US Journalist Arrested for Trolling Hillary Voters in 2016. 1st Amendment Effectively Dead.

The official version, dressed up to make it sound like a crime, by Nicole Hong at the New York Times:

A man who was known as a far-right Twitter troll was arrested on Wednesday and charged with spreading disinformation online that tricked Democratic voters in 2016 into trying to cast their ballots by phone instead of going to the polls.

Federal prosecutors accused Douglass Mackey, 31, of coordinating with co-conspirators to spread memes on Twitter falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton’s supporters could vote by sending a text message to a specific phone number.

The co-conspirators were not named in the complaint, but one of them was Anthime Gionet, a far-right media personality known as “Baked Alaska,” who was arrested this month for participating in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to a person briefed on the investigation.

As a result of the misinformation campaign, prosecutors said, at least 4,900 unique phone numbers texted the number in a futile effort to cast votes for Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Mackey was arrested on Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Fla., in what appeared to be the first criminal case in the country involving voter suppression through the spread of disinformation on Twitter. He could not immediately be reached for comment. …

In 2018, Mr. Mackey was revealed to be the operator of a Twitter account using the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, which boosted former President Donald J. Trump while spreading anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda. …

Twitter shut down the account in 2016, one month before the election, for violating the company’s rules by “participating in targeted abuse.” At that time, the account had about 58,000 followers.

Mr. Mackey faces an unusual charge: conspiracy to violate rights, which makes it illegal for people to conspire to “oppress” or “intimidate” anyone from exercising a constitutional right, such as voting.

The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

10 years in prison for posting anti-Hillary memes on Twitter? Well, compared to rape and murder, it’s serious … if you’re a Democrat politician.

These are two of his crimes:

10 years in jail hardly seems sufficient, really. (Heh, am I liable to go to prison for posting them?)

Tucker Carlson pushes back:

This must seem hilarious to the many thousands of Democrats who committed actual voter fraud in the 2020 election, but are fully protected by the swamp.

Michael Tracey:

Democrats have only controlled the government for a week and pro-Trump online trolls are already being indicted for criminal “conspiracies” involving the posting of memes on Twitter in 2016

Election fraud evidence significant, cases dismissed only on legal process grounds. By David Clements, law professor at New Mexico State University, interviewed by Patrick Delaney.

A business law professor at New Mexico State University (NMSU), [David Clements], said that anyone who proposes there “is no evidence” for massive election fraud in November’s presidential election doesn’t know what they are talking about. …

For those who believe “there is no evidence, you don’t know what you are talking about,” he said. “I’ve reviewed hours upon hours of public hearings. I have read almost all of the lawsuits that are out there. Most of them were dismissed on legal process grounds.”

These suits, he said, were dismissed due to a legal lack of standing. “The general argument” that was presented in these cases, he said, “was that because this was a general harm,” then “you have no standing because your harm has to be particular. It’s not because there isn’t evidence. There is evidence,” the professor emphasized.

“In fact, I’m in possession of 574 pages of sworn affidavits, forensic reports, all of which would make its way in a court of law under the rules of evidence in a federal or state court. The fact that the evidence has not been heard here by these courts” should not be conflated into “this idea that there is no evidence,” Clements argued.

“The courts have done what they always do,” Clements explained. “When you have political matters, they want them to be decided politically, not in a court room, but through the elections, through the state legislatures.”

However, he observed, the main problem was that “we have a bunch of cowards. We have judges who are cowards, we have politicians that are cowards, and that’s the reality.”

Clements … encouraged all “to look at the evidence, [including] sworn affidavits where people face 10 to 15 years of prison time if they commit perjury, and statistical analysis that just flies in the face of this idea that there was no fraud in this election.”

There are two new foundational lies of the left: that Biden won the 2020 presidential election, and that Trump incited the Capitol Riot. No disagreement will be allowed. The media and political correctness will enforce these two lies so strictly that after a few years you will have forgotten that they are lies. Disagreement will dissolve away, because it can never be repeated in public. Thus lies will become “facts” that “everyone knows”.

America is becoming a totalitarian state, by Petr Svab.

The formation of a totalitarian state is just about complete in America as the most powerful public and private sector actors unify behind the idea that actions to stamp out dissent can be justified, according to several experts on modern totalitarian ideologies. …

But many Americans, it appears, have been caught off guard or aren’t even aware of the newly forming regime, as the idea of elected officials, government bureaucrats, large corporations, the establishment academia, think tanks and nonprofits, the legacy media, and even seemingly grassroot movements all working in concert toward some evil purpose seems preposterous. Is a large portion of the country in on a conspiracy?

