After the coup

Andrew L. Urban

Those who claim that Donald Trump was undermining democracy by claiming the November 2020 election was rigged against him are either unaware of the voluminous facts already known or prefer to ignore them. It was an organised scheme to ensure that Trump lost. It was a political coup. That is the real threat to American democracy. So what now?

“The real threat to American democracy in 2021: the complicity of the country’s dominant institutions in overriding ordinary checks and balances to ensure the success of their own preferred political program.

“Contrary to the received wisdom of the past four years, democracies don’t die because millions of people mysteriously fall under the sway of dangerous demagogues. Democracies die when a country’s political establishment serries ranks to suppress dissent. Or to suppress a tyrant, as they would have it.” So wrote Salvatore Babones*, in The Australian on January 14, 2021, under the headline: ‘Democracy more at risk with no brake on Joe Biden.’

What now?

Economic carnage. Rising unemployment. Socio-political divisions exacerbated. Foreign relations moves that damage US and global interests. Mainstream media irrelevant.

But first: the country’s dominant institutions (state legislatures and governors, most of the judiciary and all of the media) did indeed override the checks and balances that should have been activated. Judges – even those on the Supreme Court – refused to look at the evidence of voting fraud, simply dismissing the applications.

If the complex and targeted scheme to rig the election is left hidden from public view, American democracy will remain discredited and distrusted. The large majority (polls say around 70%) of the 75 million Trump voters are angry about it. That will fester. Quickly. Even some Democrats (around 13%) and independents (around 30%) accept that ‘irregularities’ occurred; that it was in fact ‘stolen’. This issue is broiling and will resurface with a vengeance.

Impeachment – mad, bad and unconstitutional
The madness of the Nancy Pelosi’s vindictive and clearly unconstitutional impeachment (per Alan Dershowitz among others) that even lacks due process (no evidence, no witnesses, no argument) will fuel that anger even more. Also quickly. This is the equivalent of a prosecutor taking a case to court without evidence, then moving to the bench and declaring the accused guilty. And that’s not to mention the futility: the purpose of impeachment is to remove a guilty president. Trump is an ex. Vindictiveness is ugly. It’s like ‘mean girls’ in high school.

To make things worse, investigations reported on CNN and in the Washington Post are painting a picture of planning the riot at the Capitol. That destroys the laughable accusations against Trump that he incited an ‘insurrection’ on which the impeachment is founded.

Economic carnage
Economic carnage is assured. Climate change policy based on a fear of an existential threat (undefined, no evidence) is the fuse. For example, Biden’s immediate executive order to shut down the Keystone XL oil pipeline taking Canadian oil to the US, worth US$100 billion to Alberta alone. Several US surveys of the pipeline before it was built have established its environmental safety – but the left of the Democrats want it shut. Never mind 10,000 jobs at risk.

Biden has also issued an executive order lifting the minimum wage from under US$8 to US$15 an hour. This is guaranteed to see unemployment rise among the lower income cohort as well as increasing cost of business everywhere – fuelling more economic pain.

Increased taxes were an election promise. That is a socialist idea but defies logic and history. The first new tax being discussed is a gas (that’s American for petrol) tax.

The left (but they are not alone) wants the US back in the Paris accord. “Rejoining the Paris climate agreement as it stands now will have devastating economic consequences for the United States, with little actual environmental benefit, according to Nicolas Loris, deputy director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

“It will be very costly for Americans families and business because 80 percent of our energy needs are met though carbon-emitting conventional fuels,” Loris told The Epoch Times. “Regulating them and subsidizing alternatives is going to harm American families and taxpayers.

“We estimate that over a 15-year period, you’re talking about an aggregate loss of $20,000 per family of four,” he said.

Loris is not alone in this view. Biden’s green mindset will intensify across policies and commentators, advisors and rent seekers.

Illegal migration
As one commentator put it, ‘with a stroke of a pen Biden has flicked off thousands of workers’, referring to the edict to stop construction on the Mexican border wall – contracts for which are already paid for. But Biden was serving the higher purpose of opening the border to illegal migrants who will be cossetted by the American health and social security system. These are the only people in the US who are ‘above the law’; not Trump.

