Trump made a colossal tactical blunder by telling his supporters to fight vote fraud in the streets. That led to last week’s excesses, and the biggest crackdown on conservatives in American history. David Horowitz likes to say, inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out. Is he ever right!
The suspension of President Trump’s Twitter account (denounced by Germany’s Angela Merkel and top French officials as a violation of basic rights) is an affront to democracy: Whatever Trump did or didn’t do, he is the elected president of the United States, convicted in no court of law, and the people have the right to hear from him. The suspension of the free-speech social media platform Parler is another totalitarian outrage by what France’s Finance Minister calls “the digital oligarchy.” And now CNN demands that cable companies drop Fox News and Newsmax.
The Trump campaign’s vote fraud lawsuits crashed and burned because the standard of proof required by a court to overturn an election is extremely high. Proof of some fraud, or a statistical proof that the outcome was highly improbable, do not meet that standard. It must be proven that sufficient votes were stolen or invented to change the outcome. No one can collect that kind of information in a few weeks. But it can be collected in months or years, and that’s what it will take.
Either we are in this for the duration, or we’ve lost. But we have not lost yet. There was massive fraud. Whether there was sufficient fraud to determine the outcome is beside the point. Large parts of the Democratic Party are criminal organizations and have to be held accountable. Take a cold shower and a deep breath, and prepare for a long war. Ask yourself if you want to win, or just let off steam.
Civil suits require a much lower standard of proof. Criminal cases must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, but civil suits require only “the preponderance of the evidence.” We may not be able to produce enough phony ballots or enough affidavits from Trump voters to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the results were fudged, but civil cases can produce a preponderance of evidence of fraud. Statistical arguments don’t hold water before a judge considering whether to overturn an election, but they contribute to preponderance of evidence.
Every Trump elector or Republican candidate who lost due to suspected fraud can sue the relevant Democratic Party apparatchiks in civil court. These lawsuits allow interrogation of the miscreants under oath. If we can’t put them in jail for vote fraud, we can get them on perjury. And we can wreak merry havoc on the Democratic Party organizations, and make mid-level officials pay the price for the nefarious schemes of their superiors. The rank-and-file fraudsters and the local party machines are the soft underbelly of the Democratic Party. That’s where it is vulnerable to a sustained and relentless attack.
This will require patience and the participation of tens of thousands of volunteers, as well as a good deal of money (although it might eventually pay for itself through the collection of civil damages). Civil suits have been litigated successfully against vote fraud for years. Thousands of such suits would ruin the Democrats.
The issue is not whether fraud determined the outcome of the national election; the fact that massive fraud occurred is sufficient to shred the Democratic Party. For the record, I doubt that fraud won the election for Biden (why didn’t the Democrats fake ballots for the House as well as the White House?). That’s immaterial. There was enough fraud to catch the Democrats’ collective necktie in the wringer.
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