The reality now emerges that no massive conspiracy was in fact needed — merely an ideological alignment and some informal coordination, [Michael Rectenwald, a retired liberal arts professor at New York University] argues.

Despite the lack of formal overarching organization, the American socialist regime is indeed totalitarian, as the root of its ideology requires politically motivated coercion, he told The Epoch Times.

The power of the regime is not yet absolute but it’s becoming increasingly effective as it erodes the values, checks, and balances against tyranny established by traditional beliefs and enshrined in the American founding.

The effects can be seen throughout society. Americans, regardless of their income, demographics, or social stature are being fired from jobs, getting stripped of access to basic services such as banking and social media, or having their businesses crippled for voicing political opinions and belonging to a designated political underclass. Access to sources of information unsanctioned by the regime is becoming increasingly difficult.

Some figures of power and influence are sketching the next step, labelling large segments of society as “extremists” and potential terrorists who need to be “deprogrammed.” …

Is it really totalitarian?

To claim power, the regimes don’t initially need to control every aspect of society through government.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the National Socialist Workers Party in Nazi Germany, used various means to control the economy, including gaining compliance of industry leaders voluntarily, through intimidation, or through replacing the executives with party loyalists.

Similarly, the regime rearing its head in America relies on corporate executives to implement its agenda voluntarily but also through intimidation by online brigades of activists and journalists who take initiative to launch negative PR campaigns and boycotts to progress their preferred societal structure.

Also, Hitler initially didn’t control the spread of information via government censorship but rather through his brigades of street thugs, the “brown shirts,” who would intimidate and physically prevent his opponents from speaking publicly.

The tactic parallels the often successful efforts to “cancel” and “shut down” public speakers by activists and violent actors, such as Antifa.

Dissenting media in America haven’t been silenced by the government directly as of yet. But they are stymied in other ways. In the digital age, media largely rely on reaching and growing their audience through social media and web search engines, which are dominated by Facebook and Google. Both companies have in place mechanisms to crack down on dissenting media.

Google gives preference in its search results to sources it deems “authoritative.” Search results indicate the company tends to consider media ideologically close to it to be more authoritative. Such media can then produce hit pieces on their competitors, giving Google justification to slash the “authoritativeness” of the dissenters.

Facebook employs third-party fact checkers who have the discretion to label content as “false” and thus reduce the audience on its platform. Virtually all the fact checkers focused on American content are ideologically aligned with Facebook.

Attempts to set up alternative social media have run into yet more fundamental obstacles, as demonstrated by Parler, whose mobile app was terminated by Google and Apple, while the company was kicked off Amazon’s servers.

To the degree that a totalitarian regime requires a police state, there’s no law in America targeting dissenters explicitly. But there are troubling signs of selective, politically motivated enforcement. Signs go back to the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups or the difference in treatment received by former Trump adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn and former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe—both allegedly lying to investigators but only one getting prosecuted. …

“I think the means by which a police state is being set up is the demonization of Trump supporters and the likely use of medical passports to institute the effective equivalent of social credit scores,” Rectenwald said.

While loyalty to the government and to a specific political party plays a major role, it’s the allegiance to the ideological root of totalitarianism that gives it its foot soldiers, literature on the subject indicates. …

The left is obsessed by race, then as now:

Adolf Hitler … viewed race as primary. People would become “socialized” — that is transformed and perfected — by removing Jews and other supposedly “lesser” races from society, he claimed.

The most dominant among the current ideologies stem from the so-called “critical theories,” where the perfected society is defined by “equity,” meaning elimination of differences in outcomes for people in demographic categories deemed historically marginalized.

The goal is to be achieved by eliminating the ever-present “white supremacy,” however the ideologues currently define it. …

Just as Marx blamed the ills of the world on capitalists and Hitler on Jews, the current regime tends to blame various permutations of “white supremacy.”

“Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in a recent tweet, garnering some 300,000 likes.

Whites are the new Jews.

And for the same underlying reason, which due to 18C and Australian Government censorship cannot be mentioned. Economic competition is the root of both anti-Jew and anti-white discrimination.

Remember your properthink.  All groups have the exact same statistical characteristics all of the time.  Thus and verily, any statistical differences in outcomes between groups is due to discrimination

Proof emerges that leftist group “Insurgence USA” infiltrated and led the Capitol Riot. By the National Pulse.

