Trump Doubles Down on a Stolen Election
So began a lengthy address by President Donald Trump from the White House yesterday, during which he laid out in detail many of the anomalies, irregularities, and instances of indisputable fraud that have marred our nation’s November 3 presidential election.
The president’s speech was announced on Twitter and posted on Facebook. Remarkably, it’s still available. And you needn’t have a Facebook account to watch it; you can simply bypass the sign-in prompt. The president’s remarks are about 45 minutes long, and, if you care about our Republic, you should watch them in their entirety. But we’ll try to hit some of the key points below.
Or, if you’d prefer to feel your blood boil, you can check out the coverage given the speech by the incurious and dishonest leftist hacks in the mainstream media. As Wall Street Journal reporters Andrew Restuccia and Alex Leary dismissed it, the speech was “the latest rhetorical escalation by the president as he continues to contest the results of an election he lost.”
An election he lost. Strange. We can’t lay our finger upon that article of the Constitution which says that The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or the Associated Press is vested with the power to determine the winners and losers of our nation’s presidential elections, nor our local dog-catcher elections, for that matter.
The president merely “ticked through a slew of statements that have been proved false or that his campaign hasn’t substantiated in court,” according to the Journal’s reporters, without once mentioning the hundreds of sworn affidavits (read: evidence) that U.S. citizens have provided to the Trump legal team.
The president began by noting his duty to ensure the integrity of what he called our greatest privilege, the right to vote. “As president, I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States. That is why I am determined to protect our election system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege. … The constitutional process must be allowed to continue. We’re going to defend the honesty of the vote by ensuring that every legal ballot is counted and that no illegal ballot is counted. This is not just about honoring the votes of 74 million Americans who voted for me, it’s about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election and in all future elections.”
The president hit upon the historical tendencies for fraudulent voting in Democrat-controlled cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit before noting, “What changed this year was the Democrat Party’s relentless push to print and mail out tens of millions of ballots sent to unknown recipients with virtually no safeguards of any kind. This allowed fraud and abuse to occur in a scale never seen before. Using the pandemic as a pretext, Democrat politicians and judges drastically changed election procedures just months, and in some cases, weeks before the election on the 3rd of November. … This colossal expansion of mail-in voting opened the floodgates to massive fraud. It’s a widely known fact that the voting rolls are packed with people who are not lawfully eligible to vote, including those who are deceased, have moved out of their state, and are even noncitizens of our country. Beyond this, the records are riddled with errors, wrong addresses, duplicate entries, and many other issues. This is not disputed. It has never been disputed.”
The president employed a couple of visual aids to make his point, twice holding up charts that showed ballot “spike anomalies” in Wisconsin and Michigan of the sort we mentioned here in Pennsylvania, where a dump of 570,000 votes came in for Joe Biden but just 3,200 for President Trump. “If we’re right about the fraud,” he said, “Joe Biden can’t be president.” (According to the Journal, Biden’s transition team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Thirteen minutes into his remarks, Trump hit upon the importance of the January 5 Senate contests in Georgia. “David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are two tremendous people,” he said. “Unfortunately, in Georgia, they’re using the same horrible Dominion [voting] system, and … hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots have been requested. The difference is, it’s one state, and we will have our eyes on it like nobody’s ever watched anything before, because we have to win those two Senate seats.” The president clearly understands what’s at stake in Georgia, and he’s announced that he’ll head there this weekend to campaign for the two Republican candidates.
“The Democrats had this election rigged right from the beginning,” Trump said. “They used the pandemic, sometimes referred to as the China Virus … as an excuse to mail out tens of millions of ballots, which ultimately led to a big part of the fraud, a fraud that the whole world is watching — and there is no one happier right now than China.”
