Hat tip to commenter Shlomo Maistre for this link to an important piece by Darryl Cooper, published by Glenn Greenwald on his Substack site.
Who are these people?
And what does “apodictic” mean?
“Apodictic” means “clearly established or beyond dispute”. I first read it as “apocalyptic” and honestly that word would have worked as a political metaphor. For a worldview of basic trust in American institutions that has has held sway for more than a century, these are the end times.
Glenn Greenwald is a left wing independent journalist and blogger. He first came to my attention circa 2003 when he was against the Iraq war when I and most of the people I followed were for it. To be frank the main reason I remembered his name was a silly incident when he got caught out bigging up his own reputation under a different name. That was nearly twenty years ago. I now say without irony that he is one of the journalists I most admire in the world. He used to work for the Guardian, but wanted more independence so he resigned from there in 2013 to join with two other people and found a news outlet called the Intercept. Then when the Intercept tried to stop him writing about the Hunter Biden laptop story he resigned from there and went over to Substack. Greenwald is wrong about many things. But he is that strange, old-fashioned type of person, a reporter who won’t shut up for the good of the Party.
Darryl Cooper, who goes by the Twitter handle of “MartyrMade”, is a podcast host who thought he had given up Twitter. Then he got talking to a friend’s mother about Trump and the US election, and decided to crystallise the conversation in a series of thirty-five tweets that went viral. Fox News host Tucker Carlson read out most of the sequence on air. Donald Trump mentioned him by name. His current article, the one this post is about, is that Twitter thread all in one place. Here it is: Author of the Mega-Viral Thread on MAGA Voters, Darryl Cooper, Explains His Thinking.
Reading this from another country, I want to home in on one thing. There is much about the whole Trump phenomenon starting from his election in 2016 and ending four years later that I do not understand. I do not know the truth of every claim and counter-claim. But, like MartyrMade, I do know one thing with apodictic, apocalyptic certainty. If they – Twitter and Facebook and the Democrat-supporting media, which is most of the media in the English-speaking world including the UK, and the FBI and the CIA, who the media used to boast of holding to account but are now their bosom friends – did find evidence of election fraud, they would not tell us. They would lie and censor just like they did about the contents of Hunter’s laptop.
That knowledge is not in itself proof that fraud did occur. But every belief about the world is buttressed by the unspoken certainty that if something turned up to contradict it, we would be told. When that buttress is kicked away one starts to wonder about a lot of previously unquestioned beliefs.
Edit: Great minds think alike. Unknown to me, while I was typing out this post my Illuminated colleague was posting the video of Tucker Carlson reading out Darryl Cooper’s thread.
For obvious literary reasons
was not expressed as
but I suggest that the former should be understood as meaning the latter.
In the progression from (speaking colloquially) ‘balance of evidence’ through ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to ‘apodictic certainty’, things that are not known apodictically can be known well enough to guide actions, decide one’s vote in a criminal or civil case, etc.
– I rate the claim that Trump won the popular vote as very possible. I also (if asked – I’d rather wait for more evidence) rate it as balance-of-probability true, but I do so cautiously – one could honestly dissent, not just from its being true, but from its being more likely true than not given current information. It is not proved beyond reasonable doubt. I rate the statistical models that some advanced for that as demonstrations of its possibility, not as proofs of its beyond-reasonable-doubt certainty.
– I rate the claim that Trump won the election as (speaking very colloquially) beyond reasonable doubt. The level of doubt needed to deny enough of the statistical and factual evidence to keep Biden above (or even at) 269 seems to me unreasonable.
When time permits, I shall complete more posts on this subject. Meanwhile, I’m grateful to Natalie for spreading more widely Darryl’s thread that avoids addressing the precise topic of what happened in favour of analysing what it is not unreasonable for an observer to think happened. In rhetoric – and in the face of intense media pressure – this ostensibly less forthright position can have its strengths in communicating that something happened and that “nothing to see here, drive on” is unreasonable. Every little helps.
