The United States of America are broken.  We knew that.  But are they corrupt as well?  There are many questions about this election that need some answers.  Americans this week should be wearing black.

It is always very disappointing when a sharp observer of politics and a sublime talent comes up with an appalling judgement call.  First of all it was the great Melanie Phillips being conned into thinking that Covid was something over which to lockdown economies, destroy lives and smash freedom to bits.  What saw this coming?

Lionel Shriver isn’t alone – clearly – among right-of-centre observers not to like, or even be able to abide, Donald Trump.  But to write a piece in a respected organ like The Spectator telling all and sundry that she was cheering for Joe Biden? 

Really, Margaret Ann Shriver.  We need to talk about Joe, clearly. 

This man stands for everything you claim to abhor, and his opponent, the one you don’t like, stands for pretty much everything you claim to favour.  Granted, Trump is no free market man like you.  You stated you wanted America to be “boring” again.  Be careful what you wish for.  While Uncle Joe may seem boring, his vicious offsiders like Old Nancy and Ms Harris ain’t.  I myself would have demanded an argument a bit stronger than “I want America to be boring again”.

With the departure from his basement and the march of this new Uncle Joe into Washington, America will pay a massive price.  Just to think.

• Davos now has its man in Washington.  The great reset can now commence in January 2021 without that pesky OrangeMan in our faces.
• Israel has lost its best friend and chief guarantor of its right to exist.  The tentative peace strangely descending on various parts of the Middle East as a direct result of The Donald’s smart efforts, is now potentially lost.
• Perpetual Covid lockdown has its man in the White House, all masked up and ready to drive further cultural maskism and CovidMania.
• Big Tech, already on a fascist roll and routinely censoring opponents of the ruling class, will now complete the task of formally embedding themselves in power.
• The resurgent energy sector will end up in the toilet, as the once great States of America, united no more, will be carpet bombed with useless solar panels and windfarms.
• The green shoots of an originalist Supreme Court, a dream over while the Democrats control the White House.  Let us hope that Justices Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas remain very, very healthy.
• The fresh realism of keeping out of foreign wars, which prevailed over the neocons of the Republican Party, will now be lost to warmongering party of Vietnam.
• The vague hope of a less deep state, less in the control of crooks for whom the judiciary is but a mere political inconvenience, is now firmly reset to Swampland time.
• The last best hope for an America with some semblance of respect for law and order is gone.  The Marxist front organisation, Black Lives Matter, has its man in the Big House.   Ditto Antifa.  Ditto Saul Alinsky.

How did they do it? 

The rigged media we already know about.  Embedding preferred narratives is the strategy du jour for the media, both legal and social, to borrow a phrase of Michael Anton’s.  The silencing of counter-narratives, as another observer has termed it.  The rigging of the teaching of American history in the schools is well advanced.  No, let us call it “embedded”.  We know about the polling companies, wilful “voter suppression agents” as Victor David Hanson has termed them.  They now set out to influence elections.

Covid certainly was in play.  Blind Freddy (that man again), ocularly challenged as he is, would have realised the enormous potential of Covid as a swing driver in a presidential election year.  What is needed when it isn’t safe to go out (and vote)?  The miracle of mail-in ballots, that method of voting most open to fraud of any that man has come up with.  Brits like James Delingpole know only too well the potential of the dual punch combo of Covid hysteria followed by mail-ins. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srsaF5ZnBhE

Calling postal voting “dodgy” is to put it very kindly.  Nigel Farage has noted that in a “normal” US election, the post in vote is around five per cent.  This year it was two thirds.  Yes, that many.  This amounts to electoral system revolution.

Indeed.  As the observant Jack Posobiec has twittered:

These are the people who said we needed mail-in ballots because it was dangerous to gather in crowds.  They knew exactly what they were about.

Jack is demonised in the usual places by the usual suspects.  You know, the ones who censor unforunates who don’t buy their bullshit.  First they came for the alt-right conspiracy theorists.  (What a clever trolling insult this is).

That wasn’t an ace in the hole.  That was, without irony or punning intended, the Democrats’ trump card.  Trump, and Trumpism, were trumped.  Trump knew exactly what was coming.  The forty-three governors who locked down may or may not have known what game was in play.  The Republicans among them should be all taken off to a lonely place, chained up and made to contemplate the enormity of their crimes.