Trump spoke about phony ballots, ineligible voters, and laughably lax verification procedures in crucial swing states, and he stressed the need to have these many instances of fraud fully investigated and adjudicated — one of them an “equal protection” case in Pennsylvania — rather than swept under the rug. “The media knows this,” he said, “but they don’t want to report it. In fact, they outright refuse to even cover it, because they know the result if they do. Even what I’m saying now will be demeaned and disparaged, but that’s okay. I just keep on going forward, because I’m representing 74 million people and, in fact, I’m also representing all of the people that didn’t vote for me.”
The president closed by saying, “I don’t mind if I lose an election, but I want to lose an election fair and square. But I don’t want to do is have it stolen from the American people. … I am prepared to except any accurate election result, and I hope that Joe Biden is as well. … This is not just about my campaign, although it has a lot to do with who’s going to be your next president. This is about restoring faith and confidence in American elections. This is about our democracy and the sacred rights that generations of Americans have fought, bled, and died to secure. Nothing is more urgent or more important. The only ballots that should count in this election are those cast by eligible voters who are citizens of our country, residents of the states in which they voted, and who cast their ballots in a lawful manner before the legal deadline. … If we don’t root out the fraud … we don’t have a country anymore.” ~The Patriot Post
Walter E. Williams, Thank You
MARK ALEXANDER Distinguished George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams, a nationally recognized economist and Patriot Post columnist for many years, died Wednesday. He taught his last ECON 811 [Microeconomic Theory I] class of the semester Tuesday evening.Dr. Williams was an early endorser and encourager of our news and policy digest, writing 20 years ago, “The Patriot Post does a yeoman’s job advocating for the moral superiority of personal Liberty and its key ingredient, limited government, as specified by our Founders.” He was also a financial supporter over those years, which we considered a great vote of confidence.
He and his contemporary, senior Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell, who retired from teaching and writing his brilliant columns in 2017, broke ranks early with the “black” political and social orthodoxy, which they recognized was actually an enormous obstacle to the advancement of black people.
Williams, who earned both his master’s degree and his Ph.D. at UCLA, said of his early years: “I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence.” One of those primary influencers was Sowell, who in 1969 was a visiting professor at UCLA. They would later work together at the Urban Institute’s Ethnic Minorities Project.
Both men well understood that the socialist Democrat Party, and the statist institutionalized poverty it created, had been crushing black Americans for generations. Williams wrote, “Government should do its job of protecting constitutional rights. After that, black people should be simply left alone as opposed to being smothered by the paternalism inspired by white guilt.”
Dr. Williams first described the structure of that oppression in his 1982 book, The State Against Blacks, and again in much more detail three decades later in his powerful autobiographical memoir, Up from the Projects, a modern-day version of Booker T. Washington’s 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery.
I’m grateful to have several signed copies of books he and Dr. Sowell sent along over the years. They remain on the shelf above where I now write these words and serve as inspiration.
Sowell said of his alliance with Williams, “There was a time when the black conservative community would have consisted of me and Walter Williams. I know Walter used to say the two of us should never fly on the same plane otherwise the whole movement will disappear if the plane goes down.”
Of course, any black man with the temerity to question the Left’s orthodoxy 50 years ago, and no less today, was subjected to all manner of criticism — and viewed as an “Uncle Tom” and a race traitor. This is true of Sowell, too, but also other black conservatives, including Star Parker, Ken Blackwell, Larry Elder, Ben Carson, Jason Riley, and Allen West.
These intrepid souls are among the bravest people in America today.
“Williams,” as he would refer to himself in the third person, authored 13 books, numerous scholarly papers, and, of course, his exceptional weekly columns. But despite his considerable intellect, he had a wonderful talent for imparting wisdom in terms that everyone could understand and appreciate — whether he was talking about free-market economic principles, limited government, individual responsibility, or some other topic.
A typical example would be his explanation of how mandatory minimum wages result in employment discrimination: “What minimum wage laws do is lower the cost of, and hence subsidize, racial preference indulgence. After all, if an employer must pay the same wage no matter whom he hires, the cost of discriminating in favor of the people he prefers is cheaper. This is a general principle. If filet mignon sold for $9 a pound and chuck steak $4, the cost of discriminating in favor of filet mignon is $5 a pound, the price difference. But if a law mandating a minimum price for chuck steak were on the books at, say, $7 a pound, it would lower the cost of discrimination against chuck steak.”
