Tag: news

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

It is one thing to know your opponents have no soul. It is quite another to watch in real time their depravity play out with gleeful disdain.

Anyone saying that what is happening right now in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan etc. is not a conscious effort to rig an election is either a victim of propaganda or being willfully obtuse.

Because they told us this is what would happen. Through the Transition Integrity Project and bread crumbs left throughout the campaign, we knew it would come to this.

For weeks I’ve been saying I hope Trump’s performance is strong enough and his coattails long enough to preclude the Democrats and The Davos Crowd from trying to pull off the theft of the election.

That they would see the magnitude of the problem in front of them and be stopped short by little things like math.

And then realize that even if they did try and cheat it would be so transparent that nothing good for them would be gained by it. But they didn’t listen.

Trump almost pulled it off. His numbers across the board were excellent, stunning even given everything that’s happened.

He may yet pull this out and I support any and all efforts to do so, but it is looking quite grim today.

The potential is there for the Republicans to pick up as many as twelve seats in the House while holding the Senate if not picking up a seat, depending on how the courts rule on the already well-documented fraud.

Coattails that long are prima facia evidence that what’s happening with the presidential election is fraud. I won’t go into the list of red flags here, others have done a far better job (and are, frankly, more entertaining), but they are big enough and red enough to get even the laziest, porn-besotted bull in the world angry.

And that’s what should be scaring the crap out of everyone on ‘the Left’ today. Because as we heard yesterday, with coattails that long and the amount of obscene behavior on display, the remaining members of the Democratic caucus in the House are scared… and not just for their political lives.

If we run this race again we will get fucking torn apart again in 2022, Spanberger says

— Erica Werner (@ericawerner) November 5, 2020

Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in damage-control mode, saying “but we held the House” — which they were supposed to expand their majority in — and are “on track to win the presidency,” which no one will take even remotely seriously.

I’ve had visions of seeing Pelosi dragged out of the Capitol by her expensive dyed hair choking on her dentures while being arraigned for sedition, but her getting beaten with the ‘awesome power of the Speaker’s gavel’ and lynched by her own caucus for incompetence will be even more delicious.

At around 2am Tuesday evening I realized that they were actually going to do this and I texted a friend the next morning. His response?

“Civil war it is then.”

There can be no other response to this from men and women of character. Exhaust every legal means possible, certainly, but remember that the courts are as corrupt as the county governments. Fear of reprisal makes men weak.

The one thing Trump said in his post-election remarks that rang so true and with me and should ring true with every libertarian-leaning person (left or right) alive, that the process itself is corrupting. It corrupts everything it touches.

Four years of the Democrats and the Media screaming about Russian collusion and undermining the legitimacy of Donald Trump inspired thousands of people to become corrupt poll workers, mailmen, supervisors of elections, party operatives and the like.

And they obviously feel justified in this. They are, after all, the heroes of their own stories whose motives are pure and whose hearts are in the right place.

If we just get rid of Orange Man Bad, everything wrong with America will be gone. Scapegoating is as old as mankind but it doesn’t work anymore now that we’ve internalized the story from the scapegoat’s point of view, Christ.

So, all they have now is the unquenchable envy of Marxism which burns until it consumes everyone in retribution or they are put down like rabid dogs. That’s what is on display in these counting centers.

On the other hand, even Trump’s detractors had to admit the guy did inspired work to try and bring as many people under his tent as possible. To right the wrongs they see in the most non-violent way possible, voting.

But if that’s not good enough, if the message sent wasn’t strong enough through the ballot box, then that lesson will be taught in a far uglier way.

This is why I excoriated the libertarians the other day. I could see this coming. Either cooler heads prevail or the grievances get settled with violence. It’s our job to be the voice in between, not sit on the sidelines like high school band nerds sitting through a football game.

From a market perspective the threat of a marginally-empowered Harris presidency with he slimmest House majority any party has held in decades and a divided Senate means nothing gets done until the mid-terms.

