THERE is no way President Trump should concede defeat in the recent US election, and arguably he should never concede.
Yesterday’s once again misleading reported announcement by Emily Murphy, the Administrator of the General Services Administration, that she can release post-election resources for the transition process to the Biden campaign, subject to Biden meeting reporting requirements, does not affect this.
As Ms. Murphy herself wrote: ‘The actual winner of the presidential election will be determined by the electoral process detailed in the Constitution.’
First, despite erroneous claims of the media to the contrary, the election has not yet concluded, nor will it conclude until the Electoral College meets to vote on December 14. Electors conventionally vote for the winners of the popular votes in their states. But they are not constitutionally compelled to do so.
There have been 165 instances of so-called ‘faithless electors’ in American history and in 2016, the same media outlets which today speak about threats to democracy, including the New York Times, the Atlantic and the Guardian, promoted a movement of so-called ‘Hamilton Electors’ which aimed to deny Trump the presidency by refusing to follow the popular votes in their states.
In the event, seven faithless electors switched votes on the day, two from Trump, and five from Clinton, far short of the numbers that would have been required. What will happen this December still remains to be determined.
At the present time however, the Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden is the President-Elect of nothing, and the backdrop in front which he continues to be photographed is a stage set being utilised for psychological warfare. There has never been an ‘Office of the President-Elect’ and there is no such office now.
Second, the result of the popular vote remains disputed across multiple states on the basis of tight margins and numerous procedural irregularities. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada all currently remain subject to litigation, or in the process of a recount.
None of this is constitutionally extraordinary. In 2000, the Democratic candidate Al Gore disputed the results of the narrow Florida election until December 12, when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of George W Bush on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, due to a lack of common standards in recounting votes in the state.
The highly discrepant standards which were applied in the 2020 election, both to handling mail-in ballots, and to vote counting procedures, render this argument likely to return.
All this is before getting into the question of voter fraud – of which, once again, despite claims to the contrary, there is considerable evidence.
Evidence, of course, is not automatically proof, and may be either strong or weak. But whether the weight of the evidence meets the standard of proof is a matter of judgment ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, not an objective fixed standard.
In short, there is certainly not no evidence, and anyone insisting on this line is wilfully naive at best. Equally, although claims might be unproven, this is not the same thing as claiming there is no proof, since proof arrives at the end of a process, with a verdict, not at the beginning, with a claim.
Evidence suggesting election fraud breaks down into two categories: Reports of procedural irregularities and statistical anomalies. Both are abundant in the 2020 US election.
The website hereisthevidence.com, unlisted by Google, supplies a compilation of crowdsourced reports, including hundreds of signed affidavits.
There are reports of dead people voting, evidence of ballots being destroyed, significant evidence of election day irregularities – including denying poll watchers access to vote counts, and in some cases even access to the building – and perhaps most suspiciously, vote counting suddenly ceasing in the middle of election night in the Democratic-controlled urban centers of the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia, where Trump had been winning until that point by sizeable margins.
When the count resumed in the morning, these margins had been erased or reversed. Notably, this claim that the count stopped has been designated a conspiracy theory, but everyone who watched election night saw it happen with their own eyes.
Procedural irregularities can be set alongside numerous improbable statistical anomalies, including an unprecedented sweep for Trump of 18/19 of the bellwether counties
which have tracked the overall winner of US Presidential elections since 1980 (after this evidence was publicised, Wikipedia modified this page), and the strange fact that Biden won the most votes in American history with the lowest-ever number of counties.
Specifically, Biden is said to have won 477 counties, ten less than Hillary Clinton won when she lost to Trump in 2016, and 212 less than the previous record for the lowest-ever total number of counties won by a winning campaign: Barack Obama in 2012 with 689.
On a more granular level, in a detailed analysis of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, a statistician for the news website Revolver, writing under a pseudonym in light of a pattern of threats against people questioning the election results, recently found ‘strong circumstantial evidence suggesting fraud in mail votes in a very large batch of 90,022 mail/absentee votes with over 95 per cent support for Biden that arrived on Thursday November 5 at 9:09am looking statistically ‘nothing like the mail ballots counted up to that point in the NYT data’ and also ‘different from the mail ballots counted later in each precinct as measured using the county’s own data’.
Given the record high number of absentee ballots returned in the 2020 election, combined with a record low rate of ballot rejection (Only 0.3 per cent of Georgia’s 1.3million absentee ballots, for example, were
rejected for signature mismatches, compared to 3.5 per cent in the 2018 mid-terms) as well as the procedural irregularities noted above, it is not unreasonable to investigate whether batches of absentee ballots elsewhere may fit the same pattern.
