A business law professor at New Mexico State University (NMSU) said that anyone who proposes there “is no evidence” for massive election fraud in November’s presidential election doesn’t know what they are talking about.
Professor David K. Clements released a provocative video in response to a lettersent to the entire faculty of NMSU from Dr. John Floros, the university’s president. Clements described the letter as “regurgitating” the narrative “in the media” regarding the election and the January 6 violence at the U.S. Capital.
While broadly addressing many issues on these topics, he was very specific with regards to his own personal investigation into the election fraud question.
For those who believe “there is no evidence, you don’t know what you are talking about,” he said. “I’ve reviewed hours upon hours of public hearings. I have read almost all of the lawsuits that are out there. Most of them were dismissed on legal process grounds.
These suits, he said, were dismissed due to a legal lack of standing. “The general argument” that was presented in these cases, he said, “was that because this was a general harm,” then “you have no standing because your harm has to be particular. It’s not because there isn’t evidence. There is evidence,” the professor emphasized.
“In fact, I’m in possession of 574 pages of sworn affidavits, forensic reports, all of which would make its way in a court of law under the rules of evidence in a federal or state court. The fact that the evidence has not been heard here by these courts” should not be conflated into “this idea that there is no evidence,” Clements argued.
“The courts have done what they always do,” Clements explained. “When you have political matters, they want them to be decided politically, not in a court room, but through the elections, through the state legislatures.”
However, he observed, the main problem was that “we have a bunch of cowards. We have judges who are cowards, we have politicians that are cowards, and that’s the reality.”
Clements, who lost a close primary run for senate in 2014, encouraged all “to look at the evidence, [including] sworn affidavits where people face 10 to 15 years of prison time if they commit perjury, and statistical analysis that just flies in the face of this idea that there was no fraud in this election.”
More broadly Clements went through Floros’ letter providing commentary along the way. He highlighted hypocrisy on the part of the NMSU president for the special attention paid to the intrusion at the Capitol and his silence during the BLM riots last summer.
“I’m offended that this is the email you are going to send to faculty, when you have been largely silent as cities have burned. People have lost their businesses [and] homes … entire city blocks [were] turned into zones for Antifa and BLM … Your silence speaks volumes,” he said.
Floros celebrated how on January 6 “our democratic institutions held strong, and by the end of the day both houses of Congress returned to the Capitol Building to do the people’s business.”
Clements, a long-time political independent, responded, “The people’s business” that day “was to certify votes to ensure that there was a proper transition to the next president. However, in seven of those states there were dueling electors, and the ‘People’s Business’ allowed for the American people to hear evidence of voter fraud. When these members of Congress returned, they did not deal with the massive black cloud hanging over the election in November. They did nothing of the sort. They used the riot as grounds to move forward and push their paper.”
According to the law, the professor explained, during this certification process, “you can object, and you can investigate, when certain votes are not regularly given. And in many states, it’s clear that they weren’t.”
Therefore, Clements concluded, “The people weren’t heard,” that day. “They were silenced once again. And that is why you had folks show up in the first place because they felt like they were silenced in their own respective states, and they wanted to be heard.”
To demonstrate the weakness of the media narrative Clements showed video clips, including an Antifa activist bragging about his involvement in the Capitol Hill riots, police removing barriers and waving the crowds into the Capitol area, and Trump supporters forcefully working to stop “Antifa” individuals from smashing windows at the Capitol.
“President Floros, you have reached a conclusion prematurely, way too quickly,’ the law professor concluded. “I hope you will send another email out saying that you rushed to judgment.
“For my fellow faculty members who are continuing to call out Trump supporters, to demonize them, I hope that you can treat them, and myself, with civility,” he concluded.
The American flag blows in the wind after it was lowered to half-staff Friday, Sept. 18, 2020, in Washington, after the Supreme Court announced that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died of metastatic pancreatic cancer at age 87. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
By Peter Svab
The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies.