And any attempt by Harris and Obama to legislate through Executive Order will result in even more dramatic events than we’ve seen to date, including secession.

This is why Bitcoin, gold, silver and U.S. Treasuries exploded to the upside. Big money moved into the most liquid assets, UST’s, while the marginal flow piled into safe havens and those worried about cross-border capital controls are running into Bitcoin and cryptos.

Everyone is holding their collective breath while we grind towards the Great Reset with most of the first world either under lockdown over last year’s flu or paralyzed by political shenanigans which makes the U.S. look like Venezuela.

The rising euro is a function of the lockdowns and the local need for liquidity. The spasming bonds markets blew out a lot of carry and interest rate trades this week. While the dollar looks like it’s getting killed, what’s really happening is trades betting on Harris destroying capital have reversed.

And the focus now turns to the wholesale destruction of European economies. Oh well, Europe was a good thing while it lasted. Enjoy the return of feudalism, folks, maybe there will be something left for me to visit before I die.

We still have our guns, FYI.

And this is why Trump isn’t going anywhere. The Deplorables now have to become The Ungovernables. No more negotiations, discussions, turning the other cheek, etc.

Ungovernable. Just say no to Commies.

What’s the point of voting or even democracy at all if a few dozen angry black election officials in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta can decide the entire thing?

— Roosh (@rooshv) November 6, 2020

Hey man, don’t let the midwit, white women off the hook there… in this Civil War race has nothin’ to do with it.

Because no matter what vote totals you manufacture or political/judicial arms you twist no one can rule for long without the consent of the governed.

This is not a LARP nor a drill. It is a simple statement of fact.

If the men who keep the engine of the world running refuse to show up one day, the God of Power the Marxists all worship will vanish like Hillary’s emails.

Ayn Rand wasn’t wrong about everything, folks.

This is particularly true when nearly all of those men are armed and are the ones that grow the food, treat the water, patrol the streets and keep the lights on.

The legal case is being built now to go to the State Legislatures, who are the ones who actually decide whose electors go to the Electoral College, and invalidate the votes in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, at a minimum.

Article II, Section 1, Clause 2: each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature Thereof May Direct.”

LEGISLATURE, not governor, AG, or SecState.

Will GOP state legislatures of PA WI MI do their duty? If you live in those states, demand they act!

PA & WI pic.twitter.com/vG4wEcKabF

— Jim Jatras (@JimJatras) November 6, 2020

Getting those Republican-controlled legislatures to throw out the suggested results of a tainted election is exactly why the Electoral College exists. It is the last defense against mob rule and the corrupting nature of politics. The commies in the DNC and The Davos Crowd don’t like to hear that and frankly don’t care but that is the reality of it.

That’s Trump’s path to the presidency at this point, because the votes will be tallied to ensure that he not only loses but lose by a large enough ‘electoral vote’ majority to nullify any rulings by the Supreme Court.

Pelosi is prepared to invoke the 20th Amendment if there is no resolution on Inauguration day, January 20th through an act of Congress. This is why many House seats have not been called even though they are over.

She made her choice. So did the all the people currently engaged in this theft. Now the nature of the State is clear for a majority of people to see.

Civil War it is, then. Molon Labe.

*  *  *

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Today in “proof that the wealth gap is widening further and that people have too much money on their hands” news…

The Titanic, more than 100 years after sinking while traveling from England to New York in 1912, is once again being turned into a tourist destination. Hopefully, this time around it works out a little better. 

Yes, for $125,000 per ticket, you can now go back and re-live the world’s most famous maritime disaster, according to Sputnik News. In fact, there may be something fitting about re-living a massive disaster in 2020, but we digress. 

US civilian undersea exploration company OceanGate Expeditions is planning the trips for May 2021. The company is reportedly planning on six different dives to the wreck. They aim not only to cash in from tourists, but also to “conduct scientific research on sea life around the Titanic and create a 3-D model of its debris”.

