The story of the US election can be told as a tale of four cities.  As Dickens might have put it, it may just be the worst of times.

In late October, the then Democrat candidate for the US presidency boasted that he had the most extensive and inclusive(!) voter fraud organisation “in history”.

Notwithstanding Joe Biden’s propensity for saying all sorts of things that even he doesn’t understand, and the ubiquitous social media fact checkers’ claim that the quote has been “taken out of context”, the October statement is now bound to go down as one that no one will ever forget.

Despite continued counting in some crucial states, legally mandated recounts, and pending legal challenges, the world has decided that Joe Biden won the US Presidential election.  Whether fair and square, legacy media and realpolitik types have called – time to move on.  Perhaps even the President has decided that it is time to move on.  Many of us, facing what Trump has faced over four years of sterling public service, might well have decided this before the election.  With one final middle finger to the establishment that was so determined to bring him down, by fair means or foul.

Not so fast. 

Whatever the electoral and legal outcomes and notwithstanding Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s delightful suggestion that he expected a smooth transition to the second Trump Administration, there is still quite a bit of life in the US election.  At the very least, and even with Biden in the White House for at least a year or so till the Harris Plan kicks in, expect forensic journalistic and political level investigation of Biden’s stolen election.

According to one news source in the USA:

The top boss of all the election officials, Trey Trainor, has confirmed that in his professional opinion, “there has not been transparency in the election” and “this election is illegitimate.“

He dropped the bombshell on the liberal news media at Newsmax when he made the announcement that he believes “that there is voter fraud taking place in these places.”

Yes, James Edward Trainor III is indeed Chairman of the Federal Electoral Commission.

The focus not only of the Trump campaign but also of those (rare) American journalists doing their jobs has been on a mere four cities in the whole expanse of the USA.  The big four are Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Atlanta (Georgia), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) and Detroit (Michigan).  These states are responsible for 10, 16, 20 and 16 electoral college votes, respectively.  That makes 62 votes, more than enough to reduce Trump’s 306 votes from 2016 to a number safely below 270, the magic number all presidential candidates have imprinted on their brains.

These states are all swing states.  And, most importantly of all, they are states controlled by Democrats, in a nation that – idiotically it would seem – prides itself on allowing extreme competitive federalism when it comes to mandating state control of electoral system management.  As targeting strategies go, it is pretty foolproof.

Another Uncle Joe (Stalin), not normally associated with expertise in Western electoral systems, is said to have once stated, “it’s not important who votes but how they are counted”.

Mark Steyn has been, as ever, on the front foot and avoiding the mushiness of apologetic Never Trump conservatives.  He gets specific about both the time and the place where the fix occurred:

Trump won the election fair and square on Tuesday night. Then, with mysterious synchronicity, Democrat-run cities in swing states decided they were closing down for the night - something I've never seen in any free election (Canada, UK, France, Denmark, etc) but which is a relatively common trick in dictatorships and the like. When America woke up on Wednesday morning, those Democrat cities (Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta) had been the beneficiaries of necessary replenishments in the small hours, and were well on their way to delivering the election to Biden with voter turnout and candidate margins that bear no relation to the rest of the country, whether one is speaking of blue states, red states, or purple states lacking such efficient Democrat political machines.

That's where the election was stolen.

Mysterious synchronicity indeed.  Yes we did, indeed, go to bed on election night thinking that Trump, perhaps unexpectedly to some but not to me, was going to pull it out of the fire again.  Then we awoke the next morning to strange news.  Trump was suddenly behind in states where he had been clearly trending to victory.  This flipping of electoral fortunes during the count is nothing I have ever heard of, and I have been watching and sometimes participating in elections for about forty-five years.  And there was more.  Counting had been halted in certain swing states, again not something I had ever heard of.

Newt Gingrich did not hold back in characterising the election outcome as a coup:

I think he would have to do a lot to convince Republicans that this is anything except a left-wing power grab, financed by people like George Soros, deeply laid in at the local level, and, frankly, I think that it is a corrupt, stolen election. 

