One of the chief things making it difficult for people who want to rescue America from her current disastrous course is a flawed, incomplete perspective on what the reality around us is, and where it’s going.
It’s an essential mindset, of course, to not imagine one foresees everything with perfect accuracy. It enables the bearer to take on unexpected developments – which erupt almost every day – and approach them thoughtfully and without undue annoyance.
Some of the most trenchantly-spoken analysts, moreover, are also some of the most fact-respecting and prepared to correct themselves (or refresh their perspective, and when I say that I’m talking about others whose work I admire). So this isn’t about tone or affect.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Error tends to lie mainly in our premises. The wise correspondent of the Internet army’s analysis effort sifts and ponders, rather than imagining that anyone is speaking from a position of privileged access or perfect knowledge.
We can fail to see the importance of this because it’s hard for us, mentally, to get beyond the paradigm of our old life, with its core assumptions that went untroubled for so many decades. That’s understandable. Most people used to be mostly right about a lot of things. That is no longer the case. It’s a really difficult adjustment.
It’s why I want to briefly lay something out here that I hope will be a useful thinking aid.
Back in December, I wrote about the three-pronged campaign that appeared to be shaping up with the Trump team. When I wrote about the main effort (taking the vote to the legislatures), a supporting effort in the courts, and the key supporting effort of probable “intelligence” knowledge about what actually happened behind many of the election irregularities (which is still a valid assumption, by the way), I was writing in the context of our old paradigm.
I understood that at the time. It might have been better to write this present article in December, but I didn’t want to lose the audience in a discussion of something I knew most people didn’t really see at the time. (Some did, I am sure. If I could see it, others could.) In early December, in any case, it was still possible the Trump team’s effort could achieve some meaningful goals before 6 January 2021.
All that we’ve now seen has intervened since then, however, and I believe a lot more people are ready to see that our larger context has changed, and it isn’t useful to confine our thinking to that old paradigm. In it, what mattered was where plans, shifting vectors, and emerging events fit in the schedule we’ve assumed to be inviolable all our lives: that of the U.S. Constitution and the familiar, due-process arrangements of our institutions.
The truth is that, starting at least with the 3 November election, those very waypoints have not been inviolable.
Again: if I could see that 3 November had not been inviolable, and therefore nothing else would be, I’m sure at least some others could. But now, with the unconstitutionally timed Senate trial of Trump – as well as the Biden administration’s genuinely tyrannical use of dozens of executive orders to profoundly change facts on the ground for major aspects of American life – far more people are ready to see it.
A little framework development
This will be worth it, I promise.
We’re pondering deliberate action when we imagine where we are going, as much as when we try to analyze Trump or the cabal. And to ponder deliberate action, we have four layers of conceptual organization to guide us. They’re very simple: vision (the top layer), policy, strategy, and tactics.
Vision is the imagined landscape of what we want (or “expect,” but that is impelled more than we usually realize by what we want).
This is where our nature as human beings and our moral priorities are in the driver’s seat. What kind of world do we want? (By extension, what kind of world does the subject of our analysis want?) How do we see life? What do we want to expect from it?
E.g., do we think it’s important to have freedom for our relationship to our Maker, variety across society, voluntary cooperation among the varied, freedom for initiative, comfortable arrangements, the best we can manage, for our families and those we love, good things that make us weep for joy for our children, the opportunity to do each other good, to travel, to sing, to laugh, to test ourselves in sports and to make quilts, work on project cars, and barbecue things silly? What theory of human organization is the one we have in mind to support our vision and give it shape? Should there be a lot of coercion, or very little? What other questions must we ask?
Policy is how we set a foundation and framework for our vision to be realized. The U.S. Constitution is the most remarkable human policy document in history: a policy for self-government. (The Declaration of Independence was a hybrid: a vision document, one of rare clarity, restraint, and grace, and a telling critique of the policies of the English crown.) Other policies may be for fostering private ownership of land, or mounting the national defense, or trying to keep our air clean, etc.
Strategy is how we achieve the goals of policy. It’s matching means and situational plans to intent.
Tactics are what it takes to meet each waypoint we encounter in the execution of a strategy. Tactics vary in kind with the waypoints they apply to; in the analogy of military operations, some require more artillery, some are infantry heavy; some belong by geography to air assets, or the navy, or by nature to special forces – and within those force packages to specific doctrine, disciplines, and sequential planning for situations.
With this in mind, consider my December 2020 article. I didn’t really address anything above the level of strategy, which is where my three-pronged campaign analysis fits. The policy driving it was assumed: Trump saw it as necessary to expose the nature of the irregularities in the 2020 election (that they existed was already obvious).
The vision was unexamined, but also assumed: in the context of our inviolable old paradigm, the vision was to restore credibility to one of the baseline processes of that old paradigm (the electoral cycle), and thereby shore the paradigm itself – American life by the U.S. Constitution, with all its classically understood benefits – up.