Stockton Rush, president of OceanGate Expeditions, told Bloomberg: “All the bones are gone. There are no bodies down there. There are boots and shoes and clothes that show where people were 100 years ago, and that is very somber.” 

Actually it sounds kind of refreshing, relative to 2020 so far. 

He continued: “If this was just another money-losing wealthy person’s activity, I don’t see how it scales. We don’t take passengers, we don’t do trips, we don’t do rides. We’re doing an expedition.”

Those who pony up the cash for the trip will have to pass an interview process, the company’s dive chief said: “We don’t want someone who is used to being catered to—a prima donna. We don’t have chocolates on the pillow.”

Rush also said that half of the people who have already booked tickets are also already booked as tourists for Virgin Galactic’s $250,000 per person journey past the borders of space (because of course they have). Two ticket holders have even scaled Everest. “We have others who have not done a lot of adventure travel or have done minimally—a safari, or they have been to Antarctica,” he said. 

The trip will begin in Canada and will then sail 8 days to the Titanic’s wreckage. From there, there will be a 6 to 8 hour dive of the wreck.

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

One clear outcome of the U.S. election was the collapse of the promised ‘Blue Wave’ – an implosion that marks the ‘beginning of the end’ to a powerful spell enthralling the West. It was the delusion which Ron Chernow, the acclaimed U.S. presidential historian, gave credence, as he contemptuously dismissed America’s “topsy-turvy moment” as purely ephemeral, and a “surreal interlude in American life”:  No longer can it be said that there is one ‘normal’.  Win or lose the White House, Red Trumpism remains as ‘President’ for half America.

Biden, by contrast, served as the prospect for Restoration – a return to a hallowed consensus in American politics – to a reassuring ‘sanity’ of facts, science and truth. Biden, it was hoped, would be the agency over-lording a crushing electoral landslide that would terminate irrevocably Trump’s rude interruption of the ‘normal’.  Biden supporters were rallied, Mike Lind, the American academic and author has observed, around the idea of America moving toward a ‘managed’ society – based on ‘science’ – that would be essentially finessed and controlled by a managerial, expert class.

Over time, Lind suggests, American society would begin to depart more, and more easily, from its republican roots, through a process already underway: via attempts to alter the Constitutional order, and other rules, to bring about a change in the way America is governed.

The notion however, of what America – as Idea – now constitutes, has fractured into two tectonic plates, moving apart in very different directions – and likely to move even further apart as each ‘plate’ remains convinced that ‘it won’ – and the sweetness of victory has been stolen.

The fracturing of the ‘One Normal’, by contrast, provides some kind of respite to much of the globe.

The fact remains that the election has produced a result in which it is abundantly clear that one half of the American electorate precisely voted to oust the other half. It is gridlock – with the Supreme Court and Senate in the hands of one party, and the House of Representatives and White House (possibly) in the hands of the other.  As Glenn Greenwald warns:

No matter what the final result, there will be substantial doubts about its legitimacy by one side or the other, perhaps both. And no deranged conspiracy thinking is required for that. An electoral system suffused with this much chaos, error, protracted outcomes and seemingly inexplicable reversals will sow doubt and distrust even among the most rational citizens.

Though the maths and maps suggests Biden will likely reach 270 Electoral votes, the old saying ‘It ain’t over ’till it’s over’, holds true. The electoral vote scenarios in the key ‘swing states’ would only apply if there is no litigation, fraud or theft.  However all three are in play – If you are stuffing the ballot box, you first wait to see what the regular vote is, so that you know how many votes you ‘need’ (mathematical anomalies aside) to push your candidate over the top.  Trump, somewhat rashly, gave out the GOP vote calculations at 02.30 on Wednesday, and hey-presto, loads of absentee ballots suddenly arrived at certain polling stations at around 04.00.  That seems to have happened in Wisconsin, where over 100,000 Biden votes appeared seemingly out of nowhere on a flash drive delivered by hand from a Democratic district. That put Biden ahead in Wisconsin – but litigation is in process. Likewise, it appears that a huge “absentee ballot” dump appeared in Michigan that heavily favored Biden.