While many have warned about the rise of fascism or socialism in “the land of the free,” the ideas have largely been vague or fragmented, focusing on individual events or actors. Recent events, however, indicate that seemingly unconnected pieces of the oppression puzzle are fitting together to form a comprehensive system, according to Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University.
But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or aren’t even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous. Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?
The reality now emerges that no massive conspiracy was in fact needed—merely an ideological alignment and some informal coordination, Rectenwald argues.
Despite the lack of formal overarching organization, the American socialist regime is indeed totalitarian, as the root of its ideology requires politically motivated coercion, he told The Epoch Times. The power of the regime is not yet absolute but it’s becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.
The effects can be seen throughout society. Americans, regardless of their income, demographics, or social stature are being fired from jobs, getting stripped of access to basic services such as banking and social media, or having their businesses crippled for voicing political opinions and belonging to a designated political underclass. Access to sources of information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult. Some figures of power and influence are sketching the next step, labelling large segments of society as “extremists” and potential terrorists who need to be “deprogrammed.”
While the onset of the regime appears tied to events of recent years—the presidency of Donald Trump, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) viruspandemic, the Capitol intrusion of Jan. 6—its roots go back decades.
Is It Really Totalitarian?
Totalitarian regimes are commonly understood as constituting a government headed by a dictator that regiments the economy, censors the media, and quells dissent by force. That is not the case in America but it’s also a misunderstanding of how such regimes function, literature on totalitarianism indicates.
To claim power, the regimes don’t initially need to control every aspect of society through government.
Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, used various means to control the economy, including gaining compliance of industry leaders voluntarily, through intimidation, or through replacing the executives with party loyalists.
Similarly, the regime rearing its head in America relies on corporate executives to implement its agenda voluntarily but also through intimidation by online brigades of activists and journalists who take initiative to launch negative PR campaigns and boycotts to progress their preferred societal structure.
Also, Hitler initially didn’t control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.
The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.
Dissenting media in America haven’t been silenced by the government directly as of yet. But they are stymied in other ways.
In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google. Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.
Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.” Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative. Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.
Facebook employs third-party fact checkers who have the discretion to label content as “false” and thus reduce the audience on its platform. Virtually all the fact checkers focused on American content are ideologically aligned with Facebook.
Attempts to set up alternative social media have run into yet more fundamental obstacles, as demonstrated by Parler, whose mobile app was terminated by Google and Apple, while the company was kicked off Amazon’s servers.
To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there’s no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly. But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement. Signs go back to the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe—both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted. The situation may get still worse as the restrictions tied to the CCP virus see broad swaths of ordinary human behavior being considered “illegal,” opening the door to nearly universal political targeting.
“I think the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores,” Rectenwald said.
While loyalty to the government and to a specific political party plays a major role, it’s the allegiance to the ideological root of totalitarianism that gives it its foot soldiers, literature on the subject indicates.
Totalitarian Ideology
The element “that holds totalitarianism together as a composite of intellectual elements” is the ambition of fundamentally reimagining society—“the intention to create a ‘New Man,’” explained author Richard Shorten in “Modernism and Totalitarianism: Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present.”
Various ideologies have framed the ambition differently, based on what they posited as the key to the transformation.
Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, viewed the control of the economy as primary, describing socialism as “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature,” in his Das Kapital.
Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, viewed race as primary. People would become “socialized”—that is transformed and perfected—by removing Jews and other supposedly “lesser” races from society, he claimed.
The most dominant among the current ideologies stem from the so-called “critical theories,” where the perfected society is defined by “equity,” meaning elimination of differences in outcomes for people in demographic categories deemed historically marginalized. The goal is to be achieved by eliminating the ever-present “white supremacy,” however the ideologues currently define it.
While such ideologies commonly prescribe collectivism, calling for national or even international unification behind their agenda, they are elitist and dictatorial in practice as they find mankind never “woke” enough to follow their agenda voluntarily.
