It has been a busy and tiring couple of months. Keeping track of the cascade of claims about the 2020 election is a full-time job. I already have a full-time job. I finally have had some time to think and now have some time to write. Get ready to be pissed.
First and foremost, Joe Biden won the Presidential election in 2020. There is not sufficient credible information to undermine that conclusion.
I base that statement on four primary elements.
- Compared with 2016, Donald Trump's percentage of the vote in urban areas largely went up. As an example, his percentage of the vote went up in Detroit. While it is true that more people voted overall, a greater percentage of voters supported Donald Trump in Detroit. Compared with 2016, Donald Trump's percentage of the vote in non-urban areas went down. Stick a pin in this for a minute.
- His legal team is something like 1 and 54 in court. These courts include many conservative judges. Absolutely none of those courts has granted relief to alter any of the votes that will soon be cast in the Electoral College. If Clarence Thomas wasn't prepared to overturn the election, then there simply isn't justification for pursuing those legal cases. [update below]
- His legal team is either lying or incompetent. They stand on the front steps of a courthouse (or landscaping company, you pick) making grand pronouncements about possessing sufficient proof of fraud to overturn an election, declaring that there are tens of thousands of illegitimate votes, and then go in front of a judge to claim that there are dozens or maybe hundreds of questionable votes. Either they lack the competence to accurately describe the evidence they are about to bring to court, or they are lying. For some of these people, notably Rudy Guiliani, this is a terribly disappointing end to their careers.
- Donald Trump gained support in every demographic category except one; white men. As a matter of percentage of votes, Donald Trump improved among blacks, latinos, Asians, and women. He lost support from white men. Stick a pin in this for a minute.
Joe Biden is going to be our legitimately elected President after 20 January 2021. Joe Biden will be my President.
Now accepting the legitimacy of his election does not mean accepting his agenda nor accepting the Democrat's party platform. I believe that giving Joe Biden the Presidency will result in harm to the Republic. He lacks the will to counter the socialist and identitarian elements that dominate the Democrat Party. While he has recently spoken out against the excessive use of Executive Orders, he has also indicated that he wants to undo most of Mr. Trump's EOs. Most of Mr. Trump's EOs were focused on repealing Mr. Obama's EOs. And the vast majority of Mr. Obama's EOs were hot anti-Constitutional garbage.
While I will accept Joe Biden as the legitimate President, I will reserve my right to vigorously oppose any of his administration's policies that would appear to risk harm to the Republic. I'm guessing that I will be opposing most of them because the modern Democrat agenda is mostly harmful to a Republic dedicated to the defense and extension of individual liberty.
We should pause for a moment to point out that this process was made more difficult by the behavior of many Democrat politicians and leaders in 2016. Hillary Clinton may have technically conceded the election, but she spent the next four years claiming that Mr. Trump's Presidency was not legitimate. Many elected Democrats declined to attend his inaugural. Democrat leaders took the unprecedented step of organizing protests on the day of Mr. Trump's inauguration to declare his Presidency illegitimate.
Anyone that participated in that unconscionable behavior and has not since recanted and made appropriate apologies is part of the problem. By failing to exhibit traditional American behavior of accepting an electoral loss in 2016, they have legitimatized the current efforts from the right to reject the licit election of Joe Biden.
Being opposed to Trump administration policies is one thing. Attempting to deny that Mr. Trump won the 2016 election is an entirely different beast that only served to undermine our Republic.
And let's be clear, a "they did it first" defense stinks. It's a fourth-grade level justification at best with sincere apologies to fourth graders everywhere. I am not suggesting that the current activities are appropriate because Democrat politicians went there first. I am aggressively asserting that if no one violates traditional norms, then we never have to deal with these problems in the first place.
As Democrat politicians have been demonstrating new and untried methods for violating political norms for my entire adult life, I simply don't have much sympathy when they now discover that those same norms are useful. They simply must be able to support those political norms all the time and not just when it is convenient for their position.
I have seen far too many examples of unrestrained rhetoric from my friends on the right since the election. They are citing the old saw about there being three boxes critical to democracy and individual liberty; the ballot box, the jury box, and the ammo box.