Screenshots from a Discord chat channel allegedly hosted by John Sullivan — a far-left, anti-Trump activist who appears to have incited violence at the U.S. Capitol while posing as a journalist — reveal he and his followers infiltrated the January 6th Save America March in Washington, D.C.

The unearthed screenshots follow Sullivan’s arrest for his role in the Capitol riot, which included calls to violence such as “we gotta get this shit burned” and “it’s our house motherf*ckers,” an affidavit can reveal.

The Discord chat channel is allegedly affiliated with Sullivan’s Insurgence USA group, which describes itself as “forming a rainbow coalition to unite all people under one banner to fight for liberation and freedom for all people.”

“We are the revolution, lets [sic] show them the power of the people united,” the group’s page adds.

The chat logs corroborate the recent federal charge against Sullivan, noting he didn’t attend the riot to “report” but rather to serve as an agent provocateur. …

Following the riots, other Discord users revealed they disguised themselves as Trump supporters by wearing hats and shirts with the president’s insignia …

Other users, such as “deaththreat,” admitted that a “large sum of anti Trumpers” composed those storming the Capitol before appearing to identify themselves in the crowd …

Finally, there is now further information that shows Sullivan and his crew were planning to be involved in further violent protests masquerading as pro-Trump rallies …

The latest information severely undermines the establishment’s claims that Donald Trump incited a riot at the Capitol and that his supporters were responsible for the majority of the action on January 6th.

I’m wearing my shocked face again.

See the article and the links for the screenshots.

It’s like the Reichstag fire all over again, and the mainstream media fell for it so enthusiastically.

The United States of America is now a classic oligarchy. By Angelo Codevilla.

In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past. …

Together with corporate America, [government] smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.

Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment. Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience, and they punish.

Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s lived under less ruling class pressure than do today’s Americans. And their rulers were smart enough not to insult them, their country, or their race.

In 2015, Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life’s rules flow from the people through their representatives. In 2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared experts’ claims of infallibility that dwarf baroque kings’ pretensions.

In that self-referential sense, the United States of America is now a classic oligarchy.

Trump was the first major candidate to arise against the encroaching oligarchy:

In the 21st century, the American people’s trust in government plummeted as they — on the political Left as well as on the Right — realized that those in power care little for them.

As they watched corporate and non-profit officials trade places with public officials and politicians while getting much richer, they felt impoverished and disempowered. Since the ruling class embraced Republicans and Democrats, elections seemed irrelevant. The presidential elections of 2008 and 2012 underlined that whoever won, the same people would be in charge and that the parceling out of wealth and power among stakeholders would continue. …

By 2015, the right side of America’s challenge to the budding oligarchy was inevitable. Trump was not inevitable. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had begun posing a thorough challenge to the “stakeholders” most Americans disrespected. Candidate Trump was the more gripping showman. His popularity came from his willingness to disrespect them, loudly. …

Trump’s candidacy drew the ferocious opposition it did primarily because the entire ruling class recognized that, unlike McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, he really was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which the ruling class live, move, and have their being. Since Cruz’s candidacy represented the same threat, it almost certainly would have drawn no less intense self-righteous anger. Nasty narratives could have been made up about him out of whole cloth as easily as about Trump.

But Trump’s actual peculiarities made it possible for the oligarchy to give the impression that its campaign was about his person, his public flouting of conventional norms, rather than about the preservation of their own power and wealth. The principal consequence of the ruling class’ opposition to candidate Trump was to convince itself, and then its followers, that defeating him was so important that it legitimized, indeed dictated, setting aside all laws, and truth itself.

Clinton’s 2016 remark that Trump’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables,” — racists, sexists, homophobes, etc. — merely voiced what had long been the oligarchy’s consensus judgment of most Americans. For them, pushing these Americans as far away as possible from the levers of power, treating them as less than citizens, had already come to define justice and right.

Donald Trump — his bombastic, hyperbolic style, his tendency to play fast and loose with truth, even to lie as he insulted his targets — fit perfectly the oligarchy’s image of his supporters, and lent a color of legitimacy to the utterly illegitimate collusion between the oligarchy’s members in government and those in the Democratic Party running against Trump. Thus did the FBI and CIA, in league with the major media and the Democratic Party, spy on candidate Trump, concocting and spreading all manner of synthetic dirt about him.

Nevertheless, to universal surprise, he won, or rather the oligarchy lost, the 2016 election.

