Dear Friends,
While many of you may be frantically scrolling down to refresh your Twitter screen, desperate for any news—or, hey, anecdotes of any kind—about who’s going to be President of the United States for the next four years, I’ve been celebrating for awhile now. I thought we’d be just fine, and so—by God’s grace—we are.
That was a sensational election for the Republican party, completely regardless of who gets to move into the White House. Don’t believe me? Just listen to what the Progressive left is saying.
Damon Linker, The Left Just Got Crushed
Erick Levitz, The 2020 Elections Have Brought Progressivism To The Brink of Catastrophe
The Democrats are poised to win the White House. I’m writing this before anything has been called [Update: Just called prior to press], but the wind is blowing in Biden’s direction and he’s almost certain to win (and not fraudulently—see below). And yet pundits and politicians on the left are… grim. Because it is a Pyrrhic victory. As one analyst put it, Biden’s will be a “Caretaker Presidency.” He’s going to occupy the office for the next four years with very little to do. All the big, sweeping ideas are dead on arrival. The panelists on CNN last night were talking wistfully about whether Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden’s buddy-’ol-pal, might be willing to make a few deals here and there. Quite a departure from the visions of grandeur they had 48 hours before.
Remember what I said a couple of weeks ago about governance being like a football game played between the 40 yard lines? All hopes for the long bombs to the end zone are gone. Sometimes gridlock is glorious. Won’t it be nice to just get on with your life without constantly having to worry about what people in Washington, D.C. are doing? Because they’re doing nothing particularly noteworthy? That’s what our system is practically for, to give our communities room to live and move and breathe in wide open spaces removed from Federal government suffocation.
Oh, and that’s also why Wall Street seems to be ecstatic with the election results so far. And when I say “Wall Street” I don’t mean what people usually mean: “Greedy Fat Cats Ripping Off America.” When I say Wall Street, I mean your investment and retirement portfolio.
From the Linker piece:
So please, Democrats, look in the mirror and show a little humility. You're not nearly as self-evidently wonderful or widely loved as you'd like to believe. You are not destined to prevail anywhere. You share a country with a large group of people who hate your guts, and who aren't going to submit to your rule or go along with your giddy plans to remake the nation in your image. It's time to start acting like you understand this implacable fact and all it implies about the limits of your power and the parameters of the possible.
He’s wrong about one thing: I don’t hate their guts. I strongly oppose their ideas and worldview. The rest is absolutely true: half of this country hates what they are selling, and stood up to them with such astonishing success that it apparently has them reaching for the smelling salts. This was supposed to be a blue wave; the blue wave hit a red brick wall. Who is walking away from this collision damaged? Not red, even with the loss of President Trump. Blue lost. They lost 10 (possibly more!) House seats in a year they were talking about gaining 16 or more. They were unable to flip the Senate despite spending gazillions of dollars (Just one mailer from Steve Bullock, running for Senate in Montana, was enough to get thrown in the trash; they made sure I got three a day to throw in the trash). They lost statehouses, a governorship (in Montana—yay, Greg!), and dozens of ballot measures.
The only Republican thing not popular enough to win was Donald J. Trump.
And that is squarely his fault. No one else’s. Not NeverTrump Traitors, the media, pollsters, or anyone else. I know this might sound bizarre, but being liked and coming off as a mature adult is actually pretty important in electoral politics. He didn’t and wouldn’t ever, ever change or moderate his behavior and enough people were fed up and exhausted by it. His speech on Election night was shocking and just underscored for me that he frankly needs to exit stage left. He denounced the election as a fraud (“This is a fraud on the American people, what’s happening here!”) while he was winning and before there were any irregularities at all, and before the votes were counted. Vice President Mike Pence followed him on the podium after this childish temper tantrum, looked embarrassed, and promptly changed the subject. But many of Trump’s followers believe him—that he can only lose by the other side cheating—and so now we have these moments of tense anxiety and angst when these people should be rejoicing in the streets. And it is dangerous to our nation—beyond dangerous, frankly—to undermine the legitimacy of and trust in our process on the basis of nothing more than Donald Trump’s personal disbelief that he’s losing.
I am genuinely saddened by many friends and people I respect who are in hysterics right now about election theft and passing along rumors that somebody’s next-door neighbor’s ex-wife’s girlfriend’s second cousin saw somebody throwing Trump ballots in a dumpster (I jest, but barely). It is not sober-minded, measured, or even rational. To me, it reflects an extremely unhealthy emotional attachment to Donald Trump.
The GOP stands far better today than it did prior to the election, and they appear to have lost the one-man Rage Magnet on top of it. That’s something I didn’t think was even possible. From my perspective, it opens up a whole new world of opportunities if the GOP doesn’t cannibalize itself with temper tantrums and recriminations (I put that somewhere far south of 50/50). At very least, I just don’t see any reason whatsoever for the panic I’m witnessing. What just happened is that the country said, “We don’t want Progressivism, and while we’re at it we also don’t want Donald Trump.” They split the difference almost perfectly (in a truly perfect world, John James in Michigan should’ve pulled out his Senate race—the jury is still out on that vote count).
