push back against criticism that they have a track record of rigging elections in secret, Democrats have now adopted a policy of rigging elections in broad daylight so everyone in the country can see it.

"We are being entirely transparent about our election interference," said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows after announcing former President Donald Trump will not be allowed on the 2024 primary ballot. "Any wild allegations of covert efforts to rig elections are simply preposterous. As anyone can clearly see, the steps we are taking to interfere with and rig the outcome of our elections are being done in plain sight. This is a win for democracy."

Bellows's decision to rule Trump ineligible to be included on the state's ballot came on the heels of a hotly debated ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that also attempted to keep Trump's name off the ballot in that state. Though serious questions have been raised regarding the legitimacy of elections, Democrats deny any secret plots. "We aren't hiding anything," Bellows said. "Everyone can see what the FBI and DOJ are doing. All these baseless indictments aren't being made in secret. Heck, I made a public announcement about taking him off the ballot. I don't know where these accusations of us covertly rigging the election are coming from."

At publishing time, top Democrat powerbrokers were reportedly also preparing to begin operations in every state to rule all Republican voters ineligible to vote in any elections in order to save democracy.

The 45th president of the United States, Donald John Trump, is a particular kind of president, out of all the previous presidents in modern history, and a specific kind of threat to established political organizations.

He is not a threat per se to voters, or to Americans, but rather to the current political party system.

But there is a fascinating reason why this is so, and I’d like to suggest that it stems from the most powerful element of America itself, including its founding: individualism.

That may seem like an obvious statement, but if you map out all the elements of the current U.S. political economy, they are made, for the most part, out of the exact opposite of individualism: institutionalism. Trump stands in especially stark contrast, as he is by nature not only an outsider to politics, but an outsider to many entrenched business practices. Even if you may find him completely objectionable, he still functions as a symbol, and that symbol, like it or not, is an individual.

What do I mean by individualism, and an “outsider?” I mean that all the contentions that you are subject to daily from the “public square” of U.S. politics, are defined, organized and transmitted by institutions: the DNC, the GOP, the WHO, the CDC, the DOD, the DOE, the WEF, the U.N., and hundreds of foundations (such as the U.K. Runnymede Trust for example), and dozens upon dozens of other types of institutions. And of course there’s the media, made up of numerous corporate institutions.

And then there’s an individual named Donald John Trump.

He is considered especially dangerous because of what he effectively transmutes socially, both from and back to, the majority of Americans: individualism. This is the precise antagonism to progressive Left ideology, because everything they stand for is based on group behavior, group consensus, group solidarity, and group thinking. It derives its power from fear, and its value from perceived authority. Its authority stems purely from institutions, and its methods of coercion, including its obsession over the control of free speech and free thought, depend desperately on sustaining the illusion of institutional legitimacy, authority, and dependency: on lowering your God-given natural confidence, and replacing it with man-given doubt and controls. ...

But that may be just the opposite of what actually happened: over time, American institutions grew and grew, and grew, and now have grown out of control so that they dominate the private sector of individual interests. This includes our nation’s university system that has such influence over young adult minds. Universities are complete corporate, political institutions, and they follow, obey, and carry out all institutional signals, orders and directives (the “Covid" program is an example, which depends entirely on group obedience and group ideology: the individual is by contrast deemed “unsafe”).

The individual is the greatest threat to progressive Leftism, as it is to all authoritative regimes seeking the fantasy of absolute control. Trump is part of that system in several ways, but a part of him also naturally stands outside it, and his presence alone symbolizes directly and indirectly, deliberately or not, the nonconforming individual will of hundreds of millions of individual Americans with individual lives, individual families, individual businesses, individual wealth, individual thoughts, individual aspirations, and individual power.