Here’s what I’m telling you: the paradigm is gone. There’s no shoring it up at this point. We’ll have to rebuild it.
The top thing we now need is vision. We don’t have vision that’s useful right now. Every time I see one of our justly respected pundits write as if “Joe Biden” might do anything that looks normal to us, that comes home to me more clearly. (As always, the point here is not to pick on anyone in particular, but to illustrate with something typical.)
It is all very well for President Biden to say he isn’t Donald Trump, but he needs to demonstrate to the world that he isn’t Barack Obama, writes @wrmead https://t.co/OT1I9tbLbO via @WSJ
— Elliot Kaufman (@ElliotKaufman6) February 9, 2021
We’re 21 days into the Biden administration, and it’s already obvious Obama 2009-2017 isn’t coming back. We’ve exceeded that level of activism without taking a breath, and added a big dose of surreality with a presidential figurehead who at times can barely talk, and does little other than sign executive orders that were obviously prepared some time before he took office. The radical lurch we’ve made with “Biden” is un-self-correcting and irretrievable.
This one simply isn’t about what everyone used to know. When you have to start with vision, because the whole thing is going off the rails – well, that itself is the deal. You have to start with vision.
Vision
Things aren’t going back to our old “normal.” Ever. Deal with it now. That’s the starting point of vision.
The most important way to deal with it isn’t preparing yourself for disappointment, however. It’s deciding what the future you want is to be.
You probably think in terms of how to react to threats. Most of us do, most of the time. But the real driver of your actions will be, and needs to be, what you want. The year 2000 is never coming back. Surely you have seen by now that you shouldn’t want it to. It was already a “big lie.” The deep-seated corruption of our institutions was already well underway then.
That doesn’t mean the U.S. Constitution needs a major overhaul. For one thing, we haven’t really been living by it for a long time. It’s not our problem. But the adherence to its most basic forms, such as three branches, a batch of states, and a set schedule of elections, has kept alive an illusion that we were living by it.
Resurrecting the spirit and understandings of the original Constitution, with the Bill of Rights and the elimination of slavery, is a fine touchstone for vision.
But the importance of vision lies in this. We have to see – it is imperative to see – that merely reverting to some status quo of our imaginations is neither possible nor sustainable. There is no such future as eliminating the shenanigans of today’s “Deep State” (which we are now at liberty to call a cabal) and having a sort of political elastic snap us back to some comfortable place we were before.
Our vision must deal with what we are actually going to do when that doesn’t happen.
It would be a whole 5,000-word essay to write about that. So I’ll leave it there for now. I will only reiterate that what our vision is, what we want to get out of whatever exposure there will be of the cabal, is what will drive our goals and actions – and therefore will shape what happens.
With that introduction behind us, a little turkey about the current situation. Next to the mandate for vision, these two points are the most important.
The revelations about the cabal are not about Trump, Biden, or our electoral schedule
This can’t be stated emphatically enough. It’s really hard for people to get their heads around, but it must be understood. No one can move on to having reasonable expectations without understanding it.
The denouement we’d all like to see of truth and revelation about the anti-Trump cabal isn’t about any of the scheduled events we can see (election certification, inauguration, trial in the Senate, SCOTUS hearings).
No one whose analysis didn’t prove out at the arbitrary deadlines of our governmental order has been proven wrong because of that. Deadlines aren’t proof of anything at the moment.
We have our limited purpose for wanting to see the truth and revelation we seek, and one of its chief elements has been preventing a rig-fortified election from installing a president. That has tremendous meaning for us, especially in the context of our old paradigm and the desire to shore it up instead of seeing it broken.
But we’re not in charge of the timeline for truth and revelation. Neither is Trump, and neither is the cabal. Jehovah God is in charge of that timeline.
And as I’ve written several times now, it’s His purpose that drives it. The outcome of our election is not what the revelation of truth is about. It’s about what He wants to reveal to us. Things on His timeline will occur at times and in ways we can’t necessarily foresee. If I suspected that before 6 January and 20 January, I am now certain of it.
So I urge you, do not think that everyone’s analysis is about what will happen before X deadline. It’s not. We can’t know if Trump will be back, or what will happen to Biden (and God defend them both from anything evil).
The revelations aren’t about that.
The revelations are about THEMSELVES. They’re what we need to see, beyond what we want to see. They’ll happen on their timeline – on God’s – not the electoral timeline of the U.S. Constitution or the schedule of Congress or SCOTUS, or a plan of Trump’s.
I believe, as we see more of them, that what we are supposed to do will become clear to us, at the time we need it to be clear.
What is about what it seems
The prediction I’ve been proven 100% right about is how hard and fast “Biden” would jump to the radical left. Other analysts, I think, would say the same about their estimates. We knew he would blow left at 100 mph, 2-7-0 on the compass rose, right out of the gate.
