Introduction
This is not so much a prediction as it is an occasion for me to share my heart. Sharing your heart with others is still okay, right? Especially if it is a heartfelt sharing of the heart.
When we contemplate the coming presidential election, the phrase that comes to my mind is “brace for impact.” And what is on my heart is what kind of impact I think we need to be bracing for. And you will need to work through all seven reasons to get a complete picture.
There are two basic possibilities when the sun rises the day after the polls close this November, and one certainty. One possibility is that whoever is currently propping up Joe Biden will be president de facto. The other possibility is that we will have four more years of Trump. The certainty is that whichever way it goes, there will be massive amounts of civic unrest, and unrest may be putting it mildly. For more on the unrest, see below.
Fortunately, there is another certainty that is relevant here. That certainty is that Jesus will still be king, whichever way it goes. Put not your trust in princes (Ps. 118:9; Ps. 146:3). Don’t put any trust in the unrest either.
Without in any way making a claim to know the future, I set these seven reasons before you as compelling reasons — either way it goes. If Trump wins, then don’t forget you read it here. If Biden wins, these reasons still remain as compelling as ever they were, and that means that Americans will have chosen their poison with their eyes open, and will deserve everything that is coming to them, good and hard. That is, if Biden wins fair and square, which he can’t. But if Biden wins through massive cheating, then we will still deserve what we are getting. That is because the cheating will have to be done in broad daylight, and that means that we would have to put up with it.
So with that said, here are the seven reason why I think it wiser to brace for a Trumpslide than to brace for the alternative. Although if Trump carries New York, California, and Great Britain, we may want to call it a Trumpalanche.
Riots Are Us
The Democrats foolishly identified with the riots and rioters long enough for an ineradicable branding to set in. When the concrete of public opinion was still wet, they accepted the identification of the rioters’ cause with their own. They encouraged it. The Biden campaign bragged about how they were paying bail to spring rioters loose from jail.
Now any political consultant worth his salt would not need to look at any poll numbers to tell the higher ups that this was a Dumb Idea. No doubt there were some political advisors with the campaign who had brains, but who looked around and realized that they were advising a campaign that was a living embodiment of cancel culture, and so, desirous of keeping their jobs, kept their mouths shut. But other political advisors were on the scene, who, if their brains were dynamite, would have just enough to blow their collective nose, and they apparently said that the campaign simply had to “connect” with the “passion” and the “commitment” and the “street smarts” and the “bricks through windows” and the “looting” and the “arson” and the “murders,” and hey . . . what happened to our poll numbers?
Let me just say it here. I am pretty sure one or two thousand other political observers have said something very similar, but it strikes me that burning down cities is not a winsome strategy. That is not the pathway to the hearts of the American people. That is not a “morning in America” campaign.
Brands Don’t Rinse Off
A brand is not a henna tattoo.
Once the brand is set, you cannot deal with it by means of a simple pivot. You cannot have your candidate start condemning the “needless” violence three or four months after the needless violence started, with all of your people having egged it on in the meantime.
Just a few days ago, after his campaign realized the problem, Joe Biden engendered a great deal of hilarity when he said, “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?”
The issue was not that a large number of Americans could easily answer that rhetorical question with a shrug and an “of course.” That is exactly what he looks like. The actual tell tale issue was the hilarity that followed. Twitter erupted with a collective horse laugh.
This was his “I am not a crook” moment. This was his Michael Dukakis in a tank moment.
The only way for Biden to do something here that would be even remotely convincing to the middle America he has already alienated is to conduct a full-throated attack on antifa, and the rioters, and BLM, and the spirit of lawlessness that pervades the entire Left. He would need to pull a Clintonesque Sister Soulja moment, only a hundred times more weighty and momentous than an admonition for some entertainer. But if Biden were to do that, he would alienate what is now the hard base of the Democratic party.
That means he is stuck, and that means the brand “Friend of Rioters” stays put.
Non Compos Mentis
Policies aside, Joe Biden is clearly, manifestly, plainly not up to the task. He is not an experienced politician who has lost a step or two because of age. No, he can barely get through a scripted speech. Biden, when he was young and vigorous, was a gaffe machine. But now . . .? Crikey.
This is not a point that needs to be belabored. Everybody sees it. Everyone tacitly acknowledges it. Did I mention that there is apparently “no need” for a presidential debate?
But this means that a vote for Biden is actually a vote for somebody else. Do you think the American people will buy a pig in a poke? Who is that somebody? Will it be Kamala? Will it be Jill Biden? Will it be the National Security Advisor, whoever he turns out to be? Shouldn’t we know who is going to be actually running the country?
Besides the usual gang, I mean. As someone once observed, no matter how we vote, the government always seems to get it. And while H.L. Mencken once described democracy as the art of running the zoo from the monkey house, I think we might be in a position to see him and raise him ten.
Flop Sweat
Democratic operatives are starting to panic, and it is starting to show. They are showing signs that they are reading the above signs the same way that I am.
Here the issue is not whether these are the actual facts on the ground. The issue is our shared perception of them.