Simply brilliant.
He was a strong voice for American history, and he issued erudite warnings about the consequences of “Historical Ignorance” (here and here), the removal of historic monuments by the cancel-culture crowd, and the rewriting of American history.
Williams’s fellow economics professor Donald Boudreaux observed of his friend, “For 40 years Walter was the heart and soul of George Mason’s unique Department of Economics. Our department unapologetically resists the trend of teaching economics as if it’s a guide for social engineers. This resistance reflects Walter’s commitment to liberal individualism and his belief that ordinary men and women deserve, as his friend Thomas Sowell puts it, ‘elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their 'betters.’”
Veronique de Rugy, senior research fellow at George Mason, said, “Walter was a great communicator of ideas and a prolific, provocative and uncompromising writer. … His voice, his happy-warrior demeanor, his cosmopolitan views, his endless fight on behalf of those with no political voices, and his generosity to all of us at Mason will be missed.”
Indeed.
Thomas Sowell, in his tribute to his longtime friend, wrote: “As a person, Walter Williams was unique. I have heard of no one else being described as being ‘like Walter Williams.’ Holding a black belt in karate, Walter was a tough customer. One night three men jumped him — and two of those men ended up in a hospital. The other side of Walter came out in relation to his wife, Connie. She helped put him through graduate school — and after he received his Ph.D., she never had to work again, not even to fix his breakfast. Walter liked to go to his job at 4:30 AM.”
Connie preceded him in death in 2007.
The final “Wisdom” post by Professor Williams at his personal website was from Richard Ebeling’s “The Real Meaning of Thanksgiving.” It reads, “No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ employed in restraint of governmental power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.”
And he added a bonus post from Thomas Jefferson: “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”
Walter Williams was a fine gentlemen, an Army veteran, and an American Patriot and scholar of the first order. All of us here at The Patriot Post owe him a deep debt of gratitude and will miss him greatly. Farewell, Walter Williams. RIP. ~The Patriot Post
Project Veritas Exposes CNN Brass
As promised, Project Veritas released several clips of Zucker’s phone calls on Wednesday evening. And as O'Keefe claimed, they reveal CNN’s executives collaborating to spin the news narrative against President Donald Trump and Republicans.
Just one example of CNN’s bias is in an exchange wherein Zucker makes the decision to avoid any coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. CNN’s political director, David Chalian, responded, “Obviously, we’re not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden and, which seems to be giving its marching orders to Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber about what to talk about today. Obviously, Hunter Biden’s lawyer is quoted in that New York Post piece, and we’ll just continue to report out this is the very stuff that the president was impeached over. This is the stuff that Senate committees looked at and found nothing wrong in — scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s interactions with Ukrainians — and, now having an email that, perhaps there was a meeting with someone from Burisma is, it seems, Rudy Giuliani’s sort of ‘dream-a-vision’ of how to throw stuff at the wall in these closing days of the campaign.”
The truth is this revelation, if it can rightly be labeled as such, should come as a surprise to no one, as CNN has repeatedly demonstrated that it is little other than the media arm of the Democrat Party. What this does do is provide more damning evidence to support that very charge. Any claims on CNN’s part of engaging in objective journalism is simply fake news.
CNN has responded the only way it can — by threatening O'Keefe with legal action. “Legal experts say this may be a felony,” CNN’s communications team tweeted. “We’ve referred it to law enforcement.”
Upon that news, Donald Trump Jr. hit back by pointing out CNN’s hypocrisy. “It’s amazing that CNN has no problem aggressively running with secretly recorded audio tapes of the First Lady non-stop for weeks, but has a serious problem when someone does the exact same thing to them!” he said. “If it wasn’t for double standards, they would have no standards at all.”