“Biden” is the most predictable element of this drama. There’s no point in babbling on about that. Just remember it. Whatever is the most predictable, radical-left thing “Biden” could do, or the most pessimistically predictable intention it could have – that’s what we can expect from it. It really is that bad. Those who didn’t see it coming, or who still can’t see it, will catch up eventually.
A brief rundown of the bidding on the election analysis
The 2020 election remains significant, in part because it’s what all the current reactions of U.S. politics relate to, and in part because the refusal of the cabal to acknowledge its glaring irregularities is the violation that broke the floodgate.
Notice I didn’t say the irregularities were the violation. I’m willing to speak in terms of that being as yet unadjudicated, because it is precisely that: largely unadjudicated. In only 21 out of 80 cases has evidence been considered. Trump has now won 14 of those, something hardly anyone is aware of. In one case, in Michigan, the court has already agreed there’s good evidence that votes were digitally altered in voting systems.
By contrast, 34 cases have been dismissed without consideration of the evidence, on non-evidentiary grounds. And 25 are still in process, most in various stages of heel-dragging, their evidence unreviewed.
But the big violation is the bad-faith refusal to give what are obviously valid concerns their due process, whether in court, in the media, or in the actions of the states and Congress to certify the election. That violation is the one I spoke of above in relation to crashing our old paradigm. The “refusal” violation against the vote, which is indisputable, is by itself the one that means we can expect more violations of all our constitutional and institutional expectations.
So this section will advance a few comments about points of particular contention, which have arisen in the last weeks from information published by a handful of people using publicly available data. (Start here, here, and here.)
Nothing said in this section is about when we’ll see proof or vindication. There’s no way to satisfy the demand for timelines, promises, or even estimates. No one “knows.”
My best advice: carry knowledge of conditions and factors in your heads, and watch.
The crazy allegations
We’ll start with the most contentious. As a general point, the narrative that batches of the American vote may have been shipped overseas for manipulation is none of the following: impossible, implausible, absurd, or proven.
I’m sure many people think it establishes credibility to reject that possibility out of hand. It certainly establishes conventionality of thought, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it’s better to be willing to think about it logically than to refuse to think about it.
Logically, the bar to it is not technological; it’s intentional. And we can only make assumptions about intention. We do not infallibly divine the intentions of other people. With each fresh revelation about the cabal, it should be clearer to us that there’ve been a lot of intentions we weren’t infallibly divining over the last couple of decades (or more).
It’s entirely possible, and reasonably plausible, that such a thing could have happened. We have the technology. To say that is not to say that we know such technology was used for the posited purpose. It’s to say, quite correctly, that it could have been.
As several advocates have recounted (links above), a group of “white hat hackers” is offering data showing that it tracked hundreds of outside interactions with voting systems in the U.S. on 3 and 4 November 2020. I’m not going to go into the specifics; that information is at the links. The information offered is plausible. It appears to show connections to a handful of foreign countries.
It’s also clear to at least three courts (including the federal court that heard Curling v. Raffensperger in 2020) and several state legislatures that the electronic voting systems used by dozens of U.S. states are, in fact, connected to the Internet, notwithstanding the weirdly outdated (and, soberly, less credible) claim that they are not. User-manual schematics with full citations of origin, showing how to connect your voting machine to the Internet, have made popular appearances in the articles and videos posted by analysts, alongside affidavits affirming that live Internet connections were seen by election observers.
None of this means the overseas vote manipulation did happen. The weak link is the “white hat hackers,” whose work would have to be verified in some way. So the allegation is unproven.
Significantly, however, it suggests an answer to a valid question, which is what was going on when the mathematically and procedurally impossible losses of tens of thousands of votes for Trump were occurring – witnessed on the live broadcasts of the major networks – in the early-morning hours of 4 November. The same question arises over some of the impossible increases in the Biden vote at the same time. (See examples from several states here; one in Wisconsin is not an obvious vote switch but a basically impossible lead switch in a short time)
Some comments with due skepticism: what the white hat hackers found could have been manipulated (by yet another party); in particular, the appearance that connections were coming from specific IPs overseas. All the connections could have been from inside the U.S. They could have been from other locations overseas.
I’m guessing removing already counted votes during election night is something new? Check Pres Trump’s number … pic.twitter.com/XT0NWDeCIh
— GUNNER ?? (@thedeziner) November 9, 2020
If there was a cabal doing this, we don’t know whose it was. There is reportedly an affidavit from a source in Italy describing some of it. That too remains to be proved. A lot more can be said on this head, but readers can come up with the caveats themselves.
