I’m sure everybody has heard the most recent brain fart by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar:
“I am at the point where it has become really hard to have an intellectual debate with any of these people because the level of stupidity that they are displaying every single day is frankly, embarrassing,” Omar said. “Not just in Congress, but as Americans.”
“And the fact that these people are allowed to say just the most ridiculous things tells you that the dumbing of the United States has arrived, because how else do we get a Trump presidency again?”
I’m not surprised that Omar considers Americans stupid. They did, after all, elect her to represent Minnesota in spite of her very open and sincere contempt for the people she’s representing.
It’s the “are allowed” part of the quote that interests me.
Passive voice is interesting because it hides the active agent and sneaks the real intention behind the utterance past us. Who is supposed to do the allowing or not allowing of things Omar considers “just the most ridiculous”? Clearly, Omar is convinced she should be the arbiter of what is ridiculous and what isn’t.
The Democratic Party has been beaten badly at the polls. Omar is revealing to us that the explanation for the defeat her party adopted is that the narrative wasn’t controlled tightly enough. People “were allowed” to speak. That is the great problem Democrats intend to tackle. If once again they get anywhere close to power, shutting us up is the #1 thing they’ll proceed to do.
Enjoy it while it lasts, is what I’m saying, because truly totalitarian speech controls await us once Omar and Co are back in control.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is what happens when you have a district where the electorate is an unholy combination of Somalians, hipsters and angry African Americans with a grievance mentality, losers like Omar get elected. These sorts of insane female minority politicians really set back female politicians of color, their constituents vote for them to stick it to normie Americans and get free goodies.
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A jihadi whore who married her brother for a green card has opinions about intelligence of americans.
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“…truly totalitarian speech controls await us once Omar and Co are back in control.”
That’s what they want. But I think what they will get will be disastrously different.
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They are retaking the House and the Senate in two years. The House with a large majority, I imagine.
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That’s possible, but I don’t think it’s at all fated. November 2024 was supposed to be in the bag for Harris and the Democrats, but became a GOP sweep. If Trump’s people have the work ethic and moral courage required to root out election fraud, 2026 could be surprisingly more pro-GOP.
Conversely, I agree that the Dems might sweep Congress, but they are not going to magically make their political problems go away by how they then handle that power.
To be honest, unless somebody grows the Hell up, I think the most likely outcome remains a second American Civil War, which will be neither as impossible as some people want to claim nor as fun as some people want to believe.
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“If Trump’s people have the work ethic and moral courage”
Where are the Epstein files?
Why was bringing a couple of pedo-pimps back to the US so urgent?
Even if its’ in the long run best interest of the country wrecking the federal government will have bad short term economic effects… voters use the mid-terms to either express approval or disapproval of presidential policies and I don’t see Trump both keeping his base _and_ getting enough new followers to help. He notoriously doesn’t have coattails…
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That’s why I wrote “if”. I think it’s a mistake to go full doomer; the world we’re living in right now is far better than what we could have rationally expected one year ago. There are real opportunities for qualitative reform, and missteps in Trump’s first month don’t invalidate that hope. But it is very much unsettled whether Trump will have the seriousness required to root out the fraud machine. He has been, so far, on average much more methodical than he was in 2017. We’ll have to see.
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To be honest, “the fraud machine” is concern # one million five in my life. I’m not affected by “the fraud machine” and it’s equally easy to tell me that it exists or has been vanquished because I have no actual evidence either way. It’s all words.
Will we see less homelessness? Will it be easier to save money? Will food quality improve? Will cities become less chaotic? Will gas prices drop? Will housing become more available and cheaper for normal people? Will left ideology be less attractive to people and dominate public space less?
These are changes that people will actually notice. I will notice if I no longer have to be afraid to take a wrong turn in St Louis and have my head blown off by a gangster. But the numbers Musk publishes, then erases, then publishes again – that’s all a fairy tale that does nothing for me.
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There’s quite a lot of evidence for qualitatively decisive election fraud in Nov. 2020 and in the Arizona Nov. 2022 election. The problem isn’t that evidence doesn’t substantially exist; it’s that pointing out that evidence, in our decaying banana republic, was a great way to have your life destroyed. Tina Peters is sitting in prison with a nine-year sentence as I write this, for having obtained smoking-gun evidence of Nov. 2020 fraud in Colorado. John Eastman was debarred for making extensive legal arguments that 2020 was fraudulent. “Speaking truth to power” really only works in decent societies; in morally decayed societies, speaking truth to power gets you whacked.