For O'Keefe’s part, he made his intentions in going after CNN clear: “It’s important that we hold accountable the mainstream media. The media has to be held to account. They are hurting the American people with their lies, their innuendo, their slander, the defamation, the hyperbole and I think Mr. Zucker is shaking in his boots right now. I think he’s very afraid of what might be coming.” ~The Patriot Post
Autocrats Coming After Autos
ARNOLD AHLERT In his third autobiography, former President Barack scumbag/liar-nObama took Americans to task for liking “cheap gas and big cars” more than “the environment.” That a man with an 8,000-square-foot home in Washington, DC, and a nearly 7,000-square-foot mansion on 29 acres in Martha’s Vineyard would criticize ordinary Americans for the size of their “carbon footprints” epitomizes the gargantuan disconnect between increasingly arrogant American oligarchs and the “bitter clingers” they clearly disdain. It is that arrogance that drives their plans to eliminate personal transportation as American have come to know it — even if it means suspending reality to do so.Thus, we have imperious fops like UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and California Governor Gavin Newsom promising to phase out gasoline- and diesel-powered cars in the next 10 to 15 years as part of the “green revolution” they wish to impose on their respective “subjects,” whether they like it or not. “Our green industrial revolution will be powered by the wind turbines of Scotland and the North East, propelled by the electric vehicles made in the Midlands and advanced by the latest technologies developed in Wales, so we can look ahead to a more prosperous, greener future,” opined Johnson. Newsom declared, “We just want to fundamentally reconcile the fact we’re no longer living in 19th century, and we don’t need to drill things or extract things in order to advance our economic goals and advance our mobility needs.”
That neither man is remotely acquainted with reality should surprise no one. Of all the zealots who wish to impose their worldview on the benighted masses, none are quite as fervent as the eco-warriors who insist technological advances can simply be willed into existence within an arbitrary timeframe.
Unfortunately for them, reality intrudes. Last year, Professor Richard Herrington of the Natural History Museum in London sent a letter to the British government after he and his colleagues analyzed what it would take to convert that nation’s cars to electric vehicles (EVs) by 2050, not 2035. They concluded that such a conversion would require, based on 2018 mining levels, the entire world’s production of neodymium, three-quarters of its lithium production, and at least half of its copper production to produce the required number of EVs — just for the UK.
America? “The U.S. has about 276 million registered motor vehicles, or roughly nine times as many vehicles as the U.K.,” explains columnist Robert Bryce. “Thus, if Herrington’s numbers are right, electrifying all U.S. motor vehicles would require roughly 18 times the world’s current cobalt production, about nine times global neodymium output, nearly seven times global lithium production, and about four times world copper production.”
Professor Herrington is hardly an outlier. A 2015 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that manufacturing a midsize EV would produce about 15% more emissions than the process of building an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle. For larger EVs with larger batteries, that gap could grow to 68% or more.
Besides, does anyone with even a modicum of common sense consider mining to be a “green” activity? Moreover, as Bryce also points out, internal combustion engines are more efficient than batteries in terms of “gravimetric energy density,” or the amount of energy contained per kilogram; the engines themselves are getting more efficient; and ICE vehicles are far easier to refuel — as in the five minutes it takes to fill a gas tank compared with hours it takes to recharge an EV.
Yet Bryce is also somewhat naive, noting that “EVs are still too expensive for low- and middle-income consumers.” For the self-anointed power-mongers and their totalitarian ambitions, vehicles priced beyond the reach of ordinary citizens is a feature, not a bug, in a brave new world where they promise “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”
Automotive expert Eric Peters sees the proverbial writing on the wall, noting that “by 2030 not much else that isn’t electric will be built,” and the few cars that aren’t “will have been driven off the roads entirely by regulatory fiat and extortionate/punitive gas and registration fees” by 2040.
In short, he sees a world where government-imposed “polluter taxes” raise gas prices to $10 per gallon, and/or ICE vehicle registration fees to $5,000 per year, making such a vehicle unaffordable for the vast majority of car owners.