Aside from the culture wars, the Democrats are blinded from reality by their desire to harvest those votes. The reality is that if borders are open, the whole world can funnel through … without the filter of a well managed legal migration process. They like to conflate the two groups so they can paint Trump and the wall as anti migration. Over 1.12 million legal migrants arrived in the US in 2017 and some 53,000 legally documented refugees.

Homeland Department officials on January 23, 2020 ordered the release of all illegal migrants held in detention. There were 52,000 in 2019 (I don’t have any figures for 2020. At the same time, the Biden administration is moving to halt the deportation of illegal migrants, including those convicted of crimes – other than terrorism and espionage. Texas is suing the Biden administration over the move, claiming it “ignored basic constitutional principles and violated its written pledge to work cooperatively with the State of Texas to address shared immigration enforcement concerns.”

Climatism
“Let’s get real. Climate is a man-made problem. But Biden’s climate alarmism is almost entirely wrong.” That’s Bjorn Lomborg, an each way climate authority, who manages to get it almost entirely wrong. I used to trust his views.

Maybe it’s thanks to Biden’s capitulation to left wing alarmism that has unsettled Lomborg and made him scupper his credibility while trying to save his climate relevance in the left’s view of climate change. It was published in The Australian on the weekend after Joe Biden’s inauguration as President. The second sentence is jaw dropping. Let’s get real, Mr Lomborg, climate alarmism is the man-made problem.

So is the media’s abject failure to probe the climate alarmist claims and to maintain a healthy, professional scepticism.

Iran & China back in favour
Biden was having secret meetings with Iran prior to taking office. The team which forged the original disastrous agreement will again handle the deal. And set the same template? Will Biden’s Chinese connections influence his policies. Will America be grated cheese again?

Media irrelevance
The media has also collectively abandoned their professional duties to the country, instead campaigning against Donald Trump on a daily basis for four years. Their irrelevance continues on as failed champions of freedom of speech and the twisters of facts. As UK columnist and author Douglas Murray pointed out last July in The Spectator, in the context of his finding the New York Times useless: “Some time ago I became aware that I no longer trusted it even on issues that I didn’t know about. Because on every issue I did know about, I discovered that the paper was spreading untruths and lies.”

Overview of the coup

When on arrival at the Presidency, Donald Trump claimed he was ‘bugged’, he was laughed at by the Democrats and the left, especially the media. Then it was proven to be so. They established a special investigation under Robert Mueller, spending millions of dollars and distracting the country with a conspiracy made up with a set of lies and a fake intelligence dossier. Trump had colluded with Russia to win the election from its rightful winner, Clinton. Mueller found nothing.

They impeached him, with a hollow, manufactured claim predicated on a phone call with the incoming President of Ukraine. They accused him of failures, even those they imagined. For four years. Together with and encouraged by the mad celebrities who wanted to punch him or behead him, as well as the media, the left hated him and tried everything to destroy his presidency. In that context, rigging the election can be seen just a continuation of that barrage of hate. It’s not out of character, is it?

“I have been told that we have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics,” Joe Biden told media in a news clip before the election. Nobody blinked an eye. They couldn’t believe he would be so careless as to say it publicly; he must have been suffering foot in mouth again. I saw Joe Biden make that statement as part of a news report on Fox News; I have not been able to find a link to it via Google. (Surprise.) It was also quoted in a discussion thread by reader Gringo in The Epoch Times, Dec. 17, 2020.

“We don’t yet have complete 2020 data on what presidential candidate won each congressional district. But an analysis based on 2016 data suggests that adopting a congressional district system in these swing states would have resulted in a 2020 Trump victory with about 282 electoral votes—12 more than needed.” – Robert G. Natelson, retired constitutional law professor, and senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver. 

On January 5, 2021 it was reported that the Data Integrity Group, a group of data scientists, has been dissecting publicly available data on the presidential election in multiple states. Most recently, in Pennsylvania, they found over 432,000 votes were removed from President Donald Trump in at least 15 counties.

