News FLASH from Dan Gelernter. And also, y’know, moi.

We’re coming up on another election of national importance—the Virginia governor’s race is November 2. My friends are hopefully suggesting on social media that this will be the election that turns things around, where the full anger of the common folk at being bossed around by autocratic overlords finally manifests itself and we throw the bums out.

Mind you, they were saying the same thing with the same hope about the California recall election. And I said at the time, weeks before the vote was tallied, there was no point in hoping that patriotic anger would outbalance the massive machinery at work behind the scenes: Your votes didn’t matter in the 2020 presidential election, they didn’t matter in the California recall, they won’t matter in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and they won’t matter next year.

And the national circle-jerk goes right on a-circling, the self-perpetuating wank-a-thon producing the usual tedious and unsatisfying climax at the close of another “Election” Day. After another late-night disappointment, conservative commentators awaken Wednesday morning to feign astonishment that the desperately longed for conservative “wave” petered out on them yet again—UNEXPECTED!™—without ever generating enough kinetic energy to finally curl over at the top and forcefully crash onto the encrusted slime and filth we so desperately hoped might at last be washed away from these shores. Hopefully, the ever-phantasmagorical “wave” election might usher the ugly detritus far out to sea, whence the disgraceful blight would then gradually dissipate into nothingness—the whole sorry mess scrubbed from memory as thoroughly as the incoherent, puzzling nightmare you had two weeks ago, a chaotic brain-jumble brought on by the highly questionable shellfish you optimistically had for dinner before turning in.

The commentariat, rising to the challenge of duty and responsibility, blearily springs into action once more to flog analyses and explanations of how such a befuddling thing could possibly have occurred, against all odds and in contradiction of the very latest polls—or, for the more brazen pundits, peddling the shopworn claim that the latest stinging defeat was in fact a momentous triumph for Repugnican candidates who will never be either sworn into the offices they sought, or be heard from again. EVER.

Dan does a quick fly-by past the 2020 dumbshow before moving on to describe the three crooked legs of the election-fraud stool.

So what’s the situation now? Vastly worse. This huge Time-documented conspiracy only half-expected to get away with stealing the election from Donald Trump. They discovered unexpected allies in three vital places: First, the courts, including the Supreme Court, refused to hear a single case of election fraud on the merits. They dismissed all the cases for lack of evidence or standing, which was much safer than letting the plaintiffs present their evidence in court.

Second, the Department of Justice was happy to say they’d found no evidence of election fraud, without drawing attention to the fact they hadn’t been looking. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to any investigation at all: How many of you are aware that it was the relentless pressure of private citizens in Yuma, Arizona, who provided photographic evidence that the Justice Department couldn’t ignore, which led to indictments (so far two public) for vote fraud in the 2020 election? But even as the government was forced to charge the little people who were getting paid to collect ballots and cast them illegally, they assiduously refused to investigate where that money came from. Perhaps it came from a well-funded cabal of powerful people?

But third, and most important by far, the thing that ultimately renders our elections meaningless is people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. They are the most important allies in the conspiracy to steal our elections, precisely because we expect them to be fighting on our side. Fraudulent elections cost Republicans seats—cost Republicans the presidency—so why wouldn’t the most powerful people in the Republican Party be fighting just as hard as they could to expose fraud and pass laws requiring in-person voting with ID?

Here’s the secret answer: These people hate you. Sure, they’re willing to pay lip service to America as a great nation, to churchgoing values, and so forth. But they’re really just Democrats with different special interests: They want to funnel all your money to military contractors instead of environmentalists. People like Donald Trump interfere with that. People like you interfere with that. Because you want the government to mind its own goddamned business. And, on that issue, Mitch McConnell is united with Senator Chuck Shumer (D-N.Y.) against you.

These people live for power. They exist for the pleasure of spending your money to retain that power. And, now that they’ve managed to separate that power from public accountability by legalizing mail-in, no-ID, drop-box, multiple-ballot, and similar voting practices, you think they’re going to give all that up?

Of course not. The power, the perks, the ill-gotten gains will all have to be taken from them. Like it or not, that can only be accomplished forcibly. Coming up next: The Flinch.

There is no solution to this problem short of a Constitutional Convention that restores our elections to their original format: Voting on election day, and in-person. Until we make that happen, there is no point in hoping the next election will be magically less fraudulent than the last one. That is precisely what the Mitch McShumer crowd wants you to do: hope. Hope is an excuse not to act. Don’t take it.