📉 Uh-oh — there was even more bad news for democrats. The Guardian ran a depressed report yesterday headlined, “More than a third of US adults say Biden’s 2020 victory was not legitimate.” And even worse — it’s going the wrong way. The WaPo did its absolute best to minimize and obfuscate the news, confusingly inverting how it was phrased into the negative, reporting that “fewer people say Biden’s election was legitimate.” In other words, put more plainly: more people in all groups think Biden’s 2020 election was NOT LEGITIMATE:




As you can see in the chart, in 2023 more people answered that Biden was “not legitimately elected” than they did in 2021 — including democrats. Overall, confidence in Biden’s election fell from 69% to 62%, with Republicans being the most skeptical, as you could imagine. I would also assume that they made every possible adjustment to the poll figures.

Still, the WaPo gets credit for admitting the truth, which should have been the article’s headline, later down in the article:




I guess those overproduced January 6th Committee hearings didn’t help convince people the election was legit, after all. For some reason.

Tens of Thousands of Votes Cast in Georgia with Ineligible Addresses in 2020 Election

An investigation has discovered that tens of thousands of voters cast ballots in Georgia during the 2020 election with ineligible ballots.

The discovery emerged during a probe of the state’s voter rolls.

Concerns have been raised for some time due to voter rolls never being reconciled against any other data.

In every state, there are active voters older than Abraham Lincoln – still voting and registering in recent years.

Working with the Georgia election integrity team for months, Fractal developed an integrated Fractal database.

The database includes all available Georgia election records for 2020. ...

The results show that ballots were cast from locations where people were dead or had moved to ineligible addresses.

It also discovered multiple ballots were cast in many of the ineligible voters’ names.

Instead of a dusty report nobody could comprehend, Fractal has published a film to detail the findings.

The video exposes the bombshell discovery of the ineligible addresses casting votes that were counted in the 2020 presidential election.

https://vimeo.com/898393328

We can agree that all elections have some funny business going on in them, the question here is a matter of degree.

Here are two questions:

Was the scale of the illegal interference large enough to prevent a clear win for Trump?

Is there an innocent, logical and legal explanation for the suspension of vote counting on the night of the election in several key States, with a hockey stick change in the graph of the vote tally in the following days?

If your answer to these questions is No and Yes, then you would conclude that the reason people turned up to protest the election loss is that “they have fallen prey to misinformation and conspiracy theories.” That they had been manipulated and that you can discount their emotion as unjustified.

If on the other hand you answer the above questions as Yes and No, then you see the crowd as justified in their anger over a genuinely stolen election.

The problem is, it’s very hard for most people to answer those questions. Accurate information about what happened was very hard to come by just after the election. You had to really work hard to find it, ensure it was credible and consume it.

But if you did, as I did at the time, you would reasonably reach the conclusion that there was a very sophisticated and coordinated flip of the election.

You can come up to speed on what happened here in any of these books:

The Deep Rig: How Election Fraud Cost Donald J. Trump the White House, By a Man Who did not Vote for Him - Kindle edition by Byrne, Patrick M.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections: Hemingway, Mollie

The Big Steal: How an Army of Criminals Rigged the 2020 Election Against President Trump: Corder, Timothy Wade

[Note: If anyone knows of even better, well researched, books or material on the subject, please let me know, as I will likely write about it one day.]

Trump Releases 2020 Election Fraud Report for Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan & Pennsylvania

“It has often been repeated there is ‘no evidence’ of fraud in the 2020 Election. In actuality, there is no evidence Joe Biden won,” Trump document states.

https://cdn.nucleusfiles.com/e0/e04e630c-63ff-4bdb-9652-e0be3598b5d4/summary20of20election20fraud20in20the20swing20states.pdf