It’s easy to know that the Dems cheated – their frantic reactions to the audits, and the unleashing of the DoJ on the Arizona politicians and auditors.
If the Dems didn’t cheat they could simply sit back and wait for the inevitable egg on face outcome.
Instead we’ve got Joe Biden raving like an absolute lunatic.
@Flubber – and while none of that is evidence, it is certainly adding to the weight of argument.
His Fraudulency, Pedo Joe Biden may not KNOW whether the election was stolen by his own minions, but his ranting and raving suggests that at the very least he suspects this to be true, hence his ranting and raving.
There are some aspects of the election night reporting that MAY (but only MAY) be caused by the vast number of votes made by mail-in-votes. I don’t believe it is, but it is certainly possible, albeit unlikely.
But if you then start comparing the 2020 election with every other US election in the last century, then the results themselves are an outlier, way beyond the fraud that the Kennedy’s pulled in the 1960’s or the tight Bush/Gore election of 2000.
How can they genuinely (with a straight face) claim that Joe Biden got more votes than any other president ever and yet at the same time they won only 1 out of the 19 bellwether counties and of the total number of about 2,500 counties only 519 actually went to Biden. I mean, sure, it’s possible for that to happen, but how probable is that? How actually likely is that? If this result was in a history book talking about an election in the 1920’s, wouldn’t you be tempted to say “Hmmm. Sounds like fraud to me”.
You get to the point where some level of fraud to deliberately push Biden over the top in the places that counted is more probable than the claim from the Democrats that this was “the cleanest election in history”.
Maybe that misspoken comment about “the best voter fraud operation in history” was more of a Freudian slip than anything else…?
See also the Wuflu and the documented cases of censorship there (and self-censorship) that have then had to be walked back when the evidence becomes too strong that the former party line is no longer viable.
As a long time climate change “skeptic” I had some prior experience of this, but the last year has been shocking none the less regarding how much the MSM and co can refuse to report or investigate stories that refute the received wisdom
Agree with points made so far. I’d just like to add that my skepticism of the government/Tech/media/academia complex has gone retroactive. For example, I now believe that the deep state engineered the Iraq/Afghanistan debacle and that they deceived Bush and manipulated the media. I always believed that I was more cynical and skeptical than the average bear, but to my dismay, I’m faced with the brutal reality that I was really quite naïve.
It is the grotesque, shrill, histrionic, over reaction by the propogandists to any challenge or even mundane questioning that is the tell isn’t it? They undermined their own credibility.
Having completely blocked Twitter a few weeks ago (I don’t even see embedded Tweets now), that’s the first time I’ve read Cooper’s piece. Bravo.
I remember saying months ago that, like him, I won’t say the election was stolen for certain or not, because I simply don’t know… and that’s the problem. A free election doesn’t just have to be won; it has to be seen and accepted to have been won by everyone involved.
Russiagate completely destroyed the media’s and the establishment’s credibility. (I don’t think they appreciate this at all; they’re used to getting away with it.) And, as Glenn Reynolds is fond of saying, the Democrats and their media friends simply aren’t acting like people confident they’ve just won a fair vote.
It seems to me we are at a pivotal point. The dems already had the judicial and they’ve most likely stolen the executive. Surely the midterms will be a cage fight for the legislative? Am I wrong?
Roué le Jour –
If the AZ, GA, and PA audits are sidelined, suppressed, or dismissed, what chance do the 2022 elections have of changing anything? Vote harder, or even harderer, only works with honest vote counting. *Biden himself just stated that “It’s not who votes, that counts, but who counts the votes!” The soapbox has been silenced through censorship. The jury box has been taken away by a judicial system that refuses to hear challenges. The ballot box has been snatched away and stuffed by our ‘betters”. That leaves only one option, and it is being attacked at every level from federal to state to county to city.
I think the R’s still hold the federal judiciary, at least.
Biden is so obviously senile, and the denials of this are becoming quite surreal. Harris is even more of a grotesque than anybody imagined she would be.
The very probable fraud that occurred has almost become secondary.
