DANGEROUS DISTRUST OF ELECTORAL PROCESS

Yes, I did call for President Trump to resign two weeks ago. However, it may surprise readers to know that if I could go back to 2016, I would vote for him again; 2020 too. Despite his behavior since losing reelection, I see his presidency as a net positive. Impeaching him now is farcical given that he’s leaving office anyway but the Dems want to prevent him from ever running again because they’re afraid of him.

Biden brags about getting Ukraine prosecutor fired

This latest impeachment for inciting violence may have grounds, unlike the 2020 effort which charged Trump with asking Ukrainians to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling. Pelosi ignored then-vice-president Biden on videotape threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine to stop a Ukrainian investigation into Hunter Biden. Mainstream media allies cooperated on both fronts.

Ever since Trump got the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, mainstream media has amplified every Democrat effort to impugn him. First they magnified the Clinton campaign’s fabricated Steele Dossier and dubious Trump/Russian collusion story. They ignored Obama’s use of intelligence agencies to spy on Trump’s campaign before the 2016 election and then afterward on his transition team. They cheerleaded the dubious Mueller Investigations into General Flynn and President Trump, neither of which found anything to prosecute and only succeeded in bankrupting Flynn, destroying his reputation, and crippling Trump’s presidency.

Conservatives did a slow burn watching all this and 90% negative media coverage of Trump’s presidency despite its long string of successes: Trump isolated Iran and its terrorism. He killed Iran General Soleimani, ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and al-Qaeda leader Qasim al-Rimi, among others. He forged the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab leaders. He spurred economic growth that Obama claimed would be impossible. He reduced illegal immigration and built over 400 miles of new border wall. He hammered out favorable trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, the EU, and China. He appointed hundreds of pro-life judges and three originalist Supreme Court justices.

He eliminated the Obamacare individual mandate, reformed the VA, withdrew from the Paris Accord and the Iran nuclear agreement, got NATO Countries to pay their fair share, cut restrictions on oil drilling and coal exports, fast-tracked and funded a COVID vaccine, brought unemployment to record lows, raised median household income to record level, brought home troops from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, reformed the criminal justice system, and created the Space Force. Trump may be the most controversial president ever, but he’s also one of the most accomplished, especially considering he did all that in four years.

After losing on November 3rd, however, Trump claimed election fraud. Mainstream media said there was no evidence. Millions of Trump voters however, watched as Trump was winning that evening when swing states abruptly stopped counting votes, sent observers home, and resumed counting. By morning they were reporting that Trump was losing. Pennsylvania extended its deadline for counting votes without constitutional authority, after which the votes swung to Biden.

Is that evidence of election fraud or coincidence? Millions of Trump voters believe it was cheating. Mainstream media denied it all and called the election for Trump. Hundreds of observers made sworn depositions of voter fraud. That is evidence. Only two eyewitnesses, for example, are needed for a murder conviction and sometimes only one, but mainstream media continued claiming there was no evidence. There’s also video of ballot stuffing in Georgia. Law suits alleging fraud were dismissed on procedural grounds like lack of standing. There is plenty of evidence for election fraud largely perpetrated by Democrats, though probably not enough to overturn the result.

Our Founders gave us freedom of speech for many reasons, but one was for irate citizens to blow off steam by expressing their anger verbally and in writing. Here in 2021, people don’t use 18th century broadsheets; they use Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Those outlets are owned and run by leftists who have been censoring news and posts with which they disagree, especially about election fraud. Because they’re private companies, they probably aren’t violating the 1st Amendment, but they’ve assumed enormous political power and they’re using it against conservatives, so far under the legal protection of Section 230.

We now have a huge percentage of our electorate that no longer trusts the electoral process. One could debate whether that mistrust is justified or not, but there’s little dispute that it exists. That is a huge threat to our republic that should give all of us the shivers.

Trump has been accused of narcissism even by supporters. What they at first saw as a character flaw was turning into an unraveling after his election loss, and it accelerated week-to-week. By January 6th it had completely blinded him to the political reality that Biden’s election would not be overturned. His unwillingness to accept that is embarrassing for all who voted for him. I will not vote for him in any 2024 primary and I hope he doesn't get the Republican nomination again. Right now I'm looking at Nikki Haley.

LEFT & RIGHT OCTOBER 28, 2020

 

In the left chair for this show sat John Burroughs, MD. He calls himself centrist, is politically independent, and “looks at every policy on its face.” As the show went on, I saw nothing that would contradict that self-assessment. The first cold question from our producer asked if we were concerned that, because newly-sworn Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared with the president at the White House, she would be a pawn of the president. John said he wasn’t concerned. He said Barrett was certainly conservative, very much against abortion as a Catholic, and “Barrett’s primary loyalty is not to the president, but to the law.” He said nothing with which I would disagree. Interestingly he believes Barrett would not vote to overturn Roe V Wade, and suggested she might recuse herself as a Catholic because she had done that earlier as an appellate judge in a capital punishment case which the church opposes. Second question from the producer listed several right-wing groups and asked if we thought voters would be put in danger from those and some left-wing groups. I said that there are very few paramilitary right-wingers who might cause damage like the Oklahoma City bombing, but there are far more left-wing groups like BLM and Antifa who, though they would cause comparatively little damage to people with their tactics, they would cause far more overall damage to property. Right wing groups tend to be made up of former military people who have been trained to kill, and they’re more dangerous that way. BLM and Antifa will through Molotov cocktails at police cars and burn down buildings. John said both groups like creating chaos, unrest, and violence more than making political statements and that’s their commonality. They like imposing their views on the public at large because “they believe their personal values transcend the rule of law.” He says Donald Trump is dodging questions about whether he would incite violence through such groups should he lose the election. I asked him if he thought Democrats wink at violence by BLM and Antifa. He said both parties wink at extreme behavior by their respective radicals. As we discussed possible election outcomes, John mentioned the Safe Harbor Deadline, with which I was not familiar. The Electoral College sets a date by which states must report to the Electoral College the results of voting within their state. Our producer then printed some documents John read setting the date this year as December 8th. If there are challenges to the vote count they must be resolved within each state by that date. [SIDE NOTE: These procedures will now be playing out. This show was taped six days before the election, but now the results are being challenged in lawsuits by President Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Trump is demanding a recount in Wisconsin. Arizona may not have gone for Biden as reported and not all the votes are counted as of this writing the afternoon of November 5th.] Given that we didn’t disagree on topics we covered, and this wasn’t a pure Left & Right show, I decided to pick his brain about medical issues, asking why he believed masks are effective with the Covid virus. He said they inhibit spread but don’t prevent it entirely and cited examples. I then asked him about two organizations of doctors, one in the US called the “Frontline Doctors” and the other an international group who signed “The Great Barrington Declaration." Both disagree publicly with various policy recommendations by our NIH and CDC. And, both groups had been censored by Twitter and Facebook as a result. John had not heard of either, but it turns out he agreed with the Great Barrington Declaration, which states that economic and school shutdowns do far more harm than good and are unwarranted. About the Hunter Biden laptop, John believes it’s a hoax perpetrated by the Russians. I brought up Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s recent statement that there’s no intelligence to back that up. John, however believes more in a committee report by Senator Chuck Grassley supporting his assertion, which I had not read. At the end, he agreed to come onto future shows and explore other topics like Roe V Wade.