Election Skulduggery

By Joseph Stanford

     With respect to the recent election, it is interesting that just a few cities ended up determining the entire election: Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. And all these Democratic run cities inexplicably stopped counting ballets on the most important night of 2020.

    Trump publicly declared his suspicion of foul election play in these cities well in advance of election night. This was a good priming method for persuasion, independent of whether he thought he would win or lose. If he wins,

everyone will forget his predictive claims of election fraud and Trump keeps his desk in the Oval Office. If he looses, it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that he challenges the election results. Publicly announcing your anticipatory suspicions of election skulduggery provides multiple paths to victory. 

Every political move or strategy can be spun into whatever narrative the fake news desires. This is how the fake news stays in business. Suppose the Trump legal team intended to deploy an early and aggressive barrage of post election law suits to stun the courts and begin the election fraud conversation while buying time until more substantial lawsuits were prepared based off circumstantial evidence. The legal team may have even had some of these “burner” lawsuits ready to file prior to election night. However tactical this strategy may have been, it still provided a surplus of chum for the sharks of the fake news to feed off. Any sequence of events, no matter how noble or strategic the motivation, can be exploited with a fake, yet believable news story. Creating a fake news story is just as seductive to the capitalistic journalists, who spins it, as it is to the fake news consumers who seek stories consistent with their own personal reality. When it comes to politics, we are particularly subject to emotional inertia in the direction of our own biases. Today this is a monetized industry.

In the weeks leading up to the election, why wasn’t Biden campaigning while Trump was out performing and energizing multiple sold out crowds a day in multiple cities and states. After holding massive rallies in 4 different states earlier that day, I watched Trump closed out a packed Miami crowd at 2:00 am before a short night’s sleep and doing it all again the next day. He did this day after day leading up to the election. Trump called this “leaving it all out on the field”. This was all done despite being hospitalized for COVID19 just a few weeks prior. Biden on the other hand, was getting honked at by a handful of unenthused cars in parking lots at a cadence of a few events a week. It looked more like PR stunts than a campaign rally. I assumed that this was an artifact of Biden’s health. Maybe at his ripe age of 77, Sleepy Joe didn’t have enough gas in the tank to hype up crowd after crowd, day after day.

Even though the fake news spun a narrative that Biden couldn’t string a sentence together, he always seemed more or less coherent during his public appearances. In his debates and press conferences, we never saw him encompass the stumbling mess the fake news made him out to be. But now it’s clear to me, Biden had no “hustle" in the moments before the election because he knew the election was fixed. Why risk putting yourself out there to contract COVID or make yourself vulnerable to gaffs when you know it won’t make a difference come election day. Sure only time will tell if this is what actually happened, but in terms of what makes a better story, let me pose to you the following 2 scenarios:

Trump wins in such a colossal landslide that despite widespread and targeted election fraud, he serves four more years before passing on a broken democratic system to the next generation of presidential candidates.

or

 2. Trump comes up short on election day because of election skullduggery, he calls out the fraud and fixes the system, thus restoring our nations democratic integrity and granting him another 4 years in the White House.

What makes a better and more interesting version of reality? 

I will leave you with the following Tweet from Scott Adams concerning trust in institutions:

“Let’s replace “trust” in intuitions with transparency and good systems. We should never trust institutions. Never.”