Yet that extortionist agenda of government-mandated ICE vehicle obsolescence is only part of the equation. Because consumers will be trapped between the artificially inflated expenses of an ICE vehicle and an equally unaffordable EV, the economic “solution” will be the elimination of car ownership itself. It will be replaced, Peters warns, by a rental system producing “serial debt in exchange for access to transportation as defined, delimited and controlled by the owner thereof, which probably won’t be you.”
An added “bonus”? Because an EV is “electronic as well as electric,” it can be controlled by someone “other-than-the-owner,” he adds.
Virtue-signaling auto manufacturers are more than happy to accommodate the oligarchs. Volkswagen, Honda, GM, Ford, Daimler, Toyota, and Tesla are all jumping on the EV bandwagon in a big way.
Coordinated subterfuge is also part of the mix. The move to EVs is being framed as an effort to prevent China from dominating the market. “In a future driven by electric vehicles, China is poised to dominate if the U.S. does not transform its automobile industry in coming years,” asserts CNBC columnist Evelyn Cheng.
In the coming years? As Americans discovered during the pandemic, the same “citizens of the world” who made our nation beholden to medical supply chains controlled by communist thugs are facing the same reality with regard to EVs. Two Chinese companies, Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) and BYD, account for a third of the market in the electric batteries that power EVs, and all six of the major battery manufacturers are Asian companies.
It gets worse. According to a report titled “The Commanding Heights of Global Transportation” released in September by Washington, DC-based advocacy group Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), there are 142 lithium-ion battery megafactories under construction globally. Of those, 107 are being built for China — versus just nine for the U.S.
Do any of our elites remember how government-subsidized Chinese steel devastated our domestic steel industry? Do they care that the same thing could happen to the EV market?
The answer is no. Our elitist class has made it clear that patriotism and national security take a back seat to self-enrichment and oligarchic control. Self-enrichment and control they self-aggrandizingly frame as “saving the planet.”
“Transportation control [is] one of the cogs in their new world construct,” columnist Peter Skurkiss explains. “The end game of EVs, the Green New Deal, the Paris Climate Accord, facial recognition AI, and possibly things like vaccination permits for travel is more control and power for the elite and less freedom for the rest of us. This highway to the future is leading us straight back to serfdom.”
Highway to the future? Highway to hell is more like it. ~The Patriot Post
NASDAQ Invests in Racial Discrimination
Wood, though, soon began to second-guess himself, noting that Wyoming is full of wondrous things — Rock Springs, Thunder Basin National Grassland, Bighorn National Forest, Devil’s Tower, and, of course, nearly all of Yellowstone. But diversity? Not so much.
“If an idea can be said to be important simply because of the number of people who uphold it,” Wood went on, “diversity is indeed an important idea; many millions of Americans regard it so. They are, I think, mistaken.”
In the 17 years since Wood wrote those words, diversity has become ever more embedded in our culture and our way of life. By our count, there are only three monochromatic holdouts among our major institutions: the NBA, the Westminster Kennel Club, and The Washington Post. That list used to number five, but Hollywood announced that its liberal, lily-white legions would begin counting by race in 2024, and Wall Street went woke just this week, with its NASDAQ board cravenly caving to the Diversicrats.
As ABC News reports, “Nasdaq filed a proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday that would require all companies listed on its U.S. stock exchange to publicly disclose the diversity statistics of its board of directors. Moreover, the new rules would require companies on the stock exchange to have at least one woman director and one who self-identifies as an ‘underrepresented minority’ or member of the LGBTQ community — or face possible delisting.”
NASDAQ President Nelson Griggs, however, couched this ominous threat of delisting as — what else? — an opportunity. Now, instead of working to improve the quality of their product or service, these companies can focus on the critical task of “increasing representation of women, underrepresented minorities and the LGBTQ+ community on their boards.”
As Power Line’s John Hinderaker points out, “The purpose of a board of directors is to manage a corporation for the benefit of its shareholders. It is not to advance a collateral liberal agenda, which is what NASDAQ no doubt has in mind. It is noteworthy that the American Civil Liberties Union, which once advocated for civil rights but now is on the other side, applauded NASDAQ’s crudely discriminatory initiative.”