@ exasperated
I feel pretty much the same
I heard someone say that far more people voted in the 2020 US election than were registered to vote: the numbers offered to me were in excess of 20 million extra votes, possibly more.
Even for a country the size of the USA this is an astonishing number, if true. They may have been ‘unregistered aliens’ or somesuch, or another factor. Indeed they might have been all Republican voters realising that Trump was toast and while 80 million or so Americans were mad-keen on Biden, the now reduced band of American citizens who still believed in Trump were frantically voting again and again to try to stop the Biden/Harris pairing taking power. However unlikely, it’s possible. But one thing is true however it breaks: there was fraud of some kind in those numbers.
Now given the subsequent cries of ‘fraudulent election’ you would think the Dems would be happy to swiftly and openly examine the ballots and procedures, because if they were innocent of any such claims they would surely move heaven and earth to demonstrate theirs were the legitimate votes and any fraud was therefore perpetrated by Trump supporters, or maybe unregistered aliens. By the same token, the social media giants and the mass media elite outlets would be pushing hard to demand transparency and freedom of access, etc to show honesty on the Dems part. Instead we get an almost frantic bludgeoning or silencing of any who say the whole thing might be fraudulent.
Why, it’s almost as if they don’t want anyone to look…
I say this in horror, with not a gramme of schadenfreude, but the USA is looking more and more like a third world country in waiting.
It has: corrupt elections, a partial judiciary, political persecution under colour of law, widespread rioting, looting, systematic and widespread spying on its citizens, massive government debt.
On reflection, the only reason I said “in waiting” is because it still has enormous purchasing power.
bobby b,
Sure, but they wouldn’t intervene in the vote rigging, and I doubt you could find one to block one of Old Joe’s executive orders.
AZ Audit Finds 74,000 Ballots Returned and Counted in 2020 Election with NO RECORD of Being Sent Out!
And two comments to this story say:
“More ballots returned than sent out is CLEAR FRAUD.”
“ESPECIALLY if one could get the media to actually REPORT on it.”
Same is true of UK.
Clovis: you forgot the political corruption.
Of zero value if the judiciary can be intimidated into not hearing cases.
Of course. The plan is to destroy every western country to usher in their glorious utopia.
And it says something that I can, while sitting in the UK, look at Canada and Australia and think they’re even deeper in the shit.
Yes the 2020 United States Presidential Election was rigged – sometimes the rigging was on a truly grand scale, as in Pennsylvania.
However, the Federal Bureaucracy was rotten to the core even before this. For example, Covid 19 was allowed to kill half a million Americans – most of whom could have been saved by Early Treatment with a combination of long standing medications. The treatment that Dr Fauci and his cronies would rush to if they got sick themselves – but SMEAR in regards to ordinary people. And the mainstream media allowed Fauci and co to get away with this – and with everything else.
The FBI (a corrupt political force – totally committed to a “Progressive” Collectivist agenda) and the rest of the “Justice” Department knew about the crimes of the Biden family for YEARS – and did NOTHING.
The “Republican” William Barr appointed the “Republican” John Durham to investigate the dirty tricks (the illegal campaign by the government bureaucracy) against Donald Trump and everyone associated with him since 2016 – and Mr Durham has done NOTHING, even though the evidence of crimes committed against Donald Trump and others has been put on his desk (was delivered to him – again YEARS ago).
The same “Republican” William Barr refused to do anything about the blatant rigging of the 2020 election – indeed he threatened (yes threatened) other people into not doing anything.
The despicably corrupt FBI organises a False Flag “invasion of the Capitol Building” on January 6th (via its agents in various organisations) and gets away with it – indeed uses the whole thing as an excuse for a reign of oppression (people locked up in prison for months for trespassing, when they were WAVED IN – and then beaten and abused in prison) all over the United States.
An unarmed woman is shot dead – and the media does not give a damn, instead LYING (pretending that Capitol policemen had been killed by protestors).
