MAGIC VOTES ☙ Tuesday, November 12, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS
The media can no longer avoid the mysterious disappearance of millions of democrat votes from 2020, but they won't admit it yet, either; more solid Trump picks; fake news alert; Russia leading; more. JEFF CHILDERS
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! This morning’s roundup includes: New York Times feeds Democrats propaganda to explain where all Biden’s extra 2020 votes went; Trump chooses two great loyalists for Administration posts; fake news abounds and requires critical reading; and Russia begins encouraging repopulation regime.
WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY
>> The New York Times rushed out a broken-narrative-mending article yesterday headlined, “Why Was There a Broad Drop-Off in Democratic Turnout in 2024?” The ominous sub-headline offered: “Many Democrats failed to turn out to vote at the rate they did in 2020 when they ousted Donald Trump.” Baffling! Where could the mysterious missing Democrat voters from 2020 have gone?
It’s tempting to think the Times is edging toward uncovering a terrible truth, but do not be fooled. The New York Times knows perfectly well why all those magical 2020 Democrat voters didn’t turn out in 2024: Because they don’t exist.
The only reason the Times is talking about it now is because it has to; a lot of Democrats questions about the 2020 election are starting to boil over. So the Times raced to put a lid on that sort of thinking before it could ruin Thanksgiving dinner.
The Times had to do something. In the vacuum of any other permissive programming, some smart Democrats were connecting some very inconvenient dots and starting to think for themselves. Look at the numbers from just this one example tweet from a relatively small account — it’s had 1.4 million views:
A new BlueAnon conspiracy theory is born! They’ve re-discovered election denialism! (Where is the FBI when you need it?) While it would be fun to fact-check the Stolen StarLink theory, it would be a digression.
The frayed narrative was falling apart. It forced the Times to admit that there is, in fact, a mysterious and very thought-provoking dropoff in Democrat ballots between 2020 and 2024. Its article primed readers by first proposing a half dozen possible reasons. Then, most of the way down the article, the Times finally confessed one of the most remarkable facts about this history-shattering 2024 election. “Remarkable” meaning being worthy of remarking upon. Let us remark upon this:
Abra-cadabra! Poof! Buh bye! Adios! Amscray! Honey, I shrunk the Democrats.
In predominantly urban counties. Meaning, big blue cities.
The Times, or whichever deep-state psy-officer actually wrote this article, excreted an overflowing septic tank of excuses purporting to explain the Great Democrat Voter Evaporation of 2024. For instance:
— “Harris did not have enough time to overhaul the campaign after taking over for Mr. Biden.”
— “Some backsliding could be expected after the record turnout in 2020, which was aided by pandemic rule changes that increased mail voting.”
— “Harris was simply the latest political casualty of a postpandemic global trend favoring challengers, no matter the incumbents’ politics.”
— “New federal election rulings let campaigns directly coordinate with outside groups on pushing voters to the polls.”
— “The Harris campaign was chasing ghosts by trying to appeal to Republican crossover voters, campaigning with Liz Cheney, and talking about threats to democracy.”
— “Trump had edgier and stronger material that he was constantly communicating at rallies, on podcasts and in other appearances.”
My goodness. Even Blues Brother Jake couldn’t cough up a longer list of evasive explanations.
Could the truth that the Times was trying to bury under a railcar of rationales be that fake mail-in ballots and overnight electronic cheating falsely inflated the 2020 Democrat voting figures? And the 2024 figures are closer to the real vote? Is that the truth the Times was desperately trying to stop smart Democrats from figuring out?
Many of us feared a repeat of 2020 this year. What changed? In hindsight, the good news was that fixing egregious, 2020-style cheating only required focusing on a few urban, blue counties from which Democrats could tip the statewide scales:
The Times can never admit this, but what really changed was that in the wake of 2020, the Trump-led GOP devised a four-year strategy with two main prongs. First, it found untapped voters —like the Amish— to ensure a turnout that was too big to rig.
Second, it worked across the country to tighten election laws, through lawmaking in red states and litigation in blue states. It also successfully elected friendly or at least fair supervisors of elections, and strategically prosecuted a handful of election crimes in the right places. The plan to tighten election laws was back-loaded, shifting into the highest gear mainly in the final six months before the election.