Not so fast, though, says attorney Hans Bader, who notes that NASDAQ’s discriminatory designs seem to runs afoul of federal law. “The stock exchange NASDAQ plans to impose racial quotas on companies that are listed on it,” he writes, “requiring them to violate federal law. Under a proposed NASDAQ rule, corporations would have to put at least one minority and one woman on their board of directors. Such racial quotas violate a federal statute, 42 U.S.C. 1981, which forbids racial discrimination in contracts, and which has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as forbidding racial quotas even when such quotas are motivated by a desire for diversity.”
Ah, yes, the Supreme Court. Thirteen years ago, in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1, Chief Justice backstabber-John Roberts famously wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Seems like a pretty sensible concept.
If NASDAQ’s dopey diversity directive ever winds its way to the nation’s highest court, we’ll get to find out whether the chief justice really believes what he says he believes. ~The Patriot Post
CAL THOMAS
The Dog, the Fracture, and the 'Palmists'
Whenever president-elect scumbag/liar-Joe Biden makes a rare public appearance and is out of the immediate control of his team it increases my suspicions that he is not physically, and above all mentally, up to the job he is about to take over.
Last week, scumbag/liar-Biden fractured his foot and now must wear a walking boot for several weeks while it heals. The scumbag/liar-Biden staff claims the fracture occurred while he played with his dog, Major. They also want us to know the German Shepherd is a rescue dog, which is a joke waiting to be told, full of irony. Who will “rescue” Mr. scumbag/liar-Biden from himself?
The press pool was denied access and not allowed to take pictures of scumbag/liar-Biden after he visited an orthopedist and was given the boot (no pun intended). This caused even Andrea Mitchell on liberal MSNBC to complain that the scumbag/liar-Biden team wasn’t being transparent about his injury. On Tuesday he finally allowed photographers to take pictures of his boot.
Contributing to the narrative that scumbag/liar-Biden is slipping (pun intended) was on display when he attempted to quote from the Bible. scumbag/liar-Biden, who self-describes as a practicing Roman Catholic, “referred to the authors of Biblical Psalms as "palmists.‘” Twice. When President Trump quoted a passage of Scripture during a speech at Liberty University, the press widely mocked him for referring to “two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians.” It prompted a joke that began “two Corinthians walk into a bar.” There was no similar mocking of scumbag/liar-Biden for his “palmists” mispronunciation.
This is no laughing matter. A president of the United States needs to be physically fit and mentally aware to address every challenge, especially those that might come from foreign governments.
Throughout the campaign scumbag/liar-Biden has engaged in numerous malapropisms, slurred words, mispronouncing words and misidentifying people (he called his wife his sister, after all) to raise serious concerns. Yes, George W. Bush and other presidents have, on occasion, stumbled over the English language, but this seems different. The website pjmedia.com has a list of 22 incidents and the list is not exhaustive.
There is nothing about this that should arouse partisanship. Past presidents have had health issues they and their staffs tried to hide from the public. Most notable was John F. Kennedy’s back problems and his Addison’s disease and the drugs to control his pain prescribed by his physician and withheld from the public.
However one voted in the recent election, none should wish any president ill. But if scumbag/liar-Biden does suffer from mental impairment and struggles as he does to articulate even the most basic thoughts, including an inability to put together sentences that make sense, even when reading a Teleprompter, this is —or should be — cause for concern.
The major media, which have constantly lambasted President Trump for actions real and imagined must not apply a different standard to Mr. scumbag/liar-Biden, but likely will if recent softball questions asked of him are any indication. The greatest power of the media is the power to ignore and suppress information.
There are those who believe that scumbag/liar-Biden is only a placeholder for vice president-elect lowlife-Kamala Harris, whom it is speculated many on the left would prefer as president. Refusing to be transparent about the president-elect’s mental and physical health can only lend credence to that theory. ~The Patriot Post
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