In Marx’s prophecies, the revolution was supposed to occur spontaneously. Yet it never did, leading Vladimir Lenin, the first head of the Soviet Union, to conclude that the revolution will need leadership after all.
“The idea is that you have some enlightened party … who understand the problem of the proletariat better than the proletariat does and is going to shepherd them through the revolution that they need to have for the greater good,” explained James Lindsay, author of “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.”
Elements of this intellectual foundation can be found in ideologies of many current political forces, from neo-nazis and anarcho-communists, through to progressives and to some extent even neoliberals and neoconservatives, Lindsay acknowledged.
“This is why you see so many people today saying that the only possible answers are a full return to classical liberalism or a complete rejection of liberalism entirely as fatally disposed to create progressivism, neoliberalism, etc.,” he said.
That’s not to say these ideologies are openly advocating totalitarianism but rather that they inevitably lead to it.
The roadmap could be summarized as follows:
There’s something fundamentally and intolerably wrong with current reality
There’s a plan to fix it requiring a whole society buy-in
People opposing the plan need to be educated about the plan so they accept it
People who resist the persuasion need to be reeducated, even against their will
People who won’t accept the plan no matter what need to be removed from society.
“I think that’s the general thrust,” Lindsay said. “We can make the world the way we want it to be if we all just get on the same page and same project. It’s a disaster, frankly.”
Points four and five now appear to be in progress.
Former Facebook executive Alex Stamos recently labeled the widespread questioning of the 2020 election results as “violent extremism,” which social media companies should eradicate the same way they countered online recruitment content from the ISIS terrorist group.
The “core issue,” he said, is that “we have given a lot of leeway, both in traditional media and on social media, to people to have a very broad range of political views” and this has led to the emergence of “more and more radical” alternative media like OAN and Newsmax.
Stamos then mused about how to reform Americans who’ve tuned in to the dissenters.
“How do you bring those people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us all back into the same consensus reality?” he asked in a CNN interview.
“And can you? Is that possible?” CNN host Brian Stelter added.
The logic goes as follows: Trump claimed the election was stolen through fraud and other illegalities. That has not been proven in court and is thus false. People who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and managed to break inside and disrupt the electoral vote counting did so because they believed the election was stolen. Therefore, anybody who questions the legitimacy of the election results is an extremist and potentially a terrorist.
With tens of thousands of troops assembled to guard the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) recently told CNNthat all guard members who voted for Trump belong to a “suspect group” that “might want to do something,” alluding to past leaders of other countries who were “killed by their own people.”
Former FBI Director James Comey recently said the Republican party needs to be “burned down or changed.”
“They want a one party state,” commented conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in a recent podcast. “That is not to say they don’t want an opposition. They want a token opposition. They want Republicans where they get to say what kind of Republican is ok.”
Just as Marx blamed the ills of the world on capitalists and Hitler on Jews, the current regime tends to blame various permutations of “white supremacy.”
“Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in a recent tweet, garnering some 300,000 likes.
She was referring to the Republican lawmakers who raised objections on Jan. 6 to election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Their objections were voted down.
“Can U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror?” Daily Beast’s Jeff Stein asked in a recent headline, concluding that a call for “secret police” to sniff out “extremist” Americans “may well get renewed attention.”
Under the regime, allegations of election fraud—de facto questioning the legitimacy of the leader—have become incitement of terrorism. YouTube (owned by Google), Facebook, and Twitter have either banned content that claims the election was rigged or are furnishing it with warning labels. Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey was recently recorded as saying that banning the president’s account was just the beginning.
The approach closely mirrors that of the Chinese communist regime, which commonly targets dissidents for “subverting” the state or “spreading rumors.”
What’s the Alternative?
If calls for radically reorganizing the world are inherently totalitarian, how is the world to avoid them? The question appears to be its own answer. If totalitarianism inherently requires allegiance to its ideology, it can’t exist in a society with a lack of such allegiance.
The United States was founded on the idea that individual rights are God-given and unalienable. The idea, rooted in traditional beliefs that human morality is of divine origin, stands a bulwark against any attempt to assail people’s rights even for their own good.