Covid was the ultimate remote cause, as that conspiracy theorist Thomas Aquinas might have called it.  Michael Anton has called out the Democrats’ “ballot harvesting”.  The enabler in chief for this strategic play was Covid.  It turned a trickle trend towards postal voting, already observed across the Anglophone democracies, into a flood.

As Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out, Covid gave cover to, indeed, enabled State Governors in what turned out to be critical swing states to claim justification for changing electoral laws in specific ways that allowed hitherto unheard of practices in relation to the processing of ballots.  And not a hanging chad in sight.

What of the mechanics of the fix?  Michael Anton refers to:

… the irregularities in the voting and counting that began in the wee hours on November 4 and continue to this minute, including but not limited to: inexplicably halting the counts in five states late on election night; the continuing, and mysterious “finding” of huge tranches of ballots overwhelmingly—and in some cases exclusively—for Biden; computer “glitches” that flipped Republican votes into the Democrats’ column; people showing up to vote in person only to be told that they had already voted absentee when they had never request an absentee ballot; Democratic-controlled states limiting access to Republican observers even in defiance of court orders; etc.

Now, it’s possible that each of these, and many other, shady-looking events has an innocent and plausible explanation. If so, we should be told what they are.

But mostly we’re not being told. Instead anyone who asks is either ignored or, more likely, told to shut up and called a conspiracy theorist and an enemy of democracy.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/06/lets-take-stock-of-where-we-are/

Democrats might be crooks, but fools they are not.  We all thought they were, picking a senile old pervert as their Big Guy, for example, and a black female nobody as his running mate from central woke casting.  No, the Democrat gerontocracy is so used to cheating in order to attain and hold power that they have simply become very good at it.

When discussions about vote rigging in the USA arise, the conversation normally turns to Tammany Hall.  It turns out that America has a long history of “vote collection”, going right back to the times of the French Revolution.

On one definition:

It was the main local political machine of the Democratic Party, and played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics and helping immigrants, most notably the Irish, rise in American politics from the 1790s to the 1960s.

It is perhaps ironic that the ultimate benefactor of a system that commenced in order to “help” Irish Catholics will be himself a Catholic.  The first such since Mattress Jack Kennedy back in 1960.  Mind you, Joe Biden is to Catholicism as Ray Bright is to high quality Australian spin bowling.

Tammany Hall is typically associated with corruption, despite its pretensions to helping the poor and migrants to access the political process.  Does any of this sound at all familiar?  Sanctuary cities?  Open borders?  Oh, wait a minute.  That would be the Democratic Party, the party of slavery, the KKK and Vietnam.  And now the party of the ruling class, no longer of the workers, whom they abhor.

https://www.history.com/topics/us-politics/tammany-hall

Or for a more vigorous treatment, one could take as one’s reference Gustavus Myers’ The History of Tammany Hall (1901), available in e-book form through the Project Gutenberg people.  Theft, swindles, frauds – all dutifully catalogued in 1901.  As the Frenchman once said, “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”.  Yes, corruption was embedded in the American city from an early stage.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/53115/53115-h/53115-h.htm

Mark Steyn comments on the past week in America:

… election fraud in American cities has deep roots - far deeper than anywhere else in the west - and everything they're doing in Philadelphia, for example, they've been doing since the nineteenth century. Biden's biggest margins of victory (why, in some enthusiastic precincts he won 100 per cent of the vote!) are in the old familiar places that surprise no one... In the nation at large, there was a modest red wave - but not in a half-dozen Democrat fiefdoms in purple states that take days to count and whose poll workers suspend counting arbitrarily until new boxes of ballots are delivered at three in the morning. To reprise my Thought for the Day from the late Reverend Canaan Banana of Zimbabwe:

While you were sleeping, we helped ourselves.

Decisively so, Reverend Banana.

https://www.steynonline.com/10746/election-day-plus-four

Steyn, as always, is correct and perceptive.  As he argues, we needed Trump in order to advance and defend Trumpism, the bigger and more important project.  We needed someone as indefatigable, feisty and crash-through as the President to pull off the transformation needed in America from rule by a technocrat, left-liberal elite smitten by both globalism and radical and amoral individual autonomy to ownership of the US democracy by we-the-people.

Losing Trump simply means that the Flight 93 election of 2016, as it was termed by Michael Anton, when decent low-brow Americans said “let’s roll”, will all have been for nothing.  The fetid festering swamp that is Washington, with its crooks and consultants (sometimes both) will simply rise again.  We saw in Russiagate what the contemporary Democrat Party is capable of.  Decent people in America should be very, very worried.  Lockdown may well be replaced by lockup.  Starting with the Trumpers.