The oligarchy’s disparate members had already set aside laws, truth, etc. in opposition to Trump. The realization that the presidency’s awesome powers now rested in his hands fostered a full-court-press #Resistance. Trump’s peculiarities helped make it far more successful than anyone could have imagined. …

President Trump was way too nice to the oligarchy:

President Trump neither fired and referred for prosecution James Comey or the other intelligence officials who had run the surveillance of his campaign. He praised them, and let himself be persuaded to fire General Michael Flynn, his national security advisor, who stood in the way of the intelligence agencies’ plans against him. Nor did he declassify and make public all the documents associated with their illegalities.

Four years later, he left office with those documents still under seal. He criticized officials over whom he had absolute power, notably CIA’s Gina Haspel who likely committed a crime spying on his candidacy, but left them in office. Days after his own inauguration, he suffered the CIA’s removal of clearances from one of his appointees because he was a critic of the Agency. Any president worthy of his office would have fired the entire chain of officials who had made that decision. Instead, he appointed to these agencies people loyal to them and hostile to himself.

He acted similarly with other agencies. His first secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security advisor mocked him publicly. At their behest, in August 2017, he gave a nationally televised speech in which he effectively thanked them for showing him that he had been wrong in opposing ongoing war in the Middle East. He railed against Wall Street but left untouched the tax code’s “carried interest” provision that is the source of much unearned wealth. He railed against the legal loophole that lets Google, Facebook, and Twitter censor content without retribution, but did nothing to close it. Already by the end of January 2017, it was clear that no one in Washington needed to fear Trump. By the time he left office, Washington was laughing at him.

Nor did Trump protect his supporters. For example, he shared their resentment of being ordered to attend workplace sessions about their “racism.” But not until his last months in office did he ban the practice within the federal government. Never did he ban contracts with companies that require such sessions. …

The progressive tiger and the hate unleashed by the oligarchy will now make it hard for the oligarchy to rule:

Disdain for the “deplorables” united and energized parts of American society that, apart from their profitable material connections to government, have nothing in common and often have diverging interests.

That hate, that determination to feel superior to the “deplorables” by treading upon them, is the “intersectionality,” the glue that binds, say, Wall Street coupon-clippers, folks in the media, officials of public service unions, gender studies professors, all manner of administrators, radical feminists, race and ethnic activists, and so on.

#TheResistance grew by awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them, to their hate for anyone who does not submit preemptively.

Ruling-class judges sustained every bureaucratic act of opposition to the Trump Administration. … By 2018, the ruling class had effectively placed the “deplorables” outside the protection of the laws. By 2020, they could be fired for a trifle, set upon in the streets, prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, and even for defending themselves. …

The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis — in short, as some kind of criminals — to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for prosecuting them.

Neither Congress nor any state’s legislature legislated any of this. Rather, the several parts of America’s economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this war, uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously. …

Joseph Biden, Kamala Harris, and the people they appoint to positions of official responsibility are apparatchiks, habituated to currying favor and pulling rank. They have neither the inclination nor the capacity to persuade the oligarchy’s several parts to agree to a common good or at least to a modus vivendi among themselves, never mind with conservative America. This guarantees that they will ride tigers that they won’t even try to dismount. …

Those who oppose the oligarchy must now build their own country within a country, because the oligarchy stole their country:

Intending to relegate conservative America to society’s servile sidelines, the oligarchy’s members drew a clear, sharp line between themselves and that America. By telling conservative Americans “these institutions and corporations, are ours, not yours,” they freed conservative America of moral obligations toward them and themselves. By abandoning conservative America, they oblige conservative America to abandon them and seek its own way. …

Increasingly, conservative Americans live as if under occupation by a hostile power. Whoever would lead them should emulate Charles de Gaulle’s 1941 basic rule for la résistance: refrain from individual or spontaneous acts or expressions that produce only martyrs. …

Thus, an aspirant to the presidency in 2024, … as he pursues legislative and judicial measures to abolish the compulsory racial and gender sensitivity training sessions to which public and private employees are subjected, he might organize employees in a given sector unanimously to stay away from them in protest. They can’t all be fired or held back. …

Electoral politics, however, is the easy part. Major corporations, private and semi-private institutions such as schools, publishing houses, and media, are the oligarchy’s deepest foundations. These having become hostile, conservative Americans have no choice but to populate their own. This is far from impossible. …

As conservative America sorts itself out from oligarchy’s social bases, it may be able to restore something like what had existed under the republic. Effectively, two regimes would have to learn to coexist within our present boundaries. But that may be the best, freest, arrangement possible now for the United States.