“If you’re not a believer in actual God, you can posit a God’s ideal on the matter … We have to posit some arbiter who’s above and beyond our own prejudices and biases in order to ensure these kinds of rights. … Because otherwise you have this infinitely malleable situation in which people with power and coercive potential can eliminate and rationalize the elimination of rights willy-nilly,” Rectenwald said.
Editor’s Note: The National Guard troops loyal to Biden are still standing by in DC to protect the insurgent Democrats and rogue Republican lawmakers who allowed a fraudulent election to be certified in favor of the Biden Administration who has now assumed power.
U.S. federal courts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court stood on the sidelines and refused to examine the mountains of evidence or hear a single case based on their merit. Without a political or legal remedy available, the last recourse of a free people is to assemble peacefully in DC and make their voices heard.
But instead of listening to their pleas for justice, the elitists who run DC chose to frame the protest as an “insurrection” and the protesters as “domestic terrorists” instead of admitting their own “treason” against the USA. The mainstream media covered for the elitists with a similar narrative.
The second impeachment of Donald J. Trump proceeds rapidly on grounds so vague and evidence so insufficient to warrant a trial in the U.S. Senate. There is no constitutional authority for impeaching a President who has already left office. The impeachment continues unabated to seal the coup d’tat and delegitimize the true results of the 2020 election (which the elitists, and one-half of the American people, know fully well which candidate actually won).
As clearly stated in the U.S. Constitution Presidents cannot be impeached after they leave office. So perhaps by impeaching Trump after the fact, the elitists are actually admitting that Trump was and is the duly elected President and must be removed by proceeding with a mock impeachment trial. This would be the irony of ironies!
The Democrats and their media allies are trying to convince the American people that President Donald Trump is guilty of inciting an insurrection last week. In both legal terms and in terms of the plain meaning of the English language, their claim is absurd on its face. There are two fundamental reasons for this: Trump did not incite the riots at the Capitol, and the riots were not an insurrection.
The Standard for Incitement
Legally speaking, incitement has an incredibly high bar that none of Trump’s actions since the election come close to meeting. These standards were set by the Supreme Court in its landmark Brandenburg v. Ohio case. Among other things, the decision held that in order to constitute incitement to violence, speech must include intent and specific, not abstract, instructions to act. It also required that the speech in question would likely produce “imminent lawless action,” which went a step further than the previous legal tests for incitement. According to the ruling:
[T]he constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
So as a legal matter, this seems pretty clear. But what about more generally? In Salon, Amanda Marcotte attempts to make a case that Trump incited an insurrection. She starts with a big claim: “There is no doubt Donald Trump incited the insurrection on January 6. It happened largely in public and is recorded for posterity. Let’s review the record.” But only a paragraph later she writes, “[T]he people who stormed the U.S. Capitol armed with guns, pipe bombs and flex cuffs to take members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence hostage understood Trump’s wink-and-nudge style loud and clear.”
One cannot incite with a wink and a nudge — not unless those gestures have already been specified to mean a call to violence. In this case, nothing Trump said at his speech before the violence broke out was a specific call for violence, much less insurrection. Part of how we know this is that the vast, vast majority of those who attended his speech (where he called literally for a peaceful protest at the Capitol) did not engage in any violence whatsoever.
What Trump asked his backers to do was to make their voices heard in support of the members of Congress who were working to ensure that the election was a fair one. What happened next was a chaotic mess caused by a small number of violent agitators, a complete and total breakdown of security at the Capitol, and a poor response once things began to get out of hand. Some of that poor response was owing to the fact that the events were surprising. If it was so bloody obvious that Trump was telling people to storm the Capitol, why were we all so shocked and caught off guard when some people did?
This Was No Insurrection
So much for incitement. As to insurrection, at no point was the overthrow of the government of the United States even a remotely possible outcome, not even close. Those cosplaying idiots taking selfies in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and parading around with podiums had no intentions of forming a new government. This was an expression of anger, not a realistic, organized coup attempt. Anyone among the rioters who believed their actions would result in the overthrow of the government, if there were any, were delusional to the point of insanity.