Even mentioning the name “Soros” seems to ignite all kinds of spittle flecked responses, and not only from the left.  Many right-of-centre observers of things political appear to fear nothing more in the world than being called a “conspiracy theorist”.  I am not sure what the fuss is about.  Soros funds all sorts of causes, and he is on the record as saying that there was nothing more important for the world than the outcome of the US Presidential election.  The Canadian climate change whizz kid Steve McIntyre has noted:

If anyone did anything, it was US Democrats.

Indeed, but saying that Soros loathed Trump, supported team Biden with finance and no doubt in strategic local elections, and will welcome a Biden presidency is not remotely controversial.

Robert Barnes has focused on one of the more mysterious aspects of the election, that of voter turning up exceeding registered electors:

Urban democratic turnout was mostly flat or even down…except in the big cities in swing states run by Democrats where, in some cases, the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters before election day.

Yes there is same day registration, but…

We have dead people voting. We have allegations of ballots being illegally backdated. Everything should be looked at right now.

Was this election stolen? Well, millions feel that way. The turnout numbers are odd in some states, like Wisconsin, which hit 89 percent. Now, is that figure impossible? No. Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel did the math, but it’s highly improbable given the turnout rates in the surrounding areas. It would require 900,000 people showing up for same-day registrations.

Richard Baris of Big Data Poll notes:

Trump won the largest non-white vote share for a Republican presidential candidate in 60 years. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.

Robert Barnes, the foremost election analyst, observes in these “big cities in swing states run by Democrats…the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.” 

Trump’s victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were on target until, in the middle of the night, counting was arbitrarily halted. Miraculously, several hundred thousand votes – all for Biden – were mysteriously ‘found’; Trump’s real leads subsequently vanished.

One name keeps coming up in possibly THE key state of Pennsylvania.  Who is Kathy Boockvar?

The Bucks County resident is the secretary of the commonwealth, in charge of overseeing elections. She’s new in the job, appointed last year by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf.

In those two years, the state’s voting system has changed more than it did in the previous 80, the biggest change being the ability of anyone to vote by mail. Implementing that alone would be a challenge.

The key phrase here is “appointed by Democrat”.  A (sympathetic) journalist who interviewed Boockvar noted:

She’s confident Pennsylvania is in a good position to hold a safe, secure, accurate election.

Terrific!  But there is more, as they say:

Boockvar, 52, is a Democrat who lives in Washington Crossing. She has worked most of her career as an attorney, including a few years in the mid-1990s at Lehigh Valley Legal Services in Bethlehem, where she assisted low-income clients with civil rights, employment and other issues.

For about a decade, she was in practice with her husband, Jordan Yeager, now a judge in Bucks County. After that, she worked on voter advocacy to eliminate barriers to voting, for the civil rights organization Advancement Project.

She was chief counsel for the state auditor general, then executive director of Lifecycle WomanCare, a nonprofit birthing center in Bryn Mawr that is one of the oldest in the nation.

She’s a former poll worker and a former candidate. In 2011, she ran unsuccessfully for Commonwealth Court. In 2012, she ran unsuccessfully for Congress. 

So not an objective observer, you might say.  A Democrat operative in the field, higher up the ideological food chain then mere useful idiots or indeed fellow travellers.  The journalist is convinced that all will be above board on Kathy’s watch:

As secretary of the commonwealth, Boockvar says she is committed to impartiality.

Of course, as Mandy Rice Davies may have noted – she would say that.

The digital tech guru and investor Marc Andreessen famously said back in 2011 that “software is eating the world”.   He was talking about business models.  Little did he know what electoral outcomes software could be harnessed to drive.

Dominion software has been one of two prominent systems used in the US election, and widely questioned since.

Interestingly enough, [barrister Sidney] Powell stated that the software's user manual talks about how "votes can be wiped away."

Beth Baumann states:

Attorney Sidney Powell on "Sunday Morning Futures" said Trump's legal team is gathering evidence of "election fraud" that allegedly took place in election-related software, like Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. As it currently stands, Dominion is being utilized in 2,000 jurisdictions in 30 states. Texas decided not to use Dominion on three separate occasions because of fraud concerns.

Powell explains:

We have sworn witness testimony about why the software was designed. It was designed to rig elections.

Dominion sounds as dodgy as AstraZeneca.