Read it all. A long article from a deep thinker, who has a good track record of being right.

hat-tip Charles

Georgia’s Hand Recount: Why It Is Almost Certainly Wrong. By David Evans.

Tim, a reader, asks about November’s Presidential vote in Georgia:

I watched the testimony of the data scientists from the Data Integrity Group and what they have shown is persuasive. I do have a question though. How do we as conservatives reconcile their findings with the hand counts in Georgia which still found Joe Biden as the winner?

Good question. Georgia eventually decided to recount their vote, even though they were not obliged to. They hand counted it, to avoid problems with machine counting. The recount found Biden won by 12,284 votes, less than 400 votes different from the original count of 12,670 votes. By the way, this winning margin is about 0.25% of the almost 5 million ballots counted.

There are two phases to a vote count, voting and counting. Georgia was plagued by fraud in both phases. A hand recount only affects the counting phase, but in Georgia even that was not enough even to eliminate fraud in the counting phase.

Phase 1: Voting

Are all the voters legal? How may ballots are cast by those not eligible to vote? Were fraudulent ballots added to the vote pile?

Andrea Widburg:

Phase one results in ineligible ballots that are fatally flawed and cannot legally be counted. For years, Democrats have been making Phase One fraud easier. Here are some of the methods they’ve used, often justifying them on minority civil rights grounds:

• Motor voter registration (people are registered when they get a driver’s license), creating a massive number of registered voters, most of whom don’t vote.
• Refusing to clean up voter registration rolls, creating millions of registrations tied to people who died or relocated.
• Banning ID requirements at polling places.
• Banning poll workers from comparing signatures on ballot sign-up sheets or mail-in envelopes to those on record.
• Same-day registration.
• Extending voting to a month-long period.
• Absentee voting for anyone who desires.
• Mailing ballots to every registered voter.
• Voting only by mail.
• Ballot-harvesting, which allows activists to collect ballots from voters and submit them. Harvesters can fill out ballots or dispose of ballots with which they disagree.
• Judges and bureaucrats extending the voting deadline.

All of the above Democrat initiatives make the following types of fraud easier, particularly when paired with chicanery at the polling site, such as banning poll-observers:

• People voting using another person’s ballot.
• Postal workers backdating mailed in ballots.
• Insiders obtaining and completing blank ballots en masse.
• Repeatedly feeding the same ballots into voting machines.
• Throwing out Trump votes.
• Completing incomplete ballots.
• Faking same-day registrations of non-existent voters.
• Throwing out mail-in envelopes to make it impossible to winnow out fraudulent ballots. …

Trump’s team has acquired thousands of affidavits proving these frauds.

Once the illegal ballots are mixed in with the legal ballots, there is usually no way to un-mix them. The illegal votes will be counted, regardless of the counting method.

Andrea Widburg again:

In a brief video … here, Dick Morris explains that … to the extent there are still available envelopes from the mailed in (absentee) ballots, secretary of state Brad Raffensperger stated that the counters would not attempt to match the signatures.

The refusal to check signatures or otherwise try to validate mail-in ballots has created hugely anomalous rejection rates. Typically, Georgia rejects 3.5% of absentee ballots because they cannot be validated.  This year, says Morris, the rejection rate is 0.002%.  As Morris said, with nothing more, that discrepancy points to vast fraud.

Leah Barkoukis, on illegal ballots dumped into the vote count:

Susan Voyles, a Georgia poll worker with 20 years of experience, said in a sworn affidavit Tuesday that she noticed something strange about a batch of ballots that overwhelmingly favored Joe Biden, leading her to believe “additional absentee ballots had been added in a fraudulent manner.”

The observation came when she was serving as an auditor in the recount at the Fulton County Sandy Springs poll station.

“For our first assignment, we were given a cardboard box that contained only absentee ballots,” she wrote. “It was taped shut with packing tape with the seal of the Secretary of State. But the seal was blank, signed by no one, and no information had been supplied. There were no markings indicating the provenance of the box. The box was marked as Box No. 5—Absentee—Batch Numbers 28-36.”

Within that box were stacks of ballots, with roughly 100 in each stack.

“Most of the ballots had already been handled; they had been written on by people, and the edges were worn. They showed obvious use. However, one batch stood out. It was pristine,” she continued. “There was a difference in the texture of the paper — it was if they were intended for absentee use but had not been used for that purposes. There was a difference in the feel.”

The ballots also showed no markings to indicate where they came from or were processed. “These stood out,” she said.