The mere fact that Biden started condemning riots months after they began is an indication of a flop sweat panic on his team. There is no way that this was the plan from the beginning. “Let’s allow the riots to run free in silence, and let’s identify with them tacitly but strongly, and then, months into it, let us begin to demur a little bit.”
That is not the second half of a single strategy. That is what you might call a case of horse envy in the middle of the stream.
There will be multiple examples of this. Another one is Biden’s laughable attempt to shuck off his “ban fracking” stance. Flip flopping is something that almost all politicians do, but Biden shows signs of having to do it on a grand scale. But it is one thing to abandon support for policy A in order to move to policy AB, and quite another to maintain that your previous opposition to the Destruction of the Planet and Life as We Know It is no longer your stance, at least not in Pennsylvania.
And walking back your support for the riots is what might be called a tricky operation, only to be undertaken if a bunch of your advisors have looked at some internal polls and commented on them with something along the lines of gaaakkkk!
Censors Are Not the Confident Ones
Anybody who has any real experience at all with the leftward biases of Big Tech — by which I mean Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all those guys — will tell you that they are by no means assured that the American people, left to their own devices, would choose to do the right thing.
And so public opinion must be massaged. It must be steered, admonished, lectured, hectored, harangued, and suspended. Those are the tactics of fear, not confidence.
The thing of interest here is that Big Tech’s thumb of the scales of democracy is now broadly and widely understood, and budgeted for.
There used to be a saying in Washington that nothing should be believed until it was officially denied. We may apply the wisdom found in this adage to our new circumstances. Don’t trust anything you read unless Facebook has fact-checked it, and found it to be out of compliance with Mark Z’s views on the subject.
COVID Fatigue
Apart from Kristi Noem, pretty much nobody covered themselves with glory during the pandemic fright, flight, and panic. Donald Trump got frogmarched by the CDC, and pretty much everybody else got spooked by the whole thing. Republican governors locked down their states, and Democratic governors locked down their states. So how might this factor into the election? Why would this make a difference if everybody went along with it? Isn’t this something pretty much everybody agreed on?
But the blue state governors entered into it with tyrannical enthusiasm, and the red state governors did it under pressure and with reluctance. The Republican governors of Florida and Georgia, to take two examples, brought their states out of lock down “early” when the national media was yelling at them about the carnage they would cause. They didn’t cause any carnage, however, while the governor of New York did, and all while remaining a media hero.
Now here is the situation. There is a massive amount of COVID fatigue going on. An huge number of people have simply had it — with lock downs, with masking, with the whole drill. They want back to normal, and they don’t want back to the new normal. They want back to normal.
How might such a fatigue express itself at the polls? If you want the hysterics to go away, the Republicans who played along reluctantly are your only real option. You go with them, also with reluctance. The party of the Newsoms and Whitmers would not be the way to go. Did I mention that Biden wants masking to be mandatory for the whole country?
That’s the ticket. Pulmonary staph infections for all! Yeast infections!
Put on your mask. Confess yourself to be racist and white supremacist. Close down your small business. Applaud the riots. Allow yourself to be shimmied along into the next available struggle session, sponsored by your local chapter of the Red Guards.
You say that you don’t have a local chapter of the Red Guards?
But actually, yes, you do.
The “Red Mirage”
This last point is where things get seriously ugly. We have to prepare ourselves for what the Left is preparing for. Their prep work is already being done. You can follow that link to an article that warns that election night will be a “red mirage.” It will look like Donald Trump has swept the country, see all the reasoning above. But this apparently fails to take into account all the Ryder trucks full of uncounted Democratic votes that George Soros will be able to dispatch to any locale that appears to need them.
So we have to be prepared to not accept the Left’s non-acceptance of the election results.
The easy way to do this is through having the election be not even close. But if it is a squeaker in any key battleground state, get yourself ready. As we used to say in the Navy, stand by for heavy rolls.
Now to some folks this is tinfoil hat stuff. Conspiracy thinking. So sad when a preacher of the gospel gets away from theology and lets his inner American out. You know the drill.
How dare I suggest that the Democrats will not accept the results of the 2020 election? Well, did they accept the results of the 2016 election? Not a trick question.
How dare I suggest that they would cheat using the recently adopted, rushed and jury-rigged system of mail-in voting? Well, were they willing to burn down cities in the run-up to the election? Why yes, yes they were.
Do you honestly think that the people who burned down Kenosha would be willing to go that far to get Trump out, but then, when someone suggests that they count a few extra ballots that mysteriously showed up, somebody in the resistance is going to say, “Whoa, whoa. Wait a minute, Henry. That’s a bridge too far. That would threaten the integrity of the democratic process. Hand me another brick.”
Conservatives need to recognize that the machinery of our republican form of government has already been corrupted, and they need to do more than trust the functionaries at the county courthouse. Those people have been hiding behind plexiglass for the last several months. From a virus. They think that giving you a marriage license is dangerous.
This is my answer to those who wondered at making such a big deal over the masking mandates. They said, “why waste your energy on that?” Shouldn’t you save your resources for a really serious issue? Sure. Like stealing an election? You will soon enough see that those who counseled us to roll over on the smaller things will soon enough start advising us to roll over on some huge ones.
But we had better not.