Vanilla Maricopa Pudding on a Bed of Cole Slaw

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Introduction

Over the last number of months, I have written in various places about the issue of election fraud generally, and in Maricopa County, Arizona, specifically, along with the forensic audit of that election that was ongoing. Here’s one sample of my kibbitzing.

When the report was finally released a few weeks ago, the conclusion of the report was that the election should not have been certified, on the one hand, but on the other hand there was apparently no radical shift in the vote count, which meant that Biden still won the thing. This meant partisans on both sides had something to point to and yell about, and so I was asked by various persons if I was going to withdraw my allegation that there was serious funny business going on in that election, followed by a commitment that I would try to conduct myself in a more chastened frame of mind in the future.

I promised that as the dust settled I would follow up with a reply and response, and this is it. Here we are. The answer is no, I am not going to withdraw anything, and this is why. But to reassure everyone right at the front end, I am not going to be arguing that the moon landing was faked.

A Very Basic Overview

I am going to limit most of my (brief) discussion here to Maricopa, since that is where the audit was, and because of my previous emphasis on the audit.

Prior to Biden taking Maricopa County in this last election, the previous time a Democratic presidential candidate captured that county was in 1948. That was 72 years ago. In 2016, Trump won that county handily, winning it by 3%. Moreover, Trump had garnered a bunch of additional support by the time 2020 rolled around, to the tune of 248,000 new voters. And yet, seemingly out of nowhere, Biden swooped in for his squeaker win.

When the inevitable hey-wait-a-minute moment arrived, instead of public-minded officials everywhere saying, “yeah, this one warrants an honest review, let’s work together,” the efforts to ascertain an accurate count were called every name in the book, stonewalling was taken to a new level, and bureaucrats actually defied a subpoena by refusing to turn over election data to the auditors. For more on that bit of egregiousness, you may view the video clip at the end of this piece.

When you combine the aforesaid factors with the shameless and robust efforts of Big Tech to shut down all debate on this question, it should make every cautious citizen suspicious. This kind of behavior relegates responsible voices to the fever swamps, and then uses the disreputable company that the banished now find themselves as a way of casting any dissent on this question as proof of incorrigible moonbattery,

As unaccustomed as I am to quoting Voltaire with approval, he nailed this one. “It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.” Whatever the truth about the 2020 election might be, you are probably not allowed to say it out loud on Facebook or Twitter.

Now politics is a strange world, and I for one am certainly willing (in principle) to believe that the county that turned down that old dud of a campaigner Obama twice was a county nevertheless not able to withstand the tractor-beam appeal of Joe Biden, affectionately known to some by the moniker Charisma Hole. Stranger things have happened. But I am not a nutter or a conspiracy theorist for wanting to go back over this particular hot mess to review the data. Don’t tase me and tell me it must have been the electric current of the Biden mojo. You know, the excitement of the massive crowds and all that.

There is another old adage, the kind you can find on a card rack at a Flying J truck stop. It is the one that says, “don’t pee on my leg and tell me its raining.” But this situation is more like “don’t pee on my leg and tell me it is a tropical dry heat.”

The responsible voices calling for more direct proof than we currently possess appear to me to asking for the kind of proof that would put particular individuals in jail, proof that would be used at the trial of Murphy the poll-worker, say.

But if we find the butler face down in the parlor with a knife in his back, the fact is suggestive. We don’t require any more proof to know that the butler was murdered, even though we might not have any proof about who did it. The two questions are not the same question. So I remain an unrepentant skeptic about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

For a wonderful overview on how anomalous this whole 2020 presidential election was, I would refer you to a recent article in Chronicles, the beginning of which is here. Get a hold of the entire article if you can. The information in that article alone is worth the subscription price. So I will look sideways—squinty-eyed and scowling—at this particular election to my dying day. And I will do so with sunshine in my conscience.

Anomalies do require explanation. As Thoreau once put it, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” You know, like a turtle on top of a fence post. When you are driving down a country road, and you happen to see a turtle on top of a fence post, the situation is clear, and the first thing that comes to mind is President Biden. You understand he didn’t get there by himself, he really doesn’t belong there, he doesn’t know what to do as long as he’s up there, and all you want to do is help the poor little guy get down.