Ongoing investigations in the Swing States reveal hundreds of thousands of votes
were altered and/or not lawfully cast in the Presidential Election. Joe Biden needed
them. On Election Night Nov. 3, 2020, President Donald J. Trump was sailing to
reelection with landslide leads in numerous battlegrounds. In Georgia, President
Trump was up by 12 points, and over 335,000 votes, with 56 percent of the vote in
at 10:17 p.m. In Wisconsin, President Trump was leading by 121,380 votes and 5 1
points at 12:12 a.m., which Fox News anchor Bret Baier noted was “not a small
margin.” In Pennsylvania, President Trump was leading by 659,145 votes at 12:38
a.m., a full 15 points. In Michigan, President Trump was leading by 293,052 votes
and 10 points.2
The election was over. However, precincts in Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia,
Phoenix, and Milwaukee kept counting until the results reached the desired
outcome, which was the opposite of the will of the voters. Georgia went from
having a total of 4.7 million votes, already a record for the state, according to Brad
Raffensperger’s count on Nov. 4, to certifying almost 5 million. This was 300,000
more votes than what the top elections official claimed were cast in the Election.
Getting to this result in Georgia, and other states, created an irredeemably
compromised Election, filled with violations of the Constitution, unlawful ballots,
widespread broken chain of custody, electronic manipulation, and missing and
corrupted election files that made it uncertifiable — and impossible to recreate the
results.
President Trump was right to voice his objections to what had unfolded before the
country’s eyes. Republican poll watchers were denied access to the counting in
multiple jurisdictions and ballots were counted in secret in the middle of the night...

@VivekGRamaswamy
Here's the way forward on election integrity:
1. Single Day Voting
2. Make Election Day a National Holiday
3. Paper Ballots
4. Government-issued voter ID matched to the identification on file.
5. English as the only language used on ballots & in voting booths.
This is easily doable & should not be controversial. 🇺🇸

It is perhaps a sign of the times that last week on January 2nd, without fanfare or much comment, President Trump issued a 32-page “Summary of 2020 Election Fraud” covering “swing states” Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan.




The Summary was carefully designed to prove beyond argument that there was enough fraud in 2020 to change the outcome of the election, which is the legal standard for bringing a case. The problem of course is that election challenge cases must be filed in an insanely-short period of time, like ten days. Since 2020, I’ve litigated five elections cases, and thought about the issues a lot. Reluctantly, there are probably good reasons the deadlines are so short.

Mostly, the rationale is that a stable society needs some certainty about who’s running things.

Notwithstanding that it’s far too late to file suit, over the last three years Corporate Media built election denialism into a thought crime even more perfidious than science denialism, if that’s possible. So the Introduction’s very first two sentences appear custom designed to trigger democrats:

It has often been repeated there is “no evidence” of fraud in the 2020 Election. In actuality, there is no evidence Joe Biden won.
Haha! They turned the “no evidence” gag right around on the media! I loved it.

You would think the media’s peals of protest would be loud enough to wake the alien diplomats on the International Space Station. After all, the Summary confirms everything the democrats have long complained about Trump’s state of mind: in black and white, Trump denied the election and said that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. Not only that, but the Summary makes specific claim after specific claim, so it should be trivial to ‘debunk’.

Each of Trump’s prosecutors should have already filed the Summary in those cases as evidence of how unreasonable Trump is.

But no. Surprisingly, the democrats weren’t triggered. Nor were RINOs or Never Trumpers. In fact, six days later there seems to be a total media blackout on the story. They aren’t even writing ‘fact-checks’ or op-eds about it...

Consider what’s missing here: there was no ‘fact check’! And there was no faux outrage over Trump’s denying the election. Corporate media’s silence is deafening.

Here’s how the Summary’s Introduction described the election, if you can call it that:

Republican poll watchers were denied access to the counting in multiple jurisdictions and ballots were counted in secret in the middle of the night without media or observers present. Countless irregularities emerged, including reports of ineligible voters, voting machine anomalies, “water main breaks,” improbable percentages of ballots for Biden, and more.

Since, investigations across the country have uncovered an avalanche of irregularities, unlawful activity, manipulation of election records, destruction of evidence, and fraud. The findings, which are outcome determinative, are detailed in these summaries of the Swing States.

The Summary is written in lay English, without awkward legal terms of art and having its citations to sources down in the footnotes. It is easy to read. In other words, it was designed for all of us. I don’t often suggest reading something, but this Summary is important, regardless of your preferred nominee. It’s a relatively quick, easy read. Consider it a core part of civics education.

Well, it’s a core part of civics education in 2024.