This is just the beginning of a new and more uncertain phase that could go on for weeks. It may be that ultimately Congress will have to certify and make the final determination in late January. Meanwhile, there are some things we know with much higher certainty: The Republican majority in the Senate may hold until the 2024 election. So, even if Biden wins, his agenda will not hold through 2024.

A President may emerge, but it will not be, as it were, a settled one:  He or she cannot make claim to the ‘will of the majority’.  Whomsoever is certified by Congress cannot truthfully say they represent ‘the nation’.  Consensus is fractured, and it is difficult to see any leadership that can bring Americans together as a ‘united people’.

“There is not a single important cultural, religious, political or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart,” David French notes in a new book Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.  French — an anti-Trump conservative — argues that America’s divisions are so great, and the political system so poorly designed to handle them, that secession may eventually be the result: “If we keep pushing people and pushing people and pushing people, you cannot assume that they won’t break”, he writes. (A 2018 poll found that nearly a quarter of each party – Democrat and Republican – characterized the opposing party as “evil”).

An ideological split, and the concomitantly contested America as Idea has huge geo-political implications, reaching well beyond America itself –  and principally for Europe’s élites.  European leaders did not see it coming when Trump was elected in 2016. They misjudged Brexit. And this year, they misread U.S. politics once again. They yearned for a Biden win, and they (still) fail to see the connection between the popular rebellion of Red under Mr. Trump, and the angry protests occurring across Europe against lockdown.

Separating tectonic plates – more strategically – usually signal a kind of dualism that betokens civil conflict.  In other words, their separation and moving apart turns into an ideological struggle for the nature of society and its institutional fabric.

Historian, and former War College Professor, Mike Vlahos warns (echoing Lind), that, “there is, here: more of a hidden – and thus in a sense, occult struggle – by which over time, societies begin to depart more, and more easily, from their roots.  The western dominant élites presently are seeking to cement their hold over society [moving towards a ‘managed’ society]: To have full control over the direction of society, and, of course, a framework of rule that protects their wealth.”

“Quite to the surprise of everyone, and given that the Republicans are being represented by a billionaire who has a great many friends in Manhattan – the Wall Street donors to the two campaigns, outnumber Trump’s donors for Biden by 5-to-1”.

Why, Vlahos asks, would Wall Street invest in a man – Biden – and in a Party, ostensibly seeking to move America toward this ‘managed’ progressive society?  Is it because they are convinced of a need radically to restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations?  Is this then Vlahos’ occult struggle?

Many of the élite hold that we are at that monumental inflection point at this moment –  In a nutshell, their narrative is simply this: the planet is already economically and demographically over-extended; the infinite economic expansion model is bust; and the global debt and government entitlement expenditure bubble too, is set to pop at the same moment.

Mike Vlahos notes that in a curious way this American story mirrors that of ancient Rome in the last century of the Republic – with on the one hand, the élite Roman class, and on the other, the Populares, as Red Americans’ equivalent:

“This is in fact the dual story of Rome in the last century of the Republic, and it tracks very well — with the transformation going on today [in the U.S.] — and it is a transformation … The society which emerged at the end of the Roman Revolution, and civil war … had too, a totally dominant élite class.

“This was a new world, in which the great landowners, with their latifundia [the slave-land source of wealth], who had been the ‘Big Men’ leading the various factions in the civil wars, became the senatorial archons that dominated Roman life for the next five centuries — while the People, the Populares, were ground into a passive — not helpless — but generally dependent and non-participating element of Roman governance: This sapped away at the creative life of Rome, and eventually led to its coming apart.

