It might not matter whom Republicans run for president in 2024.
America's propaganda press traffics in disinformation. Its Big Tech oligarchs censor news and information helpful to conservatives, while elevating biased news and information that helps the Left. And its election systems have been overrun by privately funded groups that run Democratic "get out the vote" campaigns to traffic ballots into ballot boxes. We catalogued this particularly complex problem in Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.
Instead of election day, we now have an "election season"--during which, over a period of months, we flood homes across the country with tens of millions of mail-in ballots, regardless of whether secretaries of state or local registrars have any idea if those ballots are being sent to the correct addresses. This in a country where 11% of residents move every year. We then wait for sophisticated partisan turnout operations funded by activist billionaires and run by ideological statisticians to round up those ballots in entirely selective ways.
This culminates with us all glued to our TVs on a Tuesday evening in November listening to "journalists" who spent the months leading up to the election smothering any accurate information about the state of the country with a pillow, making empty judgments about the health of American democracy based entirely on how much the results will further advance policies that favor a toxic admixture of their own corporate paymasters and woke Montagnards.
The Montagnards were the ultra-left radicals in the Revolutionary French Assembly. Or whatever that body was called.
They sat in the highest seats in the assembly hall, thus, they were called "the Mountain." Or "The mountainists." (Though montagnard might just be related to monter, to climb or to ascend.)
They were the model for all subsequent purges. They purged everyone. Every single one of their allies went to the guillotines, eventually. First the Republicans, those who wanted to keep the king, but within a constitutional order in which his powers were checked. Then the Girondists, who were anti-monarchists but who didn't want to murder everyone in the nobility. Then the leftists. Then the hard leftists.
No one was pure enough for the #Woke radical murderers of the Mountain.
They killed everyone until everyone realized that it was only a matter of time until they all went into the guillotines, and a lieutenant named Napoleon said, "Hey, I've got a great, instead of waiting around for the Montagnards to cut our heads off, let's just go drag them out of city hall and chop all of their heads off."
And so they did.
I keep waiting for the Thermodorian Reaction here in the hellscape called America.
In this world, concerns about candidate quality are irrelevant. If we don't fix this complete capture of election infrastructure, it might be impossible for anyone with a sincere desire to prioritize the interests of voters over the ruling class to win a national election.
Case in point: To the surprise of many, Republicans' electoral expectations fizzled in the 2022 midterms. With runaway inflation, Biden's disastrous exit from Afghanistan, and a long line of electoral precedents, Republicans should have had an historic victory. Instead, Democrats gained in the Senate despite a very favorable map for Republicans, and the GOP captured only the narrowest of margins in the House.
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The more likely explanation for these results is that Democratic ballot harvesting operations have reached such heights of sophistication that they can parachute into decisive battlegrounds and scare up enough votes among ignorant and unmotivated citizens to overcome the natural enthusiasm of informed and self-motivated voters.
And of course they just pay citizens to turn in their ballots to them. $10 per ballot, a "ballot harverster" reported in Florida as he dropped dime on his crimes. And he would check those ballots -- which were sealed -- committing a crime in opening them. And if the person voted the "wrong way," he'd either "correct" those ballots or just dump them in the trash.
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Just because some Democratic voter operations are technically legal, however, doesn't mean strategists and lawmakers shouldn't routinely point out that many of their schemes are genuinely sinister and should be immediately stopped. Facebook-turned-Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent in excess of $400 million on "COVID election grants." Naturally, those grants were distributed in a highly disproportionate way such that a) the largest grants went to areas of swing states with a high concentration of Democratic voters and b) the money came with strings attached, such that Democratic Party activists were allowed to run "get out the vote" operations directly from ostensibly nonpartisan local election offices. The problem was so bad that a city clerk in Green Bay, Wisconsin quit because these outside activists had taken over her job.
Incredibly, letting outside activists pay to administer America's election infrastructure was allowed, because it was such outrageous behavior that no one thought they would ever have to pass a law to stop it from happening. Since 2020, at least 17 states have passed laws making private funding of elections illegal. Naturally, the same groups involved in this scheme in the last presidential election have been brazenly trying to skirt those laws. These attempts to purchase electoral outcomes through giving "grants" to election offices also remain legal in much of the country, and despite some good work from GOP-led legislatures addressing the issue, much more needs to be done.
The Hemingways also discuss the "disinformation-government complex" and the censorship imposed by leftwing government groups and pseudo-government groups -- as well as by Woke Corporations, who have allowed themselves to become arms of the government and hence government actors themselves.
A call for an end of GOPe Business as Usual. Your business sucks. Your business model sucks. Your customers are abandoning you and may simply stop voting altogehter. Time for a new business strategy.
Similarly, conservative think tanks and advocacy groups need to get beyond policy papers and fundraising and use their resources to get aligned citizens to demand integrity and accountability of so many of our foundering institutions. The Right is generally uncomfortable with pressure campaigns; but they would do well to remember that these institutions have already largely been captured because the Left had no compunctions about them. If anything, we need to cultivate our own organizational powers specifically to counter the Left's unchecked desire to make threats. If leftist shock troops want to burn city centers to the ground, intimidate conservative lawmakers at their homes, or shut down legislative bodies with protests, this behavior must be countered immediately with the force and legal consequences necessary to stop them from pursuing these reprehensible tactics again.
There's some argument made about it not mattering if we nominate Trump or DeSantis. I don't agree with that -- I believe that Trump brings his own special set of problems to any election above and beyond the left's eagerness to rig them against him -- but I definitely agree we need to do something about all the #Rigging.
You can read the article for that.
They conclude:
The problems are pressing and dire, and the best time to start working on these structural challenges was about 50 years ago. The second best time is now.
Indeed.