And General Milley, the person who mandates soldiers read endless Frankfurt School Marxist “Critical Race Theory” books (but never mandates anyone to read ANTI Critical Race Theory books) declared Donald Trump, his (partly Jewish) family, and HALF THE UNITED STATES POPULATION – to be “Nazis” who should be crushed. Does General Milley know what a “Nazi” actually is? Has he read F.A. Hayek “The Road to Serfdom” and Ludwig Von Mises “Omnipotent Government” on the nature of National Socialism?
I do not believe it is a good thing to have a lunatic as Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “But Trump appointed him” – as always, President Trump appointed who the establishment told him to appoint (a fatal mistake).
As for General Milley’s claim that the military would have needed to remove President Trump had he refused to leave office – clearly the power-mad General has never heard of the English “demarcation”. It is for the U.S. Marshalls service, who work for the courts – the Judicial Branch, to remove someone who refuses to leave office – not the armed forces, who are part of the Executive Branch.
If General Milley really does not know what is the area of responsibility of the U.S. Marshalls service and what is the responsibility of the armed forces, then he should have never passed High School Civics.
So there we have it – a “Progressive” security police (the FBI) and a “Progressive” military top brass which does not know basic stuff that even a High School Student knew in the 1950s.
Bad show all round.
Thank you for spreading this far and wide. Appreciate it.
Great post.
Just one point: Tucker did not read out all of the 35 tweets on his show. He read many of them over those 7 beautiful minutes, but not all of them.
[I have now edited the post to reflect the fact that not all of the tweets were read out by Tucker Carlson – NS]
Agreed 100% with Cooper. I would note that his observations closely mirror those made by Mencius Moldbug, especially about the Cathedral/Swamp. Back then, many laughed at Moldbug.
Nobody’s laughing now.
The MSM was very quick and efficient in showing that there had been no vote rigging in the 2020 election.
Where was that efficiency in investigating all those ludicrous claims of Russian interference in the 2016 election?
That all dragged on for years.
Surely nothing to do with the results of those elections.
The Wobbly Guy,
Indeed. It is an interesting situation. Very interesting.
From the article OP links to:
As someone who had read A LOT of Moldbug about a decade ago and who today confesses to having been significantly influenced by his writings, I cannot say that it’s such a good thing for such massive swaths of the American population to suddenly realize certain forbidden truths.
As a certain Joseph de Maistre once wrote:
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/
Remind me – what happened after Eve ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge?
I totally agree that if CNN had evidence of fraud, they’d hide it. Thing is, if Newsmax or Lin Wood or anyone else in the pro-Trump ecosystem had evidence of fraud, they’d be trumpeting it to the heavens. And all they have is a bunch of claims that fall apart upon any kind of detailed inspection. Those claims are superficially worrying, sure, and you can go back to my comments on Samizdata from mid-November where I was saying “Yeah, I can imagine it, just show me some evidence”, back when a claim being superficially worrying was enough to justify a detailed investigation. But we’re eight months into this now, and all those detailed investigations have turned up squat.
I watched a hearing with several of the lawyers who challenged the election, this past Monday, and it was just striking how weak their arguments were. “Okay, on affidavit #123, you have person A saying that they spoke with person B, who told them that person C complained about being told to change ballots by persons D-F. Before submitting this affidavit, did any of you do basic due diligence, and look into this at all to verify its accuracy? Did any of you ever speak to person B? (*silence*). Person C? (*silence*) Persons D-F? (*silence*) Did any of you try to get into contact with any of these people, at any point before submitting an affidavit based on double hearsay? (*silence*)”
This went on for six hours. I only watched half of it, but over and over again we saw the judge ask them whether they had done any due diligence whatsoever, as they are legally required to do. None of them had a better answer than “It was submitted in another case!”, which doesn’t meet those basic standards for a federal court. It was almost sad to watch, as these career lawyers just botched their jobs so badly that even me, a non-lawyer, was laughing at how obviously they fell short. And it wasn’t even hard to see how it happened – they never said it in so many words, but from a lot of their answers it was clear that their goal was to influence the public debate, instead of to file an honest lawsuit. Because they didn’t have any arguments that could pass legal muster, and only had political hopes (and fundraising pages). Don’t be surprised if a bunch of them wind up disbarred for their flagrant abuse of the courts to fight political battles.