“… today American inequality is as great as in the period right before the French Revolution, and is mirrored in what was happening to Rome in that long century of transformation. The problem we have right now, and which is going to make this revolution more intense, is I think, the cynical conclusion and agenda of Blue to just leave behind the Americans they do not need [in the New Economy] – which is to say all of Red America, and to put them into a situation of hardship and marginalization, where they cannot coalesce, to form a rival — as it were — Popular Front.

“What I think what we are seeing here [in the U.S.] is profound: American society – emerging from this passage, is going to be completely different.  And frankly, it already feels different. It already feels – as it has felt for the past four years – that we are in a rolling civil war norm now, in which deep societal strife is now the normal way in which we handle transfers of power.  Issues will be [momentarily] resolved, with the path of society [painfully] staked out through violent conflict. That is likely to be our path for decades ahead.

“The problem with that in the shorter term, is that there is still enough of the nation aroused and ready to fight this process. The problem: Can the last energies of the Old Republic still be harnessed against this seemingly inevitable, transformation?”

A ‘fourth industrial revolution’ is the only way by which to ‘square this circle’, according to this mindset. The Reset is purposefully aimed to disrupt all areas of life, albeit on a planetary scale.  Shock therapy, as it were, to change the way we humans think of ourselves, and our relationship with the world.  The Great Reset looks to a supply-side ‘miracle’, achieved through full-spectrum automation and robotics.  A world where the money is digital; the food is lab-grown; where everything is counted and controlled by giant monopolies; and everyday existence is micromanaged by ever-monitoring, ever-nudging AI that registers thoughts and feelings before the people even get a chance to make those thoughts.

As the US’ tech war with China continues to rage, China has leapfrogged the US in satellite telecommunication technology with the successful launch of the world’s first sixth-generation satellite into space. 

The experimental satellite containing advanced telecommunications technology was launched Friday into low Earth orbit from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in China’s northern Shanxi Province, reported Asia Times. 

A Long March-6 carrier rocket’s payload consisted of the 6G satellite and 13 other satellites. A video of the launch was published on Twiter via the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

The “#UESTC” satellite (Star Era-12), the first #6G test satellite in the world and first one named after the university since its establishment, was successfully lifted off at Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center and entered the scheduled orbit on the morning of Nov. 6. pic.twitter.com/ouM2rpC7pS

— UESTC-电子科技大学 (@UESTC1956) November 6, 2020

The satellite, developed jointly by Chengdu Guoxing Aerospace Technology and Beijing MinoSpace Technology, will be used in a pilot testing program to trial 6G technology in space.

According to Yicai Media Group, 6G is more than 100 times faster than 5G – enables seamless transmission, longer distances, faster speeds, and smaller power output from space to land-based communication devices. 

6G technology is still in the beginning stages, but Friday’s launch appears to show China has moved ahead of the US in space-based testing. Many hurdles are still expected with the technology as testing will start near term. 

The launch comes as the US and China are locked in a heated tech war. In 2019, President Trump tweeted the obvious: America must step up its efforts to develop and deploy cutting edge tech or face getting “left behind.” 

“I want 5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible. It is far more powerful, faster, and smarter than the current standard. American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind. There is no reason that we should be lagging behind on………”

Authored by Allen Zhong via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign will launch a lawsuit in Pennsylvania to challenge the mail-in ballots that have been counted without Republican poll watchers onsite.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney announced Saturday the lawsuit during a press conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with several Republican poll watchers who were prevented from entering the poll sites or the rights of poll-watching were blocked.

A federal lawsuit will be filed on Monday in Pennsylvania and more expected in other states.

“We’re going to file a federal lawsuit that will cover here [Philadelphia] and Pittsburgh, and we will have as many witnesses as the court needs. Right now, it could be as many as 90 witnesses,” Giuliani said.

Several witnesses joined Giuliani during the press conference, all are local Philadelphia residents.

Lisette Tarragano, one of the witnesses, said she was never allowed to enter the polling site along with other five to six Republican poll watchers.