With 20 years of handling ballots behind her, Voyles “observed that the markings for the candidates in these ballots were unusually uniform, perhaps even with a ballot-marking device.”

According to her estimate, 98 percent were for Joe Biden.

Gregory Miller:

In addition to concerns over a scarcity of well-documented statewide procedures for this process, there is one more controversy:

“With respect to the machine-marked paper records generated by ballot marking devices (BMDs), even if human eyes manually review votes by reading only the human-readable text of choices, can those paper records rightly be called a trusted and auditable record of voter intent that was verified by the voter?”

[Dr. Philip Stark of U.C. Berkeley, the inventor of risk-limiting audits] has explained in many forums that when voter’s choices on paper records are machine-marked (i.e., in other words an imperfect complex electronic computing device is inserted between the voter and the act of recording a choice) and furthermore, given research indicating that most voters do not take time to review and verify the machine-marked record, then it is problematic to assume that the BMD records are “auditable” records of voter intent.

Furthermore, many US voters have complained that the machine paper record recorded the opposite of what they voted. Oops, sorry, made a mistake — or is the machine software just flipping some votes? Elections using hand-marked paper ballots are so much more secure.

Phase 2: Counting

If by machine, who loads and checks the software? If by hand, are there scrutineers from both parties watching every ballot as it is counted?

Andrea Widburg, on counting errors in Georgia:

The best way to prevent humans from cheating is to watch them. Indeed, those of you old enough to remember the Florida recount in 2000 will also remember that the media wandered freely through the counting rooms, getting close-ups of people carefully examining each ballot for those infamous hanging chads. Everyone understood that the point was to get it right.

What happens, though, when the people in charge of the recount, in place of transparency, once again refuse to allow representatives of the parties to audit their work? What happens is this:

In Australia, we hand count votes — no machines. Each party with a member in the election sends along scrutineers to watch the vote count. Each vote counter has a scrutineer from each party watch them count each and every vote. Any scrutineer can challenge any vote, or any part of the process. Then they have to do it again until everyone agrees. In this manner, everyone agrees on the final count.

The Georgia counting process was not scrutinized. The vote counters could have simply made up the numbers of the hand count to match the earlier machine count, in order to hide any voting machine fraud. We don’t know if the hand count is correct, because they wouldn’t allow us to see it. Secret counting produces unaudited, suspect results. The Georgia recount was designed to hide vote fraud, not expose it. Georgia could have allowed proper scrutiny, but instead choose a secret process — the inference is obvious. By not allowing effective oversight by both parties, the hand recount is not credible.

Tim above referred to the data scientists who found problems with Georgia’s vote. Jon Dougherty:

A team of data scientists testifying before a state Senate panel in Georgia earlier this week said thousands of votes were switched from President Donald Trump to his Democratic challenger Joe Biden during balloting last month.

The team, led by Lynda McLaughlin that includes data scientists Justin Mealey and Dave Lobue, told the Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Wednesday they found that 17,650 votes changed from the president to Biden.

“What we have here is we actually have fraud that we can prove in this election, there was fraud in Georgia’s election, we can prove it with data,” Mealey, who served as a Navy electronic warfare technician for nearly a decade as well as a data analyst and programmer for the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, told the panel.

“The voting will of the people of Georgia is not reflected in what was certified by the secretary of state,” Mealey, who currently works for one of the “Big Four” accounting firms as a programmer, added. …

The analysts said that the switches occurred at the county level and were difficult to detect at the state level because the decreases were offset by data uploaded by other counties that was accurate.

They alleged that a “clear example of vote switching” occurred in DeKalb county.

Around 9:11 p.m. local time, the analysts said that Trump got 29,391 votes while Biden received 17,218. But during the next update, the president’s vote tally had fallen to 17,218 and Biden’s increased to Trump’s previous total of 29,391, according to the published data.

That single event resulted in a swing (loss) of votes away from Trump of 12,173.

“I want to make that very, very clear that at no point in an incremental process, should you decrement it,” Lobue told the panel.

So Tim, it appears the hard recount was just theater designed to lend credibility to the result and deflect attention from the irregularities, without being a serious attempt to even count the ballots, let alone remove the illegal ballots.

It has mild propaganda value, but in a search for the truth the hand recount was worth almost nothing.

“The Storming of the Capitol”: The four big lies underpinning this story show it was likely a staged event. By Kit Knightly.

The story we are being told goes as follows:

Yesterday, as Congress was preparing to pass the vote endorsing Joe Biden’s election victory, thousands of violent right-wing thugs stormed the Capitol building.

