Went to Bed in America, Woke Up in a Banana Republic

Until a few days ago, a Biden presidency was simply unthinkable. A bullet-point presentation on why Biden should never, ever be anywhere near the Oval Office would need dozens of slides—and that’s just for the bullet points. On November 3, we all went to bed looking at those red-or-blue maps of the states, more or less secure in the knowledge that President Trump was on course to win a historic victory. 

A massive Republican wave was giving Trump a 3.6 point lead in Florida—by Florida standards, a landslide. Other states were coming along—could Trump really do much worse in Arizona, or Pennsylvania, or Michigan? And so, on Tuesday night, we fell asleep in America. 

The next morning, we woke up in a banana republic. Take it from someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, and who knows what democracy is and isn’t. Watching democracy shrivel and die right in front of our eyes is a surreal experience. 

A Whiff of Russian Corruption

I still follow the news in Russia closely. “Voting” in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Minnesota reminds me an awful lot of the “voting” in Russia. The winner is known in advance. Even the winner of their 2036 presidential election (that’s three elections from now) is already well-known. Hint: he’s the same guy who won all the previous elections. 

The margin of victory is whatever the Kremlin decides it needs to be. Ballot box stuffing is standard practice—the government even offers training courses to poll workers on how to stuff ballot boxes despite the presence of election monitors. Actual results bear little relation to announced ones—dozens of precincts in a big city might show exactly the same percentage of votes for the ruling party or for Vladimir Putin, down to 2 decimal places. “Carousels” are buses that take groups of “voters” from precinct to precinct. (It helps that voter ID laws are fairly loose there.) “Social workers” take ballots to the elderly in their homes, “helping” them fill out the ballots “correctly.” 

Recently, a single day of voting became three days (coronavirus!), making it virtually impossible for anyone to monitor anything even if they wanted to—not that monitoring helped much in the first place. The government likes the idea so much, it plans more of such multi-day voting—perhaps even a week of voting. 

Every election in Russia has “some irregularities” that are “investigated” in sham investigations, then all questions are swept under the rug by the compliant media and soon forgotten, while the results stand. Election fraud is technically a crime, but no one is ever prosecuted. This is all banana republic stuff, except, of course, bananas don’t grow in Russia. 

Does any of this sound familiar? 

Consider Pennsylvania. The Biden candidacy was sinking like a stone in Pennsylvania in the closing days of the campaign. In plain English, Biden was toast. On November 3, Trump had a 12-point lead over Biden, amounting to a whopping 650,000 vote margin. People much smarter than me were saying on the morning of November 4 that no, there is just no way that Democrats could possibly make up the deficit, no matter how many ballots they tried to fabricate. Simply not possible! 100,000 fraudulent ballots? Easy-peasy. 200,000? Doable. 300,000? Well . . . maybe. 

But 650,000? Sure, smart people said, Democrats will try their level best, but even they can’t possibly generate 650,000 fraudulent ballots.

Or . . . can they? Democrats kept counting, and counting, and counting—and they are still counting. As of this writing, that 650,000 vote lead gradually vanished, and Pennsylvania has turned blue, with a 33,000 vote Biden lead that is inching upwards. The more they counted, the more those shy Biden voters were turning out. 

Thanks to a rabidly partisan pro-Democratic state Supreme Court, which a few weeks ago rewrote the election law on its own and gave everyone a few extra days to vote by mail, “voter” turnout was hitting unprecedented highs. 

In the city of Philadelphia itself, 60.5 percent of the voters came out. Sounds reasonable, right? Those recent riots, arson, and looting (pardon me, those “peaceful protests”) weren’t going to stop those enthusiastic Biden supporters, even if they had to brave “peaceful protesters” to get to the polls! 

But 82.3 percent of Montgomery County voters (just west of Philadelphia) came out to vote overwhelmingly for Biden and 78.6 percent of Bucks County voters (Philadelphia’s outer northeastern suburbs) couldn’t wait to darken that bubble for Joe. Meanwhile, 80.7 percent of Chester County (Philadelphia’s western suburbs) did their civic duty. Some 75 percent of Delaware County voters (south of Philadelphia) came out for that senile old geezer. 

There are rumors that 750,000 more ballots have been “discovered” by Pennsylvania election officials, and are yet to be counted. It hardly needs saying that they will be overwhelmingly pro-Biden votes. If true, this will push statewide voter turnout rate to a gargantuan 82 percent—with turnout in Democratic urban/suburban counties dramatically higher than turnout in Republican-leaning ones, probably exceeding 90 percent.