“I was never brought in. Actually, I never got past the first identification stage, they kept saying that mine as well as five or six other Republicans, their names hadn’t been entered into the system,” she said.

Two other poll watchers, Darrell Brooks and Matt Silver said they were kept 15 to 20 feet away from the ballots.

Silver also alleged that some unusual ballot boxes were witnessed inside the polling site.

“There seem to be at least certain boxes seem to be in the same unusual pen, and seem to have very similar handwriting. Some boxes were normal, some boxes were like that,” he said.

The Biden campaign, the Office of Philadelphia City Commissioners, the election division of Allegheny county government, and the Pennsylvania Department of State didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

It was reported that a Republican poll watcher was temporarily blocked on Election Day in Philadelphia.

Kevin Feeley, a spokesman for the Philadelphia City Commissioners, admitted that the one poll watcher was prevented from entering the polling site on Nov. 3.

“The mistake was corrected, and the guy was admitted,” he said, claiming it was an isolated incident.

A poll watcher in Philly was just wrongfully prevented from entering the polling place#StopTheSteal pic.twitter.com/iJTFtRk0Id

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) November 3, 2020

During the election night, Trump led when the ballot canvassing started in several swing states including Pennsylvania. But the lead was diluted by the lately-counted mail-in ballots. In Pennsylvania, Democratic party presidential candidate Joe Biden took a slight lead after the mail-in ballots were counted.

Because the results are very close and several lawsuits are ongoing over the election outcome in several battlefield states, it’s more and more clear that this election will be settled through the judicial system.

The expected lawsuit by the Trump campaign will start another battle line over the outcome of the election in some swing states: mail-in ballots counted without Republican observers.

Over the past few days, Trump has been vocal over the need to protect the sanctity of the ballot box while claiming that Democrats are trying to “steal” the election from him due to efforts to count late-arriving ballots, which he alleges are “illegal.” He and his legal teams have been arguing that mail-in ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 but received after election day should not be counted and that votes that were counted without Republican observers present in the ballot-counting centers should also be considered “illegal votes.”

The U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito late Friday ordered Pennsylvania election officials to segregate ballots that arrived after Election Day.

A “smart garbage sorting robot” was recently launched on the streets in eastern China, able to pick up and sort trash for an entire workday. 

China’s national newspaper, the People’s Daily, published a video this week showing the robot cruising down the sidewalk in the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province on Oct. 28, identifying trash, then using its robotic arm to pick up the debris. It was reported the robot could operate for eight hours before the next charge, with the ability to pick up a total of 38.5 pounds of trash. 

A smart garbage sorting robot was launched in Hangzhou, E China’s Zhejiang. Supported by visual learning and navigational positioning techs, the robot can work for 8hrs straight, pick up and sort 17.5kg of garbage with an identification accuracy rate of 98% on recyclable trash. pic.twitter.com/SwGiI4Imnb

— People’s Daily, China (@PDChina) November 3, 2020

Trash picking robots in China is just more evidence of how automation and artificial intelligence will displace millions of jobs, not only in China but worldwide by the end of the decade. 

The World Economic Forum (WEF) released a report in October warning that robots could displace an estimated 85 million jobs by 2025. 

“Automation, in tandem with the COVID-19 recession, is creating a ‘double disruption’ scenario for workers,” WEF wrote.

“In addition to the current disruption from the pandemic-induced lockdowns and economic contraction, technological adoption by companies will transform tasks, jobs, and skills by 2025.”

A future ruled by robots would likely result in policymakers worldwide enacting some form of People’s QE. 

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

The 2020 election is a nightmare from which I — along with millions of others — am trying to awake.