Acting according to Trump’s wishes, and with his endorsement, these domestic terrorists overran the police barricades in an attempt to overthrow the senate and preserve Trump’s presidency.

Fortunately the police were able to secure the situation, drive the violent rioters out and the democratic process was able to continue.

Not one single part of this story is true. …

1. There was no “storming”. Rather videos show police opening barriers to let the “rioters” in.

In the entrance hall, the “violent thugs” respected the velvet ropes and kept in orderly lines, took a few selfies with the cops, posed for the press and — when the main events were over — they were quietly allowed to leave.

Compare and contrast the police’s treatment of those people inside the capitol, with their later treatment of protesters breaking curfew on the streets.

2. There was no “incitement”. All of Trump’s social media posts on the subject instructed people to “go home” “with peace and love”.

Is that inciting violence?

Twitter and Facebook took the totally unprecedented step of completely removing those posts, and blocked him posting any further. They claimed to be preventing further violence, but it looks more like they concealed Trump’s denunciations of violence.

3. There was no violence. Indeed whether or not Trump “incited” anything is moot, because there was no violence. Disregard the reports of chemical weapons, pipe bombs or IEDs — none of which ever appeared. None of the “rioters” are as yet shown to have hurt anyone.

The only person reportedly killed or injured was a protester allegedly shot by the police. Compare and contrast the attitude of the media to this “violence”, vs the “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests all last summer.

4. The riot ended Trump’s presidency. Although the Congressional session was widely described in the press as the “confirmation vote” for Joe Biden’s election victory, it was actually rather more than that.

VP Mike Pence was chairing a joint-session which intended to allow full speeches from those opposing the election and maintaining there had been fraud.

The violence brought this session to an end prematurely, totally undermined Trump’s legal and procedural challenges and killed any chance he had of overturning the electoral college vote. No sooner was the “attack” over, than many of the Republicans in both houses who were planning to oppose Biden’s election backed-down.

More than that, it seems Trump’s “incitement” of the rioters means he may well be removed from office by enforcement of the 25th amendment, which would end not just this term, but make it illegal for him to run again in the future.

Facebook and Twitter have outright banned him from posting. The press and television pundits are openly accusing him of treason and sedition.

So, who has really benefitted from the “chaos at the Capitol”? Because it surely isn’t Donald Trump.

One should always be wary of any event which “accidentally” achieves the exact opposite of its stated or apparent intent. …

Some prominent voices are calling for all lawmakers backing Trump to be expelled from office. The Washington Post claimed “seditious Republicans must be held accountable”.

The anti-social media campaign has begun again in earnest too, with Parler and GAB already being blamed for allowing “violent language” on their platforms.

As Twitter and Facebook limit discussion, alternative platforms will be shutdown. Enforcing a corporate monopoly that cooperates with the state…the very definition of fascism.

All this in the name of protecting the nation from “neo-nazi thugs” or “white supremacists” or other phantom threats. In the name of “protecting the constitution”, they are tearing it to pieces. In the name of “preventing a coup”, they are carrying one out in front of our eyes.

The Nazis were left wing socialists (they were way up the communal end of the individualism spectrum), and so many of the left’s actions in the last three months come out of the Nazi playbook. Street violence all summer, then the Reichstag fire, followed by the night of the long knives, the big lies, and ever-growing censorship applied by private companies in bed with the government bureaucracy. It’s textbook fascism.

hat-tip Charles

Facial recognition firm claims antifa infiltrated Trump protesters who stormed Capitol. By Rowan Scarborough at the Washington Times.

Trump supporters say that antifa members disguised as one of them infiltrated the protesters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

A retired military officer told The Washington Times that the firm XRVision used its software to do facial recognition of protesters and matched two Philadelphia antifa members to two men inside the Senate.

The source provided the photo match to The Times.

One has a tattoo that indicates he is a Stalinist sympathizer. …

XRVision also has identified another man who, while not known to have antifa links, is someone who shows up at climate and Black Lives Matter protests in the West.

Presumably not Jake Angeli, however:

Alec Dent:

The man pictured … is, in fact, a long time QAnon supporter named Jake Angeli, described as a “fixture at Arizona right-wing political rallies over the past year” by the Arizona Republic, the largest newspaper in the state. The picture of Angeli at a BLM march is cropped; the full image shows that he was carrying a sign saying,“Q sent me.” Angeli was interviewed by an Arizona Republic reporter in May of 2020 and had high praise for Trump. And shortly after the 2020 presidential election, Angeli spoke at a pro-Trump rally and claimed that the election “has not been called.”