This is insane. A 65-67 percent turnout is normal, 70 percent turnout is excellent. Getting a 72-73 percent turnout would be spectacular. But 82 percent? Ninety percent? The media, naturally, refuses to see anything wrong here. 

Relax, Nothing to See Here

All the video evidence of actual fraud, all the statements by people witnessing fraud, all the statements by the fraudsters themselves, all the pro-Trump ballots shredded or thrown in the trash, all the refusals to permit election monitors entry by Democratic election officials, all the obvious numerical chicanery—all of it is dismissed out of hand. I caught a few minutes of CNN talking heads, gleefully condemning Donald Trump for “stating without evidence” that there is election fraud going on. 

Yet there are countless videos across the Internet, showing precisely that evidence. Still our “journalists” wilfully refuse to see a damn thing. As far as they are concerned, these are all “unsubstantiated claims”—just like claims of Biden’s corruption relating to evidence found on Hunter Biden’s laptop were “unsubstantiated.” No “journalist” believes that maybe someone should go out and try to substantiate them.

Georgia is now—surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly—a solidly blue state. Trump was ahead by about 100,000 votes on November 3. But all that counting, and counting, and counting in Atlanta finally yielded the needed result. In the wee hours of the morning on November 6, Georgia, at long last became a Democratic stronghold. Georgia—a reliably Republican state—is now 3.6 points more blue than even swing-state Florida. What are the odds? 

It isn’t how you vote that counts, it’s who counts the votes that counts.

I could do the same write-up for Michigan, or Wisconsin, but the reader would probably get bored with all the numbers. Still, just one more little factoid: Trump received 43 percent of the vote in New York (New York!), but only 45 percent in Minnesota? Democrats and their media propaganda arm would have us believe that Minnesota, which is borderline red but has a Democratic governor, is only 2 points to the right of deepest-blue New York. 

By the time you read this, you will probably have seen a dozen discussions already about how Republicans did remarkably well in House races (gaining at least 10 seats), about how perhaps they held the Senate against all odds, and how outside of those anomalous cities, like Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, nowhere else do we see these insane patterns. 

But if you’re reading this, you already know the Democrats are in the process of stealing the election. You’ve probably already seen the evidence on Twitter and YouTube (if you caught it before it was censored). Would links to more of the same make any difference? You already know that a Biden presidency (a joke before it even begins) will be based on a lie—just like everything else about Joe Biden. 

The Verdict

If this proceeds, it will be the last American election where a Republican candidate had a chance. Or, at least, he thought he had a chance, until he was cheated out of it. 

All discussions of potential 2024 Republican candidates (Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida? Kristi Noem of South Dakota? Ivanka? Don Jr.?) is just whistling past the graveyard of American democracy. If a 12-point lead is not enough to win a state like Pennsylvania, then what would it take? 20 points? 30? 

With the right vote-counting methodology, even Alabama and Idaho will soon be blue. Speaking of the Senate, at least Republicans held the Senate. Right? Right? John James was leading in Michigan—until just enough Democratic votes were “found” in Detroit to help his Democratic opponent keep his seat. Georgia is starting to look iffy—both Republican incumbents are now in a runoff, and if Democrats could find 100,000 votes this time, who is to say they won’t find 150,000 extra ballots in January? We might be looking at a 50-50 Senate split, with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker. So perhaps that particular celebration was a bit premature.

It turns out democracy is a lot more fragile than we thought. We all believed it would endure, imperfect as it was, but it relies a great deal on the honesty and respect for the rules of many actors, high and low. All it takes is a few people in a few places determined to subvert the democratic process to engineer a coup.

I doubt there is a vast army of vote fraudsters out there—a few dozen in each key county is probably all it takes. The actual, physical fraud involved some Postal Service employees, some poll workers, and the Democrats on the county election boards, perhaps a few thousand all together. But the connivance and approval of Democratic higher-ups, and the knowledge of complete impunity, was a critical element for the actual perpetrators. 

For 45 bucks, you can buy a cardboard cutout of Joe Biden on Amazon. Like Joe Biden, it’s probably made in China. My mind still struggles trying to process the idea that this cardboard cutout may be the next president of the United States. Then again, in a banana republic, a cardboard cutout will do.

A Joe Biden victory will never be legitimate. He may be declared the winner, and he might even be inaugurated, if he is still cognitively functional on January 20. But he will never be my president.