The timing of the Summary’s release was also interesting;Trump issued it on the very first work day of 2024, which coincidentally happened to be the same day True the Vote was found not guilty of violating the Voting Rights Act in a 140-page legal opinion, as I reported last week:




Now that we are in the final run up to the November 5th Presidential Election, what with the Iowa caucasus scheduled for next week on January 15th, the various parties’ plans will start shifting into high gear. Things are heating up. There will almost certainly be more disclosures.

If — sorry, when — Biden withdraws from the race, the best time to do it will be right before or even during the Democrat National Convention in August (date TBD). That will allow democrat delegates to ‘select’ their next candidate, and deprive Republicans of eight months of campaigning against the party’s true nominee.

Now, don’t even start complaining about how democrat voters are going to be deprived of a democratic primary. As if they cared.

we can argue about just how much democracy is even desirable in a republic where the rights of the individual are supposed to stand paramount to the whims of the demos and that most oppressive of forms of governance “tyranny of the majority,” but i suspect just about all of us can agree to a basic issue:

if we are to have democracy, counting the votes is vital and, as a subset of such, determining which votes are valid and who is allowed to cast them is critical.

if one person can simply grab 10,000 mail in ballots, fill them out by machine, and drop them in mailboxes, that’s not democracy, that’s fraud.

if people who are not US citizens are eligible to vote, that too is fraud.

this seems a pretty uncontroversial set of ideas, but the obviousness and ethics of such seem to stand increasingly in opposition to the actual black letter law.

consider arizona, whose bizarre two tier voter registration provides a poignant example.

in order to vote in state or local elections, you must submit “valid proof of citizenship” which includes several options like passports and birth certificates or an AZ driver’s license (which requires same to get it).

however, astonishingly, no such stricture applies to federal elections. you can register to vote for the house, the senate, the president by simply filling out a form (link conveniently provided) that has no verification requirements whatsoever. ...

this leads to some questions:

is this some sort of federal loophole?

are states somehow proscribed from validating federal voting eligibility?

is this a situation unique to arizona or is it one present in other states as well?

because one can certainly see how it could provide the basis for some truly astonishing election manipulation. ...




voting in the US should be a zero trust system.

it would not be that difficult to build.

i outlined some ideas in the back half of this piece...

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/accusations-of-electoral-fraud

flooding voter rolls with unverified registrants seems assured to render valid elections impossible. it breaks a system to the point where you simply cannot trust anything, especially if these people do not even need to vote in person but can, instead, do so by mail.

this is a blueprint for fraud to the point of complete absurdity and abnegation of the idea of representation.

it’s astonishing watching the same people who were demanding “vaccine passports to be allowed to eat in a restaurant or go to school” then flip and proclaim “demanding valid voter ID is racist as it harms minorities.” it’s like some sort of master class in hypocrisy. ...

on puerto rico, elections are in person, one day affairs that require not only ID to vote, but a specific voter ID acquired from the election commission. it looks like this:




it has your picture, your address, holograms, the whole 9 yards.

to get it, you need to go to the election office, in person, at least 50 days before the election. they check your residence, your citizenship, and take your picture. you need your original birth certificate or social security card, proof of where you live, other valid photo ID, etc. it’s like getting a passport except that you are required to show up in person and all three of the main political parties have representatives there each of which processes some part of your application and all of which keep an eye on one another. it’s a simple, straightforward system. and it works.

this registration qualifies you to vote. you are assigned a voting place near your home. you may only vote there. when you go, they check your ID at least twice with the final check up against a copy of your photo that the election site has in their system. only then do you get handed a ballot.

this has had no ill effect i can see on voter turnout. ...

if elected officials wish to be taken seriously, then they need to start taking election integrity seriously.

period.

this is not arguable or debateable.

Massive Election Fraud Involving Thousands of Fraudulent Ballot Registrations Took Place in Michigan in 2020 – Lawless Dana Nessel and Chris Wray Let ALL OF THE PERPETRATORS Walk Scot Free! ...

These previous reports by The Gateway Pundit, prove that there was widespread, systemic, ongoing voter registration fraud in Michigan in the 2020 election, and that major Democrat officials knew this. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel buried the reporting.