Team Trump isn’t the only group feeling a little queasy about the vote counting and the impact of software on it.  What about the possibility of hacking – if hacking were even needed to make this software perform its partisan tricks?

There is a delightful symmetric precision to the counting tricks performed by the algorithms.  Here is Nickie Louise from (non-partisan) Tech Startups magazine:

Trump loses 19,958 votes and Biden gains 19,958 votes in just 40 seconds in PA, in a live election coverage on CNN.

This happened literally before the eyes of the nation.  Poof.  Magic.

https://techstartups.com/2020/11/08/trump-loses-19958-votes-biden-gains-19958-votes-just-40-seconds-pa-live-election-coverage-cnn/

It always helps to have supportive men at the helm of companies involved in counting the votes, important as this is, even in Joe Stalin’s estimation.  Beth Baumann again:

On top of that, former Admiral Peter Neffenger is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Smartmatic. He is also on Vice President Joe Biden's transition team, which calls into question his impartiality, which doesn't pass the smell test.

Whoa!  This is starting to sound like Michael Photios’s NSW Inc.  I believe the vertical and horizontal integration across the embedded corporates and the political class is THAT bad.

Then there are the media. 

The media have been in the Never Trump camp ever since Trump was first thought of a presidential candidate.  That was 2015.  It all started with ridicule, and when everything else including impeachment didn’t work, the enemies of Trump, especially in the media, went for Plan Z.  Cook the election.  The narratives advanced in the media have been many.  They include calling states for Biden ahead of time, nudging the Supreme Court, and nudging everyone else, talking up the transition, talking down the legal challenges, and either under-reporting or downplaying Trump Stop-the-Steal rallies.  The latest is to go after the law firm previously representing Trump in the emerging challenge to the result.

Powerline’s John Hinderaker has noted the extent to which the legacy media have teed off against the law firm representing Trump, until it suddenly pulled out after a barrage of cancel-type abuse on social media.  All to the good, for the election-stealing class.  Embeds the right narrative.

• Law firm Porter Wright subject to leftist attacks;
• Yes, Going After Trump's Law Firms is Fair Game - Washington Post;
• Pressure Mounts on Attorneys Lodging US Election Fraud Claims - Connecticut Law Tribune;
• No Self-Respecting Lawyer Should Touch Trump's Election-Fraud Claims - The Atlantic;
• Another Law Firm Bails Out on Trump Campaign – Politico.

Was it all planned by the Democrats? 

Well, did Adorno, Gramsci and friends plan the long march through the institutions?  Did Klaus Schwab plan the new world order of Davos?  We accept that they did.  People do make plans to alter the trajectory of history. 

Where is the evidence for a planned steal of the election?

Matthew Peterson of the Claremont Institute (publisher of The American Mind) opines:

It’s now clear what happened:

1. Democrats filed 100s of lawsuits to allow ballot harvesting/mail-ins.

2. Democratic political machines held/counted them, making sure not to throw out all the disqualifiables.

3. Dem machines obstructed any potentially unfriendly observers.

A stolen election rounds out neatly the left’s four pronged assault on freedom in 2020, what with:

• The Deep Covid State’s smashing of freedom at every level of our lives;
• The Black Lives Matter violent mayhem, indeed, revolution, on what once were the peaceful streets of a nation that claimed “exceptionalism” for all the right reasons; and
• The furious cancel culture attacks on free speech, principally through online bullying.

And many of us saw it all coming.  Michael Anton wrote before the election (in September) of “the coming coup”.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-coming-coup/

His colleague Matthew Peterson was equally prescient when he talked about “getting ready for a fight, the 2020 election won’t be over on election day”.

What’s happening here is obvious: the Democrats used the Wuhan virus as an excuse to change voting rules by means of hundreds of lawsuits before the election. They are set to spring hundreds more lawsuits after the election. They muddied the waters such that it would not be clear who won on election night. As Kimberly Strassel said this weekend in the Wall Street Journal, in case of anything outside of a landslide victory for Joe Biden, the fallback safety position for the Democrat party is “May the best lawyer win.” 

https://americanmind.org/features/get-ready-for-a-fight/

The masterminding organisation behind the Democrat planning machine was called The Transition Integrity Project.  Benign sounding, but with lethal intent.  Peterson explains:

The Left’s claims about how Trump was going to “steal” the election read as a kind of projection of what the Left was willing to do to win, as revealed by the activities of the Transition Integrity Project (TIP). The project consisted of a war game involving Democrat heavyweights, extensive deliberation and planning on the part of countless activist groups, and an instructive final report that serves as a game plan for the Democrat Party. It made clear that heady talk of secession may become increasingly mainstream.