And again, let's be clear, the ballot box is currently trending towards those of us in the libertarian and/or conservative end of the world. As Senator Ben Sasse is fond of observing, we are a center-right nation.
Everyone assumed that the House would swing even harder towards the Democrats. It almost swung back to GOP control.
Everyone assumed that the Senate would flip to Democrat control and that the margin would be at least by 2-3. Instead, we may have a tied Senate and perhaps might even keep GOP control which would act as a brake on the Democrats' demonstrably harmful agenda. (It's now late on the day of the run-off election. Man - nailbiter!)
Everyone assumed that Joe Biden would win in a landslide. A landslide occurs when a candidate gets 70%+ of the electoral votes; roughly 375. Joe Biden won 306 electoral college votes. Pretty much a squeaker of a win.
Getting back to those "pinned" items above, we had a greater percentage of non-white males voting for the GOP than has happened in decades. Donald Trump was apparently so racist that all those POC were willing to vote for him in relatively large numbers.
So here's the big question. How do we build on that?
Do we hold our collective breath until our faces turn blue? Or do we welcome those voters into the conservative/libertarian fold? The latter is reaching for the ballot box.
Do we hold onto a marginal person who refuses to acknowledge that he lost an election or do we pursue a positive agenda? The latter is reaching for the ballot box.
Here's the thing. I've watched this happen before. Militiagan was a thing back in the 1990s. You know what those guys never did?
- Put on some slacks and a nice polo shirt. Trim their beards.
- Volunteer to work for their local Republican party organization.
- Donate money to the GOP (think Georgia would be in doubt tonight if every Trump voter had donated the cost of a box of ammo to that campaign?)
- Donate money to organizations doing the hard work of research and issue advocacy. i.e. The American Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, The Heritage Foundation, Cato, etc.
- Donate money to groups like The Federalist Society that promote concepts of individual liberty and an originalist reading of the US Constitution.
- Subscribe to magazines and newspapers that report on the news that is routinely ignored by the mainstream media. i.e. Reason Magazine, National Review, Wall Street Journal
- Actually read those periodicals so they will be armed with the facts.
I had the privilege of listening to Rush Limbaugh during the Christmas break. It was only for about half an hour during my lunchtime. I have not listened to his show in close to a decade.
For those that don't know, Rush has stage 4 lung cancer. He was diagnosed last January and was told that he wouldn't be alive come summer. But the treatments seem to be working to slow down the progression of the disease.
As I understand it, his show has a great many guest hosts these days. He hosts the show when he is physically up to the task.
What did I hear? I heard what made me a week one regular listener. I heard gratitude for the opportunities he has had. I heard appreciation for the continuing support of his fans. I heard a man grateful to be an American. I heard confidence for the future of America; a future he simply will not live to see.
When is it time to give up on America? When is it time to abandon the American experiment in exceptional governance?
According to the man with weeks and maybe months to live, the answer is "never".
We build and we build. We win when we can and we are largely winning today even if the 2020 election ends up being a bit of a setback. We build and we win. When we lose we regroup and we build.
If the Constitution is to be destroyed, if free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to a jury trial, the right to equal treatment before the law are to be stripped from our nation, let Democrat politicians be the ones to do it.
Let the rest of us defend the Constitution as written and amended. Let the rest of us defend federalism that allows individual states to craft laws based on the needs and desires of their citizens.
Let the ones that don't believe in the Constitution be the ones to fire the first shots. History suggests that those that shoot first are almost always the ones that lose the most.
[update from above] The various court cases have proceeded. Of the 23 cases decided on the merits, Mr. Trump and/or the GOP have won 16. [as of 3/26/2021] My understanding of those cases is that very few (if any) of them are sufficient to alter the outcome of a state's election. Mr. Trump lost each state by far more ballots than are challenged by each suit.
Pennsylvania is the only state where it might come close. But once they mixed the challenged ballots in with the fully legal ballots, the only recourse would have been to invalidate their electors. That would have reduced the total number of electoral votes required to win and Mr. Biden still had the electoral votes. [people that think that the result was to flip the state's electoral votes to Mr. Trump are mistaken]
But for those that think the 2020 elections were without blemish, you are entitled to your opinion. The facts don't support that conclusion.