Nor is it true that rigged elections are irrelevant to things like saving money. Economics is downstream of politics; crooked politics leads to crooked economics; and crooked economics leads to destruction of the middle class.
Nor will losing 2026 due to fraud be a bagatelle. If the regime gets back in power in any branch of the federal government, we should rationally expect the worst. These are not misguided but good-hearted souls, and if they get a chance to try to break America once and for all, they will act on it.
I don’t like this situation; I wasn’t raised to see American politics as being like this; but U.S. politics really has become an all-consuming snake pit. A lot is riding on whether Trump’s team has the mojo to break the quite impressive fraud machine that staged a coup in Nov. 2020.
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Why didn’t the fraud machine help Kamala win, then?
I’m afraid we’ll end up as a mirror image of Democrats who are unable to recognize their mistakes and explain every electoral loss as “racism.” Only instead of “racism” we are using “stolen elections.” We’ll end with two parties which are equally incapable of admitting mistakes and changing course because we let them off the hook so easily.
Seriously, how come there was so much more electoral fraud when Trump was in office than when Biden was? What’s the logic behind this idea?
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“Why didn’t the fraud machine help Kamala win, then?”
That’s a very good question, for which I currently have no answer. Patrick Byrne has hinted that, this time around, somebody with the ability to block long-distance electronic vote fraud intervened to stop what was supposed to be an injection of Kamala votes on 5 Nov 2024. I don’t know if that’s true, or nonsense.
But it is a matter of established fact that the voting machines being used for many federal elections are highly insecure and easily hackable. Tina Peters got railroaded into a 9-year prison sentence for defying an unlawful order to electronically scrub voting machines in her district by getting outside auditors to take snapshots of their hard drives before and after the scrub and having those auditors show that the machines were being manipulated to generate false votes. Alex Halderman (a professor of computer science at Ann Arbor) testified in a 2018 Georgia federal court that Dominion et al. were radically insecure. The insecurity and external manipulability of voting machines is no more of a “conspiracy theory” than the ineffectiveness of Covid vaccines. So the *means* existed for Biden’s handlers to fortify 2024. In fact (as you point out) they failed to do so. Until Byrne or somebody else is more forthcoming, we can’t know why.
“I’m afraid we’ll end up as a mirror image of Democrats who are unable to recognize their mistakes and explain every electoral loss as ‘racism.'”
That’s convenient for the Dems. We can psyche ourselves out of paying any attention to what happened in 2020 in five swing states, or in Arizona in 2022, and we can blissfully assume that because we got a very unexpected break in 2024, it’s all puppies and rainbows now. What could go wrong?
To be clear, I am not arguing for a strawman position that every single possible Republican political failure is due to election fraud. I *am* saying that when elections are sufficiently close, the incentive for election fraud becomes very high, and that until we qualitatively reform our elections, the opportunity for election fraud by the Dems will be substantial.
“Seriously, how come there was so much more electoral fraud when Trump was in office than when Biden was?”
We don’t know that that’s the case at all. I’ve already cited the Arizona 2022 election, which happened under Biden, as an egregious instance of industrial-scale fraud. There may have been others where the GOP candidate wasn’t willing to destroy their lives by challenging the fraud legally (and that is exactly what the legal challenges did to Kari Lake’s career, which had been quite promising until she violated mokita). It’s possible that we really did have a red wave in 2022 but that fraud was used to squelch it. Until we have elections that are resistant to fraud, we have no real way to be certain that any particular result in any particular year hasn’t been at least tweaked.
Again, I’m not saying we should just assume every negative result is fraud. I *am* saying that we should not trust the people who created SARS-CoV-2 and lied about doing it to run our elections honestly, and that we desperately need honest elections if we don’t want to have to solve our political and economic problems in a non-electoral way.
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Well, then if a method was found to combat electoral fraud, we can move on and look at other reasons why we might lose in 2026. Which right now seems like a pretty surefire bet, to be honest.
Or we can accept defeat as the result of an uncontrollable issue with Dominion machines and just give up already.
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“Well, then if a method was found to combat electoral fraud, we can move on and look at other reasons why we might lose in 2026.”
As I tried to write clearly but apparently not clearly enough, we *don’t* know that. Your question about “why didn’t they steal 2024” is a good one, and will remain one until we know more. The reason why I’m not willing to go into full-on denial mode about fraud in future elections is that, if you have the patience and fortitude to read the evidence, there’s quite a lot of it not merely for 2020 but also for Arizona in 2022.