This is the value-added comment I would offer. It is entirely possible for the resources of the U.S. government to have watched this happening live. That comment does not mean we did watch it. It means we could have. This is what I’ve alluded to in previous articles, and nothing has changed from the original assessment. Since that assessment was based on known capabilities, and not certainty about timeline or intentions, nothing needed to change, or in fact will ever need to.
Trump actually had everything he needed in place to do what the U.S. government has the means to do, through the front door, by invoking his E.O. 13848 of September 2018.
Something that needs to be stressed is that he did not need the special means referred to by General McInerney and others to engage in such monitoring. There is nothing foolish about the idea that those means exist (the “H” and “S” programs), but there is also no need to hang your hat on them.
It’s best not to, in fact. Trying to make everything fit the story people think the alleged programs imply is a misleading enterprise, at best. Perhaps such tools were used, but they aren’t necessary to a scenario in which the U.S. government recorded web-based interactions with the vote in November.
One point about the general topic, however. In my view, America can fulfill the purposes of law without exhaustively investigating the possibility of live overseas connections the night of the election. It’s the purposes of national security that can’t be satisfied that way. It will take political will first, before the rationale of crime and prosecution, to force such an investigation.
The wild card
The allusion to what the U.S. government could have been doing brings up the other major element of the overall scenario, and that’s the wild card of what Trump’s strategic intent was. I’m undecided myself on what the answer may be.
Conventional thinking would be that Trump’s intent must have been limited and poorly thought-out, since he’s no longer in office after an interlude when he might have wielded information to his advantage as POTUS. That may be correct, but it’s an error to insist that it must be. We’ve seen too many things no one predicted in the last year to still be hidebound about what “must be.”
That said, I don’t find that the idea of Trump masterfully foreseeing that it would be necessary to relinquish the Oval Office in order to achieve a great purpose is decisively resonant. I’ve worded that sentence carefully, so that it means just what it says: the idea is not decisively resonant. That doesn’t mean the idea is ridiculous, or that I reject it out of hand.
I’m not convinced by it. The door is open – which I do insist is smarter than closing the door on it; it really is stupid to think Trump is stupid – but I’m not counting on anything.
I simply don’t know if Trump has a concept for a comeback that includes himself orchestrating a vast unveiling of the cabal. I only have a sense that it’s not up to him, and that he probably sees that. For what it’s worth, I suspect he came to see that most clearly in his final two weeks in office.
As for the other allegations about the 2020 vote, none of them is “crazy.” Far from being crazy, they are all fully documented in conventional ways, from voting records to hundreds of sworn affidavits to original videos of highly questionable and irregular activities at polling and vote-counting locations. What they are not is adequately investigated by authorities.
The project going forward
Will they ever be? As of this calendar date, my answer would be different from what the conventional thinker might imagine. If we go by the record of the last five years, it won’t be our duly-constituted authorities who inspect the errors, commissions, and omissions, and then bag and tag them.
The process will be more elliptical than that, but even more decisive. The cabal will take itself down by its own hand.
That, after all, is what it continued to do with the TIME article on 4 February. It’s probably what the cabal is doing with the Senate trial, which is proceeding willy-nilly in spite of its futility for the apparent purpose (to prevent Trump from running again in 2024).
It’s as if they can’t help themselves. Even if the deeper purpose of the Senate trial is to introduce a massive propaganda surge depicting 75 million Americans as seditious terrorists, that effort will only swing the cabal’s fist around to punch itself out. The Big Lies are being exposed every time they are deployed.
Indeed, such actions amount merely to the cabal dealing itself the final strokes.
The cabal has been building the fatal case against itself for many years now, seeking to exploit and manipulate the people and abusing their trust. The elements of the cabal (TIME’s word, not mine) have had numerous chances to change their ways, and they have doubled down on them instead.
The TIME article is evidence of a starkly central reality: they want to rule us with a lie. Without the Trump Senate trial, they were never going to tell us that they rig-fortified the 2020 election. But now they have parted the curtains just a bit on that, in order to refine the lie. And as with all the other lies of theirs that have been exposed through the preternatural Trump filter, this one is now exposed, and the even greater ones will be too.
We still can’t fully grasp all that will be taken down with them, I think. The scope of this is bigger than we imagine, even now. If you’re looking for evidence that “Trump has a plan” to reenter the White House, you’re watching for the wrong signs (though that doesn’t mean he won’t at some point). The same is true if you think you know anything else for sure: that there will be four years of the current presidency (whoever the figurehead is), or that the Vandals are at the door and they speak Mandarin, or whatever it may be.
Guard your dearest; hold them tight. Be the overwatch your community needs, however your talents equip you to do it. Several things will be necessary; prayer is the equal of all of them combined. The roller coaster ride of an epoch has already engaged.
The verse that keeps coming to my mind is Isaiah 66:2: “This is the one I esteem [declares the Lord]: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.” (NIV)
This is it: this is the time when we see what it really means that God has set before us life and death, and has told us: Choose life.