So if it wasn’t incitement and it wasn’t insurrection, why do the Democrats, the corporate media, and the big tech tyrants want you to believe it was? That is quite simple, actually. The purpose is to create an atmosphere of crisis and emergency that gives cover to extreme and illiberal actions to punish and silence those with whom they disagree politically.
And that has worked. Trump is banned from Twitter, as are thousands of his supporters, and big tech has colluded to destroy its competitor, Parler. Democrats are moving forward with an absurd and pointless impeachment, Simon & Schuster has canceled Sen. Josh Hawley’s book that criticizes big tech, and people who merely attended the rally and never stormed the Capitol are being fired and abused.
None of the above actions are just. None of them can be justified. This is not some existential threat to the Republic, and it never was. This is now all about power, about those on the left milking a tragedy for all it’s worth in an attempt to destroy their political rivals. But Americans are a clear-eyed people with a healthy dose of skepticism about those in power. They see what’s going on here. They will not allow the bad actions of a tiny few to fundamentally change forever the country and its freedoms they love.
Editor’s Note: Here’s another level of censorship by Google/YouTube whereby they decide what’s appropriate for viewers to watch or not, then label it as such (especially political content they choose not to agree with). Welcome to 1984 today!.
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom.
By Glen Greenwald, Founder of The Intercept
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Postreported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political rights and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reportedThe Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” APnotes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Attorney L. Lin Wood sits down for an exclusive interview with Joshua Philipp on the 2020 US presidential elections, the possibility of martial law, the Georgia Senate runoff, China’s infiltration of America, and why he fights for the truth.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Thursday that data collected by various intelligence agencies indicate there was a lot foreign interference in our election this year, but not everyone within the intelligence community wants Americans to know that.
What a pathetic reason to withhold information from the American people who pay them.
“Well DNI Ratcliffe leads the 17 intelligence agencies and he has access to the most highly classified information that is held by the US government. And he told CBS News that there was foreign interference by China, Iran, and Russia in November of this year and he is anticipating a public report on those findings in January,” CBS News investigative reporter Catherine Herridge said.
Ratcliffe’s statement, if accurate, contradicts a former Homeland Security cyber official President Trump fired last month after he claimed that no such interference occurred.
Christopher Krebs, the recently-fired top cybersecurity official during the presidential election, testified before the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday.
“While elections are sometimes messy, this was a secure election,” Krebs said.
On a Nov. 27 “60 minutes” interview, Krebs was asked what he thought of the Trump legal team’s allegations that votes were tabulated in foreign countries and were manipulated.
“So, all votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America,” Krebs said. “I don’t understand this claim. All votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. Period.”
“So, again, there’s no evidence that any machine that I’m aware of, has been manipulated by a foreign power. Period,” he added.
Somebody’s not being honest, and we tend to think maybe it’s Krebs.
Why? Consider some other information.
— The intelligence community was supposed to report to the president, via a 2018 executive order, no later than 45 days after the election (that’s Friday) whether there was any foreign interference. Office of DNI spokeswoman Amanda Schoch says that the 17 agencies under Ratcliffe’s control won’t have their reports completed by then, which is complete BS given that tracking of foreign electronic incursions into the U.S. are ongoing so the agencies knew Nov. 3 whether interference had occurred.
— As Breitbart News reports: “There is allegedly ‘ample’ raw intelligence about China’s intentions and actions related to the election, with more intelligence reporting coming in everyday [sic]. Some of the influence operations include social media campaigns seeking to amplify messages such as that President Donald Trump is a white supremacist. … Ratcliffe is concerned that proper tradecraft — which would require that the disagreement be reflected in the report with both views represented — will not be followed simply in order to deprive President Trump of a potential political talking point.”