This election in Maricopa is like that. Not everything in this mess goes together. It is like you went to dig into your vanilla Maricopa pudding, made fresh just this morning, and you discover that it is resting on a bed of cole slaw.

One Thing About the General Election

The saying goes that “if it isn’t close, they can’t cheat.” But in our Electoral College system, you have to pay close attention to certain key pinch points in swing states, states that could go either way. And this election, with all the momentous issues that were downstream from it, was decided by fewer than 50K votes. If three squeaker states had gone the other way (Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin), the result would have been an Electoral College tie. And the total margin for those three states together was 43,809 votes.

Out of 161.3 million votes cast, according to the Authorities, what kind of margin is that? And why should any sensible person take it as an article of faith that there was no possibility of cheating at that level whatever? And why would others be dismissed as loons simply because they believe that this could easily have happened? If it did happen, the behavior of Arizona bureaucrats would have been exactly what it was in this situation, and the behavior of Big Tech would have been exactly what it has been, and the behavior of our old friends in the media would have been exactly what it has been.

But the real reason this is all so worrisome is that it is happening when almost all trust in public institutions is, as the Spanish would say, el gono.

The Issue Is Trust

Allow me to anticipate a counter thrust here. It will be said that I am a die-hard conservative who believes whatever he wants to off the Internet, who won’t face facts, and that until I learn how to face facts, I will continue to deservedly suffer public calumny and scorn, and public-spirited citizens will continue to administer their verbal beat downs.

Facts, eh? Truth, eh? But we live in a generation that has collectively decided that there is no such thing as truth. If we still believed in truth, we would still believe in Christ, but we don’t. There is your truth, to be sure, and there is my truth, certainly, but only white supremacists talk about the truth anymore. Am I not right? Truth is not considered to be an objective reality anymore, and so appeals to truth coming from this relativistic culture are only, at bottom, appeals to lies and coercion. The truth is no longer something that over arches all political parties and factions, requiring them all to acknowledge its authority and to submit to it. That is the white man’s game, and we are done with those slavery days forever.

No, “truth,” when the word is still used, has been dragged down into the service of the progressive left, weaponized and used on the resistance, but only when convenient. Let me give you an example. Questioning the legitimacy of the this election means that you are undermining faith in our democratic institutions. You are an enemy of the people. You are a foe of democracy. How dare you, sir? I see. And what was Stacy Abrams doing when she repeatedly maintained that the governorship of Georgia was stolen from her? Was her election rigged? What was Hillary Clinton doing when she said there was Russian collusion that stole the election from her? Was her election stolen? What was Al Gore doing when he maintained that he was robbed?

When conservatives question the legitimacy of elections, they are clearly enemies of democracy. But this only works because we are also enemies of democracy so long as we continue breathing.

So let me close by addressing the canard, mentioned earlier, that When it comes to current events, I would offer this metric for understanding why I call myself conservative, and why I act like a conservative when it comes to such things. I don’t believe anything the government says, I don’t believe anything that progressive outlets say, and I don’t believe three-quarters of what right wing outlets say. And that is what makes me such a strident conservative. That makes me a conspiracy theorist, a tin-foil hatter, an info-warrior, and an election-denier.

I don’t know how the algorithms work, but my inbox is cluttered, and that on a daily basis, with right wing screeds, jeremiads, and bloviations of various stripes. “Biden’s poll numbers in free fall . . .” “Merrick Garland devastated by . . .” “Suburban mom wipes the floor with trustees at school board meeting . . .” Fortunately, the hysterics are usually in the subject line, and so I can delete fairly efficiently, and without losing too many brain cells.

So if you want me to start feeling bad about how I believe everything I read, you really need to try something else. Because I am not feeling bad at all. Something must be wrong.

But occasionally, something catches my eye, and I figure to myself, “why not meander over there to just take a little look-see?” And so I do. And I see something like this, not knowing whether to be more gobsmacked over the video itself or more gobsmacked that the whole country isn’t gobsmacked.

This one kind of just takes the breath away.