After repeated tries, this hail-Mary pass just might take the prize for Worst Play yet. Just who does Gelernter imagine will be in charge of planning, managing, and overseeing this Con-Con, anyway? Why, the very professional politicians who are most endangered by any fair, open, and honestly-conducted one, that’s who. He gets everything perfectly correct, right up until this sentence: “Until we make that happen, there is no point in hoping the next election will be magically less fraudulent than the last one.” He’d have done much better to omit the opening clause, starting instead at “there is no point” etc and continuing from there. Dan starts off nicely, earning himself a solid “A for Effort” only to close out the semester with a failing grade.

I’ve mentioned previously that, while I wouldn’t be so presumptious as to deride or condemn foljks who doesn’t feel the same as I do about it, I absolutely, positively WILL NOT waste my time voting in American “elections” from here on out, no matter who the candidate might be. In my opinion, it’s far more productive to refuse my endorsement and consent via participating in a process I know from the git-go is nothing but theater, a complete fraud. I see no possibility of anything useful or positive resulting from it, with plenty of negatives in the pan of the scale—beginning with my tacit acceptance of the insult to my intelligence that willing complicity in my own disenfranchisement amounts to. Anybody out there who DOES perceive any constructive aspects of continuing to act as if the “election” grift retains a single scrap of credibility is welcome to have at it, and more power to ya. Perhaps you’re right about which is the better approach. Could be I’m full of shit; I have been before, just once or twice. But whether I am or I ain’t, I am fully and firmly OUT.

Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful, as Little Richard used to say.

Bottom line: a deeply corrupt system can never be reformed by resort to the rules, procedures, and bureaucratic entities created and controlled by that very same corrupt system. It’s such a simple, transparently obvious waste of time as to beggar belief that otherwise intelligent people could be oblivious to it. What’s under discussion here is the restoration of order, decency, and rationality using the pointless and wrongheaded expedient of making civil, adult appeals to the malefactors inflicting disorder and insanity a-purpose, using those things and more besides as the weapons to utterly destroy the advocates of civility and rationality they so viscerally loathe.

We’re well past the point where moderate means can be of any use whatsoever. Only radical measures can avail us now. Too many of those able to clearly identify the problem and even recognize the iron-hard seriousness of our plight are nonetheless not yet ready or able to make the final, terrifying leap into full acknowledgment of the one non-negotiable imperative: That Team Liberty MUST prevail, no matter how terrible the measures required to gain ultimate victory over the soulless abominations presently waging all-out war against us.

Update! The view from Oz looks very, very familiar, don’t it?

There was no violent revolution. No overthrow of the government. No military coup. But the results have been as dramatic as the changes that occurred in the past when the communists or the fascists took power.

Prime ministers have come and gone. Elections have been held. Such events no longer seem to have any significance. You cannot point to any of those prime ministers and say, “it was all his fault.” Under each new prime minister both countries have lurched further in the direction of totalitarianism. Whether Labour or the Tories have been in power, or in the case of Australia Labor or the LNP, has made no difference whatsoever. The process of creeping totalitarianism has continued, slowly but inexorably. It’s clear that elections no longer matter at all.

It’s clear that whoever is in charge it’s not our politicians and it’s not our elected governments. You really don’t need to be a crazed conspiracy theorist to have noticed that.

Liberalism has been abolished. The individual has never been less important, and has never had fewer rights. What matters is the state and the corporation. The individual exists to serve the state and the corporation.

If we stubbornly insist on disagreeing with either the state or with the private corporations who rule society in conjunction with the state, our opinions are ignored. If we continue to be stubborn we are silenced. Dissent is not permitted. Individuals do not have the right to act for themselves, speak for themselves or think for themselves. If you try it on the internet you’ll be banned from social media, or (more likely) you will simply be shadow-banned. You’ll be silenced and you won’t even know it’s happened. In Britain you’ll probably be arrested.

And you don’t have to break any actual laws, because social order is now maintained by the state and by corporations to whom the law and legal rights are irrelevant. If you dissent in any way, even in a way that is technically quite legal, you will be silenced.

Liberalism didn’t fail. It was overthrown by a new ideology which for want of a better term we can call neo-fascism. Nothing matters but the state and the corporation. The individual is irrelevant. Individualism is now an anti-social act that will get you into deep trouble. We learn to obey the state and to obey its corporate partners.

1984 is already here but we pretend it isn’t that bad because the reality is too painful to face.

The irony is, the harder we resist facing reality, the more viciously reality will rub our noses in it.