Got that? The deep state morons who think they, and not the president, should be in charge have decided to skip his mandated deadline and politicize the final intelligence product to deprive Trump of a “talking point.”
Our institutions are broken, period. They no longer function on behalf of the American people, but rather as instruments to perpetuate the concentration of power in an unseen elite.
Whether or not the efforts to expose what certainly appears to be, based on evidence and affidavits, widespread vote and election fraud this year on behalf of President Donald Trump are ultimately successful, the people closest to him are refusing to give up the fight.That includes the president’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro.
On Thursday, Navarro released and discussed a 36-page report that “assesses the fairness and integrity of the 2020 Presidential Election by examining six dimensions of alleged election irregularities across six key battleground states” and concludes that “patterns of election irregularities … are so consistent across the six battleground states that they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election, strategically game the election process in such a way as to … unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket.”
The six dimensions of voting irregularities in the report include: outright voter fraud, ballot mishandling, contestable process fouls, equal protection clause violations, voting machine irregularities, and significant statistical anomalies.
All six of those voting issues were present in at least two key states, according to the report, and a total of six battleground states experienced multiple examples of the other dimensions.
“Evidence used to conduct this assessment includes more than 50 lawsuits and judicial rulings, thousands of affidavits and declarations,1 testimony in a variety of state venues, published analyses by think tanks and legal centers, videos and photos, public comments, and extensive press coverage,” the report claims.
Also, Navarro’s report cites numerous affidavits that allege the exploitation of the elderly and the infirm by “effectively hijacking their identities and votes” while accusing Democrats of politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic so they could challenge state election laws to, among other things, relax voter ID requirements to the point that ballot harvesting and fraud occur without notice.
The report also detailed instances that occurred in battleground states Trump won last time like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where his legal teams in those states have discovered that ballots were harvested illegally and then dumped into drop boxes that themselves were unmonitored and a violation of state laws.
Legal teams also found reams of evidence that dead people voted by the thousands.
“In Pennsylvania, for example, a statistical analysis conducted by the Trump Campaign matching voter rolls to public obituaries found what appears to be over 8,000 confirmed dead voters successfully casting mail-in ballots,” the report claims. “In Georgia — underscoring the critical role any given category of election irregularities might play in determining the outcome — the estimated number of alleged deceased individuals casting votes almost exactly equals the Biden victory margin.
In conclusion, the report says: “The ballots in question because of the identified election irregularities are more than sufficient to swing the outcome in favor of President Trump should even a relatively small portion of these ballots be ruled illegal.”
Now – what will be done? Anything? Does our judicial system even function any longer? How about our political system – has it crumbled as well? What about the legal system?
Because if none of them truly function in a non-partisan manner any longer, then We the People have already control of our country.
It started with an unprecedented global pandemic caused by the CCP virus, and it’s concluding with the U.S. presidential election, which has captivated the world.
On election night, on Nov. 3, an assortment of anomalies were observed, followed by a large number of specific allegations of election fraud. As the integrity of the election continued to be questioned and evidence continued to emerge, most mainstream media stuck to a one-sided narrative by calling the 2020 election the most secure in American history, and sought to silence opposing voices.
The results of the 2020 election will not only decide the future of the United States, but also determine the future of the world.
Following election night, The Epoch Times’ investigative team quickly went to work. In an attempt to uncover the issues behind the election, investigative reporter Joshua Phillip traveled across the country to swing states to interview whistleblowers, big data experts, and election experts.
This is the first investigative documentary published on election integrity in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Why was the vote count halted in key swing states on election night? What are the problems and potential fraud associated with mail-in ballots? Is Dominion Voting Systems secure or not? What lies behind the $400 million received by the parent company of Dominion Voting Systems less than a month before the election? Who is trying to manipulate the U.S. election behind the scenes? Who is the benefactor of an increasingly divided American society? What will become of America at this historical juncture?
What choice should you, I, and every American patriot make? The Epoch Times’ investigative team presents to you a detailed investigative report.
Liberty International News 