Procedural irregularities coupled with statistical anomalies are both widely recognised signs of possible election fraud when observed in other countries, along with a media which is firmly in one side’s camp and suppression of the ability of the opposition from communicating.
Of course, censorship and a partisan media have been apparent in the US election both before and after election day. In October, as the lid remained on Biden’s coffin, the media refused to cover evidence of Biden and his son’s corruption, and Twitter locked the New York Post’s account for two weeks for reporting it: Already election interference.
Later, publication of laughably inaccurate polling on the eve of the election, and artful direction of election night coverage itself seems to have been intended to establish the narrative that Biden victory was inevitable, an outcome which still remains far from certain.
Trump was never allowed to take an electoral college lead: The idea was to present him as always behind, fighting from a lost position; Florida thus remained uncalled, and Arizona called immediately.
Today, social media is systematically suppressing any questioning of the legitimacy of election results, and the global media, not excluding nominal conservatives, is almost unanimous in presenting the position of the Trump campaign as hopeless and / or deranged, and Trump himself as motivated by self-interest and ego.
But what if Trump is fundamentally correct in his assessment that massive election fraud took place? In that case, the problem would be bigger than the fate of Trump himself, but what a Presidential election victory achieved though voter fraud, and violent threats, and media manipulation means.
The question is much larger than who occupies the White House in the next four years, and concerns the future of democracy in the United States, if not the West as such.
For anyone who has been paying attention, it is impossible to unsee what has been revealed about the Democratic Party and its media establishment in the last four years.
It began with the wiretapping of Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign by Obama’s Department of Justice, a claim dismissed as ludicrous when first made by Trump, but later proven true. This was followed by three years of the Russia hoax launched by opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign, and then demoralisation propaganda and race war incitement, with the crudely falsified history of the 1619 Project.
In May, this became the 1619 Riots following incendiary media coverage of the death of George Floyd from a fentanyl overdose while in police custody in Minneapolis.
For four years the media has lied relentlessly, promoted and defended Antifa and BLM violence, including murder, and repeatedly attacked and defamed innocent people, including minors.
In this time Trump has been cast as Emmanuel Goldstein from 1984 and relentlessly defamed on the slenderest of pretexts as a racist misogynist and white supremacist and fascist, along with his supporters.
This relentless application of what the rhetorician Richard Weaver called ‘devil words’ has evidently proven successful in destroying weaker minds all over the world; even today, the mere mention of Trump is enough to send intelligent people into paroxysms of rage.
Yet Trump’s record speaks for itself. As Christopher Caldwell recently pointed out in the Financial Times, Trump presided over the first downward redistribution of income and wealth in the United States since the last century. Responding to these policies, Trump won a greater share of Hispanic and black voters from the Democrats than any previous Republican candidate in history.
In foreign policy, unlike any of his predecessors stretching back to Gerald Ford, Trump not only started no wars, but secured historic peace deals in the Middle East.
Despite facing deception by senior officials about the real levels of US military presence in Syria, his administration is now planning on withdrawing from the perpetual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started by George Bush and continued by Barack Obama.
No matter what happens next, Trump should add to his record by issuing a pardon of Julian Assange, whose persecution shames America as much as the persecution of Dreyfus shamed France.
Defences of Trump are usually hedged with a comment that he is ill-mannered or crude. Doubtless he has probably said and done some things that he regrets, like anyone.
But he speaks from the heart, as opposed to from a teleprompter, and his period in the Oval Office has generated some of the greatest poetry ever produced by an international statesman. ‘All birds are American,’ Trump declared in late October at a rally in Wisconsin. How can anyone hate this man?
Trump is no longer simply a private individual, but the champion of the American people. This is the source of his resilience, but also his incredible historical responsibility.
More than 70million Americans voted for him, and against the coalition of big media, big money and big tech, orchestrated by the national security establishment, which now constitutes the ruling powers of the Democratic Party.
For the last four years, this alliance has obliterated every civic norm in a scorched-earth campaign of psychological warfare, mob violence, and terror, which in the form of the big lie of the pandemic, and the global policy of lockdown it has generated, continues to this day.
If it has now also stolen the US Presidential election, the United States faces an acceleration of all the trends that have animated the last nine months, from riots to the devastation of the virus theatre to the greater good of corporations, along with the return of the war party to US foreign policy. And there will be no more fair elections.
For all these reasons, Trump not only should not concede, but cannot concede, since what he would be conceding is the American republic.
