[A digression: for many years I have pointed out that the current generation of TV moderators and journalists are unprofessional and manipulative in managing their facial expressions, vocal tones and body language. The women are particularly guilty of this. Remember Carol Costello on CNN? She was constantly rolling her eyes, smirking, and doing everything in her power to show her favor toward progressive and contempt for conservatives. CNN let her get away with it. At best it is subtle editorializing, but in its totality it is manipulation. If I were the director of a news show, I would order such histrionics (like the weeping and choked back tears while announcing Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024) stopped, and warn that anyone engaging in non verbal editorializing would be warned, suspended, and ultimately fired. This isn’t hard. Walter Cronkite had a tiny hitch in his delivery and removed his glasses as his only outward reaction to President Kennedy’s death. That was professionalism. It has vanished in his profession today.]

• The Democrats cheat. Their leaders have been vocal about wanting to cheat, as in the James Carville and Kamala Harris calls for the party to admit new states to guarantee control of the Senate, and to pack the Supreme Court with Democrats who would rubber -stamp the Left’s policies. The Virginia referendum, which has been thoroughly examined on Ethics Alarms, was open and flagrant cheating, describing as “fairness” a measure that was designed to create lop-sided Democratic representation in a so-called “purple” state. Colorado tried to keep Donald Trump off the ballot in the 2024 Presidential election. The party covered up its semi-vegetative President being manipulated by unelected far=left operatives behind the scenes. Its captive news media never investigated massive evidence that the President was incapacitated. The party skipped normal nominating procedures—like, you know, primaries and a competitive convention?—to install their DEI candidate without a whiff of democratic processes, all while claiming that Trump “breaches democratic norms.”
• The Left’s mantra is “by any means necessary.” That means cheating is justified. It means violence is justified. We have seen, from the two partisan impeachments, to the contrived 25th Amendment demands, to the Russian Collusion Hoax and the 2024 lawfare designed to deprive American of exercising their choice to vote for a former President if they wanted to do so, that the “resistance,” progressives and Democrats are not restrained by ethical standards and laws in their quest for power. Why would they balk at election fraud?
• Mail-in ballots, early voting, drop boxes, absentee ballots that can easily be filled in by others, voting without reliable proof of citizenship or identity, all of these measures that were suddenly forced on the 2020 election are fiercely defended by progressives and Democrats. In California, everyone is sent an absentee ballot. Everyone can vote, too, without having to prove citizenship—that can come later, supposedly.
• As suspicions of election fraud increased, the Biden administration allowed millions of illegal immigrants to enter the country…to vote?…to swell the census number in Democrat-dominated states, leading to more Democratic members of Congress?
• In the 2020 election, Trump was leading in the vote count when most voters went to bed. Then a huge wave of Biden votes arrived over-night from drop boxes and places unknown. The same thing has happened in L.A. Communist mayor-hopeful Nithya Raman conceded defeat on primary night, but after the widely predicted late ballot dump, is now projected to win the second of two spots in the Los Angeles Mayor Nonpartisan Primary, leaving the mayoral election to be fought between two Democrats. The vote-counting in L.A. and California continues nearly a week after the primary.
• Despite positive publicity and a witty, powerful campaign, LA fire victim Spencer Pratt was swamped by the late-night Democratic vote tsunami. In one wave, the two Democrats were recorded receiving thousands of votes with Pratt reported as receiving none. Oopsie! That was “corrected.”

And we have, of course, the “Dishonest waiter” phenomenon staring us in the face. Somehow, all of these dubious practices turn up supporting Democratic victories. All of the late flip-flops in vote advantages somehow go the Democratic party’s way.

Trump, infuriatingly but that’s our President, is incapable of distinguishing, or at least articulating, the two separate varieties of election manipulation the Axis has perfected. The insecure voting procedures the Left fights for is one; the other is what the President correctly accused Welker and her Axis operatives engaging in routinely: flagrant bias in their reporting, favoring Democrats, progressives, and leftist extremists. Trump’s lazy word for this is “crooked,” which is ambiguous and dumb. That doesn’t make him wrong. Never mind the ballot shenanigans, and the state laws violated because the Wuhan virus hysteria seeded by the lying experts and the news media had people afraid to go to polling places: the reporting during the 2020 campaign (and indeed during Trump’s whole first term) was so negative and so partisan that the election cannot be called “fair” in any legitimate sense of the word. The deliberate censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop discovery and its connection to influence peddling by Biden’s black shoot son with Joe’s complicity is, all by itself, just cause to doubt the 2020 election’s legitimacy.

So back where I started, to my Trump Deranged friend…

One of her non-substantive complaints that she defaulted to when she couldn’t make headway on her substantive points was that Trump, in pardoning the J-6 rioters, called them patriots. This infuriates her, and she shouted about it. I was not ready for that one or the intensity of her emotions, and simply said that I have stopped bothering to get upset about what Trump says or how he says it.

But what I should have said was that I can understand that characterization, and to some extent agree with it. From the hanging chad debacle in 2000 to the overnight Biden vote dump in 2020, the public trust in our elections has been shattered. Patriots should be angry—and indignant, and frightened—about it. The election in 2020 was a fait accompli, with Republicans and cynics being told by the news media, Democrats and the courts, “Ha Ha! Maybe we won and maybe we didn’t, but we have the votes, it’s over, and there’s not a thing you can do about it now!” And, indeed, that was the case. But patriots had good reason to object, protest and demonstrate, and there are precedents in our history for patriots in frustration and anger (and with too much alcohol) violating the law. The Boston Tea Party comes to mind.

I also should have told my Trump Deranged friend (who, like me, is from Boston), that famous incident wasn’t an “insurrection” either.