Don't Fear the Word "Fraud"
Contributed by Chuck Cambell
In the six years since Trump’s ascension to the White House, we’ve seen the establishment stoop to lower and lower depths in order to keep their power. Two failed impeachments. The Russia hoax. Riots. A non-credible election was aggressively declared to be the most credible in history.
And yet, so many otherwise-good people are still primed to see the dismal 2022 midterms as a failure of candidate selection, not a failure of election security. The words “election fraud” are suddenly being treated as radioactive, even on the right. How many times have you heard or seen the following takes since the election?
“Trump ruined the election and the Republican party! He just needs to shut up and go away!”
“We lost because too many of our candidates were still talking about 2020 and election fraud, while the voters are over it!”
“We kept choosing candidates like Palin who are crazy and no one likes them! We needed to choose more electable candidates!”
“Dr. Oz was a carpetbagger from a state Pennsylvanians don’t like, so of course no one voted for him!”
It’s all manure. Literally all of it. People were and still are one hundred percent fed up with the left. With fair elections, the red wave would have crushed all. Without fair elections, we’ll never win anything important again, even with the best candidates in the world. DeSantis in Florida banned ballot harvesting, banned mass-mail-in ballots, required voter ID, then set up election policing at the state level and told the federal goon squads to get stuffed – and the left got rocked in Florida.
Spiritually, chalking this election up to a candidate failure is a defeatist mindset. It accepts the left’s preferred narrative: that the country is moving farther left over time, that this is inevitable, that nothing can be done about it, that we just have to get used to a world where morals and freedom aren’t popular anymore and never will be again. Giving in to this demoralization is a sure path to giving up and letting the left have it all without challenge. If we accept this election as fair, then we cannot help but trick ourselves into defanging the right and becoming once more the party of Bush, McCain, and Romney.
The establishment would like very much for us to do this, of course. Since the first appearance of the Tea Party movement over a decade ago, their project has been to re-tame the American people. They want us back in that 1980s-2000s stupor where we just sort of bumbled along in a haze of national arrogance, war fury, debt-fueled false prosperity, and crisis-driven thinking. An economy-oriented right wing, catering mostly to big business, is no problem for the establishment; it’s already an integral part of such. An economic right that’s serious about good jobs, living standards, and personal freedoms for the quote-unquote little people, and not just making stocks go up, is bad news for them. A social right that’s serious about rejecting leftist hedonism and making America good again, that’s worse.
Both of those right wings working together, as started to happen around the end of Trump’s term, is an extinction-level event for the establishment – so they made a full-court press to save themselves, and “fortified” the election rules to ensure they could never be seriously challenged again. If we give up on this issue, they will be able to keep doing this – taking away the people’s voice any time the people start saying things they don’t like – in perpetuity.
Politically, state and local governments have taken on a special significance. This doesn’t mean the federal level no longer has any – even the establishment has finite resources, so some good people might still squeak through – but state and local governments can use their rights and responsibilities as a powerful bulwark against the federal overreach that the establishment runs on, buying time and room. In order to use them as such, however, we cannot fall for the lie that the left won the last two elections on their own merits – otherwise we will never solve the real problem. Don’t be afraid to speak the five-letter F-word – fraud. Facing it head-on is the only way forward.