The Great Reset Explained In 5 Minutes.

hat-tip Mark Ellis

New Study: Dominion and Hart voting machines fraudulently increased Biden’s vote by 5%. From a report by DataScience and available here.

First, the investigators used census data to build a model to predict the percentage of votes for Biden in each county in the US. This is a fairly standard and reliable statistical exercise.

While naturally the percentage Biden actually achieved in each county fluctuates from the predicted value, we found for most counties the model does a good job in predicting what should be Biden’s percentage of votes won.

Next, they obtained a data file from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission showing the voting machines used by each county in the United States. They then compared the official votes for Biden with the predicted votes, and noticed that in counties with Dominion and Hart voting machines that Biden got about 5% to 6% more votes than expected:

The official Biden vote in counties using other types of voting machines was about the same or only slightly more than predicted.

The Dominion counties were, on average, performing continuously above the predicted values for Biden had the counties used any other machines. This indicates the potential fraud was widespread and impacted vote counts in a systematic method across many machines and counties. …

In normal circumstances any candidate should perform above expectations roughly 50% of the time and under-perform roughly 50% of the time.

We see this normal result in the “Other” machine counties, with candidate Biden performing “above” expected values 46% of the time. However, in the Dominion/Hart machine counties, Biden performs above expectations 78% of the time.

This is highly indicative (and 99.9% statistically significant) that result manipulation could be occurring with the Dominion/Hart machines.

Could this statistical finding of fraud be due to something else? Almost certainly not:

One natural reaction to this analysis is to ask, “But what if the Dominion machines are only in Democratic strongholds and that is the cause of the pattern?” or “What if the votes for Biden came to a high degree from urban areas?”

It is important to understand that the analysis above is not directed at a single or handful of counties. If a single “dirty” county inflated vote totals for a candidate this analysis would not pinpoint that occurrence. Instead, this information uses data from all counties in the United States to see if there is a discernable widespread pattern involving type of voting machine and vote totals.

Next, it is also simply not true that Dominion machines are only in strong Democratic counties. In Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, for example — many rural counties that would be considered “Trump” counties use Dominion machines. The pattern of candidate Biden being “plus 5.6%” holds true across all Dominion-enabled counties, not just urban areas and Democrat strongholds.

In addition, the prediction values we developed for candidate Biden incorporated variables from the US census — including ethnicity, urban/rural indicators, and other economic indicators. All of these correlate with “traditional democratic strongholds” and urban/rural areas. Our analysis takes into account most, if not all, of these concerns. E.g., our predicted values already assign higher likely percentage of vote total for Biden in urban areas. Candidate Biden over-performed our estimates in these areas — by the same amount he over-performed in “Trump” counties.

Conclusion:

It appears the fraud may have been some type of systematic programming resulting in the “over-performance” of candidate Biden by approximately 5% in many of the counties in which the machines were used. The increases in votes occurred in hundreds of counties in the U.S.

The election results from any county in the U.S. that used Dominion BMD machines or Hart Intercivics machines are, in our opinion, not reliable. Federal, State and local officials should take every possible action to investigate and correct the calculated tallies of their elections if they used any of these machines in the vote counting.

In cases where this is not one hundred percent possible, authorities should nullify the vote from their election due to lack of certainty in the results.

That confirms the general thrust of Sidney Powell’s complaints about the Dominion machines. Do the Hart machines use the same or similar software?

In any case, this proves beyond reasonable doubt that one of the methods of fraud used in this election was that the Dominion and Hart voting machines were rigged in favor of Biden to the tune of about 5%. That alone would be enough to flip the election. (Those machines were used in a sizeable minority of counties, including the swing states.).

The US needs to hold a do-over election, at least in the six swing states.

Stephen writes:

How high is the mountain of evidence now? Everest, or non-existent as the shameless liars in the MSM would have it?

Do the thought experiment: switch Trump for Biden and Republican for Democrat, yet leave everything else the same. Would the corrupt MSM watch Republican operatives pull out cases of ballots from under tables and then say, “nothing to see here, move along”? Not for a nanosecond.

The lying MSM spent three years passionately screaming about election integrity on the basis of absolutely nothing. (Actually it was something: a fraudulent dossier bought and paid for by the hopelessly corrupt Clintons). Yet, now the MSM are passionately uninterested. Or is it hostilely uninterested?

hat-tip Stephen Harper