—
Flubber: Set aside the Democrat elites for a second, who might hypothetically have knowledge of fraud. The Dem base reacted just as strongly to the audits, because they saw the audit as an effort to fabricate evidence in order to steal the election(and not a genuine audit). It’s certainly possible to freak out at the audits with a clean conscience, because I know so many people who did. So a frantic reaction proves nothing either way, since they’d react the same way whether they cheated or not.
John Galt: The 519/2500 number looks like a very good showing for a Democrat in today’s map. What’s the biggest county Trump won – Oklahoma County? (Home of Oklahoma City, total population 718,633) Compared to running up the score in every big city in the country, like Democrats have been doing for decades, and you don’t need a huge number of counties. LA alone probably has a similar population to Trump’s least populous 500 counties combined. Here’s the population breakdown of the Trump and Biden counties: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2021/01/21/a-demographic-contrast-biden-won-551-counties-home-to-67-million-more-americans-than-trumps-2588-counties/ (which you can treat as an analysis of the official stats, even if you don’t think it reflects the real votes.)
Regarding the loss of bellweather counties, it seems like most of them are heavily populated by non-college-educated whites. Historically that group voted basically in line with the country as a whole, but in the Trump era, education has started being a huge partisan dividing line. With college-educating moving hard to the Dems and non-college-educated moving hard to the GOP, bellweathers will change a lot. And, with increased polarization, we’ll probably see fewer of them, too. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-did-all-the-bellwether-counties-go/ is a good analysis of this.
Roué le Jour: Do you mean that they have the legislative, and are fighting for the judicial? Becuase they hold both houses of Congress, but rhe Supreme Court is 6-3 Republican.
Albion’s Blue Front Door: Fortunately, that’s not true. 158,383,403 votes were cast, but that was only about two-thirds of eligible voters. Not all eligible voters are registered, but there’s still over 168 million registered voters as of 2020(https://www.statista.com/statistics/273743/number-of-registered-voters-in-the-united-states/), which means that voter turnout was about ten million less than registered voter numbers. Given that most people who care enough to register would also care enough to vote in such a polarizing election, this feels plausible. Registration went up by almost eleven million between 2016 and 2020, which also seems to back up the high turnout theory. You’re not wrong about how a lot of big organizations want to shut down people who call the election fraudulent, but frankly I believe in its legitimacy more after seeing how weak the fraud claims are (as I mentioned above)
Dave Ward: The 74,000 vote thing seems to be based on someone misunderstanding their data set. The number of early votes include both mail ballots as well as in-person ballots at the advance polls. So the number of early votes would obviously exceed the number of mail ballots sent out, because it’ll include the people who return their mail ballots, as well as a whole separate group of voters. https://twitter.com/maricopacounty/status/1415834656528764932 It’s like complaining that you bought something for $50 on your credit card and your balance is now $100, while ignoring the fact that your wife is a joint cardholder with you and spent the other $50.
Flubber: Judicial intimidation is a pretty serious claim. Do you have any evidence, or is this just a case where you can’t come up with any other explanation that lets you keep saying that the vote was rigged?
She realised two things: firstly, Eve realised talking serpents are ok with people grasping the truth.
Secondly, the chap who owned the garden was only prepared to provide food and lodging to Adam and Eve provided he would peek at them naked, which is pretty damn pervy if you ask me, but hey, his garden, his rules, right?
The naivete is strong in this one.
Perry,
What you say is true. What you say is also not the whole truth.
“Republicans” such as William Barr who knew about the crimes of the Biden family for years – and did NOTHING.