Yet far-left zealots like Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel have repeatedly lied and said there was no voter fraud in the 2020 elections, and that the 2020 elections were the safest and most secure in American history.

The Gateway Pundit later learned that the investigation was turned over to Chris Wray’s FBI. No charges were ever filed against any of the employees for the mulitple crimes committed by the fraudulent ballot registration company.

It’s been over three years since the investigation was turned over to the FBI. No charges have been filed. Chris Wray and Dana Nessel buried this major fraud incident.

Democrats and their allies in the FBI and federal government are burying the fraud. Thousands of fraudulent ballot registrations are no big thing – especially when they’re turned in by Democrat-linked groups.

In more good election news, Fox-59 Wisconsin ran a delightful story yesterday headlined, “Wisconsin judge rules that absentee voting van used in 2022 was illegal.”




Wisconsin Republicans sued the state over the Democrats’ mobile voter fraud truck, pictured above. The state DNC and a sketchy non-profit called ‘Black Leaders Organizing for Communities’ defended the fraud bus claiming there was no Wisconsin law that prohibits mobile vote-getting vans, so. But a Racine County Circuit judge disagreed, saying it doesn’t work that way: “Nowhere can this Court find or has been provided any authority allowing the use of a van or vehicle as an alternate absentee voting vehicle,” the judge wrote.

I expect to see a lot more stories like this one as November looms closer.

A couple from Illinois, Jodie and Ken Zitko, have formed a group of concerned citizens who have been analyzing the Illinois state voter database. They have found serious irregularities, detailed in a formal complaint filed with Bernadette Matthews, director of the Illinois State Board of Elections on December 21.

Here are some of their findings after almost 2,000 hours of analysis.

There were over 300,000 votes from the 2020 election missing or deleted from the Illinois voter data prior to the conclusion of the federal retention period of 22 months.
Over a four-year period, Illinois population decreased by 150,000, while the voter roll increased by 650,000.
Over 2.5 million people had votes cast prior to their registration dates.
More than 230,000 registrations show seemingly Illegal or illogical registration dates.
There are more than 4 million apparent registration violations out of 8.9 million registrations.

In what possibly may be the most remarkable headline so far this year, Reuters ran a story yesterday simply captioned, “Putin says past U.S. elections were rigged.”

My goodness. Has Putin succumbed to conspiracy theories now, too? According to Reuters, the Russian President said “previous” U.S. elections — presumably referring to the 2020 presidential election — were stolen through mail-in voting:

Russian President Vladimir Putin, running for a new six-year term in an election that his opponents say is a parody of democracy, said on Tuesday that past U.S. elections had been rigged by postal voting.

"In the United States, previous elections were falsified through postal voting ... they bought ballots for $10, filled them out, and threw them into mailboxes without any supervision from observers, and that's it," Putin said, without providing evidence.

Haha, without providing evidence! No evidence. Like, is he supposed to carry the evidence of US election fraud around in his jacket pocket? Ironically, Reuters went on to suggest that Putin intends to cheat in Russia’s upcoming elections by, get this, manipulating electronic voting machines. Even more ironically, totally tone-deaf Reuters also accused Putin of jailing his political opponents on — and I promise I am not making this up — “trumped up” charges...

This “story” isn’t news. Give me a break. It’s part of an old category of clear media manipulation that I call the somebody said something story. In other words, nothing actually happened. It was just a random Putin remark about four-year-old elections, yet every corporate media outlet covered it like he’d just announced war with NATO. Why?

Usually, the “somebody said something” story is a way for the media to make a point by putting the words in somebody else’s mouth, or support the current narrative.

Corporate media obviously knows how to ignore whatever Putin says. In fact, they are the best at ignoring stuff Putin says. They’ve been doing it for years now during the Ukraine war. So … why would they run this headline now?

After all, according to them election denialism is misinformation!

And not just regular misinformation. Election denialism is radioactive-level misinformation that threatens democracy itself. Think about it: If you had posted Putin’s remark on social media just last year, your account would have been instantly locked and you might even have been visited by the FBI. So again, why are they promoting Putin’s election misinformation?