Like many dark dreams, it is uncertain exactly what is happening. Phantasmic ballots come and go. Seemingly insurmountable Republican victories disappear into the mouth of a vote-munching machine and come out the other side as excremental — oops, I mean incremental — Democratic leads just beyond the reach of a recount. And as in any nightmare worth its salt, just when you think it’s about to end, a new trap door opens and you fall into yet one more level of confusion and chaos in a maze with no exit in sight.

But this is America. It’s not supposed to be a Kafka novel.

So how did we get to a place where, days after the election was held, despite many proclamations by news organizations to the contrary, we still don’t know who won, we don’t know who voted, and we don’t know for sure whether the rules were followed in either voting or counting?

Various irregularities have been reported in five big cities, all in strategic states, and particularly in Detroit, Mich.; Philadelphia, Pa.; Atlanta, Ga.; Milwaukee, Wis.; and Las Vegas, Nev. The allegations range from mysterious ballot drops that seem to show tens of thousands of votes for Joe Biden and zero votes for President Trump, inexplicable record turnouts in late-counting counties (all Democrat-dominated) that far surpass turnouts in counties in other states where the votes were counted on a timely basis; and of course the illegal banning of election observers in those very counties where the most outrageous anomalies are reported.

Democrats tell us that there is nothing to see here, and the compliant media dutifully moves along, unwilling to investigate on its own or even express any concern about potential wrongdoing. Even Fox News has turned into a lapdog for the Democrat Party, calling Arizona for Joe Biden long before anyone could know for sure which way the state would turn.

On Thursday night, as Fulton County was just about to swing Georgia into the Biden column, CNN’s John King arrogantly lectured Donald Trump:

“Guess what, Mr. President? We’re gonna count the votes, and if they favor you, we’re gonna show that. And if they don’t, we’re gonna show that. That’s how democracy works. We’re just counting the votes.”

Um, no, that’s not the way it works. News channels don’t count a damn thing. They just report numbers shipped out by election offices in various counties across the country, and if CNN or any other news outfit were actually doing their jobs, they would be alert for patterns suggesting fraud in the numbers they report. If “just counting the votes” were all that it took to have a democracy, then Vladimir Putin’s Russia would be a glorious example of democracy, as would the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But CNN and the New York Times see it differently. Here’s what the Times tweeted on Election Day:

“The role of declaring the winner of a presidential election in the U.S. falls to the news media. The broadcast networks and cable news outlets have vowed to be prudent.”

Well, yeah, I guess that’s better than vowing to be venal, egotistical, elitist, and dangerously biased, but that’s what the news outlets in the U.S. really are. I can’t think of a less qualified set of judges with whom to invest the power of judging winners and losers in the democratic process than Jake Tapper and Rachel Maddow.

Yet they — and their Big (Tech) Brothers at Twitter and Facebook — have set themselves up as the moral authorities on election law. They insist that there is nothing improper about the election because, well, because it ended with the result they wanted. Anyone who disagrees with them, including the president of the United States, they label as a conspiracy theorist.

But let’s think about it. Despite the total lack of curiosity exhibited by the mainstream media, there are many questions about both the casting and counting of votes in multiple states, and it all starts with the amorphous monster Trump has warned us about for months — mail-in balloting. Sadly, there is no way to verify the results of the election as accurate because no matter how many times you recount the votes, you will not be able to ascertain which ones are legal and which are illegal.

When you vote in person, you first make an active choice to vote, confirm your identity as a registered voter to a poll worker, then mark your ballot privately but in the presence of other people, and finally hand it off to a poll worker who scans it directly into a vote-counting machine while you watch.

In other words, you establish your legal right to vote and have a secure chain of custody of your ballot until it is scanned, which you yourself participate in.

None of those steps is present in mail balloting. You are a passive recipient of a ballot, your identity is assumed rather than confirmed, you may be marking your ballot under pressure of either family members or strangers, and you send the ballot to an anonymous election worker through any number of insecure methods of transmission. You have no assurance that your vote has been counted, and what’s worse, you may not even be a participant in your own vote being cast in your name.