… the changes in voting procedure the Democrats have forced in courts across the nation are intended to change the rules so as to help them win.

Here is Hans von Spakovsky on the Democrats’ superbly crafted use of the legal system prior to the election:

In state after state, almost all the lawsuits filed over this year’s elections have been filed by Democrats and liberal or progressive organizations, seeking to change election rules by judicial fiat. Their objective: force all-mail elections or huge increases in absentee balloting while simultaneously eliminating safeguards against abuse and fraud.

The renowned lockdown sceptic and medico Mike Yeadon termed what has happened during 2020, in particular, the use of Covid as cover for implementing all sorts of agendas as “contingent opportunism”. 

https://www.thefreedomsproject.com/item/588-convergent-opportunism

The viral gift to the USA from the Chinese was simply too good to pass up.  Getting the nation to mask up when doing so was not needed, locking down whole states, scaring the tripe out of people through lies about the risks of Covid – all led by Commandant Fauci (a proud Democrat) – all softened up the population to believe that extraordinary times demanded extraordinary ballot arrangements.  The judicial branch completely bought into the pandemic scam.

Spavovksy explains the sting in detail:

The nature of the hundred-plus lawsuits filed by Democrats and these organizations make that clear. All of those lawsuits (and the COVID-19 response bills filed in the House by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats) have similar goals that will give these political actors the ability to game the system. This would be true of any actors trying to change the rules in this manner mid-game. They are trying to force states to mail absentee ballots to all registered voters, despite the known inaccuracies of state voter rolls. At the same time, they are trying to:

• get rid of voter ID and witness signature or notarization requirements for absentee ballots;
• override state deadlines for absentee ballots to be either returned or postmarked by Election Day;
• void state laws banning vote harvesting by third parties;
• stop or erode signature comparison procedures; and
• require that voters be sent postage-prepaid envelopes for the return of completed absentee ballots.

What is clear from all of these lawsuits is that the Democrats and these organizations are trying to change the rules governing the administration of the November election.

On and on it goes:

Envelopes already postmarked by election officials will not be postmarked again by the U.S. Postal Service. This leaves election officials with no way of knowing whether the absentee ballot was actually mailed prior to Election Day or after the election—perhaps when vote harvesters show up at the house of someone who didn’t vote in order to entice them to send in their absentee ballot to shore up their candidate’s vote totals based on the preliminary vote count.

https://americanmind.org/memo/democrats-versus-the-vote

The sheer brilliance of the operation is breathtaking.  Vote harvesting is real and legal.  In places like California, literally anyone can turn up and return your mail-in ballot to the electoral officials.  In other states it has to be you yourself or a family member.  To call this Third World or banana republic stuff would be an insult to the Third World (as it used to be affectionately known) and to banana republics.

And how the legacy media has changed its tune as well.  This is what the New York Times said about mail-in ballots back in 2012:

… votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. 

Statistics show …  They do indeed.  Oh dear.

This all has the feel of Rod Dreher’s statement in 2017 about the Mafia-linked enemies of Cardinal George Pell in the Vatican setting out to destroy him.  When Pell was charged with sex abuse crimes back in Australia, Dreher simply stated – “so that is how they did it”.  In both cases, the sting is in, and it was simply a matter of how they did it.

We live in the worst of times, Charles Dickens might have concluded had he been around today, surveying the scene in 2020. As per the famous lines from his epic novel:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. . . .

It seems that Dickens was having an each way bet.

Yes indeed, it has been a tale of four cities.  To date, there has been no heroic Sydney Carton to step in and save the day. 

It only remains to see if John Roberts, Chief Justice of SCOTUS, will say any time soon – “it is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done ...”  Or, will he simply wave Uncle Joe through to the White House, saying in as many words, “there was nothing to see here”.