https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/11/donald-trump-meet-rutherford-b-hayes/
“The electoral standoff that sees Donald Trump in court and Joe Biden jumping the gun to proclaim himself ‘president-elect’ is an invitation to soar into the stratosphere of speculation. Could this affair, like another contest 144 years ago, end up being decided on Capitol Hill? If so, Trump wins.”
I am, by nature, sceptical of conspiracy theories. But the arrival on my doorstep of Keith Windschuttle’s new book, The Persecution of George Pell, reminded me that they do indeed happen, not least in the State of Victoria, where the Nicola ‘Lawyer X’ Gobbo travesty and the conspiracy of silence surrounding hotel quarantine have still to be fully exposed. Despite the protestations of many commentators, including some for whom I have great respect, I cannot shake the feeling that the US election is being stolen from President Trump.
If that is so, it might be due to an overarching conspiracy, or it could simply be a series of uncoordinated, opportunistic frauds at the local level — ballot stuffing and the like inspired by not-so-noble-cause corruption. Or it could be a combination of both. Setting aside the overarching, ongoing and irrefutable collusion between the Democrats, the mainstream media and Big Tech to ignore or besmirch Trump’s achievements (Middle East peace pacts) and harp on failings real and imagined (Russia! Russia Russia!) while burying Biden’s deficiencies and liabilities (son Hunter’s laptop), I confine my remarks to the election itself.
The reasoning of those commentators calling for Trump to cool it is that, even if there was some fraud, it could not have been on such a scale as to overturn the “result” so eagerly called by the media and, further, that speculation and accusations concerning vote fraud damages faith in democracy. There is irony aplenty there: if elections are bent, the greater crime is to mention it lest the citizenry lose faith in, well, bent elections. These pundits are contemptuous of Trump’s legal gambits being allowed to play out and his expanding file of sworn statements detailing mischief and malfeasance given their day in court. ‘What evidence’, they shout, ‘these are no more than unsubstantiated allegations’. It’s a fatuous claim since, by definition, allegations are always unsubstantiated. Only when substantiated do they become facts. That is a process for the courts.
It is a daunting task to tackle the weight of this orthodoxy. Most readers will understand the term ‘chaff’ used in a military sense. Developed during Word War Two, it involved the dropping thousands of small metal strips to confuse the enemy’s radar systems. There is a lot of chaff flying around at the moment, most of it, I suspect, coming from Trump supporters predisposed to promote any and all allegations that might help to reverse their candidate’s fortunes. Much of it may well be true, but it is very difficult to sort out the wheat. For example, President Trump has tweeted that the Dominion software, used by many states for automated vote counting, has stolen, literally, millions of his votes. It boggles the mind to think a conspiracy so vast might be more than the fever dreams of angry and depressed Trump supporters, yet there is at least one proven instance where this happened. In Antrim county, Michigan, a ‘glitch’ transferred 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden. This error was corrected by the electoral official who noticed it and, purportedly, no other harm was done. But who is to say it didn’t happen elsewhere and go unremarked? Computer glitches tend not to be random, isolated events and, when they happen, they are far more likely to spawn incoherent cyber gibberish and system crashes, not the neat and tidy transference of numbers from one column to another. The only places scepticism about the election result seems not to have arisen is in newsrooms.