One way of dealing with that is to laugh the problem off. I don’t think that’s a good approach. Another way of dealing with the threat of fraud in 2026 is to take fraud seriously while not using it as a generic excuse for political failure through other errors by Trump, MAGA, or the GOP. As I’ve tried to explain, that’s my preferred approach.
“Which right now seems like a pretty surefire bet, to be honest.”
Be honest: did you foresee the political outcome of 2024? I didn’t.
After watching Trump and the GOP come back to power in 2024, I’m with Lawrence of Arabia: “Nothing is written.” 2024 wasn’t ‘written’, and neither is 2026, if we have the brains and the guts to start acting now in a disciplined way to make a GOP victory possible.
“Or we can accept defeat as the result of an uncontrollable issue with Dominion machines and just give up already.”
If that was my actual view, why would I have bothered writing about fraud at all? It should be obvious that I think fraud is real, that it was qualitatively decisive in at least two federal election years, that it has had bad consequences for all of those “real practical” issues which seem so much more important than boring old fraud, *but* that fraud could be greatly reduced through disciplined effort between now and Nov. 2026. What is not obvious to me right now is whether the Trump administration will, in fact, make the required disciplined effort.
Between Nov. 2020 and Nov. 2024, all of the serious anti-fraud efforts were grass-roots from the MAGA base, with some important support from a few ‘traitors to their class’ like Patrick Byrne. One thing that needs to happen is that those grass-roots anti-fraud initiatives need to start publicly pressuring Trump to face the monster rather than quietly ignoring it. And yes, I think there are reasons why Trump and his people may be afraid to do that.
To iterate again what I shouldn’t really need to keep repeating several times: it is possible to chew gum and walk at the same time, and, it is possible to believe *both* that fraud remains a serious threat *and* that the GOP can lose elections for reasons other than fraud. In fact, I’d argue that political underperformance by the GOP synergistically enables fraud by making electoral margins small enough to rig with impunity.
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I didn’t anticipate the Trump win in 2024 precisely because I believed the narrative about the stolen election of 2020.
I agree completely about the need to start acting in a more disciplined way. I’ve spent the whole weekend observing almost the entirety of the Right being jerked around by a bimbo who tweets under the pen name “Peachy Keenan”, and my faith in the possibility of that discipline was severely shaken. It was already not doing great after observing a bunch of right-wing personalities posing with fake Epstein files and goofy smiles, and the Peachy bimbo didn’t make things better. I strongly (and uselessly) suggest we all get ourselves under control because this is turning into a hen coop that a bunch of drag queens would envy.
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[I meant to sign that last post as Erich Schwarz but I’m having a browser issue…]
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Yeah. All I’m seeing is a show. It’s an enjoyable show but in terms of actual results that would improve our actual quality of life, there’s bupkes.
The Tates and Epstein on one day was a big letdown, I’ll confess. An even bigger letdown was how easily everybody moved on.
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I live in very blue CA so it’s unlikely that we will ever see any of the things you describe (low gas prices, less homeless people). But, here are a few concrete things that I have noticed.
I realize I perhaps have a great deal of privilege here — but still, some concrete things are being noticed somewhere.
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That’s great but I kind of think that the techies would have been fine anyway, you know?
In any case, I want to be hopeful, so we’ll see. Precedent shows that if you don’t do anything really dramatic, you get voted out in the next cycle.
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“I didn’t anticipate the Trump win in 2024 precisely because I believed the narrative about the stolen election of 2020.”
It wasn’t a mere ‘narrative’. The evidence for 2020 being stolen was so bad that we almost convinced Congress to send back the electoral votes on 6 Jan 2021. It took a very conveniently staged riot happening at exactly 2 PM that afternoon (while Trump was on the other side of the Capitol lawn) to stop what would have been a Congressional proceeding in which at least 100 House members and some Senate members challenged the electoral votes. That sort of challenge had never been previously attempted in American history, and it wasn’t being attempted in Jan. 2021 because half the country was having a racist hallucination. It happened because half of the U.S. observed with “their lying eyes” exactly what you and I both seem to have observed.
I agree that seeing Trump win in 2024 is highly incongruous and surprising, but that admittedly striking event didn’t make all of the facts of 2020 go away. 2020 stank of fraud.
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