On December 12, 2020, we reported on US lawyer Stephen B. Meister’s investigation into the lection. Here is a sample: Let’s begin by looking at some undisputed swing state data. Take Georgia to start. In 2012, Barack Obama won 1,773,827 votes in Georgia. We are now told Biden won 2,473,633 Georgia votes, besting the first black president by a stunning 699,806 votes.

In other words, we’re asked to believe that Biden outperformed his former boss by 39.45 percent in Georgia, though Biden was soundly defeated in the 2008 Democratic Primary by Obama, and that was when Obama’s sole political credentials were that of a Chicago community organizer and Illinois state senator, and before Biden’s obvious cognitive decline. Trump garnered 2,461,854 Georgia votes, and thus would have handily defeated Biden’s former boss.

Now let’s look at Nevada. It presents a similarly incredulous (sic) picture. Whereas Obama in 2012 won 531,373 votes from Nevadans, Biden, we are led to believe, won 703,486 such votes, besting his former boss by 172,113 votes—improving Obama’s performance by 32.39 percent. Again, Trump, who gathered 669,890 Nevada votes, would have soundly defeated a candidate turning in an Obama-level performance.

Arizona is altogether ridiculous. In 2012, Obama won 1,025,232 votes in Arizona. Yet Biden, we are asked to believe, got 1,672,143 votes from Arizonans, a whopping 63.10 percent improvement over Obama’s performance. Once again, Trump, who won 1,661,686 votes from Arizonans, would have handily defeated a candidate turning in an Obama-level performance.

Now we learn, thanks to the court-ordered forensic audit of the Dominion servers in Antrim County, Michigan, that the Dominion software somehow experienced an astounding 68.05 percent error rate in electronic tabulation log events.

The Election Assistance Commission (originally the Federal Election Commission) allows a maximum error rate of just 0.0008 percent (pdf). That is, the 68.05 percent audited error rate for Dominion software in Antrim County is a staggering 85,000 times the allowable error rate. The forensic report understandably concluded that Dominion software was “intentionally designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”

Trump miraculously losing

Was the (non-digital) adjudication function used—by corrupt clerks—to change votes? Here, I’m willing to bet that the Dominion software has a “sensitivity” setting that determines how tiny an error on a paper ballot must be for the computer to assign it to “adjudication” (so that that ballot can then be “adjudicated” by one or more election officials). In typical paper ballots, the voter’s choices are registered by the voter coloring in an oval. Obviously, no voter is perfect on the microscopic level in coloring in the entire oval’s area.

The fraudulent use of Dominion’s adjudication function could explain how Trump went from winning all six of the disputed swing states at midnight on Election Day to miraculously losing all six in the wee hours of the following morning.

“We have to acknowledge that the court system has been deeply intimidated by the left, just as the lawyers have been intimidated,” former Wisconsin judge James Troupis told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in December 2020.

The committee was conducting a hearing that explored voting “irregularities” from the 2020 general election. During the hearing, witnesses testified about a litany of alleged instances of election fraud occurring in multiple contested states.

*

The Navarro Report: The Immaculate Deception assesses the fairness and integrity of the 2020 Presidential Election by examining six dimensions of alleged election irregularities across six key battleground states. The matrix below indicates that significant irregularities occurred across all six battleground states and across all six dimensions of election irregularities.

 

In a podcast interview on December 21, 2020, Dr Peter Navarro said that more than 379,000 possibly illegal ballots were allegedly cast in Michigan. “That’s more than twice the victory margin,”.

During a nine-hour period on Nov. 4, Trump had a significant lead over Joe Biden, he added. Within “five seconds” at around 6:30 a.m. Biden’s “total [votes] skyrocketed by 141,258 votes,” or “30 times the expected vote count,” Navarro said, citing data from the New York Times.

“Within that same time frame, do ya know how many Trump got? 5,968,” he claimed. In another instance at around 3:50 a.m. ET in Michigan, 54,497 votes were provided for Biden while Trump only received about 4,718 votes, he said.

Navarro has compiled three reports on the way the election was corrupted. Those responsible are not above the law, either.

* Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney and the author of The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts, which was named “best on politics 2018” by The Wall Street Journal.