And the same William Barr knew that the campaign against Donald John Trump from 2016 onwards was based on a series of LIES in the “Steel Dossier” (lies mostly provided by the Putin regime – yes Mr Putin was actually helping Mrs CLINTON, not Donald John Trump), and all Mr Barr did in response was appoint John Durham – who has sat stroking his facial hair for the last TWO YEARS.
Or “Republicans” such as Chief Justice John Roberts of the Supreme Court – who has been a useless waste of space for many years (long before Donald John Trump).
With “Republicans” like William Barr and John Roberts who needs Democrats?
Alsadius (July 17, 2021 at 5:47 pm), while the point of the OP is that people who do not have first-hand experience of the fraud will pursue second and third hand accounts of it – and treat media denial or derision of a particular case as more like evidence than rebuttal – anyone can find and study wholly first-hand testimony and cases who wishes.
As one example of many (I choose it because it is also relevant to the OP in another way), consider the registered Pennsylvania Republican who testified (in person, not as recounted by a friend who knew a man who once talked to her at a social distance) that she arrived at the poll to vote in person only to be told she could not because she’d requested a postal ballot (which she vehemently denied). Two days later the postal ballot she’d not requested arrived, leaving her with the choice: either violate her attitude to the Pennsylvania late-ballots case by sending it off in the probably vain hope that it would arrive within the illegally-proclaimed 4-days-after-poll deadline or (as she did) start a law case to try and get her in-person vote counted.
All this is straightforward – her arriving at the polling place on the day, the poll’s record of the clash, the system’s record of the late-requested ballot sent her, the court case she filed, etc. It’s one of many cases and not just in Pennsylvania. The only question is, as with the media behaviour noted in the OP, how to interpret it? I suggest these three possibilities cover the main options:
1) The late planned, decree-mandated postal ballot operation in Pennsylvania was so chaotic – made so many errors – that we should not see this happening to a registered republican opponent of late-submitted ballots in “the safest election ever” as indicating that intent, not accident, was at work – it happened so often the chance of it happening to her was not small.
2) We should indeed see this happening to (among others) a registered Republican opponent of late-submitted ballots as informative. It indicates Democrats were not just corruptly in control of the process but so in control they had spare time for petty insolent nastinesses like this.
3) It was a false-flag operation. Two days before the vote, this Trump supporter was so convinced by the media’s exposure of Trump’s terror-and-error-filled presidency that she fouled up her own vote to provide a talking point after his inevitable defeat (or it was a secret Trump-run organisation, not the lady herself, who thus cunningly sacrificed votes to ensure his followers disbelieved the loss he expected).
I’ll wait till anyone attempts to defend (3) before providing a less mocking summary of it. My diagnosis of (2) with a side-helping of (1) relates to the discussion here. This way of using postal voting to annul in-person voting is not a new tactic – I first read reports of it in Colorado in 2012 – but in this as in other things, the style and scale of the 2020 election made it unlike past years.
It’s inevitable that the media and deep state dishonesty the OP is about generates lots of theories, only some of which are correct. It may well also attract grifters (though it is awfully clear that far bigger opportunities for grift lie on the other side); for example, some who are as sure as I that it was stolen also think longtime Democrat Lin Wood – intentionally or otherwise – is good only for launching feeble election-challenge cases that dilute the quality of the pool.
For a summary that includes detail of how a real case was lawfared, scroll down from here – or read down, for more info on 2020 vote fraud in Georgia.
It isn’t just Trump supporters that think the 2020 election was stolen. I am not a Trump supporter. In 2016, I hoped very much that anyone else would be the Republican nominee. In November, I voted for the Libertarian, as it made no difference in my state. I voted for him in 2020 only as the lesser of two evils (and because he had shown that he was not merely a poo-flinging monkey).
And I have grave doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 outcome.
I think there are a lot more like me. And in fact, I think a fair percentage of Trump opponents, even Trump haters, also think the election was tainted or stolen. These latter groups may feel that stealing that election was justified because Trump. Probably they would also agree that the press would lie about it; again believing that such lying was justified.
(The FBI has no jurisdiction over voter fraud; as to the courts, it depends on the judge.)