Why I'm Rooting for the 1972 Landslide I Once Feared

I want a Trump win so big it sends a message to the Ruling Class that we are mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore. ...

Democrats deserve to lose, and to lose so big it sends an unequivocal message that resonates through the ages — never again.

Never Again

Can it happen in this country that the sitting president investigates a duly elected president before he takes office. It can never happen again when one regime declares itself the supreme leader and decides to systematically undo the election results by sabotaging the campaign and the presidency of their chief rival. That choice is not up to them. It’s up to us.

It can never happen again that The Regime drives an impeachment, aided by the Security State, and sends out operatives within the administration to “find something” to use against Trump and openly sabotage him when his job is to serve us, the American people.

And that, The Regime, out of bitterness, narcissism, and totalitarian impulses, demands all of American society form a phony “resistance” and use that to justify the dehumanization, marginalization, surveillance, and disenfranchisement of American citizens.

It can never happen again that the “well-funded cabal” of elites form a pact with politicians, billionaires, the media, and the Security State to rig the election. That is the exact kind of monopolistic abuse of power Teddy Roosevelt once sought to dismantle.

It can never happen again that an election is won long before Election Day because The Regime decided to change laws to allow them to collect ballots in an operation funded with dark money by billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, a decision made without the permission of the American people and hidden from them by a lying, complicit media.

It can never happen again that lawyers like Michael Teter and the 65 Project are allowed to threaten and harass lawyers who might choose to represent or defend Trump or people who worked for him. They don’t get to convict Trump of imaginary crimes in the Court of Public Opinion to justify their authoritarian overreach.

It can never happen again that political protesters are treated like terrorists in their own country, put on trial for “spectral evidence,” what they believe rather than what they did.

It can never happen again that protests themselves are turned into threats against The Regime. Not in America. Protests are the voice of the people, and it’s the government's job to shut up and listen, not to tell them to shut up, throw them in jail, and turn them into enemies of the state.

It can never happen again that a former president and his administration weaponize the DOJ to persecute and jail a political opponent. The four indictments, the two impeachments, the phony show-trial — who elected Liz Cheney to be the leader of anything, let alone the decision to convict Trump in the Court of Public Opinion without the defense of counsel or due process. Shut up and sit down, ma’am. I don’t care who your father is. This is not a monarchy. It is your job to listen to us.

The ongoing lies told by the press about Trump are beyond the scope of one regime’s power as granted to them by the people of the United States. If they are to be state propaganda, then let them be identified as such. ...

To Democrats, the memory of 1972 remains an enduring nightmare. Nixon won every state but Massachusetts. Watergate handed the Democrats one more chance in 1976 to address the needs of the people. They failed, still trying to sell their utopia.

By 1980, it was a changed country. So many wandered around aimlessly, joining cults, tuning out, going to California to “find themselves,” only to eventually “sell out,” abandon the hippie life and embrace the “greed is good” lifestyle of the 1980s. ...

Heading into the 2020 election, many of us were warning about another 1972, a pull too far to the left. Don’t pick Bernie, we said. Don’t pick Elizabeth Warren. Don’t rock the boat. Trump had shaken things up in 2016, and now we needed someone to calm things down. ...

As I was frantically urging my fellow Democrats to do something or risk Trump winning in a landslide, I slowly began to realize that there was never any intention of telling the public the truth. Their narrative was going to be that the police were racists, that Donald Trump was the racist-in-chief, and that if we didn’t vote him out, this would be our new normal.

The media and the politicians were going to gaslight Americans, lie directly to our faces at the Democratic National Convention that these were “mostly peaceful protests.” If there was violence, it was justified because Trump was just that evil.

What a fool I was. I was like Jake at the end of Chinatown, who spends the whole movie trying to rescue Evelyn, only to lead her to her own demise.

That was the beginning of the end for me. Once I saw the puppet masters, I couldn’t stop seeing the strings. They were on their way to rigging the 2020 election, and nothing was going to stop them, certainly not violent riots on the streets of America. What riots? ...

I realized I’d wasted time I didn’t have advocating for a candidate the system would install and pretend everyone voted for. ...