The most important thing to remember about mail ballots is that once they are separated from their secrecy envelope, they are completely unidentifiable. They may have come from legal voters, or they may not have. They may have come in the mail, or they may have come in the soda delivery truck. They may have come one at a time, or they may have come 100,000 at a time.

And no one will ever know.

But the boobs on cable news say there is no reason to worry about mail ballots. They say we should just trust the folks who count the ballots because, well, why would anyone cheat to elect the most important public official in the world? Just move along, there’s nothing to see here.

And that is what makes it so frustrating for not just the president but for his supporters who think there may have been deception in the vote-counting process. Because if there is fraud, how the hell do you prove it?

There are only two avenues for a candidate who thinks he has been cheated out of a rightful victory, and both of them have the potential to make him look like (as Jim Acosta accused Trump of being) a “sore loser.” One is the judicial process, which is where we are now, and the other is a constitutional process, about which I will say more in a minute.

The judicial process allows a candidate to go to court to present evidence of fraud or violations of law in the casting or counting of ballots, but then what? Trump’s lawyers have already proven that their election observers were illegally blocked from watching vote counting in Philadelphia. They are also making the case that illegal votes have been cast in Nevada, and raising serious concerns about why vote counting halted mysteriously in big Democrat-run cities during the small hours of the morning the day after the election. But if Republicans prove wrongdoing, what exactly is the solution? Remember, you can’t distinguish a legal vote from an illegal vote once they have been counted, so what can a judge do? What could the Supreme Court do?

Well, in one small part, the Supreme Court is actually well-positioned to act. That’s because the court has already heard one case based on the constitutional provision that federal elections are the sole province of state legislatures. The court split 4-4 on a ruling that would have prohibited Pennsylvania from counting ballots received for three days after Election Day because that rule was implemented by a Pennsylvania court, not the Pennsylvania legislature. The federal judges ruled it was too late to change the lower court mandate, but ordered Pennsylvania to keep the late votes segregated in case the matter ripened into a controversy.

Well, controversy it is. So it is expected that the full court — now including Amy Coney Barrett — will revisit the matter of those late ballots and very likely throw them out. There is little doubt that they are unconstitutional.

But that could only reverse one small measure of mischief, and would not necessarily repair all of the errors of the election. For the rest of those — ones involving procedure or illegal ballots that cannot be distinguished from legal ballots — the courts have limited options. In fact, there really is only one certain judicial remedy, and it is so extreme that almost no one would envision it being used — namely, throwing out the results of the election and mandating a new election to be held in a particular state, be that Pennsylvania or elsewhere.

This would obviously have to be done on an expedited basis since the Electoral College vote is scheduled on Dec. 14, but there is no reason why an election could not be held in a timely manner on a date determined by the court and administered by representatives of the court. Or perhaps I should say there is no reason why that could not be accomplished except for the lack of willingness to intervene that we can expect from either district judges or Supreme Court justices. It would be a heavy lift.

So that brings us to the constitutional solution. This one is more elegant, but it still requires a heady dose of chutzpah. As noted, under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the state legislatures are solely responsible for determining how each state’s electors are appointed. If a legislature were convinced that the presidential election in that state was tainted, it could convene and pass an emergency resolution declaring the election null and void and then choose to appoint a slate of electors by fiat. Since the claim of misconduct is being made by Republicans against Democrats, you can assume that it would take Republican-controlled legislatures to make such a bold move.

Fortuitously, Republicans do control both houses of the legislature in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona. Nevada alone among the contested states has a Democratic legislature. If legislators are convinced that the presidency has been wrested out of Republican hands through chicanery or corruption, they could set the matter right by exercising their constitutional prerogative. This is a heavy lift also, but if states intend to ever exercise their authority under our federal system of government, there would be no more appropriate time to do so than when one party seeks to arrogate unto itself power that it has not earned through a free and fair election.

The republic is at stake, and that’s not just a nightmare. It’s reality.