Take a look at how it changed Florida. The Sunshine State went +3% for Trump in 2020. This year, after four years of election-law improvements and new Republican voter registrations, Florida went Trump +13%. In 2020, Orange County (Orlando) went +23% for Biden. But thanks to a disgruntled Democrat commissioner who got primaried and turned whistleblower, we learned about the Democrats’ Orange County ballot harvesting operation.
Ballot harvesting is now illegal in Florida. And in 2024, without ballot harvesting, Harris only won Orange County by +5.6%, a +18% swing. So.
What about electronic cheating? I’m only guessing, but it is true that Starlink is now a critical part of the internet infrastructure, which means any internet tampering would be much riskier, since it could be instantly traceable. To see just how much Starlink there is now, marvel at this real-time Starlink Satellite Tracker.
Either way, this time, folks were primed and looking for signs of electronic tampering. Assuming it occurred, nobody was looking for it before the fact in 2020.
The article that began this post is best seen as a progressive permission structure. Democrats will not be allowed to attribute their loss to cheating, because that would raise uncomfortable questions about 2020. Instead, they must believe it was everything and nothing.
It’s a peculiar fix they’ve cheated themselves into. It’s leading to depressing headlines like this one from CNN yesterday:
Imagine being a Democrat and having to read these kinds of migraine-provoking headlines. Call it their 2020 hangover.
But now, in the wake of this glorious victory, the quest for real election integrity continiues. We still need nationwide voter ID verification, for example. I am very optimistic. We swung this election with four years of fighting under a hostile federal regime. We now have four more years and a cooperative Administration to get it right.
Without being able to rely on cheating, the Democrats may finally need to sacrifice the zaniest parts of their platform (like DEI), and tack centerwards. Ahoy!
>> Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Trump Chooses Lee Zeldin to Run E.P.A. as He Plans to Gut Climate Rules.” The sub-headline added, “The former congressman from New York is a strong supporter of Donald Trump and voted against certifying the 2020 election.” The Times is mostly terrified Zeldin will crush Biden’s mandates for electric cars, which are fun to drive but are mostly useless after hurricanes when the power is out.
Trump is learning. First, in a savvy political statement, President Trump said Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”
Second, Zeldin —a former Army reserve officer— lacks any degree in environmental sciences. But he’s loyal. And, during his time in Congress, Zeldin earned a lifetime achievement score of 14% from the League of Conservation Voters, a puny score that might seem like it scraped the bottom of the climate barrel, but it was actually higher than most other conservative Republicans.
Zeldin scraped up his 14% mostly by voting to require the EPA to limit PFAS (plastics that constantly leach chemicals into drinking water) and by voting against offshore drilling (although he favors fracking).
New Yorkers will surely recall that, in 2022, Zeldin was the Republicans’ nominee for New York governor, barely losing to mandate-loving incumbent Kathy Hochul in the closest gubernatorial race in the state since before the Millennium.
On an aside, I was astonished that the lying New York Times, trying to slyly undermine Zeldin, finally admitted that Biden’s dumb Inflation Act was actually a climate change new deal dressed up as a terrible economic plan:
Not only are the Times’ reporters compulsive liars, they aren’t even very good ones. They only told the truth about Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to make Zeldin look goofy on the climate.
On to the next great pick.
>> The New York Times ran a terrific story yesterday headlined, “Trump Offers Elise Stefanik Role as U.N. Ambassador.” More good news.
Ms. Stefanik, 40, chair of the House Republican conference, was a key Trump ally during impeachment number one. She served on the House Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee. Like Zeldin, Stefanik loudly questioned the 2020 election.
Given the high-stakes international situation, this was a key appointment and is part of Trump’s negotiating strategy.
>> The deep state is fully activated. So we must be more critical news consumers than ever. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran an awful story headlined, “Trump talked to Putin, told Russian leader not to escalate in Ukraine.” It was fake news. Totally made up. They never spoke.
WaPo’s story was based on a single anonymous source and some quotes from the Ukrainians, who weren’t even on the alleged call. The Russians quickly categorically denied there had been any call, much less one where Trump threatened them. The Trump team wisely refused to comment on this made up story.