I kept waiting for the day when the madness would stop, the bubble of fear and hysteria would burst, and things could return to normal. They’ve brought nothing but division, nothing but chaos. They’ve foisted upon us a cult-like religion none of us asked for. Now, we’re being forced to accept that there is nothing immoral about mutilating the bodies of children, sterilizing them all in the name of utopia. ...

Biden and the Democrats have had almost four years to prove to the American people that they were the better option, but they’ve failed. They’ve failed to unite the country. They’ve failed to defend “democracy.” They’ve failed to revive the economy. They’ve failed to calm things down. ...

I’m rooting for Trump and MAGA as I rooted for the Cutters in Breaking Away, the kind of movie Hollywood would never make today. Why wouldn’t they? Because they don’t care about people like those who inhabit this film.

For one thing, they’re white. For another, they live in a red state and would be MAGA. ...

By the end of this movie, there was not a dry eye in the house. Movies used to do this for us. They used to transport us from our ordinary lives to experience the extraordinary.

When I felt so much despair by the end of 2020, I began watching MAGA rallies, getting to know the people I’d been told were racists and monsters. But even after everything had been taken from them- their culture, government, status, and jobs - they were happier than anyone I’d seen in a year.

We had everything, and we were miserable. They had almost nothing, and they were having the best time, whether it was freezing or raining. ...

Watching the richest and most powerful people in the country demonize and dehumanize people who have no power makes me sick. They can’t tell stories like Breaking Away because they don’t know the country anymore. They have decided to turn people they no longer understand into their enemies.

Without even knowing it, the Democrats and the ruling class have inadvertently cast themselves as the villains in this story. In their ignorance and stupidity, in trying to cling to what was instead of allowing an ever-evolving country to turn the page, they’re missing one of the greatest underdog stories in the history of America.

I don’t know about you, but I’m rooting for the happy ending when the underdogs prevail and win in a landslide. Go MAGA go.

Like a mostly-peaceful protest in urban Illinois, news and social media have been burning this week with hysteria over the next pandemic, billed as a new and improved, deadlier-than-ever virus certain to derail the elections, again!. You’ve surely heard of it by now, the infamous but generically-named “Disease X” (brought to you by Coyote and the Acme Corporation).

Sometimes I wonder whether corporate media is really just trolling us. Does it reassure you that world leaders are focused on preventing a hypothetical pandemic? Does it make sense to spend billions of tax dollars getting ready to solve a problem that they admit “doesn’t exist?” Aren’t real pandemics enough for them? We literally just had one. Do we really need to spend real money preparing for fake pandemics now?

It’s for your own good! ...

And those people honestly believe they are smarter than everyone else. Which might be true in at least one sense: They figured out the grift before we did. ...

In 2008’s “X-Files: I Want to Believe,” the government first released a deadly virus, call it Disease X, hyped the public’s fear, and then released a nanotech-based genetic vaccine in service of their nefarious plot, and to catch a few Benjamins in the process. I know, I know, that plot is too crazy to even make a movie about, what were they thinking, and so forth. ...

That’s why they need Disease X; they don’t have a real pandemic anymore. Letting them fearmonger us plays right into their grubby little self-important hands. My suggestion is: ignore Disease X.

Postscript. Entertaining for a moment the conspiracy hypothesis that Covid-19 was an intentional plot to derail the 2020 elections and allow for massive mail-in voting fraud, they cannot do the same thing again. It won’t work. Everyone’s on a hair-trigger watching for a repeat strategy. It would just be too obvious to start having global pandemics only in election years. Plus, pandemics aren’t supposed to happen very often anyway, which would raise even more questions.

In other words, they’ve already played the pandemic card, whether intentionally or accidentally. Not just that; they already played the black swan card, and I doubt they could engineer even a different type of black swan event right before the very next election in a row, not without giving away the entire game. If they want a replay this time they’ll have to come up with Black Swan X, something unforeseen and totally unexpected. People are already expecting pandemics, wag-the-dog wars, extreme weather events, and even aliens.

So, top that.