As one prescient observer has noted, first they came for the deplorables.  As Auguste Meyrat explains it (writing on the eve of the election):

… what exactly is supposed to happen tomorrow? Clearly, Democrats and their allies envision two scenarios: either the election polls are correct and Biden wins by a landslide, or the election is close and Trump is pressured to concede by various forces both inside and outside the government.

Rest assured, if either of these outcomes manifest themselves, President Biden’s first actions will likely be to “fix” the election process so that populists like Trump and likeminded Republicans will never hold office again. This is precisely what lies behind plans to make Washington DC and Puerto Rico states, end the filibuster, pack the U.S. Supreme Court, and eliminate the Electoral College. It is also why groups like Antifa and BLM will continue terrorizing cities. Like the collectivos in Venezuela who beat up and murder dissidents on behalf of their government, these groups will likely do the same.

The prospects for the deplorables, aka normal everyday Americans, Trump’s seventy million, are beyond bleak in this nightmare scenario.

https://www.crisismagazine.com/2020/first-they-came-for-the-deplorables

What will Trump do next?  Michael Anton concludes:

I have no special insight into what the president may or may not do. Based on his remarks Thursday night and the actions so far by his campaign, he clearly doesn’t believe the election was clean. He may nevertheless at some point conclude that he has no viable way to get to the bottom of what happened—especially with unfriendly state officials, agencies, and courts in charge of most of the processes. 

If Anton doesn’t know what comes next, I certainly don’t.  I have often wondered, these past four years, why Trump bothered.  His enemies would no doubt say – narcissism.  But I don’t see it.  In view of the enemies arrayed against him, it took some courage, along with his legendary orneriness, simply to turn up for work each day.  The Democrats’ obsessive desire to get rid of him by fair means or foul has been something to behold.  The energy required to prosecute their endless hot war against Trump must have taken superhuman efforts.  Given that, was it ever likely they wouldn’t continue their war through election rigging?  Why would Trump bother to fight now?  Probably we should take him at his word.  Ordinary, normal people, like the struggle street types who love him and who support his policies, would wish him to keep fighting for the sake of decency and democracy.

And his supporters do love him.  Let us take Nigel Farage’s word for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHiIQkDzqnQ

The irrepressible Farage believes that Trump will see the events of the past week as a “temporary setback”.  We must hope so, for too much is at stake for Trump simply to flip the bird at his enemies and go back to real estate and a comfortable life.  Not just for Trump, or even for Trumpism, but for the United States and for democratic integrity.  Americans said that the rigging of the system to “get Pell” actually put Australian justice itself on trial.  The good guys won that one.  Only just.  Now it is the American justice system that is only trial.  Will Tammany Joe get away with it?  There are seventy million Americans who want justice.  Will they get it?

I am not sure that I share Nigel’s optimism.  There are simply too many “apologetic conservatives” in play across the Western world.  People like The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, who forever feel that they have to say sorry for the fact that they occasionally see good in Trump’s policies and achievements.  And Shriver-like Never Trumpers and the think-tank, Republican and conservative establishment brigade, ably represented by the Never Trump house journal, National Review who totally and wilfully continue to miss what is up for grabs here.  And who always wish to play nice.  Well the left, the Marxists and the Democrat Party don’t play nice.  They take to heart the dictum of Australia’s best ever and quite possibly our nastiest politician, Neville Wran, who famously opined that in politics, “nice guys are a dime a dozen”.

A few weeks ago Joe Biden stated – his very words, I heard him say them – that he had “the most inclusive vote fraud organisation ever”.  (Inclusive?  I guess if you are in the election rigging game, you want your operatives to be black, female, transgendered, disabled or homosexual, perhaps preferably all five).  Even by Joe’s slipping-of-the-tongue, foot-in-mouth record, this Freudian slip was a doozy.

Today, with the corporate media calling it for Joe, Americans who care for their country should be wearing black, for mourning.  Mourning in America.  A country broken, to be sure, but worse, a country corrupted.  Let us give the last word to a far more pessimistic Mark Steyn:

To avoid the pit of hell he and seventy million American voters are now being lowered into, Trump needed to win (in my coinage of sixteen years ago) "beyond the margin of lawyer". 

Sadly, he didn’t pull it off, beyond the margin of lawyer. 

Oh, and down in Oklahoma, in Mauree Turner, America now has its first ever queer, black, Muslim, non-binary legislator.  What a week it has been.