That wasn’t the only fake news implosion. As I reported yesterday, corporate media pushed a nasty narrative, also based on anonymous sources, that President Trump was considering appointing former CIA chief and true-blue neocon Mike Pompeo for Defense Secretary, until Trump squashed that fake news over the weekend.
Both stories, about Putin and Pompeo, were probably meant to rile up conservatives against the President. This kind of propaganda is likely to accelerate and intensify as we near the Inauguration. Remember, the deep state’s favorite tool is corporate media’s willingness to run stories based on secret sources. Laugh at them.
Take all anti-Trump or pro-war news with a healthy dose of skeptical vitamins.
>> But the most encouraging story yesterday came from the most unlikely place. The Washington Post ran an article headlined, “Russia is shrinking; the Kremlin says child-free ideology is to blame.” It would be more accurate to say every country is shrinking, but of course, Putin. The sub-headline added, “A new bill against ‘child-free propaganda’ criminalizes advocating for not having children. It could affect TV, movies and social media posts.”
Russian President Putin has said Russia’s demographic slide haunts him and he has described the problem as a critical national security crisis. Yesterday, Russia’s parliament easily approved the new law, which will criminalize ‘child-free propaganda,’ a dark prospect that gave badly triggered Washington Post the vapors.
Betraying its pro-death bias, the unbalanced WaPo article included not a single quote from anyone who thought there could be anything good at all about the Russians’ new pro-life laws.
WaPo did report the problem, and it is serious. An independent Russian demographer estimated that Russian deaths will outnumber births by 608,000 in 2024, leading to an overall population decline of around -550,000 even after immigration of about +60,000. In September, Russia’s statistical agency reported that births for the first half of 2024 plunged to 599,600, the lowest in 25 years.
President Putin praised the “wonderful traditions” of the past, when mothers had seven to eight children. The Kremlin referred to “destructive ideologies” imported from the West, mainly the glorification of abortion and pro-LGBTQ ideologies. In other words, globalists’ depopulation fantasies.
You wouldn’t know it from the article, but Russia is not alone. Last year, the UK Independent ran a story headlined, “Elon Musk mocked for telling Tucker Carlson ‘birth control and abortion’ may lead to collapse of civilisation..” Under Viktor Orbán, Hungary has also moved to reverse population decline. Two years ago, the Guardian ran a story headlined, “Hungary tightens abortion access with listen to ‘foetal heartbeat’ rule.”
The Washington Post unsurprisingly described Russia’s pro-life focus as a dystopian, real-life Handmaid’s Tale. By WaPo’s account, having children is the worst possible thing that can happen to women. But that’s not even the part that most troubled the far-left paper. Quoting an anonymous (first name only) Russian ‘choice activist’, it darkly concluded that the only reason Russia wants to reverse its horrifying demographic disaster is to create more soldiers to support its war effort.
The more significant point, which remained conspicuously absent from the story, was how the U.S. Constitution and First Amendment Freedom of Speech would make Russia’s new law impossible in the US. But WaPo couldn’t go there, because to Democrats, free speech is a problem.
The condundrum leaves leftists mired in a paradox of competing values. Russia’s ban on childless-propaganda is democratic, since it was properly passed by that country’s duly-elected representatives. Only a strong, constitutional free speech law could prevent it. (It is also worth noting that abortion is limited but legal in Russia.)
So, which is it, Washington Post? Free speech, or democratic rule? Last year, among a virulent rash of similar articles, the Hill ran an op-ed offering three reasons why the Constitution is no longer fit for its intended purposes. Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal decried Trump’s potential closure of a secretive State Department agency that ‘counters online disinformation.’
Russia does have constitutional protections for free speech, but they are weaker than those provided under our First Amendment. Russia’s weaker speech rights allow restrictions such as government bans on disinformation, powers which American liberals can only enjoy in their wildest fantasies of autocratic “democracy.”
Maybe it’s time for Democrats to re-think their Constitutional concerns.
Have a terrific Tuesday! And come back tomorrow morning for more delicious Coffee & Covid.