On Fraud
I say all this as someone who has been an actual disenfranchised victim of voter fraud. I don’t for a minute deny that it exists. But it exists on the periphery, and it is very unlikely to sway elections with these kinds of vote margins. Is it true that Republican observers are being kept from watching counts? If so, Republicans have armies of lawyers waiting to file lawsuits. There is a process to redress these kinds of irregularities. If they don’t file lawsuits with some semblance of merit, if it’s all just Trump surrogates yelling innuendo to a sycophantic crowd or into a camera on Fox News, you can be confident that there’s nothing there. I find almost every other kind of mass fraud allegation—especially ones rocketing around social media—highly dubious.
Do you think only Democrats count the votes? Like, Republicans have nobody keeping their eyes on the process, especially in high-profile elections like this one?
Do you think that if there was a conspiracy to stuff extra ballots into the count, they would be votes for Joe Biden but not the Democrat House or Senate candidates? That’s weird; ballots to get Biden over the top, but not the down-ballot ticket? Pretty badly executed conspiracy to get your guy into a lame duck Presidency because you forgot to flip the Senate while you were at it. Remember: the country clearly wanted to resist the Progressive left and send Trump packing. That’s exactly the kind of ballot you should expect.
President Trump complains that all of these late-counted mail-in ballots are breaking for Biden (it must be fraud!) when he spent the last two months telling his supporters not to mail in their ballots because the US Postal Service was conspiring to “lose” them. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.
I don’t want to make light of fraud: if there are shenanigans going on (and no doubt there are on the margins), they need to be exposed by the light of day. But when the final vote totals are in, I think you will find that “vote fraud” is not going to account for anything like the margin of victory.
Anyway, it occurs to me that you might be wondering about any number of the rumors you’ve heard. Click here to follow a guy doing a very long Tweet thread debunking them one by one.
Oh, back to my story. Let me show you something. This is a screenshot I took from the 2008 General Election raw data results for Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania.
This is the line from Ward 61, Division 6. “634” represents the number of votes for Barack Obama. “Zero” represents the number of votes for John McCain. The only problem? I was there. In person. With my wife. And we both voted for John McCain. This was my immediate neighborhood.
It’s the Philly way (read all about it here), and it is infuriating. Either our votes were thrown away or they just got tossed into the Obama pile. But, on the other hand, I can also assure you with complete confidence that we were the only votes for McCain; we were basically the only white people in our neighborhood and this was the Obama Anointing and Coronation. We weren’t going to save John McCain in Pennsylvania. But they get away with this because nobody is ever going to go digging into the ballots cast in Ward 61, Division 6, at the little polling station set up in the community center of Fisher Park. I mean, it took 12 years for it to occur to me. Maybe Republicans should dig into it, but they never bothered to put any poll watchers or volunteers at that location in the first place. Because the margin makes it a waste of resources.
Most people see a Tweet like this and freak out:
To which I reply: first of all, a county can send a batch of votes that have been separated into different piles, one for Biden, one for Trump. Second, Dinesh D’Souza has clearly never lived in a Philadelphia voting district. If there were any “stolen” Trump votes, it wasn’t more than a handful. Those “zero” vote dumps are entirely believable. Philadelphia County is Midnight Blue, and the Democrats turn their people out to vote. The polling place is a big party all day long while they collect ballots for Democrat candidates. [Late Update: It looks like Biden won Philadelphia County with 87%. Sounds exactly right.]
And that is why Donald Trump is poised to lose Pennsylvania, because that’s where the votes are left to count. And that will be Game Over.
But God has, spite of all the imperfection, been good to our nation. A wave of Progressivism was supposed to sweep away all before it, armed with an agenda to rid the country once and for all of its religious bigotry and hatred and wrong-think and wrong-speech and wrong-belief, all of which is defined, of course, as 2,000-year-old historic Christianity. The country, unexpected by nearly everyone, pushed back in a huge way. And I’m very satisfied and happy and proud of it.
Miscellany
I’ll keep this short because I need to get packed for a weeklong trip with stops in San Francisco and—well, Philadelphia. I’m gonna go down to the election office and throw a fit about my 2008 “vote” for Barack Obama. Just kidding. I’ll be on campus at Westminster Theological Seminary where I will be honored to give the chapel address on Wednesday morning at 11:00 AM (Eastern Standard Time). Here is a link for the livestream that lets you schedule a reminder, if you’d like to tune in.
I’ve long been an admirer of the Canadian organization Choice42, a pro-life group with a knack for producing really great media content. Like this classic:
Well, now they’ve put out a video that is on the darker side, called “Child Sacrifice.” It’s quite an eye-opener, and theologically spot-on:
Finally, all you GOP voters out there being all angsty about the election result, I give you a word from Molly Tuttle. I’m sure I’ve shared this song early on in the Square Inch, but this is a different live version. “There comes a time to say that’s good enough.”
I'm going back and adding a second response to each week so sorry if anyone gets a notification!. my first earnings at sports betting with cryptocurrency - https://tinyurl.com/3fbhv4ts
Love your balance and writing. Thankful to call you both brother and friend.